Arlington takes stock of the county’s missing middle housing and its racial implications

Arlington County plans to launch a new Missing Middle Housing Study to reexamine its missing middle housing stock. Prior to the official study, which will begin this fall, the county released a Research Compendium, which is chock-full of information about the types of housing currently available, and the racial disparities that may exist because of policy decisions on housing types.

According to the county website, the study hopes to provide people with a general understanding of the county’s housing challenges, what options the County Board has, and what policy changes can create new housing types.

This study follows a recent trend from other area local governments as the region’s leaders seek to address a housing supply and affordability crisis. For example Montgomery County, MD completed a similar study in 2018 while DC’s Office of Planning published a report focused on single-family zoning earlier this year.

What is missing middle housing, anyway?

Missing middle housing refers to housing that has a density somewhere in the middle between single-family detached homes and mid-to-high-rise apartment buildings. Think attached row homes, townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings.

The higher density of these building types makes a more efficient use of expensive land than single-family detached homes. They also don’t require building materials as expensive as those used in high-rise buildings. Because of this, middle-density housing is oftentimes more affordable than the alternatives of single-family detached homes or new high-rise buildings. In Arlington, most of the housing that currently exists falls into these latter two categories.

Once part of the original DC diamond, significant parts of Arlington are dense, urban neighborhoods. It contains some of the region’s tallest buildings as well as the most exclusive single-family neighborhoods. Yet current land use regulations in Arlington don’t allow for much in between.

So, just how missing is this missing middle? 6%. That’s the percentage of Arlington’s 116,000 homes that the county estimates are townhomes, side-by-side duplexes, or stacked duplexes. If you count low-rise multifamily apartments as missing middle, the percentage increases to a little less than a third of the county’s current housing stock.

Single-family detached homes also make up a minority of Arlington’s housing stock at 24%, but take up the vast majority, 73%, of the county’s land area. Furthermore, nearly all of Arlington’s recent housing growth was from mid-to-high-rise multifamily apartments along the Metro corridors or Columbia Pike, where Arlington allows growth to happen. The county’s Research Compendium, which is great, contains lots of other interesting nuggets, including more information on the middle density housing that does exist.

Missing middle housing was a policy choice that had consequences for Black people

This lack of missing middle housing is not an accident, but rather an intentional policy choice by community leaders during the middle part of the 20th century. As the region’s population boomed and row homes started to sprout up in response, Arlington banned them in order to preserve the county’s suburban character.

This restriction stayed in place for several decades, by which time the majority of the county was already built out with single-family detached homes.

Whether intended or not, it’s also hard not to draw racial implications from this history, as the row home ban corresponded precisely with a time when discriminatory lending practices from the Federal Housing Administration prohibited most mortgages in mixed-race or urban neighborhoods.

As a result, Black, Latinx, and other communities of color were mostly unable to move into Arlington during this early period of the county’s growth. Some of the few Black neighborhoods that did exist were literally walled off from their surroundings.

In 1961, the county established its first General Land Use Plan, which, despite some updates since then, has generally preserved existing land use patterns to this day. In 1975, Arlington adopted a new long-range plan that supported high-density development along the Metro corridors with the preservation of existing low-density neighborhoods elsewhere.

Today, 79% of Arlington’s land area zoned for residential use still only allows for the development of single-family detached houses by right. This great paper from Virginia Tech gives a much more comprehensive history of development, planning, and zoning in the county.

The Missing Middle Study’s research webpage draws an explicit link between its missing middle and current racial segregation:

“While Arlington’s progressive policies to support growth along the Metro and Columbia Pike corridors have allowed for production of multifamily housing that is more affordable than single-family detached housing, the exclusionary nature of Arlington’s planning vision has been translated into a long-established policy that only single-family detached housing and townhouses, in very limited circumstances, should be permitted in the majority of the County’s land area. As a result, missing middle housing types, such as duplexes, triplexes, or small apartment buildings, have been allowed in only very limited locations.

These decisions made in the past, without intentional policy updates over time, have contributed to racial disparities in housing and access to opportunity. The areas of Arlington zoned primarily for single-family detached housing overlap with census tracts where 70% or more of the population is white. There is a strong relationship between Arlington’s exclusionary zoning and land use policy and a lack of diversity and lack of housing opportunities for Arlington’s households of color, especially Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino households.

Next Steps

After the Research Compendium, which serves as a precursor to the full study, is complete, the county will begin the full study in earnest this fall. The goals of the study include identifying ways to increase the supply and diversity of housing throughout the county. This will conclude with a report sometime in late 2020 or early 2021 for the County Board’s consideration. The final phase of the process, currently targeted for the second half of 2021, will include more intensive studies of, and potential amendments to, the county’s Comprehensive Plan and Zoning Ordinance.

The county’s Missing Middle Housing Study is part of two broader initiatives: Housing Arlington and Realizing Arlington’s Commitment to Equity, which seek to address the county’s housing affordability and racial equity challenges. If you would like to follow the process or get involved, you can subscribe to study updates at the project webpage or sign up to be a community partner.