More than three years have passed since Arlington’s Homeless Services Center opened in Courthouse, but Scott Miller, senior director of development for A-SPAN, the nonprofit that runs the center, still heads out on periodic listening tours, touching base with nearby condo residents, retailers, office workers and business owners. It’s an ongoing exercise in diplomacy, he says. Prior to the center’s unveiling in 2015, neighbors feared it would bring crime, litter and other problems to the area.
Since then, many who were initially opposed to the center have changed their thinking. Homeless people who used to loiter on street corners and park benches now have a place to go, Miller says, and the neighbors’ complaints have dwindled to “zero, zero, zero.”
A-SPAN has also taken proactive steps to be a good neighbor. It hired a security guard in the evenings and routinely sends its staff out to pick up trash. It asked the county to move two benches that might attract loiterers and enforces a limit of three clients at a time smoking outside—a smaller crowd than you’re likely to see outside many office buildings.
“It’s always an issue if it’s our clients. If it’s you or me, it’s not an issue,” Miller says. “We want to be sensitive to that.”
After the Homeless Services Center opened, a neighborhood advisory council met quarterly for a time, he says. But today there’s no longer a need. Neighbors’ fears of depressed property values haven’t materialized. Condo values in the adjacent Woodbury Heights neighborhood have enjoyed the same real estate boom as the rest of the county.
Nisenson, the urban planner, says that’s not unusual. She points to a 2016 analysis of 20 markets nationwide by the real estate firm Trulia, which found that in most of the locales studied, the addition of low-income housing had no negative effect on property values. In fact, increasing Arlington’s share of affordable units could make life better for all county residents, she says—by reducing the commuter traffic created by those who currently travel long distances to get to jobs inside the county.
“This is a wonderful community, rich in resources,” says Nina Janopaul, president and CEO of the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH), a nonprofit that owns, develops and maintains multiple affordable housing properties in the area. “We want to make sure we share it with everyone and don’t become a gentrified, closed-off place.”
But to some extent that’s already happening. Between 2000 and 2017, Arlington’s supply of low-income housing dropped by 88 percent as older buildings and homes were replaced with shiny new ones—a problem some forecasters predict will worsen (as will traffic) with the arrival of Amazon and its influx of affluent tech workers. Janopaul says one of her jobs now is convincing neighbors that a new, affordable building next door is a good thing.
Such missions can be tricky, though—as was the case in 2012 when the Arlington Presbyterian Church on Columbia Pike sold its land at a discount so the site could be redeveloped into Gilliam Place, a seven-story mixed-use building with a place of worship on the ground floor and 173 affordable housing units above it. Opponents tried to stop the project by having the church designated as a historic structure but failed.
“It was a little bit bumpy,” Janopaul says, going to bat for greater density. The trend toward urbanization makes some neighbors uncomfortable. “We try to make people understand these are not bad things,” she says, “to use Arlington’s land in a different way.”