Hello,
Based on documents a Fairlington resident pried out of Arlington County Government via a contentious Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, it's apparent that County Planning Staff has secretly worked with Fairlington's 'Community Leaders' for months to permanently remove minority residents from the redeveloped Park Shirlington apartments on South 31st Street.
According to the final submitted site plan, the redeveloped Park Shirlington Apartments will greatly increase in size from 294 to 750 units and the number of parking spaces will triple to 904. The site plans request a rezoning from a maximum of 380 townhouse units. One hundred of the new apartment units would be 'affordable'. The applicant, Home Properties, Inc, has owned the current site for years. The site plans depict an apartment complex that would attract high income yupster tenants, like those who live in Shirlington Village and Clarendon.
However, a number of Fairlington's Community Leaders have a longstanding antipathy towards the largely-Latino minority residents of Park Shirlington, and want them all removed. A number of increasingly upscale Abingdon School parents believe the presence of Latino children, who live with their families in Park Shirlington, degrades the performance of all Abingdon School students.
Consequently a 'Park Shirlington Redevelopment Advisory Committee' was formed by the Fairlington civic association and a number of the aforementioned Community Leaders have been meeting secretly for more than six months. Attendance is by invitation only. If you're not invited you may be arrested if you try to attend. To its credit, Parks and Rec won't allow them to meet in the South Fairlington Community Center so they meet in North Fairlington.
Officially, the Planning Commission's Site Plan Review Committee met for the first time last month and did a walk through and review of the site plans for Park Shirlington and was uniformly negative.
So, the Community Leaders and their secret committee and County Planning Staff will meet tonight, June 24th, in North Fairlington and reveal the secret deal or deals they've been concocting.
Sorry it took so long to get this news out but it was a struggle to obtain FOIA information from the County Manager's office.
Cindy
23 comments:
Why am I not surprised? New Urbanism = Resegregation through Gentrification.
Google "White Citizens Council"
The redevelopment was pre-approved by Barbara Favola, Jay Fisette, Mary Hynes, Walter Tejada, and Chris Zimmerman in early 2011.
I lived in a 1-bedroom apartment in Park Shirlington for two years. The construction is exceptionally solid. If the County Board could approve renovation and preservation of a large apartment complex like Woodbury Park last week why can't Park Shirlington be renovated and preserved?
Why? Because the bloated CPHD and DES staffs at 2100 Clarendon Blvd. need to inflict neighborhood-by-neighborhood infill redevelopment on every Arlington neighborhood for lifetime job security.
Fairlington's 'Community Leaders' dislike Latinos? I'm shocked, shocked.....
Hello, I'm an Abingdon School Parent and I have nothing against minorities but I am afraid my little Buffy is going to catch some terrible disease, like cooties, eeewwww, from some child living in that dirty old Park Shirlington apartment complex.
So let's do what's right and have a brand new school and a brand new apartment complex at the same time with much nicer people living in the new apartments.
Something has to be said about the Arlington Police Department and its ongoing relationship with Fairlington's "Community Leaders".
The police are never in Fairlington except when (rarely) reacting to some emergency, and when Fairlington's Community Leaders want the police to attend an event sponsored by the Community Leaders.
So, when threats are made by some Community Leader or another to have residents arrested for non-conforming behavior they are taken seriously by residents.
Agree. Arlington Police can't drive through Fairlington fast enough, often ignoring stop signs.
Fairlington's streets have been crumbling for years. Where were the "community leaders"? Micromanaging the restaurant music in Shirlington Village.
They should all follow the example of their pal and mentor, Nanny Nancy Hunt, and retire to Charlottesville.
CPHD wants to get the Park Shirlington site plan approved as soon as possible so the same Planning Team that imposed a mixed use site plan on East Falls Church can begin facilitating mixed use site plans for redeveloping small businesses out of Four Mile Run - Shirlington.
Arlington has run out of open space. Time for an immediate moratorium on New Urbanism.
Redeveloped Park Shirlington would have as many as 1,000 more residents and little open space except for plazas and an inadequate number of 'amenities' on-site to support the increased population. But don't believe me, that's what the SPRC determined last month.
Also, the current residents are not bicycle owners, dog owners, runners, or pub crawlers.
Enough of this $H!+ We have about 7 layers of Nanny Bureaucracy micromanaging our lives before we reach the people we voted to elect.
Yeah, let's figure 400 more people riding bicycles in Fairlington, plus those from the redeveloped sites across King Street from Fairlington.
We were not designed for this.
Corporation that owns Park Shirlington showed up in North Fairlington and proceeded to give their same old pitch to the Fairlington sheeple, aided and abetted by Arlington's 'Planning' Staff. Can you spell D-O-N-E D-E-A-L?
Same old charade about 'affordable' housing that will go to people who earn at least $52,000 / year because the developer can't 'afford' to rent to tenants who earn $42,000 per year, let alone $32,000 per year.
I want to know who got to rent 'affordable' apartments at Arlington Mill (by type of employment) and what their incomes are.
How much do these developers get in bonus density versus what they pay to subsidize the so-called 'affordable' apartments?
So appears the developer is kicking out Latinos who earn $50,000 per year so it can replace them with urban hipsters who earn $50,000 per year.
Park Shirlington residents are paying rent comparable to rent paid by persons who rent Fairlington condos.
Is bonus density for affordable housing that's not affordable an out-and-out fraud?
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