Recommendations of the Affordable Housing Preservation Action Committee, January 2005
In April 2004, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors announced the Affordable Housing Preservation Initiative for Fairfax County . This initiative included a variety of tools to increase the amount of affordable housing that is preserved within the County. The Affordable Housing Preservation Forum, a component of the initiative, was held in early June 2004. It convened the development community, large-property owners, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, state and local political leadership and others committed to the preservation of affordable housing.
To help bring ideas discussed at the Forum to reality, the Affordable Housing Preservation Action Committee was appointed by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in August 2004. This represented a further step in the County’s initiative to respond to the critical need to preserve existing affordable housing. The Action Committee included persons who are local, state and national leaders in the fight to address the lack of affordable housing.
The Affordable Housing Preservation Action Committee was charged with completing its tasks within six month of first convening. Thus, on a tight schedule, members of the Action Committee worked quickly. The Action Committee met for the first time on September 24, 2004 and held its final meeting on January 21, 2005 to adopt the final list of recommendations to be submitted the Board of Supervisors on January 24, 2005 .
To provide up-to-date information to the Action Committee, the Fairfax County Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) compiled a binder of information that contained material on existing resources in the County, affordable housing preservation best practices around the country, and background material for a list of 12 “Intriguing Ideas.” These original Intriguing Ideas, acting as a jump start to the committee process, were generated both by benchmarking other jurisdictions from around the country as well as from ideas that were raised at the Fairfax County Affordable Housing Preservation Forum held in June 2004.
The original list of 12 “Intriguing Ideas” grew to 26 after the first two meetings. To help the Action Committee focus its work, HCD developed a survey that asked Action Committee members to rate the feasibility and impact of the Intriguing Ideas. The results of the survey were later presented to the Action Committee. The ideas were plotted on a matrix to show concepts that the Action Committee considered to be highly feasible and would result in high impact against those that were considered to have low impact and low feasibility.
Following the first meeting of the Affordable Housing Preservation Action Committee, the group broke up into four subcommittees: Land Use, Funding Opportunities, State Policy and Non-Monetary Incentives. The Intriguing Ideas were then divided up and distributed to the subcommittee that was best able to address the different suggestions, allowing each subcommittee to focus on five to six individual ideas. HCD staff members, as well as staff members from other County Departments, acted as resources for the subcommittees.
Once the subcommittee work was complete, the subcommittees presented their recommendations to the Action Committee. Comments from the Action Committee members further refined the recommendations, and on January 21, 2005 , the full Action Committee adopted 12 recommendations to submit to the Board of Supervisors.
The Action Committee’s top recommendation was to dedicate one penny of the real estate tax rate to the preservation of affordable housing. In the spring of 2005, the Board of Supervisors took a monumental step when they approved this allocation of the value of one penny from the real estate tax. This is the single largest commitment of funds to affordable housing preservation in the County’s history and will generate almost $18 million in Fiscal Year 2006. Additionally, this bold step by the Board represents the first time, in its history, that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has taken such an action. This allocation was not only new to Fairfax County , but also to the Commonwealth—never having been undertaken before.
As a result of this allocation, in May 2005 the Board of Supervisors appointed a new Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, comprised of many of the members of the original Action Committee, but expanded to include additional stakeholders from the real estate industry, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, financial institutions, employers and employees, business community, and County boards and authorities. The purpose of the Advisory Committee is to assist with prioritizing and monitoring affordable housing preservation initiatives through the “One Penny for Housing” Fund. The Advisory Committee began meeting in late June 2005 and as the summer concludes, Fairfax County has already surpassed the half way mark in its quest to preserve 1,000 by the end of 2007. A full progress report for the Initiative is available at
http://www.e-ffordable.org/documents/preservation_progress_report.pdf.
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