The apartment building Arlington County officials want to build along Columbia Pike will include 122 low-income units designed for residents who earn less than $60,000 a year.
The latest development plans for the complex doubles the number of low-income apartments that would have been built on the site under previous plans.
In the plan submitted by the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, which the county selected as developer for the project, every apartment is designated for families earning at or less than 60 percent of the county’s median income, or about $60,000 per household. Arlington has one of the highest median incomes in the country, $95,000 per household and $127,000 per family.
Ten percent of the apartments will be set aside exclusively for families who earn less than 40 percent of the median income.
Arlington had been planning to build more costly apartments on the site, along with a rebuilt Arlington Mill Community Center. But officials scrapped those plans after the developer, Public Private Alliance, failed in 2009 to get financing, according to Maureen Markham, a development specialist with the county’s Housing Division.
The original plans were for two buildings of mixed-income apartments, with one of the buildings housing the community center on several of the bottom floors. Only 61 low-income units would have been built under those plans. Under the current plan, the apartments would be built separated from the community center project.
“Given what happened with the last plan, we thought it would be a safer bet to go with the all-affordable-housing option,” Markham said.
Development costs are estimated at $30 million. The developer plans to apply for financing and tax credits from the Virginia Housing Development Authority.
Now that the county has decided to move forward with the community center and apartment complex separately, both projects are scheduled to begin construction within the next two years. The county will keep ownership of the land and negotiate a lease for the apartment complex with the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing. The county now plans to develop the community center on its own.
