In Post #323, I noted that the process for revising the MAC statute now combines a looming deadline with zero activity. That obviously makes no sense, so I think I’d like to take a few guesses as to what may or may not be happening. So please note that while the first section (Past) is largely fact-based, the end of this post (Future) is pure speculation.
Continue reading Post #325: Revising MAC? Time is short? Or is time your friend?
Affordable housing is a weighty topic that requires a real depth of knowledge if you’re going to address it seriously.
This post, by contrast, is not a serious analysis of affordable housing. This is just one of those quirky little things you stumble across doing a Google search, that, oddly enough, can be used to get across a few simple points.
Bottom line: Vienna residence, furnished, utilities included. Monthly rent is $1950 $1500. Price includes utilities, internet and cable, as well as daily maid service and free continental breakfast.
Correction: Turns out, a colleague knows people who have lived there. If you prepay a week in advance, it’s just $50/night, which works out to $1500/month.
Trip Advisor breathlessly assures me that it’s the #1 rated! motel in Vienna, VA. True, by definition.
On a more serious note, how about a little arithmetic. It looks like the Wolf Trap Motel has about 120 rooms, or “dwelling units” in this case. Is there any hope that MAC zoning will ever provide even as many as 120 affordable housing units in Vienna?
And by that I mean, actual, formally-defined affordable housing under some legally-administered program. Not the fast-and-loose discussion of “the market-determined rent on these apartments will be more affordable” that has substituted for real Town public discussion of this issue so far. (And if you have no clue what I’m talking about, in terms of a legally-defined affordable housing project, take a look at what they do in Falls Church.)
The arithmetic is easy enough: Additional MAC dwelling units x % reserved for affordable housing = additional MAC affordable housing. All we need are plausible estimates for each.
The table below works through all of that, projecting total dwelling units based on the current MAC average density of dwelling units per acre, and some assumed fraction of Maple that eventually undergoes redevelopment.
But what fraction of units might plausibly be affordable housing? To model that, I took one of the recent Falls Church mixed use projects. There, for the Broad and Washington Project, the developer proffered six percent of the units in the building for affordable housing (see this .pdf). So, if they can do it, presumably we … might too. (I think this figure is ballpark for the rest of the Falls Church mixed-use development. E.g., five beds in the large Kensington assisted living facility in Falls Church are in a special affordability program.)
Reading down the table, the first three MAC projects come in at 41 units per acre. You can then see counts of total additional units that would be built under assumptions that 30% or 70% of the total MAC acreage gets redeveloped at that density. Finally, if 6% of all new units are set aside for affordable housing, you get the counts at the bottom: 64 affordable housing units if 30% of Maple is redeveloped, or 169 affordable housing units if 70% of Maple is redeveloped.
(N.B. for the number-oriented among you. The acreage is not proportional to the percentages because I net out the 5.7 that have already been approved for mixed-use development.)
And so the answer to my question is, maybe, if all suns shine. If Vienna actually had an affordable housing program. If every mixed-use building from now on would proffer affordable units at the same rate as was seen in the model Falls Church project. And if a very large fraction of Maple gets redeveloped.
If all that happened, you might get more affordable housing units out of MAC than there currently are rooms in the Wolf Trap Motel.
But: You can’t get blood from a stone. Put aside the fact that some projects would not be suitable for this program (e.g., the million-dollar condo townhouses at Marco Polo). The bottom line remains that there is no free lunch. Every one of those units is money out of the developers’ pockets, so affordable housing must be balanced against other competing demands for proffers. For example, developers might not be able to afford both putting the utility lines underground and reserving 6% of units for affordable housing. Ditto, providing significant public green space on their property and in additional supplying significant affordable housing. And if a future MAC results in smaller buildings, there would be fewer units and less profit available from which to supply affordable housing.
My point is that instead of just talking in the abstract about affordable housing, we really ought to get into the numbers just a bit. It’s instructive. Best guess, any formal, legal, zoning-driven affordable housing program under MAC would be a drop in the bucket, relative to the perceived need for affordable housing.
My only other point is to study Falls Church, because, by definition, they’re doing better at it than we are. Interestingly, while Falls Church has this formal, legally-defined affordable housing program, they also make sure that people looking for affordable housing can find a comprehensive list of apartment and condo rental rates. They put those right on their website, on the affordable housing page (here, .pdf.). Those aren’t “affordable housing” in the legal sense, they are just (presumably) the market rates on the cheapest housing options available in Falls Church. And given the extremely limited supply of legally-defined affordable housing, the market rate is going to be what almost every person pays. Like it or not.
So, no free lunch. But maybe a free breakfast, for the time being.
I started out this post entirely tongue-in-cheek. But I didn’t realize there was more truth here than I bargained for. A colleague assures me that she knows of five or six people who do, in fact, use the Wolf Trap as the only affordable housing in town. They all work food-service jobs on Maple Avenue, as far up the block as Whole Foods, don’t own cars, and walk to work, while living (presumably two-to-a-room, so 750/month/person?) at the Wolf Trap Motel.
So, in fact, Wolf Trap Motel does function as affordable housing in Vienna. And that peculiar old motel out on Route 50 in Fairfax — the one that looks like a ship’s wheelhouse — apparently does the same for that area. So the recycling of downscale hotels as affordable workers’ housing is not just limited to the Wolf Trap Hotel.
As a final note, yet another colleague assures me that the Wolf Trap is the most common way-station for the newly divorced in the area. So, yeah, it does serve as affordable housing. Maybe not as the Town intends it, but it serves as that all the same.
As much as it pains me to say it, I’m going to continue to write about the future of MAC development on Maple Avenue. As of now, not only is there no forward motion on revising MAC, I’m not sure that the Town of Vienna government is even capable of making significant changes to MAC, based on the process used so far.
My main point here is to remind people that time is short. Continue reading Post #323: Revising MAC? Time is short.
Quick recap of the facts, in so far as I know them. Then one additional point that I believe to be a fact, but based solely on my own research. The conclusion (jump down to that if you wish) seems to be some fairly clear guidance on a way to revise MAC to be more in keeping with what the majority of Vienna residents appear to want. Continue reading Post #322: Moving forward (Where do we go from here, part 3).
At this point, I think it’s fairly well established that, to a significant degree, the Town of Vienna just kind of makes-it-up-as-they-go-along under MAC zoning. I think, for people who read this website, I don’t need to list the many examples of that. A quick reminder: the 100-day-rule that nobody else in Virginia obeys, the four-floor limit that maybe means five floors, the mezzanine rules that don’t apply to “commercial mezzanines”, the mandatory “voluntary” proffer to bury the power lines, changing the rules to make protest petitions harder, and so on.
I’ll just note the most recent one: Town staff simply gave a developer 4′ of extra room, more-or-less directly from the public street, by proposing to narrow Wade Hampton by 4′ as part of the redevelopment (Post #312). Now the Town is in the position of maybe-kinda-sorta negotiating to have the developer give that back — after the Town has approved the rezoning. Because, yeah, sure, that’s a well-specified and orderly process if ever I saw one. And an example of the brilliant bargaining tactics that have been a hallmark of the Town’s approach to MAC zoning.
But here’s the one that has me puzzled now: Why hasn’t Sunrise sued the Town?
Here’s the background. In the 5/1/2019 involving Town Council, the Town Attorney said that if an application met all the required standards under MAC, the Town could not turn it down (Post #261). If they did, they’d risk being sued for making an “arbitrary and capricious” decision. This was in a public meeting, mind you. In essence, the Town’s lawyer sets the Town’s legal position on this, which amounts to a Town of Vienna legal position of “please sue us if we turn you down”.
(For this next part, I’m not going to provide links to my prior write-ups documenting these facts. You’ll just have to take it as a given that these things all happened, and you can search this website to find them if you are sufficiently motivated to do so.)
Now, for Sunrise: At the suggestion and direction of the Planning Commission, Sunrise eliminated retail space. This was largely to improve the amount of parking available for the assisted living facility. Planning Commission Chairman Gelb did some shoe-leather research and concluded (based on a nearby Sunrise) that the parking level was probably adequate, though not ample. Town staff presented charts showing that the proposed parking levels were within the norms required by adjacent jurisdictions.
Sunrise then provided proffer after proffer to improve the parking situation further. They would have valet parking available at all times to add more usable parking space. They’d have a $20,000 annual fund to subsidize transit use by employees. They’d have a transit demand management program. They’d have employees park off-site and shuttle to the facility. They had additional usable parking spaces that were not counted by Vienna but that would be used by employees. They stated (correctly, I believe) that, given the site requirements, the Town was unlikely ever to find another use that required less parking than assisted living does. They would bar residents from having cars. I believe they stated their willingness to comply with any further requirements the Town might suggest regarding parking.
It was a good-faith effort, and then some. And by the end of it, by my calculation, they were providing more parking than any of the surrounding jurisdictions requires for a facility of this type. Far more than Town staff suggested was adequate. I even went so far as to suggest that Sunrise could provide much-needed public parking in that structure by eliminating the last vestige of retail space (Post #289).
But the Town turned them down. Near as I can recall, I heard two objections: Inadequate parking and inadequate retail space. That was the point at which I described working with the Town as akin to dealing with someone with severe short-term memory problems (Post #301, search for “irrational and psychotic Town government“). I.e., it was the Town that suggested they eliminate retail space to favor parking in the first place.
So, “arbitrary and capricious”? Strikes me that way. But while Virginia is a strong property-rights state, it also has a strong tradition of deferring to the decisions made by local legislatures. So it’s not clear that it would be worth suing.
In any case, I was under the vague impression that they only had 30 days or so to act on a rezoning. After that, it’s final. Based on this last Town Council meeting, my (again vague) understanding is that the Town pretends that the rezoning occurs when the Town Council votes on it. So … we’re pretty much at the deadline for Sunrise to file a lawsuit, I think. I sure haven’t heard that Sunrise has done or is even contemplating any such thing.
I just can’t quite fathom why. Was the Town Attorney wrong, as discussed in Post #263? Does Sunrise not consider it worthwhile to protest that zoning decision? Is it their corporate policy not to sue? Do they fear retribution from the Town (i.e., slow-walking any further permits and such)? Do they consider the Town’s decision justified?
I guess we’ll never know. Going forward, I guess the only important issue is whether or not the Town Attorney was correct in his statement that the Town cannot turn down MAC applications that meet all legal requirements. If that’s true, then MAC has become just another form of by-right development along Maple Avenue. I’m pretty sure it was not presented to Vienna citizens as such, and I’d say it’s a fair bet that its creators did not know they were doing that when they created it.
Tomorrow (7/15/2019) the Town Council and Planning Commission will hold a joint hearing on a motion to rescind the approval of 380 Maple West (37 condos plus retail, Wade Hampton and Maple).
I have discussed the background for this in several posts but my best explanation for how we got here is Post #309.
I have just three things to add at this point.
Having sat through dozens of such meetings over the past year, and having seen the Town Council approve 444 Maple West despite massive public opposition, I’m pretty sure that the “public hearing” portion of this meeting is purely for show. It’s a legal requirement, so they have to do it. But Town Council members already know how they will vote on this, and nothing that the public has to say will change those positions one bit.
By contrast, I have seen the Planning Commission modify its position in response to public comment. But Town Council? On this issue? Nah. Not gonna happen.
So, by all means, show up and speak. Be heard. Sit through the hours (?) of discussion. Listen to our elected representatives give their speeches. But realize that, absent the legal requirements, they could have gotten this piece of business over with in about five minutes. Call the roll, vote, and leave.
Why am I so sanguine about that? Because …
In order to approve 380 West, in the presence of a protest petition, at least five Town Council members had to vote in favor of it. (It used to be six, but Town Council changed that after the initial defeat of the Marco Polo proposal, one of the many times they doubled-down on MAC zoning (Post #227).
So, logically, anything under five “yes” votes for 380 — i.e., anything over two votes to rescind 380 — ought to result in rescinding the decision,. They are revisiting a decision that required five “yes” votes. Anything under five, now, means that the original motion would not have passed.
Under that interpretation (undoing the original decision), three or move voting to rescind would result in rescinding the original decision. Three or more would have been enough to block the original approval. Logically, three should be adequate to rescind the approval.
But wait, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe this needs to be treated like any other motion before Town Council, and should require a majority of Town Council members voting in favor of it.
Under that interpretation (treat as any other motion), four or more voting to rescind would result in rescinding the original decision. That’s a simple majority of the Town Council, that’s the way business is normally conducted. And that’s consistent with why this is being revisited in the first place — three-quarters of votes cast in the May election were for anti-MAC candidates, and those now account for a majority of the members of the Town Council.
Under either of those interpretations, the motion to rescind would pass. Which is precisely why the Mayor and Town Attorney aren’t going to do either of those things. The rumor I have heard is that they are going to require a super-majority of “yes” votes in order to pass the motion to rescind the 380 approval.
Because …. ?
Because they win, in that case. Under that interpretation, five people would have to vote to rescind the decision. Absent a miracle, that will not occur, as Council members DiRocco, Colbert, and Noble can be counted to vote against rescinding the 380 approval. I’m sure there will be some legalese solemly spoken in order to bless this decision. But the reality of it is, the remaining pro-MAC Town Council members would not win in any sort of fair fight. But only idiots opt for a fair fight when they control the rules. So they have taken the last two weeks to gin up a rationale that lets them win.
Which merely underscores that ….
Up to now, when challenged, the pro-MAC Town Council and Town employees have simply doubled-down on every objectionable aspect of MAC zoning (Post #227). And this next meeting will NOT be the last of that of that doubling-down strategy that we have seen so far.
Why?
Because this latest episode shows that if you control the rules, and have Town staff working for you, it doesn’t really much matter that you are in the minority. It doesn’t much matter that the most recent election should have sent a fairly strong signal about what the majority of Vienna citizens want, with three-quarters of votes case for anti-MAC candidates.
If you hold the reins of power, you can use them to ignore the results of the last election, in the hope that the next election will turn things around for you. Given that attitude, the only option for people who oppose the current MAC setup is to prevent that from happening. The only option is to try to vote the rest of them out, if we can.
I don’t say that lightly. I’m pretty much sick of this issue. But there hasn’t been the slightest indication that the pro-MAC forces are willing to consider material changes to the existing law. I.e., Almost nobody wants to get rid of MAC entirely, but a large fraction of the population appears to want smaller buildings and more green space (as outlined in this post based on a survey of Vienna residents). But all we have seen so far is more sleight-of-hand, such as the offer to replace the useless 15% “open space” requirement with what would in all likelihood be an equally useless 10% “gathering space” requirement.
In summary, for those who have been following this issue closely, it’s absolutely no surprise that those in power would bend the rules in their favor. Recall that after the original Marco Polo proposal was turned down, those in power changed the voting rules to try to ensure that would not happen again. This latest twist is just more of the same.
In Post #313, I came to the surprising conclusion that Maple Avenue, at Glyndon, is more “retail dense” than the Mosaic district. You have more retail square footage, and more establishments, within a quarter-mile walk of that intersection, than are in the Mosaic district. Although, obviously, the mix of establishments in Vienna is radically different from that in Mosaic..
This raises another question: How’s the “retail density” of the new MAC mixed-use projects working out? These are all at the west end of Maple. If you took the entire western half-mile of Maple (so, a quarter-mile walk in each direction) and built both sides of the road up at the observed MAC density (so, one mile of Maple Avenue frontage), would it equal equal the 350,000 square feet of retail found in the Mosaic District? Or even the nearly 440,000 square feet of retail at the “Glyndon Shopping District” on Maple?
Continue reading Post #316: MAC versus Mosaic, retail density is an issue
Post #302 made the case that you can’t expect the entire Maple Avenue corridor to become one big “vibrant, pedestrian-oriented” shopping district. Any such district would have to be smaller than the length of Maple. Post #310 pointed out that the Town has no plan for any area smaller than all of Maple.
In this post, I’m going to start to characterize what does and doesn’t appear to work, in this immediate area, in terms of getting that “vibrant, pedestrian-oriented” shopping experience. I focus on the Mosaic District, then turn to Maple.
And there I got a surprise. Define “retail density” as the number of retail establishments within a quarter-mile walk of some point. I figured that Maple Avenue, with those old-fashioned shopping centers, could not possibly be as “retail dense” as Mosaic. I figured, maybe the reason you don’t see people walking to the shops on Maple is that they are far too spread out.
But that’s wrong. The center of Mosaic (Strawberry Lane Park/Target) has 81 retail establishments within a quarter-mile walk. Mosaic claims 350,00 square feet of retail space. I assumed the sprawling Maple Avenue, with its old-fashioned shopping centers, would have nowhere near that density. Dead wrong. The corner of Maple and Glyndon has 107 retail establishments within that same quarter-mile walking distance. Using Fairfax County tax maps, I calculate just under 440,000 square feet of retail space in that area.
Within a quarter-mile walking distance of the intersection of Maple and Glyndon, there is more total retail space and there are more total establishments than within the Mosaic district.
Continue reading Post #313: Maple versus Mosaic, retail density is not the issue
In a nutshell: I’m not quite sure what went on with regard to the motion to rescind the approval of 380 Maple West (Post #309). About 40 minutes into the meeting, Town Council recessed into a closed session, in order to consult with the Town Attorney. That was supposed to last 10 to 15 minutes, but in fact took well over an hour. There was lengthy discussion of 380 after they came out of that closed session. I believe the upshot of all of that is that the motion to rescind the 380 Maple West approval was withdrawn — for now. Instead, they will hold a separate public hearing on July 15, to consider that motion to rescind, after publishing notification of their intent to rescind that rezoning.This will be a joint public hearing by Town Council and Planning Commission. The vote for another public hearing was 5-2, with DiRocco and Colbert voting against. Continue reading Post #315: The 7/1/2019 Town Council meeting
There is only one public meeting this week relevant to MAC zoning.
Today, 7/1/2019, at 8 PM, the Town Council will meet. The final item on this evening’s agenda is consideration of a motion to rescind approval of 380 Maple West (37 condos plus retail, Maple and Wade Hampton).
The meeting materials for the motion to rescind the decision are posted here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3998325&GUID=6AFD6CFF-387C-4BF5-BB19-48AA30CEFC78&Options=&Search=
The Town reserves the right to change or cancel meetings on short notice, so check the Town’s general calendar before you go, at this URL:
https://www.viennava.gov/
You can see my writeup of this issue in Post #309.
