Arlington's "missing middle" muddle

I first learned about the left’s war on the suburbs in 2012 from Stanley Kurtz’s book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. At that time, the war was, indeed, being waged mainly by the Obama administration.

These days, though, the war increasingly is being waged within the suburbs themselves. Local leftist are waging what, in effect, is a civil war.

Arlington County, Virginia is a good example. The County plans to do away with single-family zoning.

Currently, it’s illegal to build anything other than single-family homes on most residential land in Arlington. The underlying policy is perfectly sensible — to encourage housing density along the metro corridor and in transportation hubs while preserving residential neighborhoods. It’s these neighborhoods, after all, that attracted most residents to the County in the first place.

But under the new plan, developers could build duplexes, townhouses, and small apartment buildings throughout what the Washington Post describes as “the leafy suburban neighborhoods that take up much of Arlington’s 26 square miles.”

The drawbacks of the plan are obvious. It likely will result in overcrowding of public schools, increased traffic congestion, and a reduction in green spaces. Given the fact that Arlington now has a Soros-backed prosecutor, it might also produce a spike in crime. It certainly will deprive residents of the kind of neighborhoods they paid to live in.

To the extent these problems emerge, they will likely drive some residents out of the County to areas that are more “leafy” and less crowded. To be sure, Arlington will continue to be attractive to many. However, now that working from home has become more common, there’s less of a premium in living close to Washington, DC.

To the extent well-to-do residents leave and are replaced by less prosperous ones (the intended beneficiaries of the plan — see below), the County’s per capita tax base will shrink, making it all the more difficult to pay for schools and roads to accommodate the increased population.

What are the advantages of the plan? Advocates sell it as providing housing for “the missing middle.” In other words, it will enable people who currently can’t afford to buy a home in Arlington (the middle class?) to do so.

But why should people who can’t afford to buy a home in Arlington be able to do so when the cost of enabling this is a significant alteration of the community? There is no divine right to own a house in Arlington.

It’s enough that anyone who can afford to buy in Arlington be legally able to buy; anyone who can afford to rent be legally able to rent; and others be legally able to live in a locale they can afford. All of this is possible. The age of restrictive covenants and other forms of housing discrimination expired long ago.

Moreover, it’s far from clear that building more housing will make buying in Arlington significantly less expensive. The lack of high cost housing in Arlington is driven by the quality of its schools, Amazon’s new headquarters in the area, and the County’s proximity to Washington DC. These forces might very well mean high prices for the new housing, as high-income Amazon employees bid up the sales prices.

If so, Arlington will experience many of the downsides of the plan — crowded schools and roads, plus less green space — without accruing the supposed advantages to the “missing middle.”

Some advocates of “missing middle” housing acknowledge this problem. County Board member Takis Karantonis, in response to an objection that the new housing will go to “pretty well-off households” as opposed to those below the area median income,” said there are “other instruments of affordable housing policy in our toolbox” to deal with this challenge.

Exactly. The “missing middle” initiative is just the start of a drive to provide low-income housing that will alter the County even more radically.    

Nonetheless, I suspect the missing middle initiative in some form is a done deal. Those living in a jurisdiction controlled by Democrats should take note. Something similar will probably be attempted in your neighborhood, if it hasn’t been proposed already.