Northern Virginia's Preservation Challenge: A Closer Look at the Route 1 Corridor

By Michael A. Spotts, President

Following up on the June release of the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance's (NVAHA) research on Northern Virginia’s Preservation Challenge: Trends, Threats, and Opportunities, last week NVAHA and the Coalition for Smarter Growth hosted A Community Forum on Preservation through a Lens of Equity and Inclusion. This forum focused on the redevelopment of Fairfax County's Route 1/Richmond Highway Corridor. The area is the subject of the EMBARK Richmond Highway multimodal transportation plan. The corridor is relatively diverse, and includes a significant number of market-rate rental properties that serve low- and moderate income households. Fairfax County is commencing a planning strategy to address the challenge of preserving affordability within the corridor so that the catalytic transportation and redevelopment investments benefit the people who currently live there, especially those most vulnerable to displacement.

In addition to presentations and/or comments by Fairfax County Supervisor Dan Storck, NVAHA's Michelle Krocker, and the Coalition for Smarter Growth's Stewart Schwartz. The event was headlined by a practitioner panel discussion, which featured: 

Nicholas Bracco – The Michaels Organization
Karla Bruce – Chief Equity Officer, Fairfax County
Nina Janopaul – Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing
Shelley Murphy – Wesley Housing Development Corporation

I also had the pleasure of presenting Neighborhood Fundamentals' preservation research, conducted on behalf of NVAHA.

Resources from the event are included below:

Presentation: Northern Virginia’s Preservation Challenge: Trends, Threats and Opportunities - Michael A. Spotts
Presentation on Columbia Pike Plan – Nina Janopaul, APAH
Presentation on One Fairfax Policy – Karla Bruce, Fairfax County
EMBARK Richmond Highway Comprehensive Plan Update Affordable and Workforce Housing Map
Opportunity Zones Located along Richmond Highway

For more information on this research, please contact Michelle Krocker, Executive Director of the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance and Michael A. Spotts, President of Neighborhood Fundamentals, LLC

June Roundup: Cross-Sector Coordination, Preserving Rental Housing, Comments on Facility Co-Location, and Other Notes

By Michael A. Spotts

As summer (and vacation season) starts, it's easy for news and events to slip through the cracks. To bring everyone up to speed, here's a roundup of what Neighborhood Fundamentals has been doing over the last month:

• On June 20, the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance (NVAHA) released research produced by Neighborhood Fundamentals on Northern Virginia’s Preservation Challenge: Trends, Threats, and Opportunities. If you are in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, please join NVAHA and the Coalition for Smarter Growth for a July 25 event and panel discussion on the report and its findings. 

• On June 29, Michelle Winters, Executive Director of the Alliance for Housing Solutions (AHS) and I offered public comments on Arlington County, VA's draft Capital Improvement Plan. The comments offer recommendations for using public land assets and facility co-location as a means of providing affordable housing in a land and capital-constrained environment.

• On June 27, I joined Lisa Sturtevant and Ryan Price of Lisa Sturtevant & Associates and Ellen Harpel of Smart Incentives in participating in a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Planning Association Maryland Chapter. As the Smart Incentives blog post on our presentation details, we focused on the key question of: "How can local communities develop integrated land use, economic development, housing and transportation policies and plans to promote inclusive development and ensure that all residents benefit from growth?"

• On June 7, I published a blog post that analyzed the effects of the 2017 federal tax law on efforts to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program.

"Tactical Transportation" vs. the Megaproject

By Michael A. Spotts, President
Twitter: @MichaelASpotts

Yesterday, Streetsblog published an article by Michael Anderson about San Francisco's protected bike-lane project, which utilized a "tactical" approach. Rather than planning every last detail then spending larger sums to build the project, the city agency initially relied on inexpensive methods such as temporary or semi-permanent infrastructure. This approach illustrates key lessons for those planning for housing, community and infrastructure development:

• Trial, error and adjustment. Despite the tendency in planning to try to get things just right, development is necessarily messy. As I wrote earlier this month in the context of micromanaging housing typologies, over-planning reduces the number of viable "paths to success" and can yield unintended consequences. A tactical approach can allow for trial, error and the real-world testing of alternatives, without the enormous sunk costs and inflexibility of a build-for-permanence approach. 
• Building a base of beneficiaries. Major projects (whether it is a form-based code, zoning change, light-rail project, or public park) can take a long time to plan and implement. When completion is a distant prospect, it is easy to see how status quo bias can take hold. A nearby resident might wonder whether the long-term benefits to be achieved (sometimes more than a decade out) outweigh the present-day inconveniences of a multi-year construction process and local tax increases. Quickly-instituted tactical investments start building a user-base right away. Furthermore, those users can quickly suggest improvements to the system based on reality, not theory. 
• "Modest" projects can have huge impacts. Large scale rail transit projects get most of the hype, but bus riders make up the plurality of all transit users (47.6%), nearly as much as all other modes combined. The impact of bus service is magnified when one considers that many metropolitan regions and smaller cities lack the scale for an extensive rail network. Therefore, investments in improving bus service and redesigning bus networks may be able to impact a significant number of people for modest amounts of money. Furthermore, such investments can have positive social equity impacts, by spreading the potential benefits to people living outside of a specific corridor. 
• "Tactical" and "Major" are not necessary mutually exclusive. Despite the headline of this article, tactical approaches can be a complement to (or core component of) major development efforts. Planners can replace expensive models/studies in part with pilot projects. For example, a bus system seeking to boost speed by investing in technology for off-board fare collection (or a proof-of-payment system) can test out how much time this would save by holding a time-limited "fare holiday" in which rides are free (eliminating the need to swipe a card). A planning department trying to diversify its housing stock could initiated a quasi-by-right, streamlined approval process for a specified number of non-conforming building plans. The information from these experiments could then inform the final plans/policies. 

In order to act boldly to improve community development and infrastructure, you do not always have to "think big." Sometimes it is more helpful to "act now."