All About That (Tax) Base

Last month, Douglas Development defaulted on a $51.7 million loan, which secured numerous commercial properties around the region, including several in Alexandria. Earlier this year, the commercial vacancy rate in Washington broke all-time records. The vacancies are cascading across the region as a parade of horrible news continues for commercial real estate and development in general.

Clearly commercial landlords and private developers are not high on the list of those in need or deserving of sympathy. Markets go up and down, and investors benefit or suffer accordingly.

Yet, the fate of Alexandria's municipal balance sheet and the quality of life in our community are inextricably linked to the success of our real estate market.

This year, our overall real estate tax base grew by 0.33%. This brings the City's real estate tax base to $48.5 billion.

Over 61% of the costs of Alexandria's government come from residential and commercial real estate taxes. The City's ability to fund the services expected by our community depends on the resiliency and steady growth of our real estate tax base.

The City did experience $522.1 million of new development in the tax base last year, of which residential development constituted $284.4 million and $237.7 million came from commercial growth. Between 2020 and 2024, $2.6 billion of new development has been added to the tax rolls. At the current tax rate, the taxable value of that growth generates a little over $29.5 million in annual real estate tax revenue, the equivalent of over 6 cents on the current real estate tax rate.

That means over 5% of the City's total real estate tax base was created in the past 5 years. Just over $5 billion of our tax base was developed in the past decade, or just over 10%. In the past 15 years, beginning in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the City has added an average of over $434 million of new development annually.

While most cities and counties around our nation would be deeply envious of that sustained economic growth, there are risks on the horizon.

Unfortunately, this year's new growth was more than offset by $736.88 million of value that was lost from our commercial tax base.

The loss of value in office properties in Alexandria has significantly accelerated this year. Values for office properties dropped by over 12% this year and almost 2% last year.

Alexandria had $4.16 billion of office space in 2019. Today Alexandria's office space is worth $3.14 billion. That lost value alone generated over $11 million of annual real estate tax revenue for the City. For much of the aged office space in our City, it is only the possibility of residential conversion that is providing some floor for the valuation. The City Council continues to advance commercial to residential conversions, as we lead the nation in such conversions. These conversions not only restore obsolete properties to more productive use, but they also serve to protect the value of more competitive office properties.

It is this proactive approach that has given Alexandria one of the lowest commercial vacancy rates in the region. While 15.5% of our commercial property is now vacant, the regional average is just under 20%.

While a quick trip around our City would pass numerous construction sites and cranes dotting the horizon, things are slowing. The development under way in Alexandria today are projects that were approved years ago. These projects were financed in a different economy. Many of these efforts under way are proceeding with financing from the City or its partners. The pipeline of new development is slowing as development costs have risen, financing has been more difficult to come by and competition growing. Some private projects have had to seek alternative financing in order to proceed.

While there are certainly many in our community that will welcome a slowing of new growth, that slowing will be accompanied by negative impacts on City revenues and our ability to fund critical services.

Twenty four years ago, City Council received its assessment report from our City Assessor. The City Council learned that between 1999 and 2000, the City's real estate tax base grew by a little over 9%. For the next 6 years, annual tax base growth never went below double digits, as the City AVERAGED 15.3% ANNUAL tax base growth between 1999 and 2006. This was an unprecedented appreciation in our tax base. 

From 2006 to 2007, the City's real estate tax base grew by just a little over 4%. For the next 12 years, annual growth in the tax base never again reached 4%. From 2008 until 2019, the City's tax base grew annually by an average of 1.47%. There were two years during this period where the tax base actually shrunk. 

For four years, we began to transition from this very low-growth period. From 2020 until last year, we saw uneven but more significant annual growth, averaging just over 4% each year.

This year ends that period of healthy growth, with the most anemic tax base growth since the Great Recession.

Almost 19 years ago, the City held a Economic Summit, which led to a Economic Sustainability Work Group, and a series of recommendations that have guided the City's prosperity for the past 2 decades.

At the suggestion of my colleague Councilman John Taylor Chapman, the City will hold another such summit this Fall. We have a different set of challenges, risks and environment, but the goal is the same: to ensure that Alexandria thrives long into the future. We look forward to you helping us chart that course.

Time To Vote

Early voting for this November's General Election will begin this month.

This is an important election, as we will choose our President, our Vice President, one of our United States Senators, our representative in the United States House of Representatives, our Mayor, all 6 members of the Alexandria City Council, and all 9 members of the Alexandria School Board.

On Tuesday November 5th, all City polling places will be open from 6 AM until 7 PM for the General Election.

If you are not registered to vote at your current address, you can register or change your registration online today.

Virginia has expansive early voting, so voters have three choices to vote this November:

1. You can request a ballot by mail online now. Ballots will be mailed out this month, beginning 45 days prior to Election Day. The ballot can be mailed back or dropped 24/7 at the drop-box located in front of 132 N. Royal Street (next to City Hall).
2. You can vote in person at the Alexandria Registrar's Office (132 N. Royal Street), Monday - Friday from 8 AM until 5 PM. Friday September 20th is the first day that you can vote in person. Saturdays and evenings, as well as alternate locations will begin in October.
3. You can vote in person at your precinct on the General Election day of November 5th.

I'll see you at the polls!

New Minnie Howard Pool

Last month, the new Minnie Howard campus of Alexandria City High School formally welcomed students for the first time. While the attention has been rightfully focused on the largest expansion of our educational infrastructure in 17 years, this facility includes an important recreational amenity for the entire community.

The Minnie Howard Aquatics Facility is now open to the public! This new facility features a brand-new competition-standard pool and a smaller accessible training pool. In addition to this new community use, the pool will become integrated in academic and interscholastic programs as well.

Several years ago, the City had seven municipal pools: the indoor pool at Chinquapin Recreation Center, two large outdoor pools (Old Town and Warwick), and four small neighborhood pools (Ewald,  Charles Houston, Lee and Colasanto). 

Over the past two decades, with little new financial resources devoted, and mounting capital needs, the City closed Ewald, Lee and Colasanto. In the summer of 2015, Warwick did not open with the other outdoor pools. 

In the spring of 2013, in adoption of the FY 2014 budget, the Council made a significant financial investment in the future of municipal aquatics. 

In partnership with Advocates for Alexandria Aquatics, the Council proposed a partial rebuild of Chinquapin Recreation Center to include a new 50 meter pool, as well as aquatics improvements throughout the City. 

While Warwick closed, in the Fall of 2014, the Council gave the direction to the City Manager to begin engineering and building a new pool on the site. A new Warwick Pool opened a few years ago.

For Chinquapin Recreation Center, the Council budgeted $20 million to match the commitment of $2.5 million of private fundraising.

One of the central components of that new investment was the exploration of feasibility and construction of a 50-meter pool at Chinquapin Recreation Center. The financing plan approved by the Council included assumptions for $2.5 million of private fundraising from  Advocates for Alexandria Aquatics.

With funding from the Council for a feasibility study, the City completed a comprehensive study of the potential expansion.

A decade ago, with next steps ready to begin, and an ever-mounting capital crunch, the City Manager recommended (and City Council concurred) pausing the project to ensure resources would be available for school construction. Ultimately, the 50-meter pool at Chinquapin fell victim to brutal capital prioritization driven by low revenue growth and mounting needs.

Three years ago, the Council took advantage of an opportunity offered by the reconstruction of Minnie Howard. With the addition of additional funding three years ago, the indoor pool facility was added into the school project.

The Capital Improvement Program recently approved by City Council includes $9 million to rebuild Old Town Pool in Fiscal Year 2026. Planning for this effort will begin this year.

Eventually we will need to address our City's indoor aquatics needs at Chinquapin and beyond. It will require significant public resources and likely private resources. It will need to involve sustained commitment from the community and policymakers. 

Short-Term Rentals

Our City staff is preparing new regulations on short-term rentals and they would like public input before bringing their recommendations to the City Council later this year.

You can watch a video detailing the issue and proposed solutions. You can review a deck with more information. Between now and September 15th, you can respond to a survey on these proposals.

Today there are over 700 short-term rentals in the City of Alexandria. This comprises a little less than 1% of our housing stock. As defined by law, a short-term rental is a dwelling space that is rented for fewer than 30 consecutive days at a time. They have been popularized by AirBNB, VRBO, etc.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has struggled to arrive at the correct regulatory regime and provide Virginia's local governments with appropriate tools to address quality of life impacts. 

During the 2017 General Assembly session, legislation was enacted seeking to address these types of businesses. The adopted legislation allowed local governments in Virginia to create a registry, requiring registration, imposition of a fee for registration, and fines for those who do not register. 

With the law in effect, Alexandria moved quickly to implement this new authority and today 460 short-term rentals are registered in the City.

Shortly thereafter, Alexandria became one of the first in Virginia to negotiate a tax collection agreement with AirBNB to allow them to collect and remit the appropriate taxes from those short-term rentals operating within the City. 

Today, short-term rentals constitute over a quarter of the transient lodging (hotel) tax revenue that the City receives. Last fiscal year, this portion totaled $3.3 million from short-term rentals and so far in this fiscal year (which ended yesterday), we have collected $2.5 million from short-term rentals (through the end of March).

Yet, we do hear complaints from residents regarding the quality of life impacts of these short-term rentals. Since 2018, the City has received 33 calls to 311, citing concerns such as trash, noise, parties and parking. We have received 65 calls to Police during this same period, citing concerns regarding potential criminal activity. There are also studies that cite the impact of short-term rentals on housing affordability.

In May, our City staff came to the Council to discuss to regulation of these uses and how the City may adopt a more stringent regulatory structure to address these concerns. You can watch the staff presentation and the City Council discussion (the presentation begins at the 25:00 point).

With your input, our staff will engage with the community regarding further regulation, returning this fall with proposals for consideration by the City Council. Let me know your thoughts!

Measuring Student Achievement

Last month, my daughter started 11th grade in the Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS). She follows her older brother who graduated over a year ago and just started his sophomore year in college. With 14 years as ACPS parents under our belts, my wife (an ACPS graduate herself) consider ourselves generally well-informed as to the quality of our schools.

Alexandria continues to have good schools, filled with dedicated, creative, and hard-working educators that inspire our children everyday. 

If you have good educators in the classroom and a supportive environment at home, children will thrive. That's typically the measure most parents hope for. 

Whether we like it or not, our schools, our kids, and our educators will ultimately have their success each year measured by standardized tests. In our case, the battery of tests we call the Standards of Learning (SOL) is how we measure that success.

Last month, the Commonwealth released the latest results of these standardized tests. Within Alexandria, these results showed modest improvement across the board, as results continued to rebound from lows during and immediately after the pandemic. The improvement is welcome, yet significant achievement gaps within our student population persist.

While we continue to educate and prepare highly qualified students for higher education, trade schools, the military and more, we cannot be satisfied with the fact that we have children who are not achieving in our schools.   

There are certainly plausible explanations. Alexandria maintains the highest percentage of students receiving Free and Reduced lunches in Northern Virginia, with a rate double or triple that of our neighbors in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties. There is ample data to suggest that poverty is one of the most significant impacts on academic achievement.  

Of that peer group of jurisdictions, Alexandria has the highest percentage of English Language Learners with over 38% of our students arriving with limited English proficiency. Again, this presents another barrier to student achievement.  

It should not be ignored that the four jurisdictions with the highest pass rates, Falls Church City, and Arlington, Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, are also the four jurisdictions with the lowest rate of Free and Reduced lunch recipients in the region. The very same variation exists within our City, with the highest test scores in our City being posted by schools with the lowest rates of Free and Reduced lunch recipients.  

Yet there are school systems around the country that have excelled in educating children challenged by poor backgrounds or limited English proficiency.   

The variation in test scores within our city show that there are schools in Alexandria that have even excelled in educating these children.   

As a member of the City Council, it can be easy to make the case that this is an issue for our School Board. There is no question that the Board, which was elected to lead our schools, has an enormous responsibility for ensuring our students' success.  

That being said, our children are in school for 32.5 hours a week. What they experience in the other 135.5 hours of each week (as well as the five to six years before they enter our schools) has a dramatic impact on their achievement.   

We cannot ignore the significant role that the City government plays in the success of our children.  

Many of our children receive pre-school, day care, after-school and summer camp from City government. They may access programs from our Health Department, our Recreation Department, our Court Services Unit, or some of the many non-profit organizations that receive City funding.   

Thirty years ago, Alexandria elected its first elected School Board (School Boards were appointed by the City Council prior to that.). For the first time in 30 years, there is no competition this year for any of the 9 seats on our School Board. As residents of Alexandria, we are fortunate that citizens of our City are willing to give their time in service to our schools. We have dedicated and conscientious members of our School Board today and I'm sure the newcomers to the board will bring new ideas and energy. However, competition is good. The fact that we only have nine people running for nine seats, for the first time ever, should prompt some introspection from us all.

We need more residents to get involved! Our students depend on it.

ACPS is crafting a new Strategic Plan. They are looking for volunteers to help develop that plan. Tuesday is the deadline to apply.

If something more direct is your interest, the Alexandria Mentoring Partnership is always looking for adults to mentor our youth. Sign-up today to make a difference!

The wealth of a student's family should not dictate academic achievement. We have more work to do in order to make that aspiration, reality. Please get involved to help!  

Housing Master Plan Update

In 2013, while adopting our Housing Master Plan, City Council had set an ambitious goal to create or preserve 2,000 affordable units by 2025. We are on track to meet this goal.

It is time to adopt new strategies and new goals as we work to improve the accessibility of housing in Alexandria.

This month, we will hold two community events to kick-off an update of our Housing Master Plan. Our goal is to define a plan to meet Alexandria's housing needs through 2040. Please join us on September 18th and September 25 to offer your perspectives on this important effort.

At the end of June, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the Biden-Harris Administration had awarded $85 million of Federal resources to support local actions around the nation designed to lower housing costs and boost housing supply.

The funds are awarded as part of PRO Housing, Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing. A few days later, leaders from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) traveled to Alexandria's West End to announce that Alexandria, along with several of our regional partners had been awarded a portion of this money to support housing efforts convened by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG).

Last fall, the City Council voted unanimously to seek these new resources to advance recommendations from our Fair Housing Plan and Zoning for Housing efforts.

It has taken generations of cumulative, coordinated, and frequently bigoted policy approaches at the Federal, State and local government levels to create the broken status quo of American housing policy. It will take coordination of all three levels of government to create a coherent housing policy that ensures the availability of housing for residents in the future. This grant is an important step into a more positive future for housing policy around our region and our nation.

Last fall, the City Council approved a series of policy proposals designed to expand Alexandria's housing production, improve affordability and address past and current barriers to equitable housing access. You can watch the full City Council discussion and votes beginning at the 2:45:00 point of the video.

These actions were the culmination of a year of engagement with residents around our City. In an effort to be fully responsive to the input we have received, our staff posted the specific input and their responses to the input on our website.

We began this effort nearly two years ago, with great ambition and high-minded language. We ended up with a modest package of reforms that removed barriers to the creation of a diversity of housing types, informed by deep analysis of infrastructure requirements and the history that has shaped housing access in Alexandria for generations. I believe these reforms will move our community forward, improve accessibility and protect the quality of life we cherish.

Prior to our votes, our staff formally presented the specific proposals in a joint worksession with the Planning Commission. You can watch the full joint work session, including our Planning Director's presentation online.

The specific land-use proposals made by our staff address these areas:

• Single-Family Zoning
• Removal of Restrictive/Exclusionary barriers from the zoning code
• Bonus Height
• Expanded Transit-Oriented Growth
• Industrial Zones
• Coordinated Development Districts (CDDs)
• Inclusionary Zoning
• Townhouse Zoning 
• Property Conversions
• Expansion of the Residential Multi-Family Zone (RMF)

This effort was prompted by an urgent reality: Alexandria has become largely inaccessible to those of low and moderate incomes.

You can watch my comments at our kick-off event at the beginning of the year, and leading into presentations from Richard and Leah Rothstein, the authors of the recently released book, "Just Action,' a follow-up to Richard Rothstein's seminal tome "The Color of Law."

All of the sessions were recorded and are viewable online.

While this effort had a pair of motivations, a foundational acknowledgement is that for much of the 20th Century, wide swaths of Alexandria housing was off-limits to Alexandrians that were not white. That reality was enforced by a patchwork of ordinances, restrictive covenants, intimidation and lending practices that served to effectively segregate our City for generations. While de jure policies that explicitly enforced segregation were made illegal long ago, the legacy of these policies live on today. In fact, in recent years, Alexandria has grown MORE segregated. These realties are detailed in the Draft Regional Fair Housing Plan that I wrote about last year. This plan was formally received by the City Council shortly thereafter.

In September of 2019, the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) unanimously adopted new regional housing creation targets. This was the first-ever regional commitment to accelerate the development of housing supply as a means to address our affordability crisis. 

These targets, while voluntary, commit the City to the creation of additional units, with most of those units committed to be affordable for low to middle income households. To ensure that this housing creation does not exacerbate existing transportation challenges, most of this new housing must be located near job centers and high-capacity transportation infrastructure. 

In March of 2020, the City Council became the third jurisdiction in the region to endorse new housing targets in conjunction with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG).

With the adoption of the COG housing targets, the City has committed to an additional 11,500 housing units, with 4,250 as committed affordable or workforce housing.

The housing non-profit HAND began an annual report to measure the work that each jurisdiction in the region is doing to achieve our commitments. HAND recently released the annual update of this measurement. The HAND "Housing Indication Tool" report shows that Alexandria has made significant progress, with more work to do.

The City cannot raise and spend enough money to make an appreciable impact on this problem. The City's power to determine how land is used, our land-use authority, provides a critical tool to spur the creation and preservation of both committed affordable housing as well as market-rate housing. Said another way: building additional housing supply, whether committed as affordable housing or market-rate housing, helps address our housing affordability challenges and reverse generational impacts.

The City will continue to seek creative partnerships, new land-use tools and innovative financing to preserve and create affordability in our City. Our Housing Master Plan update will lay the groundwork for the next phase of this important work. Please make your voice heard!

Community Health Assessment

An Alexandrian that lives in the Beauregard Census tract, which is just west of 395, will die on average 5 years earlier than an Alexandrian who lives less than a mile east along Seminary Road in the Seminary Hill Census tract. Over half of the residents in Beauregard are black and foreign-born. Less than 5% of the residents in Seminary are black and less than 10% born in another country.

A black resident of Alexandria is 117% more likely to die before the age of 75 than white residents of our City.

These are provocative disparities that exist and persist due to generations of structural racism and inequities.

In 2019, just prior to the pandemic, the City completed a Community Health Assessment (CHA). The comprehensive report, created with partners throughout our community, provided an overview of public health conditions and disparities around our City.

While the report showed that overall Alexandria is a healthy community, it did indicate disparities in health conditions within the City, particularly relating to chronic illness. It is those chronic illnesses that contribute to the disparities in life expectancy.

The 2019 assessment led to the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP), which has led to intentional actions throughout City government to help all Alexandrians live longer.

As one example, the report indicated that the City's adult asthma hospitalization rate is the highest in the West End (Zip Code 22304), with 10 hospitalizations per 10,000 residents. Yet in Central Alexandria, residents experience only 2.9 hospitalizations per 10,000 residents.

Given how strongly correlated asthma and other respiratory illnesses are linked to housing conditions, our Health Department partnered with the National Center for Healthy Housing to prepare a report detailing how we can promote healthier homes.

With this factual basis, the Health Department worked to design interventions to help improve the health of homes, and reduce the impacts of these chronic illnesses. From this effort the ALX Breathes program was born.

We are now preparing to begin the cycle again. On Tuesday October 1st at 6:30 PM, at Patrick Henry Recreation Center, you are invited to join us. We will be kicking-off a new Community Health Assessment to see where we are as a community, and help determine how we make Alexandria a healthier community in the future!

Please RSVP so that you can be a part of this important community conversation!

Alexandria West Plan

On Thursday evening, the Alexandria Planning Commission will be considering the Alexandria West Small Area Plan. You can review the recommended plan online and sign-up on to address the Commission at the hearing.

Assuming the Commission acts on the plan, this will come to the City Council for consideration on Saturday September 14th.

Since the fall, our community has been engaged in a comprehensive update of the Alexandria West Small Area Plan. This plan will encompass a wide swath of our City, the entire northwest corner. 

You can watch the community meeting where our staff presented the draft plan.

The City's Master Plan is made up of 18 Small Area Plans and several Citywide sub-plans (Transportation, Housing, Open Space, etc). This is how the City meets the obligations of state law to adopt and update a comprehensive plan. 

Over 23 years ago ago, the City Council adopted  "Plan for Planning," a vision for how the community could proactively work to get ahead of development pressures and ensure that our community's vision would shape transition in our neighborhoods. 

Since that time, the City has been revising and modernizing these Small Area Plans, working intensely with different neighborhoods around the City to adopt a vision for the future of our community. 

But no plan is worth the effort if the City will not implement what was planned. Over the past several years the City has worked to improve our efforts to implement plans and policy goals in a variety of areas. 

To provide accountability for those efforts, the City publishes an annual report detailing the status of implementation of the most significant City planning initiatives. 

I am excited to see these neighborhood planning efforts moving forward, specifically as we work to conclude a new Alexandria West Plan! I look forward to your input. 

Bus Rapid Transit

Transit Corridor A began service as "Metroway" a decade ago, and was the region's first bus rapid transit (BRT) service, providing service to Potomac Yard and Crystal City, with further enhancements planned.

While every bus rapid transit system is different, many systems include dedicated lanes, easier boarding and fare collection, signal priority and other amenities.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA), which has provided funding to new BRT systems in the region, including 3 in Alexandria, is now working to plan a connected BRT system across the region. True regional cooperation will maximize public investment and improve regional mobility.

Over 16 years ago, the City adopted its latest Transportation Master Plan. At the time, the plan was a significant transition in that it shifted from a plan focused on roads and vehicle traffic, to a plan that prioritized transit. 

One of the most significant changes that came from the 2008 Master Plan was the designation of three transit corridors for high-capacity transit. The three corridors were Transit Corridor A, which was nominally north to south on Route 1 on the east end of the City, Transit Corridor B, which was intended as east to west on Duke Street and Transit Corridor C, which was north to south on the west end of the City using Van Dorn and Beauregard. 

After the adoption of the 2008 Master Plan, a community task force was assembled to provide some more details around the vision for each of the transit corridors. 

Transit Corridor C, now called the "West End Transitway" will be the next to come to reality. The West End Transitway has now been awarded $73 million of State and Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) funds.

The slower pace of redevelopment in the Beauregard corridor will necessitate multiple phases to implement this project. With funding now in place (2024-2025), work begins to plan the implementation. 

Transit Corridor B, the Duke Street Transitway, will be the final corridor implemented. Four years ago, the City received $75 million in regional funds from the NVTA to bring this new transit to reality.

High capacity transit provides our residents with alternatives to congestion and delay. I am excited to see these regional planning efforts to create a true system of mobility.