Expectations are a funny thing. Take for example the recent Disney+ show Secret Invasion. It was the latest Marvel MCU story (awesome), it featured Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury character (awesomer), and it was adapting a legendary and era-defining Marvel comics storyline (awesomest). Anticipation could not have possibly been higher for this show… and then it just kind of landed with a plop. It was excruciatingly mediocre [editor’s note: Jesse you complete and utter dork, this intro is what’s excruciatingly mediocre and it’s going to make sense to a total of like, four people!] despite the breathless excitement that came before it.
That’s how it felt on Tuesday when the long-awaited, massively-hyped, pre-freaked-out-about Zoning for Housing proposal was finally unveiled by the city. In comparison to the outreach, engagement, and rhetoric from city staff in the 18-month run-up to this moment, the package as released couldn’t help but feel underwhelming.
This is not to say the proposal is bad! Far from it. There’s a whole lot to like, starting with the removal of the single-family-only zone (is that a triplex in Del Ray’s pocket or is it just happy to see us?) and especially the dynamic vision for what we can do in the city’s remaining industrial districts. Particularly worth noting is the focus on transit corridors and development oriented around stations and passenger hubs - this is great and very much in line with the smart planning we’ve come to expect from recent city leadership.
But at the same time, these new measures don’t seem to meaningfully address the problems the initiative was intended to solve. The projected number of new housing units we’ll get out of this is—like a scrawny Burger King Whopper facing a class-action lawsuit by disgruntled customers—smaller than expected. Members of both council and the planning commission were right to be lukewarm on the proposals Tuesday night (“existential disappointment” and “barely moving the needle” in the words of one planning commissioner) and gave voice to legitimate questions about the boldness of purpose with which the assignment was approached.
Because let’s be clear, the purpose of [gestures broadly] all of this… couldn’t be more important. Making our city more affordable? Hell yes. Reducing the region’s carbon emissions and preventing exurban deforestation by helping more people live in already-urbanized areas? Let’s show Greta Thunberg how it’s done. Addressing the legacy of discrimination by increasing—and not by a de minimis amount—housing opportunity in racially segregated single-family neighborhoods? Could not be more pumped to make this happen.
But it seems like these lofty goals were forgotten along the way, sometime between our citywide The Color of Law book club and last week’s Property Value Jamboree. Come on, guys! It’s supposed to be Zoning for Housing, not Zoning for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We can do so much better than this! Our city needs and deserves transformational greatness, not a milquetoast set of half-measures with all the charisma of a wet paper towel.
So let’s ask our leaders for more. Let’s make sure that this proposal is only the start, and that we keep building [*rimshot*] from here. Maybe we beef up these policies now. Maybe we try again next year with Zoning for Housing II: 2 Zoning 2 Housing. Whatever. As long as we actually do it! Because if this is the end rather than the beginning… it probably wasn’t worth the mayor forcing his kid to Driving-Miss-Daisy him all over town on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to take pictures of apartment buildings just for this.
Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life
This was a very cute and very well written story from Vernon at ALXNow about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign the Alexandria library hosts for kids.
Alexandria did 435 office-to-residential unit conversions last year, second in the nation only to Los Angeles. Los Angeles! Hell yeah!
It’s tempting to judge the actions of others, but whomst among us hasn’t tripped and “accidentally” dumped a gallon of latex paint directly into a storm drain?
Multiple readers have asked us to note that there’s an Alexandrian competing on the first season of the Golden Bachelor (disappointingly not a show about Air Bud’s search for a wife). Also of note (so long as we are noting things) is the very cool fact that her late husband was the prosecutor in the Aldrich Ames espionage case!
Local Discourse Power Rankings
Zoning Reform (Last week: 1). The moderation and straightforward practicality of the Zoning for Housing package along with its mixed reception among housing advocates and some local electeds didn’t stop the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria from putting out a sweaty and agitated press release, including this all-timer of a quote: “The future direction of the city should not be left solely to bureaucrats, outside interests, ideologues, or partisan politicians.” Tag yourself - we’re ideologues!
You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: 4). It was just Duke Street in Motion in this space previously, but the judges conferred and decided to pull in a more inclusive set of road (design) rage. This week, members of the You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (YIADTRW) discussion group caught on to the planned redesign of the King/Russell/Callahan intersection and they. have. had. enough. of this funny business. If you think traffic in Alexandria is bad now, well just you wait until #JustinsTrafficJam gets its grubby hands on this arterial intersection. He’s doing it to intentionally wreck your (yes your, specifically your) commute. Watch this space!
Record High Temperatures (Last week: NR). What the hell man. Just, like, what the absolute hell. Much in the way that Inuits have dozens of words for snow, those of us trapped in the ever-warming mid-Atlantic need to expand our available lexicon for describing moist. Luckily, local kids were able to beat the heat by cooling off at the Del Ray splash pad [IMAGE FILE NOT FOUND] and the city’s new olympic-sized swimming pool [IMAGE FILE NOT FOUND].
Bike Lanes (Last week: NR). There was a minor piece of news this week that the city is soliciting input on a new four-block bike route down Holland Lane, connecting Duke Street and Eisenhower Avenue. This kicked off a round of social media comments across various platforms which revealed some of our neighbors make a hobby(?) of counting bike lane users like they’re a club bouncer holding a silver clicky thing. This naturally leads us to the question… what is wrong with you people?? Pick anything else to do with your time! Deciding to die on the hill of “it bothers me that fewer bicyclists will literally die on this literal hill” is such a deeply deranged personality choice we’re not even sure what else we have to say about this. Anyway - bitching about bike lanes is back, babyyyyy!
Ting (Last week: 2) There’s a funny thing happening where people are talking about how thoughtful and generous Ting is being… in response to some inconvenience or fuck-up they caused. They’re paying people’s parking tickets because they can’t get their shit together to coordinate enforcement with the city. They’re offering free months of internet because they disrupted some other utility service. They’re sponsoring every single public event because they’ve exploded four-fifths of the sidewalks in your neighborhood. And you know, it’s nice to see that kind of consideration and effort - good for them, truly! It’s just that, if you’re cranking out that volume of “oops, our bad” giveaways, maybe you should also be asking some hard questions about your project execution.
Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… A Giant Fucking Sewer Tunnel
Have you ever been told that you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground? If so, we have excellent news for you.
Our city is now home to a 150-foot-deep gaping maw that an increasing number of local notables (and Becky) have willingly descended. It’s dark, it’s clammy, it’s accessible only by a cage elevator that jerks distressingly at random intervals, and it’s absolutely crawling with all of your friends, neighbors, and elected representatives.
Why, you might ask, have we constructed this terrifying hellmouth a mere 350 yards from Lost Boy Cider? The answer is less “wait, I’ve seen this movie… there’s a balrog down there, you fools” and more “what if infrastructure week were real instead of the most belabored running joke in political history.” As detailed in this very cool Washington Post feature story from July, a massive-yet-somehow-adorable 380-ton drill named Hazel has been lowered down the hole and is digging a tunnel underneath Old Town and along the Potomac. It’s the biggest infrastructure project in Alexandria’s history (four-block bike lanes excluded).
When the tunnel is complete, it’ll capture most of the sewage that currently spills into the river every time it rains and send it to the wastewater treatment plant instead. Yeah, sorry, we forgot to mention that this whole hole situation is not only an impressive feat of technical engineering but also kind of disgusting! But the upshot is a cleaner river, so starting in two years your happy hours at Barca are going to get a lot less smelly.
The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week
From the department of Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time:
“To enable this trade-off, Density Champions need to help beleaguered owners of near-empty office buildings convert them into housing.”
Density Champions, you might remember, was a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon from 1994 that ran for 7 episodes in the time slot after Captain Planet. It was canceled by Ted Turner and TBS following a particularly scathing Tom Shales review in the Washington Post, in which he questioned the age-appropriateness of a body-horror conceit that had children using magical bracelets to transform into anthropomorphic construction equipment and demolish single-family homes.
We Get Letters
We find it implausible that none of you have anything to say this week. Reminder: our mailbox is open 24 hours a day at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com. We’ve already built quite a considerable audience in just one week’s time (you subscribers are the best!) and while our standards for what counts as a publishable guest opinion aren’t the lowest in this city (ahem), they’re still pretty generous. Try us.
One Awesome Thing in ALX
This may not come as news to Alexandrians younger, cooler, and more generally awake past 9pm than us (parentingggg whyyyyy), but our city has quite the kickass local music scene these days. Acts like Marian Hunter, Hanoi Ragmen, and Mia Humphrey are recording and releasing music and playing venues in Alexandria, DC, New York and more.
And there’s a bunch more than just these three! We’d link more of them here, but uh, see previous note regarding young-ness and cool-ness and going out at night-ness. The point is: we have a city full of damn talented young musicians and we hope you’re making the time to discover and appreciate them on Spotify, at local festivals, and in any one of the many joints in town that have embraced hosting live music (angry letters to the editor be damned).
It’s also worth noting that we’ve seen the emergence of the kind of infrastructure that can foster and support a thriving local scene. Rock of Ages Music (ROAM) does a tremendous job engaging musicians from the youngest ages, Crab Shack Music has a legit studio recording business, and Baffin Records is an honest-to-god label that publishes and represents some of the acts mentioned above, among others. This isn’t to say that Nashville needs to start looking over its shoulder anytime soon, but it is extremely cool to see the start of a nascent new industry here in town.
That’s it for now - until next time, try and stay out of giant fucking sewer tunnels.
You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can also find them @beckyhammer and @jesseocnl begrudgingly continuing to xeet (no, stop that, ew) on the website previously known as Twitter.