On Common Ground - Summer 2016: Housing For All

cut costs by more than $50,000 per unit and were critical to the feasibility of the project.

Infill development like the Arlington Mill project — the community center and apartments replace a closed Safe-way store the county acquired in 1996 — is one of many smart growth principles Arlington County has applied over the years to prevent sprawl and promote sustainable development.

But smart growth can have an unintended consequence. One of smart growth’s tenets is to provide housing for a wide range of incomes, yet the popularity of smart growth neighborhoods — compact and walkable with easy access to jobs, shopping and transit — can push prices out of reach of low- and moderate-income households.

“Unless you are very intentional about (maintaining affordability), smart growth will, in fact, raise the prices,” Fisette said.

Arlington County’s need to continue providing affordable housing for young workers, seniors and others makes the sweet deal it gave APAH a good investment, Fisette said.

“You don’t want to have a community that prices people out at the early stages of their life or at the end of their life,” he said.

The success of the Arlington Mill project inspired the county to launch Public Land for Public Good. The initiative identified eight other publicly owned properties suitable for affordable housing and set the stage to perform planning studies for each site.

“Using public land for affordable housing is much harder to do if each project is sort of a separate idea,” Fisette said. “It’s easier if planning documents incorporate housing affordability into the planning.” Montgomery County, Md., is an affordable housing pioneer. In 1974, it passed the country’s first inclusionary zoning law requiring most new housing developments to include a minimum percentage of units at affordable prices. In the late 1980s, it began taking inventory of public land and spearheading development of mixed-income housing — affordable, combined with market rate — on various county properties.

Now the county is making a concerted effort to colocate affordable housing with public facilities after participating in its first such project — a library and a senior apartment building called the Bonifant at Silver Spring.

Owned and operated by the nonprofit Montgomery Housing Partnership (MHP), the Bonifant at Silver Spring is 11 stories and contains 149 housing units. All but 10 units are priced for households with incomes between 30 and 60 percent of the area median, which works out to between $458 and $1,028 a month for a one-bedroom unit.