Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 21:54     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.



Speak up to do what exactly? The people who work in the county and make all the zoning regulations already made the rules. They codified segregation. FFS, the Pike isn’t getting any additional transportation upgrades, yet the density continues unchecked. Meanwhile, EFC just made a sector plan that doesn’t even rezone a neighborhood in walking distance to a Metro stop for anything but SFHs and townhouses. It’s by design and completely on purpose. Lee Hwy isn’t going to be upzoned so that it could have CAFs on the edges of the neighborhoods, just like the Pike. Why? On purpose. BFD that they’re going to allow some “missing middle flats” and accessory dwellings. Who’s going to live in those? Not families whose kids qualify for fr/l. The people who will build the accessory units N of Lee Hwy will use them for their childless nanny or au pair, not a family who can’t afford a market rate apartment. Even the “missing middle” housing will be too pricey for them.

It’s the NA homeowners, who claim they care about equity and diversity, who are going to have to do more than just write an occasional check before anything changes. Push for more density, real density, on the edges of your neighborhoods and around the EFC Metro, to allow family-sized CAFs to be built there instead of only on the Pike/Buckingham and some in the R-B corridor. Also, the neighborhood right around National Landing needs to offer new affordable housing opportunities, too, right in 22202.

If NA can’t bear to allow any AH along Lee highway, perhaps at least it can lend its voice to the upcoming debate. Rather than allowing the CB to carve up the county and urbanize and destroy the neighborhoods with the least political clout, follow the example set by Minneapolis. If one area gets up zoned, they all do. That’s fair. Don’t sell us out. Not even asking for anything. Just don’t screw us.

There are some great schools in SA. The teachers and support staff are top notch. There are many bright, gifted, hard-working kids. But the opportunities for them are not and won’t ever be equitable, even with outside “extra” money, until the schools are less economically segregated. So many kids living in poverty and experiencing the educational barriers that poverty itself presents, all attending just a few schools, makes it harder for those schools to focus on anything other than meeting basic needs. And it contributes to further segregation as families of means within those boundaries don’t send their kids to the schools where their experiences will be so divergent from other Arlington schools.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 17:58     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:When they say “ missing middle”
I suspect they ( boomers) mean housing in north Arlington for their kids and grandkids.


Pretty much.


Maybe their kids can come and live in South Arlington. Then they'd care about the schools.


I think most NA parents care deeply about SA schools, if nothing else if they improved it would likely alleviate overcrowding in the long term.

Na parents are happy to send money, resources, build new schools, whatever it takes. Sending their kids is a nonstarter both b/c of logistics and parental expectation. That is unsurprising and not going to change.

So absent busing, what do SA schools need? Is it simply the AH lobby dumping more and more ESOL students into the system?


I wish that were true. There a voluntary PTA fund thru which APS school PTAs can donate to needier ones. Combined, over the last five years, the total contribution to that fund from NA schools is less than a fifth of what any single NA pta raises in a single year.

Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 17:55     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I am PP that commented on the pike plan. I too am missing middle and so are my friends. We live just off the pike because we cannot afford anything else. But my home isn’t appreciating much either. So no nest egg. And I am very disappointed with my kid’s school and can’t afford better. I have no amenities near me. I can’t walk down the street at night because the pike around 4 mile run is dangerous at night. I can’t find a place to park my car because there is insufficient parking. Lots of trash and a bit dingy around me.

I would like a little gentrification.


There definitely seems to be winners and losers so far in the Pike gentrification. If you live east of Glebe or maybe even Mason, your part of the Pike is gentrified. The rest is not so lucky yet.


Relatively speaking. How long has P Brennan’s been sitting empty? 5 years? ArlNow should write a story about the failure of ground level retail mandates.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 17:52     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:We need to zero out building new AH and focus on the high need families we already have. Better schools for their kids, better transportation options for their breadwinners to get to work and expand their options, better social services for at risk families, etc etc


But rather than doing that, and focusing on helping families across the full spectrum of need AC just crams more and more high need families to compete over the same share of resources


Quantity over quality.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 16:53     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
We need to zero out building new AH and focus on the high need families we already have. Better schools for their kids, better transportation options for their breadwinners to get to work and expand their options, better social services for at risk families, etc etc


But rather than doing that, and focusing on helping families across the full spectrum of need AC just crams more and more high need families to compete over the same share of resources
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 12:30     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The pike plan is not designed for the missing middle. The affordable housing contribution must be for 60% ami or lower. That is not missing middle. Lee highway is only looking at missing middle according to their docs. Only on the pike are you required to have housing for the poorest people.

That said, costs to live on the pike are much lower than elsewhere, so more of the missing middle live around the pike. It is just cheaper. And will stay that way, at least west of glebe.


Do you have a link handy for lee highway planning docs? Kinda funny that APAH VP lives up there and is on the pike revitalization committee, but mostly it’s sad.


Yeah, not funny at all in any sense of the word, to those of us living along the Pike.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 12:29     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Columbia Pike is getting several more big buildings. All are market rate, though, which I was glad to see.


Yup. And doubtful any kids will be living in them, so that’s a plus on the one hand for keeping overcrowding manageable. If MC kids do end up living there, it’s exactly where we don’t need them - the Fleet zone, which along with Oakridge already has the lowest FRL rates in SA.


The one that is close to completion right now is at Mason and the Pike - that's in Barcroft. And there's supposed to be a plan for townhomes just off Taylor St S.


Centro is going to be an extended stay hotel, for now, right? The other two buildings described in the recent arlnow article are in the fleet zone. As for townhouses, aren’t there neighborhoods off the pike where county s pike plan basically forbids that type of structure from being built? So much for the missing middle.


Only part of it, only as it transitions into an open, operating residential facility as they get renters to fill the building. It might be wise to keep it partially so more long-term to accommodate people coming in for training at the foreign affairs facility, people who bring their per diems and discretionary money to support local restaurants and food establishments along the Pike - since that's all we get down here and don't have office worker traffic to keep retail afloat.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 12:27     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.


As some of the responses in this chain demonstrate, SA homeowners HAVE spoken up - many times, for many years. The problem is, OTHER SA homeowners speak up in support of MORE AF in the same concentrated AH neighborhoods and their voices have more weight. The County's mantra is quantity over quality; quantity over location; quantity over diverse neighborhoods; quantity over diverse schools; quantity over all else - because we love and value diversity.

And the poster who said the AH groups and developers will get a huge portion of Amazon money is absolutely right. The CB has already said so. With all that additional money, they should be able to afford to develop projects in north arlington beyond rosslyn and buckingham. That's their argument: north arlington is too expensive and you can get more units (quantity) in south arlington. The CB needs to get 3 backbones on it for a change and make the zoning and policy changes needed to guarantee Lee highway development similar to Columbia Pike - do unto them as they do unto the SA homeowners who have fought for geographic distribution: dismiss their objections and do it anyway. Hell will freeze multiple times over first.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 12:16     Subject: Re:APS Sinking Ship
As unpopular as this sounds. If I could not afford to put my kids in a high performing public school, I would move a little further west and send them to a suburban school district rather than live close into DC. I lived in south Arlington as a grad student, single professional and newly married/childless couple, but I would never consider living there with school aged kids.

I've voted for CB candidates who I thought would support schools over AF housing, and guess what they lost. I wrote my SB reps and attended school board meetings, signed petitions, etc. and none of it mattered. If anything I watched in horror as Barbara Kanninen (however you spell her name) decided at the 2nd to last voting meeting for moving 200 or less HS students from WL to Wakefield and Yorktown, that one of the options was unpalatable b/c it meant having trailers for 1 year (versus 3 years at WL with ongoing construction of the Ed Center), and somehow her decision was approved unanimously at the final meeting (a new option that had never been introduced before the final meeting).

Seeing all this sh*t go down, I wouldn't trust all the sheeple who vote down the board Democrat which means they kiss the asses of the AF lobby.

Don't trust that these elected officials will do what's right for SA.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 11:25     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.



Speak up to do what exactly? The people who work in the county and make all the zoning regulations already made the rules. They codified segregation. FFS, the Pike isn’t getting any additional transportation upgrades, yet the density continues unchecked. Meanwhile, EFC just made a sector plan that doesn’t even rezone a neighborhood in walking distance to a Metro stop for anything but SFHs and townhouses. It’s by design and completely on purpose. Lee Hwy isn’t going to be upzoned so that it could have CAFs on the edges of the neighborhoods, just like the Pike. Why? On purpose. BFD that they’re going to allow some “missing middle flats” and accessory dwellings. Who’s going to live in those? Not families whose kids qualify for fr/l. The people who will build the accessory units N of Lee Hwy will use them for their childless nanny or au pair, not a family who can’t afford a market rate apartment. Even the “missing middle” housing will be too pricey for them.

It’s the NA homeowners, who claim they care about equity and diversity, who are going to have to do more than just write an occasional check before anything changes. Push for more density, real density, on the edges of your neighborhoods and around the EFC Metro, to allow family-sized CAFs to be built there instead of only on the Pike/Buckingham and some in the R-B corridor. Also, the neighborhood right around National Landing needs to offer new affordable housing opportunities, too, right in 22202.

There are some great schools in SA. The teachers and support staff are top notch. There are many bright, gifted, hard-working kids. But the opportunities for them are not and won’t ever be equitable, even with outside “extra” money, until the schools are less economically segregated. So many kids living in poverty and experiencing the educational barriers that poverty itself presents, all attending just a few schools, makes it harder for those schools to focus on anything other than meeting basic needs. And it contributes to further segregation as families of means within those boundaries don’t send their kids to the schools where their experiences will be so divergent from other Arlington schools.


This is an ignorant question, so I apologize. But what proportion of housing should be CAFs v apts v SFHs? Do we need more AH in Arlington, but distributed better to ensure no concentration of poverty? Or do we have the right amount of AH?


I have no idea what the overall “right” proportion of each housing type is, but there are definitely neighborhoods that have NO affordable opportunities and some that have many. We probably need to concentrate more on making sure that zoning allows for the expansion of affordable opportunities into new neighborhoods, and that might include building CAFs on the edges of neighborhoods where there haven’t ever been any before.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 09:53     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.



Speak up to do what exactly? The people who work in the county and make all the zoning regulations already made the rules. They codified segregation. FFS, the Pike isn’t getting any additional transportation upgrades, yet the density continues unchecked. Meanwhile, EFC just made a sector plan that doesn’t even rezone a neighborhood in walking distance to a Metro stop for anything but SFHs and townhouses. It’s by design and completely on purpose. Lee Hwy isn’t going to be upzoned so that it could have CAFs on the edges of the neighborhoods, just like the Pike. Why? On purpose. BFD that they’re going to allow some “missing middle flats” and accessory dwellings. Who’s going to live in those? Not families whose kids qualify for fr/l. The people who will build the accessory units N of Lee Hwy will use them for their childless nanny or au pair, not a family who can’t afford a market rate apartment. Even the “missing middle” housing will be too pricey for them.

It’s the NA homeowners, who claim they care about equity and diversity, who are going to have to do more than just write an occasional check before anything changes. Push for more density, real density, on the edges of your neighborhoods and around the EFC Metro, to allow family-sized CAFs to be built there instead of only on the Pike/Buckingham and some in the R-B corridor. Also, the neighborhood right around National Landing needs to offer new affordable housing opportunities, too, right in 22202.

There are some great schools in SA. The teachers and support staff are top notch. There are many bright, gifted, hard-working kids. But the opportunities for them are not and won’t ever be equitable, even with outside “extra” money, until the schools are less economically segregated. So many kids living in poverty and experiencing the educational barriers that poverty itself presents, all attending just a few schools, makes it harder for those schools to focus on anything other than meeting basic needs. And it contributes to further segregation as families of means within those boundaries don’t send their kids to the schools where their experiences will be so divergent from other Arlington schools.


This is an ignorant question, so I apologize. But what proportion of housing should be CAFs v apts v SFHs? Do we need more AH in Arlington, but distributed better to ensure no concentration of poverty? Or do we have the right amount of AH?
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 09:44     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.



Speak up to do what exactly? The people who work in the county and make all the zoning regulations already made the rules. They codified segregation. FFS, the Pike isn’t getting any additional transportation upgrades, yet the density continues unchecked. Meanwhile, EFC just made a sector plan that doesn’t even rezone a neighborhood in walking distance to a Metro stop for anything but SFHs and townhouses. It’s by design and completely on purpose. Lee Hwy isn’t going to be upzoned so that it could have CAFs on the edges of the neighborhoods, just like the Pike. Why? On purpose. BFD that they’re going to allow some “missing middle flats” and accessory dwellings. Who’s going to live in those? Not families whose kids qualify for fr/l. The people who will build the accessory units N of Lee Hwy will use them for their childless nanny or au pair, not a family who can’t afford a market rate apartment. Even the “missing middle” housing will be too pricey for them.

It’s the NA homeowners, who claim they care about equity and diversity, who are going to have to do more than just write an occasional check before anything changes. Push for more density, real density, on the edges of your neighborhoods and around the EFC Metro, to allow family-sized CAFs to be built there instead of only on the Pike/Buckingham and some in the R-B corridor. Also, the neighborhood right around National Landing needs to offer new affordable housing opportunities, too, right in 22202.

There are some great schools in SA. The teachers and support staff are top notch. There are many bright, gifted, hard-working kids. But the opportunities for them are not and won’t ever be equitable, even with outside “extra” money, until the schools are less economically segregated. So many kids living in poverty and experiencing the educational barriers that poverty itself presents, all attending just a few schools, makes it harder for those schools to focus on anything other than meeting basic needs. And it contributes to further segregation as families of means within those boundaries don’t send their kids to the schools where their experiences will be so divergent from other Arlington schools.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 09:14     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.


Well at some point south Arlington homeowners will have to speak up. They don’t, so this is what they get.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 09:09     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Not happening. If anything, Amazon has scared the lobby and the board into thinking that SA will gentrify. Believe me - the AH developers will get a SIGNIFICANT chunk of Amazon money coming to the county. SIGNIFICANT.
Anonymous
Post 06/21/2019 09:00     Subject: APS Sinking Ship
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:When they say “ missing middle”
I suspect they ( boomers) mean housing in north Arlington for their kids and grandkids.


Pretty much.


Maybe their kids can come and live in South Arlington. Then they'd care about the schools.


I think most NA parents care deeply about SA schools, if nothing else if they improved it would likely alleviate overcrowding in the long term.

Na parents are happy to send money, resources, build new schools, whatever it takes. Sending their kids is a nonstarter both b/c of logistics and parental expectation. That is unsurprising and not going to change.

So absent busing, what do SA schools need? Is it simply the AH lobby dumping more and more ESOL students into the system?


SA needs the AH lobby to stop. SA needs gentrification.