Blog posts are the personal views of Letty Hardi and not official statements or records on behalf of the Falls Church City Council

Dear Friends,

Myth busting 101: this is a week where I’m going to share info worth your time from *outside* our City Council meeting that may surprise you. While we are the ones that cast votes that get the attention, our work is informed by data, recommendations, and expertise from our professional staff, guidance from our boards and commissions, and collaboration with our School Board partners. Read on for info that came out of the recent School Board and Planning Commission meetings, related to the top 3 issues I hear from the community:

• School capacity and enrollment – the annual “where students live” analysis is always heavily anticipated. I’ll share the hot off the presses data with you that the School Board saw this week and my quick takeaways
• Single family home development trends
• Traffic volumes in Falls Church

Look forward to hearing your thoughts. And if you have more FAQs like this, check out my October 2023 post. And in case you missed it, we got a national shout out on Jeopardy!

Best,
Letty

What Happened This Week:

(1) Where Students Live Analysis

Long time readers know this is an annual topic I share every fall. The general government and schools collaborate and produce an annual analysis on student enrollment by dwelling unit (don’t worry, all anonymized), which is then used to inform our fiscal impact modeling for every mixed use development project, school capacity planning, and budgets. Recall we always pay attention to annual enrollment at the beginning of the school year and projections from demographers (I last shared back in September), but this next level analysis dives deeper to understand where students live.

From the presentation and the data:

• Total FCCPS student enrollment is 2714 (2719 was projected) which represents 3% growth over last year
• Forecast of 2873 students for 2024-2025 school year, 5.8% growth
• Students from the 10 mixed use buildings represent just 10% of the total enrollment, students from single family homes 60%, the rest from townhomes, older multi family buildings, etc.

As part of the decision-making for every mixed use project in front of us, we forecast the number of pupils and costs of new residents (vs the expected revenues from new taxes and spinoff economic benefit) as part of our fiscal impact analysis. Then every few years, we go back and see how the projections compare to actuals which helps us refine the modeling going forward. The snapshot below is from the 2022 report card with a new column (pink) added in to show this year’s actual enrollment by building. The quick takeaway is that our projections have been quite accurate, apart from the long-standing Pearson Square exception.

We are due for another mixed use report card update, using 2024 data when the year wraps up, so stay tuned.

(2) Trends in single family homes

As a city and as a City Council, we pay a lot of attention to the very visible mixed use development and growth in our commercial corridors: they usually represent significant change from what was there previously, they welcome new neighbors and new dining, shopping, entertainment options to the city, and we spend a lot of time negotiating for community benefits and concessions to mitigate costs and impacts. And once approved – construction, albeit temporary, is incredibly disruptive and inconvenient. What’s not talked about as much is the quieter turnover in single family neighborhoods and the pace and amount of change we’ve seen there.

Planning staff put together an excellent analysis of single family neighborhoods that was in front of the Planning Commission recently. The analysis showed trends as smaller, older homes turnover and the associated impacts/costs. You may not be surprised that homes built in the past 20 years have been larger, more expensive, take up more impervious land, and have a higher pupil generation rate (ie, cost to the city).

**What may surprise you is that new residential construction has impacted about 100 acres of land in the city over the past 20 years – which is nearly 3X the amount of land impacted by commercial, mixed use development (about 38 acres) through the special exception process over the same time period.**

The map below shows housing construction year across the city, where we can reasonably project the pace of turnover and change from the older housing stock going forward.

Letty’s thoughts: This is important data and trends to understand to shape policy decisions if we want to preserve starter home stock, plan for stormwater, tree canopy, and other infrastructure impacts. Far more impacts are happening due to growth in our neighborhoods, just dispersed and less visible, than commercial mixed use development.

(3) Traffic volumes

Another shout-out to the city’s Planning staff for this great analysis on vehicle volumes mapped with population over time in this week’s Planning Commission docket. I last shared similar data in 2022 based on an article analyzing actual VDOT data. From 2022, the quick summary is that while population increased about 20%, VDOT data showed that overall car volumes decreased by almost 10% in the same time period. Some streets saw small increases in volumes, but total volumes of vehicle traffic in the city decreased over time, busting the myth that more people automatically equals more cars especially when we invest in other forms of transportation, like walking, bike, and transit.

The trend below is something we’ll keep monitoring closely, as I know we still have a few more months of construction-related congestion on Broad St and individual streets and neighborhoods are seeing increased bad driving and speeding post-Covid, so we’ll continue to deploy traffic calming measures, pedestrian safety improvements, and enforcement.

What’s Coming Up:

Monday, November 18 – City Council Work Session*

Monday, November 25 – City Council Meeting*

Monday, December 2 – City Council & School Board Annual Joint Meeting (6 pm, City Hall)

Monday, December 9 – City Council Meeting*

Wednesday, December 11 – Ask the Council Office Hours (9 am, City Hall)

*Mondays (except 5th Mondays and holidays) at 7:30 pm. You can access the agenda and livestream here, including recordings of past meetings