Dec. 14, 2023
Located inside the Beltway adjacent to the nation's capital, Arlington County, Virginia, has cultivated a distinct reputation for high densities of federal workers, doctorates, and decorum. The civic success of the region, which was picked in 2018 to be Amazon's second headquarters, owes much to what many in the wealthy suburb call the Arlington Way of rational, dispassionate government. One former official joked, due to the laboriousness of the exercise, the county's real slogan should be "Process. It's our most important product."
But that veneer of unity was put to the test during a multiyear debate over upzoning and missing middle housing, specifically allowing multiunit structures like low-rise apartments, duplexes, or triplexes in the vast swaths of the county's residential land zoned only for single-family homes. Like many communities in the region and across the country, Arlington has become a victim of its own economic success in terms of housing shortages and affordability — the average home sale price was more than $800,000 in 2022 and median two-bedroom rent is $2,600 as of November 2023. That has helped further the divide between renters and homeowners, especially NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard).
The planning commission saw this challenge as more reason to embark on zoning reform, which made key progress in March 2023. After spirited debate continued over multiple meetings with hundreds of speakers — as well as a blitz of yard signs and childish antics during comment sessions — a unanimous decision was reached by the county board in favor of upzoning all single-family-zoned areas to allow up to six dwelling units per lot.
The process, which planners researched and refereed, got Arlington to a yes and offers a blueprint for other communities on how to utilize community engagement and self-determination against loud protest and pushback from NIMBYs.
"One of the strategies that was really clear to us from the very beginning was the importance of community," says Kellie Brown, section supervisor for comprehensive planning in Arlington. "What exactly were the problems we were trying to solve? We really put together a series of research questions that helped us clearly provide an answer."
Kellie Brown and other planners strove to educate the community about the planning context and current issues, while avoiding jargon. Photo by Alyssa Schukar.
Wealthy communities like Arlington, filled with single-family-only zoning, represent a bellwether in the larger national push for upzoning, housing reform, and improved affordability.
While the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have spoken of the urgent need for zoning reform, housing costs continue to strain the budgets of many Americans. Planners who today find themselves at the cutting-edge of housing choice and housing diversity, can't — and shouldn't — become political actors in this fray. But in Arlington, like so many communities, the majority that may favor change often finds itself blocked and delayed by groups operating under the NIMBY banner.
Demographics are instrumental
Arlington's seven-person planning department got to work by framing and informing the conversations, communicating the stakes, and educating the community about the history and future of zoning policy in the area. That effort engaged and energized the community debate, ultimately giving political players in the community and on the county board the input to prevail.
The hoped-for, recommended change was upzoning all single-family parcels to accommodate up to eight units. The missing middle plan that finally passed earlier this year was slightly more limited; single-family lots could now accommodate up to six-unit structures, and annual approvals would be limited to just 58 projects per year until 2028. But it's widely seen as a vital first step in additional reform, and an inspiration to similar efforts in neighboring parts of northern Virginia that are dealing with these issues right now.
"This has led to sustained interest in more affordable housing in less-dense parts of Arlington," says Eric Maribojoc, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill real estate professor focused on housing affordability. "Making a dent like this in a community like Arlington, going one step at a time, is the right approach."
As planning department research found, redevelopment of existing properties into larger homes is actually making the affordability and inequity crisis worse.
In the case of Arlington zoning reform, demographics have proven to be instrumental. Beginning in the 1970s, as Washington, D.C., metro stations splayed out from the capital, Arlington began zoning for and building massive, transit-oriented housing developments adjacent to stations along four separate rail lines. The Arlington Way, in part, refers to aggressive community action of the era that pushed plans for aboveground rail stations underground and shrunk a proposed highway, in effect transforming the county from a struggling inner-ring suburb into today's more dynamic urban fabric.
By the 1990s, apartment dwellers outnumbered those living in single-family homes, and most of the region's developable land had been built out. That has attracted a younger, more diverse community to Arlington that has increasingly been engaged with the direction of local government.
But, with most of the county's land zoned exclusively for single-family housing, apartments and condos aren't coming online fast enough to meet demand. As planning department research found, redevelopment of existing single-family properties into larger homes is actually making the affordability and inequity crisis worse. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments estimates the D.C. metro region needs to produce 32,000 units a year for nearly a decade to catch up on the shortfall by 2030. And with the new Amazon HQ2 having officially opened in May 2023, regional demand for homes and homeownership continues to skyrocket.
Arlova Vonhm, AICP, Arlington county's zoning administrator and zoning division chief, on the county's journey to ADU adoption.
Arlington planners anticipated these issues for years. Beginning in 2015 with the county's Affordable Housing Master Plan — and continuing through successful efforts to legalize accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and a 2019 equity resolution to examine county policy through an equity lens — it was clear that expanding housing and diversity were key goals that were being left unmet. As Arlova Vonhm, AICP, the county's zoning administrator and zoning division chief, put it in an interview, Arlington was great at attracting high-rises near mass transit but had begun to reach its limit. It was time to figure out what to do with the 79 percent of the county's residential land area where only single-family homes were allowed.
That's where missing middle housing came in. Broadly defined, this type of housing covers an array of mid-rise, often vernacular options, mainly smaller apartment complexes of a few stories. Once a staple of cities and inner-ring suburbs, they met the needs of a variety of household types with varying budgets. In many cases, they've become signature urban housing styles, like Brooklyn brownstones, Chicago greystones, or the dingbat apartments of Los Angeles. By the post-WWII period, economic and regulatory factors — including suburbanization, higher development costs and, most significantly, the proliferation of neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes — made them more and more rare. In Arlington, housing clearly shifted toward single-family homes, then bifurcated with the introduction of high-rises, with very little in the middle.
Expanding housing choice means making room for missing middle, multifamily, and transit-oriented housing, like this condo development near a Metro stop.
This infill development in Arlington is nestled amid single-family houses. Showing real-life examples helped people visualize options and challenges. Photos by Alyssa Schukar.
Educate and engage
That was the context behind the planning department's detailed three-phase approach: conduct a missing middle study (which began in 2020), formulate a policy proposal, and refine it via additional community feedback and engagement. For planner Kellie Brown, that meant formulating a broad-based community engagement approach informed by the confines of the pandemic to reach parts of the population that really hadn't been brought into similar discussions in the past.
"Because of the pandemic, we pioneered all kinds of new communication strategies," says Brown. "We were very intentional with all our meetings and aimed to reach the broadest cross-section of the community possible."
This included virtual engagements, Jira boards (a type of shared digital whiteboard), and pop-up events at popular community gatherings. Listening sessions and virtual walking tours helped familiarize community members with the issues at stake and showed off legacy examples of missing middle homes.
It was instrumental to the proposal's package to engage with the renter population. As Brown's colleague Matthew Ladd, AICP, Arlington's principal planner, adds, the goal was to fulfill the board's advisory role, take the community's pulse and provide the decision makers — the elected officials — with input and information to make sure they understood the proposal. This wide-ranging effort made people feel heard and allowed many more engaged citizens to understand why elected officials were making the changes they ended up making.
The planners' role included taking the community pulse and arming elected officials with resources to aid in decision-making, says principal planner Matthew Ladd, AICP. Photo by Alyssa Schukar.
"Change is hard, and people's communities are very important to them," says Brown. "You have to be respectful of that, but also recognize there are important goals as planners we can work toward and changes we can communicate. We can show that the benefits are greater than the burden."
Part of the challenge was awareness and language: Brown felt it could be hard to set the groundwork to solve the housing shortage without a common set of assumptions, history, and facts, as well as jargon-free ways to discuss the county's housing stock. That's why the most important document the planners produced wasn't the final proposal.
During the first phase of the process, they created a five-part Research Compendium, a detailed, visually focused report tracing the history of the city's zoning and housing rules. Information was made to be very user-friendly, with extensive charts, diagrams, and visuals produced by an outside designer. It made the information accessible so that readers didn't need a degree in planning to understand it.
One key section of the compendium focused on the history of county zoning — and, as the researchers and planners noted in the report, the "legacy of exclusion and a lack of housing opportunities for a diverse community." The same zoning rules had remained virtually unchanged since 1930.
The planners showed a methodical focus, telling Arlington residents how it got to its current state and outlining scenarios around what would happen with and without change.
Brown recalls a certain graphic that overlaid areas with a greater than 70 percent white population with single-family zoning overlays, which connected the history of exclusion with present-day policies. It would become a favorite image for the pro-reform movement, which reproduced it everywhere. It showed the direct connection between zoning and inequity, and the narrative helped spark more pro-housing, YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) sentiment that led to a large turnout at community meetings.
The report spoke about the problems the community was facing and why it had those problems in the first place, Brown says. "And I think it galvanized a lot of people in the community."
This engagement helped place zoning in a relevant context and gave people the information needed for a robust, data-driven debate. Maribojoc, who previously taught at George Mason University in Northern Virginia, says that the planners showed a methodical focus, telling Arlington how it got to its current state and outlining scenarios around what would happen with and without change.
The first phase, which utilized the research compendium to drive engagement, really helped get citizens "on the same page" around the problem that the planners were trying to solve, Brown says. That made it easier to get actionable feedback to inform the second step — the creation of a policy proposal. The early investment helped the planning department recognize the main stakeholders and a path to consensus, which made the third step (creating specific regulatory changes) that much easier.
A planner's guide to mastering pushback and passing zoning reform with tips on how to shut down anti-housing arguments and spark real conversations about policy shifts.
It also smoothed over complaints around the speed of the process — both from NIMBYs, who argued (and continue to argue) that the final proposal wasn't thorough enough and lacked proper environmental and transportation review, and the YIMBYs who wanted more extensive upzoning. But while the planning department was caught in the middle upholding its role as a referee and rules-bound public agency, even passionate supporters on both sides conceded they did a good job.
"I do believe that they did much better than most other planning departments in other jurisdictions have done when they attempted something similar," says Adam Theo, director of communications for YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and former independent candidate for the county board. "The county planners and the county boards were stuck with the system and processes that had been long ago established by past decision makers."
Collaboration with other county departments and stakeholders also streamlined the process. Planners solicited feedback from the county board while drafting policy proposals to better understand the legislative issues and policy concerns. There was exceptional outreach with zoning — "one of the better examples of planning and zoning working together," Vonhm says — which helped smooth out potential enforcement issues. The collaboration guaranteed that missing middle changes would be more efficient when they were rolled out and help set the groundwork for future adjustments.
Exploring equity impacts on zoning changes
Toward the end of the process, as part of navigating community feedback, the planning department also released a comprehensive racial and socioeconomic equity analysis, which identified the benefits and burdens of their recommendations compared with the status quo. It showed the history of county zoning policy, and how expanding missing middle housing would impact opportunity for lower-income members of the community, which Brown believes really provided additional fuel for proponents, especially on the county board, to push for approval.
"It's in our AICP code of ethics and Equity in Zoning Policy Guide to recognize our unique responsibility as planners to eliminate historic patterns of inequity tied to previous generations of planners. I took it as a point of pride that we were able to accomplish that and fulfill my aspirational goals as a planner."— Matthew Ladd, AICP
"It's in our AICP code of ethics and Equity in Zoning Policy Guide to recognize our unique responsibility as planners to eliminate historic patterns of inequity tied to previous generations of planners," says Ladd. "I took it as a point of pride that we were able to accomplish that and fulfill my aspirational goals as a planner."
While the total number of potential new units the missing middle proposal allows only goes a short way in solving the larger housing challenge, the process breaks new ground in Arlington. The planning department's work established a narrative around the impact of zoning that wasn't there before. It also sets the stage for additional change.
"We couldn't do the kind of widespread missing middle housing zoning amendments that were seen in cities like Portland or Minneapolis," says Ladd. "But in terms of our process, I think it's a good one to follow, and I would encourage people to look at that."
So far, neighboring counties and municipalities, including Fairfax, Loudon, and Alexandria counties, have done just that. Those communities have, or will soon, embark on upzoning efforts informed in part by what worked in Arlington. There's still NIMBY pushback, including a lawsuit. And one of the anti-missing middle leaders, Peter Rousselot with Arlingtonians for our Sustainable Future, said his group and many residents still oppose the decision.
But Maribojoc argues that the effort to educate the broader community is what won the day and will continue to pay dividends. This effort will lead to more successes, he argues, and since the missing middle regulations passed, even small area plans in Arlington neighborhoods have been more adventurous due to the success of the debate. The planning department continues to track the impact of the efforts, listing new units created and showcasing results, which helps build the growing case for future change.
"It is a much better plan than I think Arlington County would have gotten otherwise, if we acted just like other jurisdictions," says Theo. "I think it's safe to say Arlington County is on the forefront of missing middle reform."
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