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These groups joined with the Arlington Chamber of Commerce and YIMBYs of Northern Virginia to encourage the Arlington County Board to pass the EHO ordinance. Their work paid off when the county board voted unanimously in March to eliminate single-family zoning in Arlington.

As the debate raged over the Missing Middle Housing plan, some supporter argued it was simply about increasing the supply of housing in Arlington, no matter the price tag, not about addressing housing affordability or rectifying past harms in housing policies.

During the county’s work on the Missing Middle Housing study, opponents of the planned increase in housing density argued it would create additional incentives to tear down more reasonably priced homes in order to build higher-end duplexes, townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings that would be out of reach of low- and middle-income homebuyers.

READ ALSO: Arlington Board Candidates Call For Close Monitoring Of Missing Middle

If helping the historically excluded population of Arlington and providing reasonably priced homes for teachers and firefighters was one of the plan’s goal, the Missing Middle Housing proposal approved by the county board was not a viable solution, according to opponents.

The Missing Middle Housing plan did not offer any committed affordable housing options or mitigations against displacement of people of color, said Anne Bodine of Arlingtonians for Our Sustainable Future.

As crafted by the county, EHO will likely lead to higher-income and higher-educated residents moving into a historically marginalized neighborhoods, similar to what has happened in Arlington over the past 20 years, Bodine wrote in a recent guest column for the Virginia Mercury published on April 19.

Arlington’s historically Black neighborhoods are already largely zoned for Missing Middle-style housing, which has increased displacement, voluntary relocation and gentrification, Bodine said.

Green Valley, the largest historically Black neighborhood in Arlington, went from being 60 percent Black residents in 2000 to 23 percent in 2020. “The county and its supporters have never explained how expanding the same zoning will yield different results,” Bodine said.

The same type of displacement happened across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., where less than 25 years ago the Columbia Heights neighborhood was 92 percent Black and Hispanic residents. But after zoning changes that allowed greater housing density, Columbia Heights is now about 65 percent non-Hispanic white.

One of the reasons that number isn’t higher is because community groups were able to lock 20 percent of the housing stock into income-restricted covenants, something that Arlington County has refused to meaningfully do, according to Michael O’Grady, a second-generation Arlingtonian, development economist and current PhD Candidate in Public Policy who previously worked for Arlington Economic Development.

In Arlington, one of the reasons for the increased displacement of Black residents is the disparity in household incomes. In North Arlington, according to the latest census data, white households make on average $81,780 more than black households ($184,356 to $102,576). In South Arlington, white households make $90,512 compared to $55,553 by Black households, according to O’Grady.

Black residents also are 2.7 times more likely to be rejected by loan officers than white people with similar zip codes, incomes, liquidity and credit scores, he said.

“Given these dynamics, which the EHO policy change doesn’t address, it is highly unlikely most Black buyers can compete in a bidding war for the trickle of units that will come on the market in Arlington,” he said. “Thus, I expect to see exponentially more Black-to-white housing successions than white-to-Black.”

Missing Middle: Pilot Or Permanent?

With nearly a quarter-million people squeezed into a small geographic area, public policy analysts view Arlington as a fitting place to try out new and potentially radical ideas. The large population combined with its small size — less than 26 square miles — makes it easier to measure the potential benefits and costs of a public policy experiment or pilot program.

The ranked choice voting pilot in Arlington likely failed because of the decision to roll it out in a two-seat election. Many voters who did not have their second-choice candidates counted due to the type of ranked choice voting used in the Democratic primary felt disenfranchised.

After deciding not to use ranked choice voting in the general election, Arlington County Board Vice Chair Libby Garvey admitted that she initially thought she understood how the vote tabulation worked in a two-seat race. But Garvey conceded at the July 15 county board meeting, where ranked choice voting was given the thumbs-down for the general election, that she was confused by the tabulation process.

She later told Patch that one of the reasons she voted last December to allow ranked choice voting in the 2023 primary election was because the Democratic Party was anxious to use it.

Similarly, in her comments after voting in favor of the Missing Middle Housing proposal in March, Garvey said, “No one really knows for sure how this is going to turn out.”

Garvey said she viewed the Missing Middle plan as a pilot program, similar to how the use of ranked choice voting in the Democratic primary election was characterized. There are enough “guardrails” in the plan to mitigate any unintended consequences, Garvey said in March.

During her successful campaign for one of the two spots in the Democratic primary for county board, Maureen Coffey, who was endorsed by Northern Virginia Realtors Political Action Committee, YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and former County Board member Katie Cristol, along with many traditional liberal groups, expressed a different view.

Coffey emphasized there is no going back from the elimination of single-family housing in Arlington. “We don’t get a do-over,” she said. “There’s only a do-next.”

Former county board candidate Natalie Roy, who opposed the Missing Middle Housing plan and came in third in the Democratic primary, said the election was about “whether we in Arlington want unplanned density for the sake of density throughout the county or environmentally sound, transit-oriented development that meaningfully promotes affordability and diversity.”

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O’Grady, who is a member of the Arlington County Civic Federation’s Housing Committee, said Arlington’s adoption of Missing Middle and Expanded Housing Option development is a continuation of a mentality among county leaders to push “flashy policies or projects” and “mindlessly embrace trending schools of thought” like New Urbanism “to get written up in publications like Governing Magazine.”

Arlington County’s zoning division started receiving applications for Missing Middle-style housing on July 1. Developers immediately began seeking permission to tear down houses in order to build EHO housing types like townhouses and 6-plexes.

READ ALSO: 6-Plexes, Townhomes Among 1st Missing Middle Applications In Arlington

As of July 21, county staff were reviewing applications on 17 properties to build a total of 72 EHO units. Projects under review include eight 6-plexes, one quadplex, four 3-unit townhouses, and four semi-detached units. No more than 58 EHO permits can be issued per calendar year.

The 58 EHO permits will be distributed by zoning district: seven permits for R-5; 30 permits for R-6; and 21 permits total for R-8, R-10 and R-20 housing. Lots sized 5,000 square feet, for example, are classified as R-5, and 6,000-square-feet lots are R-6.

O’Grady told Patch he finds it “downright Orwellian” that Arlington is now increasing destruction of less upscale types of single-family housing “in the name of achieving social equity without guaranteeing historically marginalized groups a place in Arlington’s future.”

Similar outcomes have been documented in other cities, including in D.C. In the Hill East neighborhood of D.C., where O’Grady’s father has lived since the mid-1980s, displacement of Black residents has been occurring for the past 15 years, he said.

In Southwest D.C., different types of new housing units were built over the past 15 years as part of a housing boom, increasing density in many cases by filling in vacant lots. Between 2010 and 2020, census tracts in areas along the waterfront in Southwest D.C. went from 66 to 41 percent Black people and 22 to 40 percent white people, according to The Washington Post.

“Just saying ‘build more’ does not actually achieve racial equity. We’ve got to build affordable. Even the affordable units are not possible for Black families,” Coy McKinney, a member of Southwest DC Action, a group that advocates for equitable development, told The Washington Post.

According to O’Grady, Arlington’s housing crisis will continue to be a function of affordability rather than supply. Market-based supply interventions, like what is happening with the county’s EHO program, without any affordable housing mandates, is unlikely to alleviate the crisis or help families across the income spectrum.

“Since we make little effort to track vulnerable population flows, even though 40 years of research says this is a major flaw in the system, we’ve adopted a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ mentality when it comes to displacement,” O’Grady said.

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