Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

Good evening, welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting of the City of Fairfax Planning Commission for Monday, September 23rd. Our first order of business is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join me as you are able. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Our first order of business is discussion and adoption of the agenda. The agenda was posted ahead of the meeting. Are there any changes or additions? Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Chairman, I move the agenda be adopted as presented. Second. It moved and seconded to adopt the agenda as presented. All those in favor say aye.

Aye. Opposed? Motion passes unanimously. We do have to admit Mr. Coleman. Do we have a motion? A resolution for that? Let me. Hmm. I can try. You got one? Previous. I can pull one up in just a minute. Sorry? I can pull one up. Okay. Bear with us. Mr. Coleman is going to be participating remotely. But this was kind of a late game time decision. So we're not quite all together at this point. Sorry. I think I always have paper copies. I think I always have paper copies. Yes, we always have paper copies. Oh, here we go. There we go. There we go. Our vice chair will. No problem. Thank you. Who's Lockhart? Mr. Chair, I move in in accordance with the Planning Commission's adopted policy that is permitted by Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3708.3 to approve the request from Planning Commissioner

Anthony Coleman, properly submitted in writing prior to tonight's meeting, for remote participation subject to the requirements outlined in the Planning Commission adopted policy and applicable in all portions of the Planning Commission meeting of today, September 24, 2024. Second. Second. Moved and seconded. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Welcome officially Mr. Coleman. Next order of business is presentations by the public on any matter not calling for a public hearing. We do have one public hearing this evening, which is on the amendments to the City of Fairfax comprehensive plan. And so there will be an opportunity to speak to that in a little while. Is there anybody present who would like to speak to the Commission at this time?

Have we had any earlier sign-ups? No. No sign-ups. Anybody in the room like to address the Commission at this time? Okay. Seeing none, we'll move on to consideration of the minutes for September 9, 2024. They were issued again prior to the meeting. Mr. Chair, I move that we adopt the meeting minutes from September 9, 2024, regular meeting of the Planning Commission as presented. Second. Second. Moved and seconded. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Aye. Aye. Next item is the agenda is items not requiring a public hearing. We have no such items for this evening. So we move to our public hearing, which is public hearing on final recommendation to the

City Council for amendments to the City of Fairfax 2035 comprehensive plan based on the five-year review conducted in accordance with Code of Virginia section 15.2-2230. Staff report from Mr. Napty. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the Planning Commission. This is again the public hearing for the comprehensive plan review amendments that have come out of the five-year review and according to a state code. A quick review of our schedule. We began this back in the summer of 2023 and began with outreach to various city boards and commissions as well as the community through public meetings and brought that information back in our compilation phase that we worked on through the early part of this year and refined it over the course of the summer.

So we are now down here toward the end at our first red dot. That is the tonight's public hearing. The yellow circle before that was the work session we had with Planning Commission on September 9. That's the last time we discussed this item and that was followed with a discussion on the same item with City Council on September 10. So we made a few revisions based on those two meetings and tonight I will share with you what those revisions are. And then following that we will go through and do a very quick summary of the key changes that are being made with these amendments. Kind of a review of everything we've been discussing over the past year. And that way anybody who is joining in for the first time can get a kind of a quick catch up to where we are.

And then we will open up, turn it over to you to open the public hearing. So first we have two changes that were proposed that are proposed to the text. These are both based on feedback that we got from City Council. The first is in the introduction. As you may recall in the introduction section in the background we added a statement acknowledging past inequalities and the availability of different races and incomes to be able to move here as a lot of our housing stock was being developed in the 1950s and 1960s. City Council asked us to add to that that the city has recognized this and has begun taking steps to address this. And so we have some new language in two portions of the introduction that state that we are beginning to move forward on this.

Second, with the environment and sustainability chapter, there is a action and the natural environment guiding principle that is shown here in the white where it says address environmental protection in tandem with other comprehensive plan goals. Similar actions have been added to the transportation, the land use, and the economic vitality sections of the comprehensive plan. The purpose of this was to ensure that we are cross coordinating as reviewing projects or coming up with ideas on what the city needs to do next. However, the City Council recognized that environment sustainability is the City Council's number two goal. And I wanted to emphasize that this has some priority to it. And so they asked us to add something that turns into the statement at the end of this highlighted yellow that says,

and ensure such protections are prioritized in the design and development of public and private projects. So again, we have a similar action in several of our guiding principles. But based on Council feedback, we wanted to add a little bit more to emphasize the priority, particularly in this guiding principle. One staff change has been made since we last met. As you recall, we added the proposed or anticipated costs for the transportation projects that are included on the transportation projects map. Staff is recommending that we remove three of these. These are really management and maintenance type projects. We did have these listed in the previous comprehensive plan, but they aren't what is requested by the state code and they aren't shown on our transportation projects map.

So removing them doesn't mean that the city would not be doing them. It's just that the comprehensive plan is intended to focus really on capital projects as opposed to maintenance projects. And so to keep that consistent, we recommend removing these three from this chart. And then lastly, as you may recall, when we last met, we did not have amendments to our appendices or index at that time. So I'll go through and quickly identify what is proposed to change in those two sections. The first appendix is the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Plan. As we mentioned last time, there are no proposed changes to the actions or guidance from the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Plan because that is done through a separate effort.

But there are some updates to some of the data and the figures that are in there. And so these are the three maps that are proposed to be updated. The first is a floodplain map. As the Planning Commission may recall, last year, FEMA completed updated analysis of the floodplains in the city and made some revisions. And so now the new floodplain map reflects those revisions. We have changes to impervious cover that have occurred since the last comprehensive plan was adopted. So those are shown in the new impervious cover map. And then lastly, storage tanks. This includes above ground and underground storage tanks. This is updated. The actual locations has not changed for storage tanks, but the expiration date for permits has changed.

I did want to note that that data comes from the state, which may not include all of our updates. So we have, for example, the Wawa that was recently completed is not showing up on here yet, but we expect that will be in future years. The second appendix refers to or has additional information about transportation practices and policies. The only change here is that there's a section that talks about bike share. And since we now have a operating bike share system in the city, the statements have been changed to reflect that. And then lastly, the index. The index provides a little more information about some of the terms that are unique to the comprehensive plan. So this includes things like our our land use place types or our transportation street types.

So one thing that is changed that remove the boulevard street type, as you might recall from our previous discussion. This is primarily merged with the commercial main street type. So there's no longer definition for that. And then there are several of the the terms in the index that refer to activity centers. A lot of these had to be adjusted based on the changes to the activity centers, including the adoption of smaller year plans and other types of references. So all of those have been changed to reflect their reference in the comprehensive plan correctly. So those are the changes that are proposed since the Planning Commission last saw this two weeks ago. Now I'll go through and as I mentioned, this will be a very quick summary.

I know the Planning Commission has seen this quite a few times, but we do want to give a quick summary of what the primary edits are proposed to be for anyone who might be following along for the first time. So first, the cover. The shown here, the previous cover on the left, the proposed cover on the right, essentially it's staying the same. We've shuffled the colors around and this is intended to signify that it's essentially the same comprehensive plan, but it is more of an update than a simple land use request would be. So this will help us make sure we're looking at the correct comprehensive plan over the next five years. The vision statement, the Planning Commission, we did not discuss this with you at your last meeting, though we did discuss it with you several months ago.

And we did bring it up with the City Council on the following night, two weeks ago. The change to the vision statement, the terminology is proposed to remain the same. However, we're reordering the sentence so that the statement. Oh, sorry. A vibrant 21st century community is the key statement. So that comes first and is supported by a strong, sustainable economy, which is what's supporting the vibrant 21st century community. And that's reversed from the order that's there now. And again, that was based on earlier discussions with the Planning Commission and City Council supported this change. So going through the document, starting with the land use chapter. These are the changes, proposed changes to the future land use map.

We are looking at changes to the American Legion site based on a request from the property owner. Change to Old Town Square to activity center. Change to the Camp Washington water tower on Williams Place. Change to the Mathey property where the city purchased the property that was previously designated as townhouse to now be designated as open space. In several locations, we are changing the designation of open space public to open space private. This is in any location where a resource protection area overlaps with a single family lot. And this is to signify that the city wants that to remain as open space, but not necessarily that it be publicly accessible. And we've expanded the activity center, the Fairfax Circle activity center boundary and the Northwest quadrant of Fairfax Circle to match the area that was recommended by the Planning Commission City Council to be within the study area for the small area plan and was ultimately included through the adoption of the small area plan.

Another big change regarding land use is the addition of the mixed use place type. This place type is not mapped anywhere. It is provided as an opportunity for certain sites to accommodate a mix of uses that are not located in activity centers. And based on previous discussions with the Planning Commission, this is limited to only locations with a partial specific consideration in the comprehensive plan. There are two such sites that are identified and that we have design based criteria for this place type as shown in the chart here. And these are the two sites that are recommended to have the partial specific consideration to support a mixed use place type. Again, these are not mapped to the mixed use place type.

The property owners would have to request that, but that could be supported through the comprehensive plan. And just based on our previous discussion, we did not add the property at 10655 Fairfax Boulevard. This is the Baskin-Roppins property where the property owner sent a letter requesting they be considered. The Planning Commission at the last meeting supported the concept of allowing residential uses on the second floor of the existing building there, but didn't think it warranted a amendment to the comprehensive plan and believe that such an idea could move forward without such an amendment. In the transportation section, we are proposing changes to the street types. So first here is the street type map with the changes shown here.

Some of the main changes, as previously mentioned, are the elimination of the boulevard street type and consolidating that with commercial mains. Again, this is because the typical cross section for those two street types was similar. The only difference was related to the uses outside of the public right of way and having them both on the street map just led to confusion. There are also other changes based on what is recommended to individual small area plans, as well as changes to the neighborhood circulator locations to match the location shown in the bicycle master plan for neighbor ways. The transportation projects map as previously discussed, a lot of the projects on the current transportation projects map are underway.

And so those have been removed and replaced with these newer projects. As we mentioned last time, many of these projects are smaller in scale than what we saw in the previous comprehensive plan. And the total estimated cost is about one third of what we saw in the previous comprehensive plan. But we do have an upcoming fairly major transportation planning project that is recommended in the proposed comprehensive plan as a combination pedestrian master plan, safe streets for all action plan and old town circulation study. And we expect some larger scale projects to be recommended through that effort. And those could be incorporated through future amendments into the comprehensive plan. In the environment and sustainability chapter, the major changes we're looking at are incorporating the some of the actions of the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Plan directly into the comprehensive plan.

Even though this is an appendix, we found that it wasn't always properly referenced. And so we wanted to include some of those key actions. These include actions such as conducting watershed management plans, identifying and conserving and protecting natural resources, and developing a sustainable landscaping policy and establishing an evasives management program. There are recommendations to strengthen the resiliency goal that was existing in the comprehensive in the existing comprehensive plan. But this would add some additional detail to that based on work that the Environmental Sustainability Committee has been doing over the past several years. This includes new actions to limit development in floodplains, to develop projections for future floodplains based on climate change,

to conduct climate risk assessments of city infrastructure, to reduce urban heat island effect, and increase infrastructure resiliency. This could be through things such as undergrounding utilities. There are new actions for green infrastructure and sustainable landscaping, as well as to develop an electric vehicle readiness plan. There are two actions associated with the EV readiness plan, and we expect this may change when that plan is completed. And then lastly, there are additional actions to support healthy food access and urban agriculture. In the economic vitality chapter, the first item here is not necessarily a change. The question came up about whether the city should still strive to increase the commercial tax base, given the challenges in the current economy.

And it was suggested that we do continue to do that based on our current market. We actually had a comprehensive plan implementation meeting this past week. And somebody threw out the idea of saying maintain and increase, as opposed to maintain or increase the commercial tax base. We're certainly open to doing that if the Planning Commission directs us to do so. There is a new action to monitor codes for new business types. This is based on what we have been experiencing over the past couple of years with kind of ingenuity of business types that do not necessarily fit within our existing codes. And so the suggestion here is that we be proactive to try to identify what those are and accommodate them with our codes where appropriate.

So we don't hold up the ability of businesses to locate in the city. Revising actions to market smaller plans, as opposed to develop them with a focus on Old Town and North Vax as a priority. And then we are removing the goal to pursue a single zip code for the city. And then lastly, in the community services chapter, there are a lot of changes here, but some of the primary ones are to monitor school capacity. We do this. We analyze school impact from new development based on development applications. But the suggestion here is that we look more long term at the capacity of our existing schools. There are new actions to support affordable childcare that came from both the Human Services Committee and the School Board.

New actions or expanded actions for physical and mental health and the Parks and Recreation guiding principle that were moved from the Sustainability Initiatives guiding principle. Recommendations in cultural arts to strengthen visual arts as opposed to just performing arts, which was the focus in the previous comprehensive plan. New actions for establishing green infrastructure and to establish level of service standards for all of city services. So that is again a very quick summary of the changes that are proposed with this comprehensive plan amendment. The materials that are posted for this meeting, the full proposed comprehensive plan is provided in attachment one. And a markup of all of the text in the comprehensive plan showing those changes is provided in attachment two.

As far as next steps are concerned, if we receive approval from the Planning Commission tonight, we will proceed to a city public hearing with the City Council on October 8. And then if the City Council adopts the comprehensive plan, then we will move forward with an implementation plan. We have an implementation plan for the current comprehensive plan. But as we have discussed with the Planning Commission recently, we will look at different ways to set up the structure of that to make our discussions on that more efficient. Our next review of the implementation plan would be in January 2025. And so we'll try to work that out with the Planning Commission in the months leading up to that. We will identify Planning Commission efforts, things that the Planning Commission would take the lead on that are new in the comprehensive plan that will help us develop our work plan over the next couple of years.

And as the comprehensive plan is adopted, we will continue to reference it in project reviews for private development projects as well as city projects. And it will be used as a reference in the Capital Improvement Program. And so that is what we have for today. We're happy to enter any questions. Thank you, Mr. Napty. Any comments or questions? I'll remind you, Mr. Napty did raise one question about the commercial tax base, which came up in a different forum about maintaining or increasing versus maintaining and increasing. If you have comments on that particular that would answer that question. My perspective is grammatically that doesn't make sense because if you increase, you're not maintaining.

If you want to maintain existing and increase, that could be something. But then the market is dynamic. I don't know how you can maintain existing. Markets will change and so forth. I'm personally happy with maintain or increase. But looking for comments on that and any other questions or comments you might have. Mr. Galli-Yan, Mr. Napty, Ms. Briggs, Mr. Rice. Just a quick question on the above ground storage tank graphic. That's page 174. Okay. So what is the nature of the green versus yellow categories? I'm having a hard time discerning the legend there. And the point symbols over on Pickett for the tank farm, are those collection of four point symbols to represent specific tanks or are they just generally standing in for a large tank facility?

So first with the symbols, the colors, any color symbol, whether it's a circle or triangle means that it's inactive. Still there's still something stored in the tank. And all the hollow ones mean that the tank is inactive. It's still there but not being used. The green triangles are, UST stands for underground storage tank. So this would be the type of things you see at gas stations. Yep. And then the ASTs are above ground storage tanks. So above ground storage. I don't know the answer to your question about the tank farm. I do believe that the symbols indicate multiple at the same location. Because it's only there and up off of old Pickett Road where that type of symbol is shown. Okay. It's such a large facility and notable enough.

I know generally cartographically we're not going to pepper the map with additional circles to represent tanks. But so I guess just let me maybe make a comment another way. When I moved to the city, I happened to be fortunate enough to move next door to a former fire chief. And the fire chief, Mr. Gary Maceres, had some very difficult episodes at the tank farm with underground releases. This was a really difficult series of events for the city and the county, regulatory in nature. And we're light years ahead of where we were in terms of safety and monitoring and a whole bunch of things. But I think more generally than focusing on Pickett and the tank farm, a general theme, which I'd like to have captured in some way,

maybe closer to the beginning of the comp plan, perhaps in conjunction with the vision statement or the background for the plan, would be some additional pointers of some sort that we may be able to insert into the comp plan that would help set context for areas where the city has made a lot of progress. So we're going to redo this process every five years. It's part of the way we operate as an independent city. We're required to update the comp plan every five years. What I'd like to make sure we have next time this happens, which will be 2029, I'd really hope that we can start at a place without having to reconstruct anything. And let me provide some additional context. Some of the people I respect the most, like chief Maceres, like my colleagues here on the planning commission,

like Mr. Dale Estina involved in multiple boards and commissions, hard to think of the city without having some of those people in my mind. Those people are no longer active on boards and commissions. And some of the great things they did in the last 20 years are only communicated vicariously through other folks who say, oh, yeah, 10 years ago we did this. So I think if there's something that we could do inside the original version of the comp plan, or at least the initial part of it to maybe provide some context for important things that have happened in the city. And in areas of housing, you know, if we go back 60 years in my neighborhood, you know, there was active redlining and really significant problems with equity and justice and even, you know, people being forced out of housing within that south side of the city.

And we are way beyond that. We're investing money through housing programs to get people to renovate homes. We no longer have the problems we did 60 years ago. And it would be helpful given all the other things that, you know, the past two decades have allowed me to see in the city. We've made great progress. And I think it would be helpful in thinking about a revision five years in the future if we had some way of pointing to things done in the city that were helpful. And I don't know if that puts me in a place of exception amongst my colleagues, but it would be nice to have just a little bit more in that initial section. That's it. Thank you. Ms. Lockhart. If we can revisit, sorry, the city council comment that you mentioned in your first introduction update.

It says it's the changes are indicated in yellow, but I'm afraid I didn't see any explicit text there pertaining to what they're asking. Could you explain that a little bit more? Yes. Give me just a minute and I will read it to you. Okay, there are two statements and this should be highlighted in attachment two on page A2-2. And then the first change is there was a sentence that was added when we last talked to you that said, Homeownership opportunities, well, it starts with federal housing programs following World War II, catalyzed suburban development in the city, attracting veterans and their families, and spurred rapid population growth. The added sentence was home ownership opportunities were not equally available to all races.

However, as most of the single family homes in the city were developed prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The proposed revision is that the sentence be read as, while home ownership opportunities were not equally available to all races as most of the single family homes in the city were developed prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the city has recently begun efforts to help address this inequity. And then further down, there is a statement that discusses the population growth in the city. It says the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments forecast population increase of 3,400 people in the city by 2035, as shown in Figure 1. And then it's proposed to add a statement that says, as diverse housing opportunities become available.

And then the following sentence is all broken up. I'll just read it as it is proposed now. It says, the city strives to maintain its unique charm while being accessible and inclusive for all and guiding growth and development projected for the metropolitan area. Okay. Yeah, thanks. Sorry. I was still looking at the original introduction and I didn't see the addition. Okay. If we're going to say that we've begun efforts, should we be explicit about what those efforts are or point to them in the document? Okay. This might be what Mr. Rice was getting at. It's, we didn't do that because the, this background section is very broad. It's only about a page for the entire history of the city. So getting into specific efforts really takes it off track of what this is.

So it didn't seem to fit. But it sounds like what Mr. Rice is suggesting is that we include some kind of external reference to where more information can be found, whether it be here or, or somewhere in this introduction section, and that would help get to that point. Yeah. Or even if the language should be tied into the actual comprehensive plan itself rather than explicit actions as we're trying to get to, maybe the verbiage could be the city is committed to addressing this iniquity, reference, you know, outcomes, X, Y, and Z. If we want to make these statements tie into the plan itself. Could you say that one more time? Sure. Rather than say the city has recently begun efforts and sort of leave it vague, say the city is committed to addressing this iniquity, reference, action, outcome, whatever it might be.

That is more concrete. That's, I think, something I like the wording. Yeah. Is committed and has already committed. They've already done things, so to say. It is committed suggests maybe nothing's happened yet. So there's maybe some hybrid of the two. But I think the idea of a pointer, it's kind of a conversation I had with city council member as well, to point to something. Because, you know, what's happened over the last five years is now background for the next update. So it's okay to not just leave the background static. We can update the background as well and point to a couple of things. I think it was a good suggestion from council. And some of the goals in here are still holdovers from the previous.

Oh, yeah. And there's some specific references throughout the plan to some things. But. Something else. Mr. Cunningham. Thank you. In reference to Mr. Rice's comments, if we can go back to page 174. When I look at that and we're talking about above ground storage tanks, what is the range of fluids or solutions that are stored? When I look at Blenheim Boulevard, for instance, going down and see five, six white triangles and recognize that's an entirely residential street. What are those six symbols indicating in terms of storage? I don't know what they would have been, but since they're not colored, it means they're no longer active. Okay. And that's an indication they're still there, but empty.

Correct. Then or to be dealt with in a future time? Yes. Okay. Thank you. That's right. Do I carry with it suggestions there could be ground contamination because they're still there? I presume. That's why we keep track of them. Yes. I think it's to know that it's there or to know that we need to take precautions if work is being done at those locations to properly take care of the tank and any potential leakage in the soil. Would those include things like heating oil tanks? I don't think so because there are a lot more of those than I showed on this map. Others? Mr. Coleman, anything from you? I was just going to echo, Chairman, that I do agree with your maintain or increase. I don't think you can do both.

That was really kind of the one comment I did want to echo out of the presentation. Thank you. Others? Anything else? Do we want to try to work on some language here to address the concerns about pointing to some of the things that have been made? Are we comfortable leaving it up to staff to maybe work with the chair and a couple of the commissioners? Would that be amenable? I would minimize the amount of work being produced tonight before it has to go to city council for adoption unless you want to delay the process. No? I don't think it will. I think it's a minor edit actually, honestly. Okay. So if it's okay with the commission, a couple of us will work with you. I'll certainly volunteer and one or both of you.

Okay. Mr. Rice, Ms. Lockhart. If I could just say, and I'm sure you will do this, when you get to the motions, if you can still read into the motion saying subject to further amendments to be determined. Okay. Can you capture that, Ms. Lockhart? Motion. Thank you. Okay. So this is a public hearing. We will open the matter up for comments from the public. Have there been any sign-ups ahead of time, Madam Clerk? No sign-ups. No sign-ups. Is there anybody in the room who would like to speak to the commission to address the update to the comprehensive plan? Please come forward, state your name, and it rests for the record. You'll have three minutes, please. Okay. Hi. My name is Evan Ramey. I'm a GMU student, and I took a look over the proposed comprehensive plan.

I think it would be a fantastic thing for the city, as is. I love the idea of activity centers and having some more urban density, urban prosperity in the city. Even if it is clustered in the little spots, they're also along the Q bus. I think it's a great idea. I want this to go to the city council as is, as strong as it can be. I wasn't admittedly here for the very beginning, so I will ask. I noticed there's the mixed-use place type earlier on in the document, but I don't actually see it zoned anywhere on the proposed land use map. Is that just for clarifying when it is included in an activity center, but not explicitly placed? I'm not sure about that, but I really like the ideas. I want to see as much of this as it can be sent to the council, so I'll be back.

Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Napty, would you maybe re-describe the mixed-use place type? Yes. Thank you. A little bit of background. The purpose of the mixed-use place type was to try to be more accommodating to conversion of commercial to mixed-use development outside of the activity centers, since such development is not supported anywhere in the city through the comprehensive plan outside of activity centers. However, through feedback we received from the Economic Development Office, as well as the Economic Development Authority, conversations among the Planning Commission, there was a concern about opening this up too broadly. And so the idea is that we would introduce this new mixed-use place type, but not map it yet.

Just have it prepared to be able to accommodate such uses in the future, and reference where it could be supported through another section of the comprehensive plan, where two specific sites are identified for now. So that's the reason that the mixed-use place type is not mapped at this time. Either of those two property owners could request to be mapped to it, and through future amendments the city could initiate expansion of that. But it would have to be city-initiated if we want to expand it beyond those two sites. Okay. Thank you. Otherwise, we would like to address the Commission on the comprehensive plan update. Please come forward, state your name and address for the record, please. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Tasia. I'm also a GMU student, and I just wanted to give my support of the plan generally. I think it's quite good. One of my largest concerns is climate change because I'm kind of young, and so I will be facing the brunt of the consequences of it. And so, you know, I think it's very good that you guys have tied the, you know, the environmental needs of the community with the transportation needs because I think those two definitely need to go hand in hand. I also think the focus on the Chesapeake Bay is quite good and making sure that, you know, runoff is treated appropriately and making sure that, you know, things that, you know, will affect our water basin are minimized as much as they can be at least.

So I definitely agree with my other student here that mixed use is quite good, and I like that that is being, you know, given a priority and given an option that I think, as far as I know, wasn't really a thing back, you know, before this, or at least not as big of a deal. You know, I know that R1 zoning used to be kind of the dominant thing, and luckily it no longer is in this area. And I guess I just have, like, one question at the end because I don't fully understand how the process at the local level works, but I'm kind of curious about, like, if there, like, how much collaboration there's going to be between, like, Fairfax County and other counties, if that's something that, like, you know, instead of having this, what I think is quite an amazing plan, just be here,

if it's something that you can discuss with other people in the area and have it be more of, like, a kind of starting off centralized in, like, the D.C., Arlington, you know, area, and then expand out as much as we can try and get it and have the benefits be available to people who, you know, are just kind of born in, like, some of the more rural areas. And so, yeah. Thank you. Before any further discussion, are there any other comments from the public? Seeing none, we'll close the public hearing. Put this back in the matter, back in the hands of the commission. Commissioners, any other questions or comments you'd like to make before we go to a motion? Or Mr. Napty? Okay. As far as collaboration with adjacent jurisdictions, have we had any?

I think that's a good question. It's, I'd say collaboration happens in a number of ways. Through this process, through the review, Fairfax County staff was aware that this was happening. We didn't coordinate with them necessarily throughout the process. However, we do coordinate with them on individual issues as well as with the region. So, depending on what the topic might be, for example, with transportation, we coordinate with not just Fairfax County staff, but also the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and those types of things. From a sustainability perspective, similar, we coordinate with different entities on regional goals.

And a lot of that is what drives our comprehensive plan. And so, I guess to sum it up, I would say each topic in here has its own coordination method with not just Fairfax County, but the region and the state. And they all happen in their own ways. Thank you. Anything else? We have a motion, Ms. Lockhart. Mr. Chair, I move that the Planning Commission adopt Resolution No. PC-24-03, approving amendments to the City of Fairfax Comprehensive Plan and recommending approval and adoption to City Council in the draft dated September 18, 2024, subject to modifications discussed this evening regarding incorporation of City Council feedback, clarification and confirmation of updated map graphics, and related inline text edits as put forth by the Chair and designated commissioners.

Is there a second? Second. Moved and seconded. Are there any further discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Roll call, I think you want. You want a roll call? Absolutely. It's typically not necessary for the Planning Commission. Your resolution has a roll call listing. Okay, we'll do a roll call vote. Noted, so. We shall do a roll call vote. Mr. Coleman. Aye. This time, one time. Ms. Briggs. Aye. Mr. Denton. Aye. Mr. Cunningham. Aye. Ms. Lockhart. Aye. Mr. Rice. Aye. And the Chair votes aye. Passes unanimously. Thank you very much. This is a culmination of 15 or 16 months of diligent effort on the part of the Commission, but probably more importantly, the staff, Mr. Napty, Ms. Denny, Mr. Harden, and your crew,

and all the departments, the collaborations with the boards and commissions who've been with us along the way as well, and the City Council. So I just want to thank you all. Congratulate you all for getting to this point. We had a very positive review, I think, with the City Council two weeks ago at the public hearing. I was there. Not the public hearing, the work session. I was there and spoke along with Mr. Napty, and we had relatively positive feedback and support. They were encouraged to hear the updates. As we talked about doing, was emphasizing equity throughout the plan in a better way. The additional expansions in the areas of environmental sustainability were well supported, including current initiatives that we're working on now, such as urban agriculture and so forth,

all well thought of. So I just want to thank you all. Congratulations. Thank you, Mr. Napty. Okay, we will recess our regular meeting and go into a work session. We have one work session this evening, the Housing and Homelessness Strategic Plan work session we'll discuss, and we welcome Ms. Abashian and your cadre. Really appreciate you guys allowing us to come tonight. My name is Leslie Abashian. I'm the Director of Human Services for the City of Fairfax. Don't get to hang out with y'all much, so it's nice to be here tonight. And I was just, Paul said, I bet it might be good for me just to tell you just quickly what I do. I do a lot of cradle-to-grave kind of things under Human Services, and what I mean by that

is that I oversee the Health and Human Services for the City of Fairfax. A lot of that has been provided through the General Services Agreement with Fairfax County. I also oversee the Community Response Team, which is a behavioral health crisis response team that we started a year ago, and also the Fairfax Village in the city, which is a program that supports people that are aging in place with volunteers. Another thing that I do is I think about housing. I do. I think about housing a lot. The last year and a half, the unhoused population and some of the concerns of the community and those of staff. We had a Homelessness Task Force, and I was one of the staff members for that. Based on that, I don't know if you haven't seen it, we did a report, and it had 38 recommendations.

Ten of them are prioritized that we're starting to work on. And one of the things we're doing is we're looking at affordable housing and a homelessness strategic plan. So tonight, I have Thomas P. Miller at Associates are going to talk to you a little bit about the affordable housing piece of it, because I think it's really important, obviously, to have you as a planning commission as a part of these conversations, not just tonight when they're telling you a little bit about what we're trying to do with the strategic plan, but as we work on the strategic plan, because it is a part of our community and what we need to move forward. And I know you guys do a lot of work around planning and making sure the right things happen

in our community for all our residents. So I really appreciate it, and I'm going to turn you over to the TPMA. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Melanie Thompson, and I am a senior consultant for TPMA, and I have my colleagues with me this evening to give you an overview of the affordable housing and homes. homelessness strategic plan. I have Miguel Garcia and Ashley Sharp. TPMA is a national consulting firm that provides bold solutions to empower communities, delivering transparent insight to complete the workforce, education, and economic development ecosystem. We had the pleasure of working with the city of Fairfax with their housing plan in 2023. This plan will include the staff, myself acting as the project lead.

Aaron Finley will act as the project advisor. Miguel Garcia will be the project support. Ashley Sharply will be the engagement specialist. And Erin Brown, she will be the research specialist. Just to provide an overview of the project. In 2023, the information included the rising housing costs and the unhoused population. That information will be considered as we move forward with the strategic plan. And in 2023, the homeless task force did an amazing job with making recommendations that will be considered also as we move forward. The scope of work is very important because this strategic plan will be different. It will analyze affordable housing, the affordable housing market, and the homeless situation.

We will engage community stakeholders, such as city officials, advisory boards, and commissioners, city and county agencies, and service providers, nonprofit organization, businesses, and community groups, and the unhoused population experience housing insecurities in the vulnerable individuals. Also, an inventory and assessment of current programs and services that include gaps. In addition, we will present best practices, short, medium, and long-term planning, and provide a toolkit for success. The timeline for this project will include in January 2024, the project was launched. We had a launch call. August through December of 2024 will be the discovery period. September through December 2024, we will hold stakeholder engagements that will include focus groups.

October through December 2024, there will be a program service inventory and assessment. From January through March 2025, the best practice, research, and recommendations will occur. From April to May 2025, there will be an evaluations and revisions. And then in June, the final report and presentation will be done. So at this time, we'll have Ashley just give an overview of the meaning and definition of affordable housing. Ashley. Ashley. Ashley. Ashley. Ashley. Ashley. So at this point, basically what we want to do is just kind of walk through when we talk about affordable housing, what we mean, and be specific about it, and who we're talking about, and kind of what that situation looks like for them.

So I'm sure most of y'all are very familiar with affordable housing, its definitions, and how we talk about it. But if nothing else, kind of just consider this a bit of a refresher, and a little bit of the context is like how we're looking at the affordable housing ecosystem in the city of Fairfax. So first and foremost, one of the things that we come across a lot is the kind of misconception that affordable housing is a nebulous idea that doesn't have a firm definition. Luckily, it very much does. And it's very, very straightforward. Essentially, housing is considered affordable if a household is spending less than 30%, sometimes up to 30% of their monthly income on housing costs. Once they exceed that 30% threshold, a household is considered cost burdened, and their housing

is no longer considered affordable. So what you're seeing there on the left is a breakdown of what cost structure looks like for the standard family in the city of Fairfax, and specifically a family with two adults and two children who are in child care. So this is an example that's used by the Alice Foundation. So for anyone that's not familiar, Alice is an asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed household. So they're specifically looking at individuals that come in terms of income above the poverty level, but below what's considered the kind of baseline needs to attain or to afford a cost of living in a community. According to their 2022 report for specifically the city of Fairfax, while approximately 7%

of the city falls below that poverty line, an additional 23% of households are fallen to that Alice category. So that's nearly a quarter of the city, and so it makes up a significant portion of the community. But we're, yeah, so we can go ahead and go forward there. So when we talk about affordable housing, the most kind of consistent baseline to focus on is through HUD affordable housing brackets. It's important to recognize that these are slightly different than if you just plugged into a calculator, the median household income for Fairfax. But they fall into three or essentially four main categories. So you have that low income limit, and that's at 80% of AMI. The very low income, which is at 50%, and then extremely low income limit.

And that can vary because it combines a few different thresholds. But you can see in that chart the bracket, the percentage of area median income, which is essentially the same as median household income. And then what that income looks like in Fairfax. So a lot of times I think that when we talk about affordable housing or low income housing, it draws to mind a very specific picture or idea of who that's serving. But in Fairfax, the HUD income limit for low income is nearly six figures. And that's a little bit lower technically than, you know, that median household income calculation. But again, those have additional limits. So the question is, right, who needs affordable housing? And the answer is that everyone needs affordable housing.

The chart that you're looking at on the left is the percentage of households that are cost burdened, broken down by income brackets. So you can see all the way on the left that very, very low income is essentially at 100%. But even at individuals who are in households who are making, not individuals, households that are making $75,000 or more, you still have 13% of households in the city that are spending greater than 30% of their income on housing costs. And that, you know, number gets bigger and bigger the lower you get in those brackets. So we have a few examples. And noted here, these are median salaries or income ranges for individual occupations, right? So lots of households are not just a single income.

But we kind of use this as a benchmark. And you can see kind of where these key people we consider essential workers, people we, you know, occupations and people we want to ensure are able to, are, you know, staples for the community and kind of what their median income looks like in the Fairfax area. So, you know, the very top of this list here you have, you know, in this like social workers and police officers. But retail workers and home health care and personal care aides are making less than $40,000 a year. These people are overwhelmingly, in terms of like those residents, in a cost burden situation. So, again, the last thing that I wanted to kind of just share with you all, something that I'm sure you're all very familiar with.

And these are just point in time counts, looking at the homelessness situation in the county. Again, you know, oftentimes a kind of dilemma and something we're very much looking at, you know, how to overcome, is that county counts and city counts are not the same thing, obviously. But it's difficult to, you know, attain that data on a smaller level. We can see that on the whole, homelessness has increased over the past several years, although the county is reporting that it's stayed relatively stable and potentially decreased just a bit in the last year. But on the left, you're looking at people who fall into that general, like that normal definition of unhoused. And so those are people in emergency shelters and similar situations.

On the right, though, you're seeing the capacity count for supportive housing. Those individuals are not counted in those general, like, point in time counts. So there are people who are in, you know, in that transition or supportive housing. So they're not considered unhoused at that time. Notably, people that are not counted in either of these include people that are what we call, like, couch surfing or in unstable housing. Right. So they're not going to be counted either on the left or the right. But they are unhoused. The people who are not in stable housing. They're either staying with friends or family or sometimes are in and out of, like, hotels and motels and things like that. They're not calculated in these counts.

But they are an incredibly important demographic of individuals. Oftentimes, people that are kind of backsliding into consider being unhoused are the ones that are ideally easiest to catch. At this point, I'm going to hand it off to Miguel. He's going to talk a little bit more about what affordable housing can look like and the people that, you know, we're targeting. Thank you, Ashley. In a prior life, I was assistant director of the planning department in Houston, Texas. So I appreciate the great work that you're doing here with the general plan. And with a sharp interest, I paid a lot of attention to your presentation. So congratulations on getting it through this far at this point. Why are we talking to you today, the planning commission?

Because planning commissions typically regulate or inform uses, physical uses. We have to remember that as stewards of a community well-being, we have to address both places and people. And so very often we invest in people or we invest in place. Sometimes that's a tradeoff that's not equitable. But it's an important tradeoff from a public policy standpoint that you all as a commission and you as staff have to always wrestle with day to day. So we tend to talk about people in place. So the two go together. So some of the types of housing, of your housing stock, that are plausible, that we see exist today and might have potential for future inclusions into your general plans, for instance, might be mixed use and mixed income.

We heard from some of the students back here about plotting mixed use developments as part of the next wave of general plans. And that's something we'll be looking at in our study and our plan. Mixed income. This is where you have different incomes in the housing configuration where you try to develop quality housing stock that supports the needs and opportunities for people at different socioeconomic levels on the same property. Okay? Next slide. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. shows you the next slide. marketplace in the housing market where apartments and renters are going to be needed to be supported and so even though there's always been battles between homeowners and renters and most communities that I've worked in most of

my life there are ways to hopefully make them coexist and make them see the value that each of them bring to the table in a local economy because sometimes as you'll see in my final slide I think next one there are there are ladders of opportunities in the housing stock that you have here and no one is ever necessarily be static in that housing ladder you can have folks at one end of the ladder that are trying to exit homelessness always up to homeowners and in between you may have different stages where you have renters would be townhome leases and some cases you might have some apartment cottages or you might have some accessory dwelling dwelling units as well the point here is that you have a

ladder any given housing market laid out here going from just above and including those that are the unhoused supportive housing shelters SROs going always up to homeownership but there's some key ladders along the way some key kind of let's say rungs along that ladder and along those those rungs you have enablers stabilizers and sliders you're hopefully trying to create an upper mobility path through your housing stock for those that want to be increasingly mobile you also have stabilizers those that are there already and are happy to be there in that particular rung of the ladder you don't want them to backslide to go down market as you start going down market then you start putting pressure on human services

and social services our our colleague here that creates more caseloads for them and more burdensome so I urge you to think about this as a planning commission as a fellow planner to say how does our housing sector perform how does perform along a ladder such as this those that want to be a really mobile can we get ahead of the market can we work with the market to provide that opportunity those that are happy can we help them stay there and economic conditions like ones we're being now that are a little bit hot market we don't want them to go back downwards and those that do go down market can we quickly identify them and catch them before they fall into a situation which becomes very cost ineffective let's just say to work with them at the end of the day these are

people and this is housing and people go together with housing and as long as we remember that you look at housing hopefully in a way that says it's not just a a zoning map it's not just an inventory of units it's also a place where people can thrive people can actually be stabilized and a place where people can be hopefully prevented from falling slipping into homelessness at this point so with that I'll just wrap it up and say thank you for your time and thank you for accommodating us as we depart on this particular planning effort of our own for your affordable housing sector thank you thank you miss Sebastian did you want to wrap up any comments yourself happy to would you have any comments or questions

from the Commission mr. Cunningham thank you yes our way of questions when we look at it there there are issues and in housing that we talk about that get out of just a a single family in a house affordable dwelling units is is one of those kinds of issues where we're talking about providing additional housing but when we get into this scale and what we're talking about are there any areas that that we should be talking about more when you're talking about this end of the housing spectrum when you have shelters and SROs down there listed not everyone who is homeless is is equal so to speak in either bad luck or mental health and crisis aspects of it so shelters are things that we don't specifically make provision for in neighborhoods are there types of housing or

aspects of housing that we should be considering when you're looking at this kind of a program and if so how would we handle that from a comp plan standpoint in looking at handling this portion of the population I would say that first of all you have to be humane first of all you have to be humane when you address this because you're talking about lives that are probably being shattered most of the homeless literature suggests that by the time someone ends up on the streets or deep into difficulty they've had a cascade downward of events that have led them to that point so they're very sensitive they're very vulnerable they're also they could be very aggressive of not wanting help as well and wanting their independence because they're trying to maintain

some level of pride I think as far as trying to prepare yourselves as a commission or as local stewards of a policymaking process I think it's important that you try to signal to the marketplace that citing or permitting or reviewing such facilities does not necessarily mean it's going to be an eyesore there are very good facilities around the country in your own state not too far away that are actually very well run very well maintained and very well operated that don't create this kind of nexus of negativity so to speak right that's the first thing the second thing I would I would put to our colleague you know from from kind of the the social worker perspective these particular individuals need a lot of a lot of help

from a human development standpoint right they need a place to live and to stay and to to thrive and stabilize themselves but they also need perhaps workforce training they also need perhaps soft skills they also probably have some mental health challenges they have to deal with so get counseling maybe some medication they also have to be looked at from a perspective of you know can you reunite with your family or not in many cases and so there is the whole human dimension to this work that goes on inside of these buildings that perhaps might be cited as part of the housing inventory and the final piece is that be ready for them for some of them to actually go up the socioeconomic ladder which I showed and be ready

for some of them not to take advantage of it or have challenges with that they might need some a little bit more work and more time because none of us are the same we all bring our own baggage to to the housing sector and so we may react differently at different times to to help at this point so in some I'd say compassion number one number two be smart about how you plan your facilities and your units through your your comp planning processes and number three engage a good coalition of human social development social service providers to be kind of your your your kind of your backstop to helping these individuals or families stabilize and or once again get back on the path of upper mobility okay also to one point that we have just reviewed the data here 30 percent of the unhoused here

in the city of fairfax 30 percent are working so when you address workforce housing you're going to also also simultaneously address homelessness and in this study in this plan we plan to find out the gaps of your service providers because once those gaps are addressed they will be able to help help people move to some form of stability based on their one in need so it's a pleasure to be able to work with the city of fairfax because this is a very difficult and challenging conversation it's progressive it's based on the pulse of the community was palpable what's going to be received so progress can be made something else uh go ahead i just had a quick question about how your methodology addresses the proportion um or population of college students in the city i think we're sort of unique

compared to the broader county in that there is a there is a substantial sizable population of college students some of whom are i would consider you know in the constrained resource environment for housing but many of whom are able to represent themselves as such while also being very well supported you know anecdotally i had a colleague who was fortunate enough to be able to put their starter home on the market they were committed to providing an affordable housing option in the city and all of their applicants were college students right out of the gate so just sort of you know in a population that could very well be need in need of supportive housing but many who are not i know charlottesville is another use case in that

regard like when they up zoned they ended up seeing a lot of college students renting the adus etc so that's a great question um it's actually something you know um we've been discussing kind of at length to uh earlier in our discussions today um i think there's a couple ways um that we're seeing that kind of play out a couple of ways that can be approached one of them is exactly what you're saying where uh there uh we we look at what we refer to as like naturally occurring affordable housing um that's the that's the housing that needs the most preservation that needs to be protected so that you know uh individuals are able to maintain um that affordable rate a lot of times it does seem like

a lot of those affordable rental units um are being taken up by by students and that's not necessarily a bad thing um but uh one of the ways that we've seen that kind of uh approached or responded to is uh by expanding dedicated student housing so that housing can open up um for non-students to you know access that affordable housing on the flip side um something you know we're always interested in is the rate that communities are able to retain uh recent graduates right and so a lot of times when we're talking about affordable housing people uh the thing that comes to mind is that you know their their children can't afford to go to college and come back or stay and you know in this case stay

in the area um because their potential salary is coming coming directly out of college won't allow them to to afford to to stay in the area so you know you have definitely both ends of the spectrum there where current students and recent graduates um are struggling to you know afford housing costs but also that when students are taking up a considerable amount of that naturally occurring affordable housing that means that it's not available for residents so um yeah there's a couple like i said there's a couple of ways to approach it but it's definitely something that we're taking into consideration and ideally we're looking to involve that demographic in part of our direct outreach and engagement thanks that actually leads me to my follow-up question which was in terms of

stakeholder outreach um are property owners part of your outreach so there are several landlords non-local that own a large proportion of rental housing for example immediately surrounding george mason i know they can be hard to reach anecdotally but is that a target of the study as well it's certainly a target um in an ideal world we're able to you know directly um you know have that that outreach with as many landlords as possible with as many property owners as possible like you said um they've historically been a challenging group um to kind of nail down um but in addition to those property owners we're really concerned with being able to reach um individuals uh renters and people in that you know current affordable housing um as well as the you know unhoused population so we're trying

to make sure that we can be as broad as possible um but you know part of you know what we spoke about earlier is the difference between the housing assessment that you know we did a year ago and this is that in addition to those developers um and uh you know city staff and elected officials we want to ensure that we're reaching um individuals and families and households that historically haven't had a voice um in these kinds of studies and assessments and strategies uh so definitely um but we want to ensure um first and foremost that those um what melanie virtues like the voice of the voiceless are being heard and assessed in the process Others and mr coleman anything from you nothing from me at the time thank you thank you mr cuny

thank you will this study also get into the dynamics of economic competition and when i say that housing is a competitive marketplace one of the reasons that the city doesn't have affordable housing any longer and years ago it was considered the most affordable place in the county is the economics of the change in the area and when you have housing that falls into that end of the spectrum that would make it affordable it frequently is economically attractive to other interests who will come in and consolidate then tear down and put up new housing which does not address affordability for the most part but that is part of the marketplace that we end up having to deal with in that and so how do we address that as a pro planning standpoint uh to to make it a worthwhile

avenue to pursue one of the one of the compelling concepts is to consider your workforce companies consider when they consider moving to a municipality they want to be able to house their entry-level workers to their ceo so housing does address the economic development part in the ecosystem one of the things that tpa has done is made it a point to associate housing in the economic development department because you have to consider that in the growth in the futuristic uh financial stability of a municipality so that's a point that um affordable housing workforce housing will address commissioner cunningham let me also out from an economist standpoint you know what is that incentive for developers we work a lot with developers for them to think about not tearing down and starting from scratch right

right and going at high density and so we had a discussion with the mayor this this afternoon about are there ways of incentivizing some more progressive more patient developers to think about preservation of units as opposed to demolition and construction of new higher density units for market rate housing i think we were just coming down from a hotel and we saw i think one of your projects here um starting nine hundred thousand dollar townhomes you know and that's a reality check for all of us right i can imagine you live with that every day right so are there ways to get to some of those developer property owners even they may be absentee to say wait a minute before you think about this there might be some

incentive packages we may be able to stitch together through grant funds through tax subsidies and through other sources of incentives that might make you think about at least securing part of your property for this purpose not necessarily all of it because we're not trying to meddle with the market so much we're just trying to basically slice off of a piece of the onion so to speak um because i'm a believer in that markets do dictate trends but at the same time we can't just have fully free markets all the time because they don't always work for the poor at this point that's that's where affordable housing has to be strategic and thoughtful and clever of finding those little pressure points with developers and property owners that are

seeking highest and best use highest yield rates of return is there a way to kind of like make them think a little differently and part of our our work through this plan is to give you some some messaging some ways ways of talking about that effectively to your property owners at this point hope that answers your question sir i think that answers my question and i'm looking forward to seeing some of that language and thought because as you have described we have we have dealt with every one of these situations in the city over the last few years and finding constructive ways to move it forward i think is still a challenge and that's something that if we're serious about this that needs to be addressed in moving forward

and there are projects that had a lot of the creativity you suggested that have not proceeded there are projects which had affordable housing overtaken by redevelopment there are areas in the city that we're trying to maintain and through trying to maintain and upgrade the aging housing stock what in effect you're doing is making it less affordable although it's more livable being updated so it's it's a challenging process and i'm looking forward to seeing what what suggestions you can bring out of it thank you others mr denton being a a very small jurisdiction with a very small population but a relatively high area median income makes it extremely challenging because you don't have things like housing authorities or a ton of money

coming from hud you might not even have staff how many housing staff members that are dedicated to housing do we have at the city we're getting ready to have one well that's that's a step in the right direction so if you come up with great ideas and best practices and and and an outlook for the city of how to take steps in the right direction for affordable housing you have to have at least one staff member right to to work on those things uh or or half of a staff member or one and a half depending on all these things do we currently have any in the city do we currently have any programs that are funded by hud or virginia housing money we're a part of the fairfax county continuum of care do you know the continue of care is

what hud uses in low in communities for the money to come down like for the permanent support of housing like for instance the the lamb centers project sure that's where the money comes down and right now david meyer is our is the chair the county um i guess he he left us as a mayor and then they got him he's like the chair of the um the coc right now so there are pro programs and projects that are in the city there are you know the permanent support of housing um the you know some where folks are just getting some support you know through funding so it is it's there but i think one of the things that's really hard sometimes even with um choice housing choice vouchers you know because a there's never

enough and they're always capped and if you always hear that a lot of times they're not even giving new ones out but sometimes those are the lifelines for families to be able to pay for their housing right um but sometimes it's because of the market even if you have it in your hand you have the golden ticket in your hand you can't find a landlord that will take it um i know when we were doing the homeless task force we had our community event i had a a female come up to me and she said you know i serve in the army and i came back and i have four children and i needed assistance and i got a you know um a waiver and she i forgot it was a staggering amount of properties that she'd looked at that

you know nobody would take it right nobody would take it so i i think that you know in some ways us being in the area we are there's more a lot of you know more resources than it the farther you go out the less resources and i think fairfax county um since we work so closely with them they're you know fairly progressive on some of the ways they're using even some of the properties they own where they're doing some co-locations and they're building the affordable housing um units but we just don't have enough and i think that that's one of the things that we're going to be really looking at with the strategic plan is who's not living here because they can't afford the housing i mean is it your son

is it your grandmother you know is it your your mother who retired and can't afford to you know to live here so those will be some of the things we're looking at um and we're also hoping with this how i'm so excited about this house this housing person because being in the role that i've been in i do a lot of little a little bit of a lot of stuff right and i really think for something like housing policy and working on housing you need somebody that lives in that you know and lives in that and it can come here and talk to you guys or go uh you know when planning when when the somebody's coming to the plant uh planners to talk about doing a new project or something like somebody that really lives in that

uh that policy environment not just for us but for the whole region and so i think that that's going to help us a lot but we're a little bit behind the eight ball you know because a lot of the jurisdiction around jurisdictions around us already have housing staff right and have been working on this so when when this person starts you'll hear me yell at excited yell because i do think that that's a good opportunity for us starting forward but that's not what we're we have to keep moving and i do appreciate you guys being willing to listen to us tonight and answer you know ask ask questions and be thoughtful because i think this is if this was an easy situation y'all would have solved it a long time ago right

right and then you would you know begin noble peace prizes and and all those good things but but we just got to do it together as a community so i do appreciate it i think the the you're you're correct if other jurisdictions have staff and have been involved in programs and their low income housing tax credits are coming due and they're um you know refinancing these properties they are but they're also going to be the people that want to see you succeed more than anyone else and they'll want you to hey here's our policy like some things aren't going to be applicable but uh you know they're going to want to help uh whether it's the you know housing northern virginia housing expo or uh the city of falls church would be a

great example they have housing programs they have dedicated housing staff they have a very high area median income but very small population so they get very little funding but they do apply for additional funding for home and community development block grant money that funds rental assistance programs that they've had for years and um like uh down payment closing cost assistance programs so they have everything from you know something helping someone at 120 of the area median income down to their um you know they're probably least served people that have no income or homeless uh working homeless uh but that would be a great jurisdiction to get a lot of information from and and just mirror some of the things they have

just to like you said get up to speed um the i haven't looked probably in a long time but the accessory dwelling unit policy for the city of uh fairfax is very restrictive um age limits uh uh per cent percentage of your home you know when you get in bed with the government people that's negative already okay now they have to be 55 or older why do i want to go through this nightmare uh i'm sure some people just rent portions of their homes and aren't meeting this criteria but if if there was sensible regulation in that people would want to join in to take advantage of maybe empty nesters that now have room there's george mason students or or maybe a dedicated uh non-profit that wants to lease a portion of their home

for someone to live there uh there's like you said you're trying to find maybe uh landlords or developers that already own properties to incentivize them so that they're not building say maybe higher density or more uh premium units or whatever the case may be i bet if you find most of the rental housing that's already here it's already above that 80 percent ami so i'm not saying that it's not less it's not more affordable than brand new market rate unit that has a new pool and lots of amenities but those will already be people in the higher amis that unless you have rental assistance and and unlike down payment closing cost assistance when you pay 25 grand once if you have someone that has an affordability gap of 800

a month that 800 a month usually never goes away right can sometimes get bigger so um you know it's a struggle for such a small jurisdiction with such a high ami but we will have dedicated staff it sounds like so we'll have someone that can implement the things so right commissioner denton that you bring up a good point that is um if the market's this hot stays hot you got to find ways either to like i said before slice off a piece of it and work with those that are willing to work with you to keep it a little cooler or as it gets hot try to figure out ways to do a little bit more mixed income housing those are the two ways that i've seen with an ascending market and the other point is um yes you're getting a staff

person for housing which is great you have jurisdictions around you that perhaps have left the starting gate ahead of us but at the same time part of our our plan is to look at the capacity building opportunities for your staff right to meet you where they're going to be at so we hope that through the course of this study and this plan that we identify low-hanging fruit something we can go after sooner than later still identify those longer term opportunities but be realistic to say not just plan but plan and do right that way we see some feedback in the medium term as opposed to saying that was a bunch of great ideas that never came to fruition and the consultants went back to indianapolis and never heard from them again so we don't want to be that that team we want to have some singles and

doubles before we hit home runs here so to speak and just one last thing for me um fairfax county being larger um some of them some of the uh ways they got larger percentages of new construction um apartment buildings or multi uh mixed-use buildings is is something that's um that they weren't seeing when they were building normal height buildings five-story buildings when they gave density more density around tyson's corner and halstead square near metro stations when they and or when they gave that density to developers increasing the value of potential projects that's when they were able to get larger quantities of adus and affordable housing so there's that piece of if you have restrictions of five stories and you have

a minimum of say six percent adus in new apartment buildings sometimes the only way to make the deal pencil out for on the developer side is to increase the density and then it helps solve that six if you're only getting the minimum so that's something that's always a struggle because a lot of people don't want really tall buildings but one way to get affordable housing is to allow the buildings to be a little more dense so thank you for your your counseling thank you mr coleman thank you mr chair um really enjoying the presentation so far you guys brought up a good point about waivers and vouchers and in my day job i get asked regularly from my agents waivers vouchers pros cons give it to me straight i definitely think one and if

real estate agents are asking those questions and that is supposed to be their knowledge base and they don't know i think we can make a general assumption that you know the landlords have absolutely zero clue what the perception of this waiver or voucher is handout however the public wants to look at it so i think there's a lot of potential about the education about the pros of that and what it ultimately does because there is an affordability issue within the county within the city uh the second all second kind of question that i have for you guys um whether obviously whether or not you guys are planning on looking into that education is going to be something that i say constantly is words matter and you we we've alluded

to workforce housing and affordable housing generally always gets slumped in that's the big broad slot swath that everybody just kind of paints the broad brush with but i've always felt that if you use workforce housing and you guys even alluded to it in your presentation teachers social workers police officers firefighters healthcare professionals and you lump that with workforce housing people go i can really get behind this you use affordable housing and people go i'm not sure how i feel so is there a delineation that you guys plan on going down between workforce housing and affordable housing or kind of how have you seen this play out in your previous work so to answer your second question first um yes there is uh

there's a couple of different ways right so there's the colloquial way we approach that situation and then there's the like definitional way so definitionally affordable housing is that big umbrella term that refers to um it just means for any household for any income that they're spending less than 30 percent on housing costs when we talk about workforce housing most of the time what we're talking about is um that 80 percent to 120 percent of area median income that's where most like uh affordable i'm sorry uh workforce housing programs are are targeted um uh when we're talking about people below that 80 percent mark um that's when we are using terms like low income very low income extremely low income and of course

those refer to those different brackets colloquially right um we've uh found that it's best to just be flexible um there are some communities that are very averse to the idea of you know talking about affordable housing sometimes we call it attainable housing sometimes we just refer to the whole thing as workforce housing um but uh at the end of the day whatever makes people the most comfortable and the most willing to approach the subject to engage with it and to maybe uh adopt it into their own understanding is the best word to use that being said um when we're talking in terms of policy when we're talking in terms of like practical steps it is important to understand and be specific to be

accurate um in the terminology that we're using and exactly what we're referring to um so it's it's definitely a balancing act you know when we when we speak to people at large sometimes they're more comfortable with you know referring to things with different terminology um but when we're making these plans and you know writing out these strategies and reports and things like that if we're not accurate and specific sometimes things get lost in translation um but i hope that answers your question to answer the commissioner's question about language on one of our colleagues aaron finley who's not with us here today but he was referenced in one of our slides his notion of workforce housing is where jobs go to go to sleep at night right and he finds that to be very helpful that those people

that are working during the day where do they sleep they have to go somewhere to go to bed they have to go somewhere to live and that's where the the workforce housing simplicity of a description sometimes breaks through some of these nimby isms that we talk about right some of these issues where those people work here they have to go somewhere to go to sleep at night and have a life with their family and so that that tends to get a little bit of traction in some communities that we will see if it does here or not anyone else thank you a lot of questions i had or comments have been made you've unpacked a lot for us this evening um i know you're not we're just getting into the discovery phase but um as you dig

into things that the planning commission has some influence and oversight on of course eager to be in dialogue with you and maybe some updates and conversations along the way the comprehensive plan the zoning ordinance and so forth there are a couple of comments made one by miss lockhart about some of the houses near the university that have been bought up and used for students uh references to apartments you'll if you haven't already heard about it there was a development in the city within the last couple years where what we call naturally occurring affordable housing apartments um are being redeveloped for very high income uh relatively high income a developer comes in it's hard to compete with them despite language in our

comprehensive plan that calls for preservation of affordable housing any insight helps or whatever you can provide us along the way tools language we would welcome that as we look at at our comp plan and things like that but there's a lot more to learn mr denton referred to the county community they do have a lot of resources they also have land we are land constrained so again another challenge for us is probably incentivizing a developer in some way rather than trying to take advantage of what little land the city owns to do something with but eager to hear the outcome and be in conversation along the way we'll put our thinking caps on thank you anything else thank you very much looking forward to

the your work as you go on thank you mr bashing okay we will reconvene our regular meeting and move to our staff report thank you mr chair members of the planning commission uh going back to the september 10 city council meeting uh aside from their discussion on the comprehensive plan uh they had a presentation on the 2025 legislative program a couple of things that are being suggested that the city submit um that relate to planning and the planning commission one is about local authority for the city bill to be able to accomplish certain things one of which is accessory uh regulate our own accessory dwelling units as you might recall during our earlier conversations on potential amendments the zoning orders related to accessory dwelling units the city council is anxious to

to have our own policies in place because there is pressure from the state um and potential for the state to uh develop their own regulations uh that would require us to follow uh their suit not as much of an interest but still related um a a request to require that our advertising for our public hearings be on our website as opposed to in a newspaper uh so for example tonight's um public hearing on the conference of plan had to be advertised in a newspaper uh i guess the thought is that not as many people refer to those anymore and then um during that conversation uh and as what came up partially during the conference of plan discussion uh it was suggested that we add a um a measure about the concern about digital price fixing and this was one of the things that the city council

asked us to include some kind of language on the conference of plan as you might recall we added language about cooperating with other entities outside entities to help resolve issues that are making affordable housing more complicated and so not addressing that issue specifically but how we approach those types of issues so but that is something that now through the legislative program city is taking an effort towards taking the next step on that for tomorrow's city council meeting they will have a public hearing on the urban agriculture zoning text amendments that the planning commission had a public hearing on on september 9. they'll also have a work session on the proposed redevelopment of courthouse plaza as a reminder that application is only requesting a

special use permit and special exceptions no no rezoning and so the planning commission is not is not it's not subject to review by the planning commission and then as i mentioned going ahead to october 8th is when we are planning on having our public hearing with them on the comprehensive plan review upcoming planning commission meetings our next meeting is not until october 14. this is indigenous people's day it is not a city holiday but we want to throw it out there to see if the planning commission wanted to cancel that meeting if you have any other plans or anything like that otherwise we will be here we have one potential item request from the proposed project to develop townhomes at mantua professional center to have a work session

that is not concrete yet they could potentially move that to another date so i'll stop there and see if anybody has any thoughts about uh or really prefer everybody prefers not to meet on october 14th okay others you okay with meeting on a regular date ms coleman should be fine with me okay okay if we have a topic we can meet okay uh then later in the month you should be receiving a presentation regarding green building policy this is a project that's been underway for a while but um this is a quick reminder that the way that the city can incentivize uh things like green building uh under state code is that we have to have some kind of offset for it we have to incentivize uh property owners as opposed to require it the initial thought

was that or the initial recommendation from the consultant is that we rely on tax abatements through early conversations with the city council that was not seen as an appropriate way to go so now they're looking at potential um bonus density or other types of um incentives we can receive through the zoning ordinance which makes it more of a planning commission issue so they're coming to you now to um to share where they are with that project you will be receiving an introduction to the capital improvement program from finance staff likely on october 28th not confirmed yet also there's been a request for a work session on the new application that has been received on 4131 chambers road that's a davies property

and then also we are in the process of scheduling a stakeholder interview with you on the urban forest management plan this will just be a work session but the consultant for that project is considering a stakeholder interview but interviewing a lot of other stakeholders other boards of commissions as well as members of the community and that kind of thing so that will be coming up likely before the end of october um november 11 uh veterans day is a city holiday that must be canceled or rescheduled we have no agendas at this time but we also we often have cip discussions around that time we don't have enough information i think to tell you if we would actually have agenda items so just want to throw that out there and we can bring it up at one of our next meetings to

see if we want to reschedule that or not lastly i want to mention that on the urban forest management plan the second public meeting will be held on october 17 at the sherwood center and that's all we have for our staff report tonight questions for staff all right commission comments anything mr brings miss mr denton just thanks for all the work on the comp plan i know it takes forever and you're near the finish line so that's great mr cunningham no comment just an observation i've seen an uptick in property owners holding outreach sessions with the public about major development proposals so if that has been at the urging of planning staff i want to thank you all for having them do that um that's been a definite change i would

say in the last few months so hopefully those are successful in getting a good turnout and are resulting in better applications mr rice i attended the parks and recreation um advisory board meeting and they've um provided some updates uh to us on a number of um projects that are in various phases um their meeting minutes were online and probably a better survey of those projects available through the meeting minutes um tice park has a kind of financial gap between the development plans and the things we've discussed repeatedly and the um prices coming in from contractors and so it's maybe not a surprise and typically the city builds in kind of escalators and things to accommodate that but there's uh still a gap and so they'll have to

make some decisions on either scaling back or finding additional funding for that it really is the only park in that corner of the city and it's under uh relatively high demand for baseball and some of the very attractive infrastructure in the park ada compliant play lot walking track around the exterior additions to the kind of additions to the kind of lighting uh that would be kind of friendly to the neighborhood a lot of those issues will those features will now be looked at relatively closely we had a little bit longer discussion about old town hall as you're probably aware that will close for renovation and there's been a perpetual discussion about paint and color and And we've seen some additional renderings with PRAB for those,

and I suppose at some point we may see something. But the closing will be approximately year-long from February 25 to a year past that. Retirements and some transitions in staff on PRAB, and generally they're pushing forward with their plans and various projects throughout the city. They're always appreciative to hear what the Planning Commission is doing, always a little curious and questions given and answered during that segment. I do always invite them to attend our meetings and participate. And there's always enthusiasm on the spot, but I think when it's Monday at 6.45 p.m., they find other things to do. It was great to see two Mason students here. One of the two has been to several meetings, including a PRAB meeting, and that's great.

The more we can do to get Mason students that are impacted by what we do to show up and give comments, the better off we're going to be as a city. And that's all I have. Thanks. Speaking of Old Town Hall colors, that also comes before the bar. Have there been any meetings you've been able to attend recently? Anything new? The most recent meeting I wasn't able to attend, that was a special session, and they haven't had any other meetings. Okay. Mr. Coleman. I appreciate the remote participation, so thank you guys. Thank you for being willing to come in remotely. The only thing for me, Mr. Napti mentioned the work session of our evening on Courthouse Plaza. It does not come before the Planning Commission due to the nature of the application,

special exceptions. That didn't prevent me from sending comments to the Mayor and Council to remind them of some of our objectives, what they've been related to, particularly as this is an activity center, small area plan around this. And the particular concern I expressed was around the, I will call, minuscule amount of commercial space on the ground floor. If any place can support more commercial, it should be the Old Town Activity Center with all the residences there. So I provided those comments from my perspective. So you're aware. Otherwise, I have nothing else. So at this point, we are adjourned. We will see you later this month. No, early next month, sorry. Mid-month. We're adjourned.

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