Good evening and welcome to the City of Fairfax Planning Commission meeting of Monday November 24th, 2008. Please rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. to the high of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands when nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Yeah, as everyone had opportunity to review the agenda and if so can we have a motion. Mr. Chairman, second. Okay, all those in, please say aye. Aye. Okay. It's unanimous. Sorry. First item then is presentations by the public. Are there any presentations this evening? Seeing none, we'll move right on to item number three, consideration of the meeting minutes of October 27th, 2008. Mr. Chair, I move that the minutes be adopted as presented. Second. If there are any discussion, we'll call the question, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And I will abstain as I was not present. Moving on to item number four, the staff report. Thank you, Chairman Bairman. Very briefly, I just wanted to remind the commission that you have two meetings in a row after tonight, December 1st and December 8th. The December 1st will be a work session on the capital improvement program where you'll get the presentation from the very departments and December 8 will be two things. One is a public hearing on the capital improvement program. The second is a public hearing on a subdivision action that's necessary to finish the site plan for the PNC bank at the corner of Main Street in Judicial. So I just wanted to let you know that those, and you do not have your second, third Monday in December meeting. So you'll have those two meetings in December, the first two just because they're out of sync, I wanted to remind you. That's all. Very good. Well, we have a very brief meeting this evening. However, we have a much more involved work session where we're going to be covering a number of topics including transportation improvements on Fairfax Boulevard and other locations, an update on housing issues by Mr. Forman, and also an examination of demographic issues change and other issues developments, housing values in the city. But prior to that, do we have any commission comments before we adjourn and go into the work session this evening? No? Seeing none, why don't we move adjourned and then move right into the work session discussion, starting with item number seven, schedule transportation improvements and Fairfax bullet barred. Thank you Ms. Kullessa for the memoranda that you shared with us in advance of the discussion. Sure. Very briefly, this was just to provide you with some background information and materials on transportation improvements that have been engineered in our planned, both along the Fairfax Boulevard corridor and in a couple of other areas in the city. To give you a little bit of an idea of what's actually planned to happen in those areas and what additional projects are being scheduled for engineering and design. I had a future meeting when you're going to talk about the transportation section of the comp plan, our transportation director Alex Versosa will be here to answer questions on these specific items. But the issue was brought up at your last meeting about how these transportation improvements are going to play very much along with land use and to what we do with the Fairfax Boulevard corridor. And I wanted to get these out in front of you. I don't have a lot of specific information on them and don't have a full staff report this evening, this was an information item for a future agenda. What I really expected we would focus on in this work session is the next two items on housing and demographics. Thank you. Any question from my colleagues? Mr. Cuttingham. Yes, some questions. We've got the information, we've got the information about specific projects in that. Do we have any sense of cost or time frame with any of these projects or any of these imminent in progress? Are there budget issues with them? Yes, a couple of them have been on the City Council's agenda for approval of appropriations as you may notice as they go through the Fairfax Circle short term improvement, certainly George Mason Boulevard, as you can see out there in the field is underway. Some of these issues with North Facts have been discussed and will continue to be discussed at the council meeting. I don't have in front of me a matrix of the costs and the timing, but that's something that I have asked Mr. Versace that have provided to you. So that'll be coming back to you at a future date. I'm sorry I don't have that information this evening. Okay. Okay. Mr. Butterchelly. Yes, Mrs. Coliseum. Can the North Facts project be taken on before the storm water? The North Facts project actually is a two-part project. One part is the storm water. The second part is the roadway, but both are involved in the V.D.O. project. And will lay out both of those details for you. But the stormwater will occur first. That's the first phase, but it is part of that project. So I have this on any questions. Just give us a real, give me a real brief idea of what is being planned at Camp Washington. And it looked relatively small, but from the drawings, I was not able to glean a whole lot. Yeah, some of these were at list spot improvements, like at Fairfax Circle in Camp Washington. For the most part, their pedestrian crosswalks and ways to facilitate pedestrians crossing several lanes of traffic with stop areas in between them. When you look at the drawings and you see the sort of striped areas, those are new crosswalks in landings. But I don't know any more specific details other than that. A little bit of sidewalk, a little bit of crosswalk, I think in that area. Thank you. Dr. Carter, any questions? Thank you. I just want this George Mason Boulevard. What is the timeline on that? And is that this is the one going to the George Mason campus, right? Yes. The part of George Mason Boulevard that runs between school street and the entrance to George Mason University has been cut through. They're putting in the underlayment now. You can see it's lower than the rest of the road. They'll be lowering that section of university there to match with it as well. You need to leave yourself room, Dad. Ask vault over time. And that's what's happening there. They got that. The first section, of course, was done through the community adjacent to us. Then we obtained 11 Oaks we went through that section the last section then will be from school straight through here to University Drive. You can see the bulldozers out front they're preparing now to do that. It's imminent. So I would expect that this work will be completed by the end of the year. How about the road that from the city hall, this community behind us, initially they are going to open that and connect with the judge missing. Is that that's part of George Mason Boulevard that will be running right through. So it will be open. Okay. Yes, so well. I didn't see it tonight. I came by that. Yeah. Thank you. I was telling you one additional comment that goes with that. I attended one of the in the Friends Day celebration committee meetings with my wife this past week and for the rest of your best, the Fourth of July parade folks. And they had some comment on the construction here and that it was going to impact the parade and parade routes. And I am not aware that this should, as the road should come down to the current intersection and tie in nicely with that. And as I recall, the parade route comes up in the university and turns right then in front of the building, in front of City Hall, to come past, is there any impact on Fourth of July parade or anything else that should come out of this project, perhaps Mr. Fasocik would comment on that. That's a good question. I'll ask it and bring it back to you. And Ms. Robinson, any questions? Okay, let me jump in then with just two quick questions. The one is from an earlier discussion that we had as a commission on how the traffic plan in Old Town Fairfax is working out. And if I remember correctly, I think that this was something that was being monitored and there was going to be a report at some point in time. Is there any update to that? I don't have it, but I will find out. Yeah, I think as we're discussing the comprehensive plan, I think that is an area particular for many city residents of great interest. And then my other question has to do with secondary roads. Much to my surprise, even though we've had really almost a year and a half of extremely mild weather last winter was almost nonexistent, I've noticed on many of our secondary roads, the roads are literally crumbling in places. And certainly they're not identified here as planned transportation improvements, but I'm wondering how the city is planning what appears to me to be a higher than usual need for repair on many of the secondary roads. That's certainly something that you'll take up and next Monday night in the capital improvement program. The ongoing road maintenance of our secondary roads that we undertake is on a scheduled basis, a rotating schedule. In very tight budget times that we're finding ourselves in now, those tend to get pushed back because it's fairly high ticket item for us. So I'd say that's something you'd want to pay particular attention to. And if you have specific roads that you find at issue, you might want to make a list of those and ask specifically about those when Mr. Summers comes in next week. So invite my colleagues to take a look around their communities and let's make an informal list before we have that dialogue. If we're seeing it, I'm sure the city residents are seeing it and probably driving it or walking it as well. Great. Yes, Mr. Cunningham? There's one additional side road projects that we had talked about, I believe was a year ago at this time. And that was last year we had four or five or six projects on Route 123 between North Street and Route 50. That, as I know here included both the bridge replacement and Kenmore Drive, but also putting sidewalk on the west side of the street across the creek and up the hill and widening projects that went further down. And I was a request, I believe last year at this time to have all of those individual projects brought together into one group so that the Planning Commission could discuss them as a whole in terms of what would be done with 123. But if we could return and revisit that and get a sense of the collective projects that affect 123 along, that particular stretch would be appreciated, at least on my book. And I'd like to add, if there's an opportunity to reach out to the Civic Association, that really is impacted by that discussion to have their thoughts would be very helpful as well. All right. Mr. Chair. Yes, please. Back to Ms. Codillus. I believe you said that when Alex Versoso comes in, Mr. Chairman, you said that he was going to give us a list of traffic monitoring and how the flow through the city was going now. If a specific question could be directed to him, I'd be curious just from personal experience both today and usually in the morning in particular traffic going along North Street towards 50 when you come up and cross over Chain Bridge Road, right at the intersection of Chain Bridge Road There's a no left-hand turn sign you can't take a left from north to Chain Bridge and then right as you go through that intersection There's a small no left-hand turn sign into The parking lot that's right there From I think the times designated as no turning are three to seven. And if you don't know to look for them, you don't see them. And oftentimes I find myself in that lane trying to move straight. And I can't because I'm behind someone who's trying to turn left onto 123. We're trying to turn left into this parking lot. And you've got people blaring their horns. People are trying to cut out of line and go around them. It's a very tricky intersection at best, because of the way that everybody merges around the Truro Church, and you either have to stay straight to go on to, I think it's West, or go right to get back onto Main Street. So I'm curious if the size of those signs are as effective as they could be, if there's a different alternative. Obviously with budgetary constraints, it may just be that there's no money, even if there is an alternative. But if there's something bigger, something electronic, I don't know what the solution is, but if you don't know to look for those signs, they're very easy to miss and cause a great deal of frustration during the peak hour. Is your sense that the size of the signs is the most relevant or the placement of the signs or either? your sense that the size of the signs is the most relevant or the placement of the signs or either? I would say a little of both because you, again, if you're not looking for them or not thinking to look for them or there's not something, a line of cars that are backed up because someone's trying to make that turn, you don't necessarily look up for it. And when you do, it's small and you're trying to take in that there's no left term, but it also says from three to seven. So there's a lot of mental juggling that goes on in a split second to either make that turn or to turn into that parking lot or realize that you can't and kind of jerk back onto the road. And it does back up everyone else who happens to be behind you in what is supposed to be a through lane. Okay. Ms. Robin, let me just suggest to everyone as well that why don't we share our questions in this area in advance with Ms. Cuttle S's. So she can in fact brief the transportation staff before they come in and they can actually direct their responses to us. But I do want to also concur. We've been talking about 123 for a while. So this is an opportunity to really, if we can have the civics involvement to really chew on the issue a little bit as we look ahead at the conference plan, that would be very good. Are there any more items to talk about regarding agenda item number seven for the work session? Okay. So what do know, we're in the process of undergoing the midterm review of the comprehensive plan. And tonight we'll be talking about the housing section of the comprehensive plan. And with sections from the Com Plan such as housing, we're not reviewing word for word in the midterm review of these sections, but we're rather examining some of the more major elements of these sections that may have policy implications or that may have changed in some regard since the last time the plan was approved. Now the housing section is kind of an interesting section out of a plan that's 200 or 220 pages long, the housing section is 12 pages. So clearly it's not, not major by volume. But these days, housing issues have obviously been at the forefront of everyone's mind. You can't turn on the news or can't pick up a newspaper without looking at housing issues House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of the House of what essentially is a snapshot of the city's housing market as we see it this month. And then we'll transition into by taking a look at housing sales from a pretty detailed perspective. It's difficult to find this information from the media on a very local basis. You can't help but be deluge by it in some regard or another, but everything that you hear tends to be national, tends to be state, tends to be regional at best, and folks frequently ask us what's really going on with the housing market here in the city. So we'll try to delve into that in a little bit. We'll take an overview of the foreclosure issue. This clearly is the biggest issue in the real estate market and in housing, and we'll take a look at the city's history of foreclosures this year and take a look at a few specific foreclosures and try to see what kind of pattern leads to these foreclosed properties. And then we'll move on to some of the comprehensive plan issues. Take a pretty detailed look at the city's housing mix. And if recommendations from the midterm review wind up being made as far as housing mix what those recommendations could be. So we'll start off by taking a look at the housing market. And if you like graphs, you'll like the next few slides. This is what we're looking at here is a chart of the median sale price of homes that have sold both in the city, which is the blue line and the county, which is the orange line, over the past seven years. And it's a very interesting chart because you don't need a degree in economics to spot the bubble in this picture. It goes way, way up. And you can see that in 2003, 2004 and 2005 you had an escalation of these median sale prices that was really pretty dramatic. And you see it steady for starting in the second half of 2005 through 2006 into 2007. We had more or less steady prices. in 2007 we had more or less steady prices. And starting halfway through 2007 you see a very, very sharp decrease that's even more sharp than the increase in prices was. Now keep in mind when you're looking at this chart, the city and the county are on here for a reason. The city again is in blue and you see the city's at median sale price spikes up and down a lot for individual months. That's for no other reason really than the city's very small. And we only have at the most maybe two dozen properties that sell in the city per month. So all it takes is a handful of very expensive properties and that number goes way way up, a handful of much cheaper properties that can go way way down. So the county is in here for a reason, it kind of smooths out the city. You can see that the two of them really follow a very similar trend. Back in the beginning of 2002, in January of 2002, the city in the county median sale price for a home was about $250 to $275,000. Over four years, to 2005 and 2006, this doubled. And it peaked. The sale price peaked at about $500,000 for the county and actually went higher on a few occasions for the city. It's come down to where now at the end of 2008, we're at approximately $345,000 as for as a median sale price for both the city and the county. Now what's interesting about these numbers is if you start off at the beginning of this chart in 2002 and if you would index that for the rate of inflation over the next seven years, you'll get to approximately where we are today. So if the housing bubble had never happened, and if housing prices had increased at approximately the rate of inflation, we'd be seeing housing prices similar to what we have today. Now, this is for the city and the county. The next slide here shows a few more counties added to the mix. Now this takes a look at Fairfax County at Loudon County and Prince William County. And what's interesting here of course is that you have three counties with very, very different housing stock and very different locations. And you see a very similar, almost identical trend in the bubble accelerating and then decelerating in 2007 and 2008. An interesting issue that this brings up is if you look at the right hand side of this chart, you know, everything is in the $200,000 to $304,000 range. And a few years ago, the big issue in housing was the lack of affordable housing. Now, you could still question whether $300,000 house is affordable. But I can't imagine any type of policy that could have resulted in a greater number of affordable homes than what we've seen right now. And that's not saying that what's happened has been a good thing. But it's actually started to address a situation that really had become very critical. Right now in the city we have probably a half dozen homes, single family homes that are for sale for under $300,000. And for several years in a row, you had not seen that anywhere in the city at all. Now, the next chart here is a much different way of looking at the real estate market, and it's a lot harder to spot the bubble in this picture. This examines the city. Now, this is just the city, it's not the county. This is a month-by-month examination of real estate listings which are in red and real estate sales during the same month which are in blue. Now in a tight market, the number of sales and the number of listings are just about equal. And that's what you had in this graph from 2002 until the midpoint of 2005. If you could look at each single month, every house that came on the market pretty much sold and those two lines are right there next to each other overlapping. As soon as midpoint 2005 came, that was the bursting of the housing bubble and you can see just how quickly that happened and what a dramatic change we saw all of a sudden in 2005. The number of listings shocked way up. The number of sales per month dropped and it's held pretty steady in the mid to lower 20s ever since that point. And prices of course have fluctuated but this is a pretty interesting way of looking at the housing market. Now, over the past year, obviously the big news in the real estate market in the region and in the country has been foreclosures. So we'll take a look at the foreclosures that have occurred in the city and try to get a little bit of understanding of them. So far through November of 2008, there have been 85 foreclosures of residential properties in the city. What's interesting is to look at what these properties are. Now if you take a look at the chart on the right, this is a chart of the 85 for closed properties. You can see that just over half have been of single family detached houses, and about 38% has been from condominiums. Now compare this to the chart on the left, which is the chart of all city housing units. And you can see the big story here is the percentage of condos. Condominiums in Fairfax have really been overrepresented as far as the number of foreclosures than any other type of housing. We've had more than twice the rate of foreclosures that you would expect. Overall, the 85 foreclosures amounts to about 12 foreclosures for about every 1000 housing units. For condominiums, it's up to 29 per 1000 housing units. And it may seem dramatic and may have a dramatic impact on the real estate market, but the city of Fairfax is one of the least impacted communities in our region. There are many communities that have several times the rate of foreclosures than we have here. Now, I think to fully understand which really going on as far as foreclosures, it helps to take a look at individual foreclosures and to see what kind of pattern emerges and how properties wind up in the foreclosure process. So what we'll do now is we'll take a look at four examples of foreclosed properties within the city of Fairfax and take a look at their assessment history, their sale history and see what story it tells. This is the first example of a foreclosure. It's a single-family house in Old Lee Hills. Now if you look at the big graph, the brown area on the graph that says assessed value is the assessment history from 2002 to present. Now this particular house sold in 2005 for $649,000. At the time it sold, the assessed value of this house was just over $400,000. So this house sold for, I don't know what this finds up being, 60% more than the assessed value. The assessed value eventually went a little bit up, but then started declining as most assessed values have done. This house went into foreclosure this year, was listed as a bank owned property for sale for $250,000. It was on the market for approximately two weeks before it sold, and the sale price hasn't been released yet, but it would be somewhere in the $250,000 range. But this chart is very interesting because you can see the very high sale price and you can see, I mean imagine this multiplied many, many times and you can see how these high sale prices had an upward pull on assessed values, assessed values reflect sale prices. And now we're in the opposite situation where we have the dress sales including foreclosures, short sales and whatnot, which have the same kind of pull in the opposite direction has this downward pull on values right now. The second property that we're looking at has a very similar story. This house sold in 2006, so this was really after the biggest frenzy in the housing market. Sold in 2006 for $530,000. Even at that time, that was $60,000 over the assessed value. The assessed value never went up from that point, and this property wound up in foreclosure this year was advertised again as a bank owned property for $339,000. Same story with condominiums. This is one of the townhouse condos in most be woods sold for $320,000. This was about 50% more than the assessed value in 2005. This was about 50% more than the assessed value in 2005. The assessed value climbed, started falling, and this property was listed as a bank owned property this year for $151,000. The Foxcroft colony has seen probably the largest concentration for closures in the city. This unit in Fox Proff colony again sold for over the assessed value in 2006 and was foreclosed in 2008 for $149,000. Was advertised for sale as a bank owned property. Now these are four examples and you can tell from these four that they really follow a very similar pattern. They were purchased on, I mean, what you can judge from an impartial observer is being a speculative effort. Speculation is not necessarily a bad word. It tends to have some negative meanings of concerning investors and whatnot, but it's basically meaning that somebody bought it on speculation that the property would increase in value. We don't know if people were living here or were renting it out or whatever. And these properties were of course purchased at the height of the housing bubble. If you look at the 85 properties that have been foreclosed on in the city, you see that this is really the dominant pattern that we see. Two-thirds of the homes that have been foreclosed this year sold the last time in 2005 or 2006 and pretty substantial minorities sold even in 2007 and were foreclosed a year later. Very interesting pattern emerges and you can definitely see how home owners have gotten into trouble trying to repay loans for properties that can possibly retain, regain their purchase value for a very long time. Now, the foreclosure situation, of course, has attracted the most attention from the housing market. There have been other elements as well. Short sales are frequently mentioned, other type of dress sales. And these sales, like I said, have pulled prices down very similarly to how the speculative buying has pushed up prices. The foreclosures, of course, have had impacts far beyond just the real estate market. Obviously, we all know that the impacts spread into the broader economy. Nothing is perhaps more directly impacted than the construction sector. And if we take a look here in the city at residential building permits over the period of 2002 to 2007, we had an average of 28 new residential building permits issued in the city per year. So far this year we've had nine. And you can tell that that's pretty dramatic drop off. And furthermore, those that have gotten building permits will not necessarily get built. You can drive around the city and you'll notice there's a lot of projects for which work really seems to have ground to a whole. The photograph on the left here is a residential property that has a foundation on it and you can see there's a foundation and a few building supplies and that's it. That's a scene that you see periodically. The photograph on the right is one of the larger housing developments that has gotten approved and a portion of it has been built not occupied and it's just there. This obviously is a direct result of the economy. If there is virtually no speculative building going on right now and by speculative building what I mean is building a house and then advertising it for sale later. And the reason that's most often cited is it's just not realistic to get financing for a house that doesn't have a buyer yet. So what builders are doing is trying to presale houses and that clearly takes much longer time. The last bullet point here is probably the most important point to take away from the discussion on the housing market. The slowdown and this, you know, relates to both new housing construction and existing housing sales is temporary. We will bounce out of this. It'll take years undoubtedly, but it's not something that's permanent. So if you take a look at all of the things that we've just discussed, all of the graphs and photographs and whatnot, you know, what you see is combining sales, combining foreclosures, combining construction data, the picture emerges at a really pretty slow housing market. It's worlds different than what we were talking about three or four years ago when we had, I mean, we're really only be described as a hysteria in the housing market as far as buying. But the housing market here in the city is much less tumultuous than it is in a lot of other parts of northern Virginia. And we're really not in as bad condition as many other jurisdictions are. This discussion of new housing construction is actually a relatively good segue into what we're really here this evening to discuss, which is the comprehensive plan, and some of the recommendations that we can make as far as future housing. And you know, we can't, to a large extent, affect the immediate real estate market as far as foreclosures and short sales and whatnot. There's just limit how much a local government can do. What we can affect, of course, is a long-term market. And this especially concerns new housing or future housing, I should say. And the big issue that we'll be discussing tonight is the issue of housing mix. And what the housing mix is, is what type of houses are in the city, as far as detached houses, town houses, rental apartments, the duplexes, et cetera. And the two big questions that we'll be talking about is the current mix in the city appropriate for us. And our current units, current houses, market competitive. Well, first what is the city's housing mix? Well it's right here we have approximately 8800 individual housing units in the city this includes rentals and and ownership and just over half our single family detached houses. About 30% of the city's housing units are multifamily, and that includes condos and apartments, and if you notice from the right-hand part of the graph, about 60%, I think it's 58%, of the multifamily units are rental apartments, as opposed to condominium units. Now, the important thing to keep in mind when talking about housing mix is there's no such thing as an optimal housing mix. There's no silver bullet that can solve all of our housing problems. There's no benchmark that any individual city can or should try to achieve. It's all a matter of what we want our community to be. That said, everyone wants to know how we compare. So this chart here compares us as the city to the county, which of course is dozens of times larger. And it's a very interesting comparison because you'll notice that the multi-family percentage is almost identical. We have 30% in the city and 29% in the county. And the mixture of apartments for us condos is also almost identical. The big difference between the city housing mix and the county housing mix is actually in townhouses. The county has a much larger proportion of their housing stock and townhouses than we have here in the city. And that's true even if you add our duplexes into the townhouse because there's always a question of what, you know, our duplexes really single family houses or townhouses. Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, put them into townhouses, you know, the county still has a higher proportion of townhouses than the city has in comparison. Now besides actual quantity, there are other elements to housing mix other than just raw numbers. And two of the most important elements are age and market competitiveness. So let's take a look at what the age breakdown is of some of our housing units and we'll go by type of housing unit. We'll start off with apartments with rental apartments. And it's very interesting to look at this chart and to look at the age of our rental apartment stock. We have approximately 1,500 rental apartments here in the city. And about 90% of these apartments are 30, 40, or 50 years old. And that's an important distinction with multi-family, because the age of multi-family frequently relates very directly to market competitiveness. It's much more difficult to modify a apartment for current market trends than it is a single family house. It's possible, but just much more difficult. And it appears that there's no shortage of apartment units in the city. We've got a pretty good percentage of multifamily housing. There does appear to be a shortage of market competitive units. There's been very, very few bill recently. Now you see a very similar scenario playing out in condominiums. We have two condominiums that have been built within the last decade, Providence Square and the Crossings. And these are only two condominiums that were purpose-built as condominium units. The remaining 80% or 83% of our condominiums stock were built as rental apartments in the 1960s. And it's a picture of the condo market that obviously is skewed towards a earlier decade. Now moving on, we can look at townhouses and we can see that the townhouse construction, the charts are getting progressively more confusing as we call along because we're adding decades. We can see that the townhouse construction is really more dispersed among various decades. But the big story is, take a look at the tiny little slipper from 2000. We have essentially, I don't know, maybe 10 units from one development, which is Fairfax Gateway, that were built in the city within the 2000 decade. The rest of the housing units are dispersed through previous decades. So most of the housing construction that's occurred in the city during the 2000s has been with single family houses. And there's been very little in the way of townhouse construction. Now let's take a look at single family houses at detached houses. Now this is the most confusing chart yet. And the big story here is about half of the city's detached housing stock was built in the decade of the 1950s, which isn't a surprise. If you had the 60s into a mix that accounts for about three quarters of the city's detached housing stock. But interestingly, look at the blue sliver on the top. Almost 10% of the city's detached housing stock has been built since 2000. And that's actually a pretty, pretty big number and that relates to maybe four, four hundred, five hundred units. Now another interesting aspect of taking a look at the decade bill of housing is take a look at the pictures and start at the picture in the upper right with the red framing and go clockwise around and you see the houses get progressively larger by each decade. And that's not a non-random sample. This is what the size actually looks like if you look at it in chart form. And this is one of the issues that we've been dealing with as far as infill development. And this is an issue when we get into talking about infill development again in the spring and it will come back. This is one of the biggies. The average home in Fairfax that was built in the 2000s is about 50 percent larger than the average home that was just built in the 1980s. So you've seen a very rapid buildup in home size, and this is one of these issues because it's been so rapid, it really hasn't been accounted for in the comprehensive plan as much as you'd expect. And this is one of those issues that we really can tackle in the midterm review. Now, townhouse and multifamily, of course, we're dealing with issues regarding townhouse and multifamily as well in the midterm review. And we can delve into those a little bit, a little bit greater detail now than infill development, which will wait till the spring. One of the other issues that keeps coming up about multi-family is our condos or apartments worth more per square foot. And this is one of those age old budget questions. And it's very difficult to answer because to answer this question you have to get a real solid look at very similar buildings that were built as condos and as townhouses We don't have that in the city. We only have two new condos. We have no new apartments So we'll have to look outside of the city so to try to get some kind of a Grasp on this question We looked a little bit west of the city in the government center area of Fairfax County. And if you go through there, it's been built up over a relatively short amount of time. There's a lot of buildings in the government center area that look very similar. They're all about the same height. They're built in a similar configuration. Some are condos, some are apartments. And what we did is we took a look at a lot of these units and priced them on a per square foot level to try to give us an idea. And this is just one of those issues that goes into the comprehensive plan decision as far as housing mix. Now what we found in looking at these units in the government center area is that a condominium value per gross square foot is approximately 20 percent more than a similar apartment per gross square foot as of 2008. Now, this might seem as a ringing endorsement of condominiums, but keep in mind the price of condominiums keeps going down. So this in reality will fluctuate some, it's pretty safe to say the condos are worth a little bit more per square foot. I wouldn't expect it to stay at 20 percent, you know, for the foreseeable future. But this gives some kind of an indication, as far as the answer to the question that folks in this capacity tend to ask a whole lot. So putting all of this together, what kind of conclusions can we reach about the housing mix and where we go from here as far as the comprehensive plan? It seems that as far as the housing mix goes that we have an appropriate quantity of multi-family housing units. The balance of rental versus condo is not particularly skewed in any one direction. We have more apartments than condos, but not egregiously so. The bigger issue, I think, when people are talking about multi-family units is that the existing units that we have tend not to be market competitive on a large scale. Townhouses is more of a quantity issue. Our townhouses do tend to be market competitive when judged with other townhouses in the region. It's just that the quantity of townhouses tends to be a little bit low. And then as far as detached housing, detached housing has been very strong in the 2000s. Obviously, and this is not unique to the city of Fairfax has been slanted towards very expensive, very large homes. You'll see that throughout the region. The average assessed value of the home built in the 2000s is just under a million dollars. So clearly it's not a representation, but there has been a lot of construction and a lot of market competitive construction going on. So where does this take us concerning our work on the comprehensive plan review? Multi-family, now this is building up to adding an addendum really of goals and objectives to the comprehensive plan. What we're looking at now is something along the lines of putting in the comprehensive plan that there is not necessarily a shortage of multi-family units, but we would like to see more market-competitive units. And really, what that boils down to is encouraging either the updating or replacement of existing multi-family developments with new multi-family developments. Townhouses, due to the relative shortage of townhouses in the city, we think the townhouses could be an appropriate solution for areas where higher density housing might be appropriate. Not necessarily houses, not necessarily in the middle of single-family neighborhoods, but those that are on the edge of single-family neighborhoods or, you know, near commercial areas and whatnot. And then, single family, we'll really deal mostly with the infill issue that we've dealt with before in the past and that we hope to delve into, once again, in more detail in come springtime when we finish up the midterm review. So with that, I hope it's a little bit helpful in just giving an overview of the housing market and kind of Giving us some guidance as far as where we're going with the comprehensive plan Mr. Foreman that was a very Very helpful presentation sobering presentation as well If you if you wouldn't mind going back to one of your first slides, looking at the mean price of housing in the city versus the county, I think I'm sure that my colleagues, and I have a lot of questions about the presentation was very in depth, and thank you for that. I guess we can't help but take away the very significant impact that this is going to have on the tax base not only in the city of Fairfax but frankly throughout Northern Virginia. There is no way that if you're looking at early 2006 at 500,000 plus being the median price for the city for for sales and looking then where we are today through 2008 at a number that appears as you said to be in the 300,000 range. We are not immune from what is happening in our economy. The silver lining is that clearly compared to Montgomery County, Prince George's County, Prince William, the rate of foreclosure is lower here in the city and that is very, very good. But we are in some very challenging times and I think this is going to demand from all of the city staff as well as our city council and us as a planning commission some very serious review of the impact on city services, what is prioritized in the capital planning approach, capital expenses. And I also have to say, while I applaud the presentation, I have a few questions because clearly people were looking to particular types of mortgages to deal with the affordability gap that you were describing as the housing bubble was on the up curve. Many jurisdictions have looked at the type of mortgage products and their rate of default with some very common trends, for example, adjustable rate mortgages or option arms, which have teaser rates, have a much higher rate of default than a consumer, for example, who had a fixed rate mortgage for 30 years, and they can more adequately plan. The other issue that the private mortgage insurance companies are looking at, and now many states with very high foreclosure rates, such as Florida, Colorado, California, and other areas in Nevada are looking at is really a deeper dive and it's very important from a planning perspective that we do the same. And that is the number of homes that were purchased during the bubble upswing that are now in, frankly, the consumers are in upside down situations because the value of their mortgage and the value of their land is far less than what they owe on it. And that has a very significant impact on the municipality or this county or state what have you because consumers are beginning unfortunately to walk away from those homes. They're leaving the keys on the table and they're saying, I can't even sell this, I'm stuck. And I'm curious if our city has looked at the percentage of consumers who have these non-traditional products, some are subprime, some are prime, and also if we've looked at the number of homes that frankly are in an upside down situation in our jurisdiction. down situation in our jurisdiction? I know we've looked mostly at sales and at assessment because that's the data that's available to us as a municipality. Now we do belong to some regional organizations that deal with foreclosures and I agree it would be interesting to look at that and see what kind of data is out there to see, you know, what the incidence of foreclosure and of default are from these less than adequate loans. Yeah. The one thing I will say before I open up to my colleagues, particularly for consumers who are at risk, maybe they have one of these new mortgage products, is that there are many not-for-profit organizations serving the City of Fairfax that are working with the Hope Now Alliance, mortgage companies and servicers, traumatic by loans to do forbearance agreements even to lower the amount of debt, because they realize that the underwriting associated with these loan products were very problematic now. And I hope that a consumer who is in a situation where they may be resident in the city or the county, may be watching, who may be having problems with their mortgage payments right now We'll go to a not-for-profit organization who is had certified for assistance That's very very important and that's win-win for all of us. Let me turn it over to my colleagues if there are any thoughts right now Mr. Khan and Camel. Okay, everyone Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a number of questions. So please cut me off when you're ready to share. This is an important issue. Thank you for the presentation. And I think it's most interesting to look at it and having looked at it for a long time. If we go back to our current comprehensive plan at the beginning of the housing section. You've got a graph in the lower left hand corner that says the city's median family income ranks 20th within the surrounding jurisdictions. While the city's housing value for median housing value ranks 81st. Those two numbers stick out at me as saying that we've got a lot of people that are well capitalized in this city with a housing stock that is very affordable. And the picture that you've just painted for us is again the flip side of that. We have seen tremendous appreciation and housing as you have outlined going through here, we have a foreclosure issue and prices are coming down. What isn't clear to me as we look at housing and housing stock is where we sit from a priority standpoint, if you will, or the old time planning metrics that used to be used and that we potentially are returning to. And one of the, one of the issues I would hope we could look a little further out with this and sort of a matrix and looking at it would be to look at our housing by designated values and value ranges, which I believe is probably dead of the city should have in here and looking at it by gradations that way. Then being able to look at potentially the tax data that the city has, and I don't know whether the city has the gross numbers that are filed essentially on all the city tax returns without correlating them to the households, but the number of people in what their tax rates are. Aiming able to put those two together will give you a ballpark metric that gives you an affordability rate. Now, there will be tremendous exceptions to this, but I think as Mr. Bernbaum said, you've got people who are upside down at the question is when they will walk away from a bad situation if it's not going to get better. We've got a tax situation as we're looking at this that is going to be rather severe for the next couple of years as we try to deal with the budget and the CIP proposals that we're dealing with and one of the concerns that I think I'm trying to ask and looking at this data is that if we were to look at what is the fordability range do we have the kind of people that can still afford what we outlined five years ago is our can still afford what we outlined five years ago? Is our housing still in an affordability range or are we still out of balance so that our incomes are less than our housing stock coming down? And we have to deal with an expectation that things are going to continue to be tight for several years rather than a one-year quick dip in return. Do we have a picture that's emerging that gives us a tool in looking at the comprehensive plan for a reasonable recommendation for the next five years? Because I think a great many of the former planning parameters have been put into question in the current economic environment. If we've got housing stock that puts houses down in the neighborhood of 250,000 again, that's great. It makes it affordable for the region as a whole, but it may not make it affordable if unemployment in the city goes from what used to be less than 2% to 5% or 6%. Now 5% or 6% is tremendously better than 8% or 9% nationally, but in our losing local stock, that means still be a significant number. Can we get some idea, I guess, of where we're headed? Now, I think that's very good idea and I can help out right now with one half of that equation, which is the valuation of properties. And as you might expect by the housing mix of detached units where the preponderance of housing units were billed over one period of time, they were all relatively similar. And as such, we have a similar bulge of housing values and about two-thirds of the city's current detached housing units are valued between $406,000. That's the vast majority, and you have about 20 percent less and 20 percent more. Now regarding income, I think that's very interesting concept to track income and to track average valuation and to see are they diverging or are they getting closer together? And that's a very good goal for the conference of plan update is to go ahead and do that work. Okay. I recognize and I don't know if we can quantify the number of mismatches that there might be to see if they're a significant number. We've got people who have lived in housing in this city for a very long time. Much of that housing has appreciated and they've done work and updates on it. So you've got some people with lower income living in some very expensive housing. But it's not at risk of foreclosure for the most part because those people have owned it for a long time. They didn't buy it at the current valuation. They're merely paying taxes on it at the current valuation. And that would be one of the factors that would go in if we have a significant amount of senior housing stock still available. That stock is going to come on the market at some point, but it may not hold us back in terms of going into the foreclosure market in the next few years, where it may or may not be issue is in the issue of being able to increase taxation on that housing on people who've lived in a for a long time or that are on a fixed income. And so they can't stand a large increase in tax rate to deal with budget issues, which is part of what we're going to need to do to make a CIP recommendation for a proprietary end and affordability in ranked things. But if we've got a match that's better in terms of incomes and housing stock, I think it may give us one additional tool for being able to make recommendations for the next couple of years for projects that are coming along and the kind of mix to follow with. One other thing I think would be potentially useful in the housing area would be a look at projects that have been approved but not constructed. You indicated there's only one set of townhouses that was completed in the 2000s. I don't know whether the units that are on the corner of Main Street and Judicial are occupied for the three units that appear to have been completed on that site or the first set, but they appear to be sufficiently completed that they could be occupied at the moment, although there are 36 units you have to be constructed in that location. That's very true. As of now, those units are now on the assessment roles, so I don't believe they're occupied. Okay. But that's true. That development, once it does get built, will add townhouses to the current mix. So the mix? And behind it, on the other side of the creek, is another condominium structure that has been approved, but in the current financing market is not going any place. I know that this body and the City Council took actions to rezone the old Fairfax City Library site as a condominium structure. I don't know what its economic status is as to whether it could be built as condominiums, whether it could be built as upscale rental apartments or whatever, but there are some sites that have had actions taken that because of economic issues are being held in a bans at this time. And if we could have some sense of, is there a pool that we have already looked at and could look toward proceeding at some date and that you've gotten a proof plan, or is that pool pretty well dried out as well as construction drying up? I think that might add one more piece to this mixes. We're looking down the road and trying to determine when we look forward what recommendation to give to the types of housing that should be recommended in the comprehensive plan. Just a quick footnote if my name is kind of up to that. I noticed that we're not quite there in the discussion. The demographic memo that was shared with us, a major reason for relocation of families was the size of the housing unit itself. We have to look at that both that single family units as well as rental units. That's a factor, particularly with some of the more dated rental complex as we have in the city from the 1960s that you spoke of. The other very telling figure was the increase in pre-school age children, 10%, which, you know, I just want to note that for the time being because there's been a lot of discussion around facilities and schools and I noticed that in the minutes green acres was briefly discussed. If there's ever an argument to hold on to a property for future need, there's an argument right there, 10% increase in preschool population, regardless of what the university may wish. And I just say that, I just put out there as a placeholder for our discussions around the comp plan. Mr. Kaye, I want you to make one more point, and then we'll turn to your colleagues and come back. Anything else you want to talk about? No, at this point, let me. OK. And why don't we just, I'll go from left to right, if I may. Just mixing it up a little bit. Oh, sure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes. Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Forman. As I'm sitting here looking at the numbers and I'm looking at the charts, it occurs to me that having foreclosed properties, having projects that are completed and now not occupied, doesn't believe the city at all. It doesn't help us. Is it possible as we're doing our master comprehensive plan that we can somehow designate for future purposes and for some of the properties now when a builder decides to build something when a certain, if we get to a certain percentage of foreclosed homes that the city institute some type of program for say our first responders are teachers to be able to move into these homes if the prices that are that are that we're seeing on these slides these are the most affordable prices that we've seen in the city at least since I've been here, relatively speaking. And I think it's beneficial to everyone, A, from a tax perspective, to have these units occupied, whether it's a house, a single family home, whatever the case is, but to have it occupied with people who are invested in the community, our policemen, our firemen, our teachers. If we had a program that allows these people to come into these units, into these houses, and we had particular projects when something is approved, a certain percentage has to be set aside for this, I don't know, first responder type program, we increase our stability, we get these people in at a price that's affordable, affordable, because let's face it. Teachers, first responders, are not the highest paid people. So it's very possible that there's a lot of these people who are working here, but can't afford to live here. And now they can. We get the benefit of adding them to the tax rolls. We get the benefit of having stability within our communities. And the benefit of having people here that are invested in the community and aren't necessarily speculating. I think it becomes a win-win for everybody and if we're going to be reviewing our plan anyway, if this is a recommendation that can be made to City Council to target particular neighborhoods, maybe neighborhoods that are closer to George Mason, we recommend an agreement that says, okay, George Mason, you can buy these properties at this rate for faculty housing, especially now that we're in the quandary that we have with the 11 Oaks property and the rezoning issue anyway. If they're looking for faculty housing, why not have them buy a house in a neighborhood that's foreclosed? It lowers the possibility of having college renters there. You get a stable professor, his wife, their kids, and maybe they buy, they pay into the tax system as well. It just seems that right now with this storm in front of us that more than likely is going to drive housing prices down even further before they go back up. This is a chance for us to do something that has some, maybe make something good out of what's turning into a pretty awful situation. I'll leave it at that. Mr. Robinson, that's a very good point. And I think certainly should be part of our zoning discussion, which is us upcoming as well. Let me ask a slightly different question. The federal government has recently allocated funds to states across the nation and entitlement communities across the nation to purchase for closed upon homes order rehab homes. Will the city of Fairfax be a recipient of any of the funds that the Commonwealth will be receiving? That's a question that's currently on the discussion between us and the human services. I know that there is some of this funding is going to Fairfax County and being distributed from there to nonprofits to do some of the same kind of things that Ms. Robinson is talking about for first time home buyers and joining with the Virginia Housing Development Authority, specifically targeting workforce housing, which is what you're talking about in first time home buyers. We're the process of trying to find out, we've actually made a lot of phone calls and hadn't gotten enough responses, whether or not the city can participate in those programs directly with the county. The problem with some of those programs for as small a community as we are, is that the administrative costs of doing that and going through these programs and monitoring them means staff time. And it's an issue. But through programs such as, I think it's new hope, you can get online, you can be referred to nonprofit agencies which are, in fact, buying these houses. But the byproduct, as Eric mentioned earlier, of some of these four closures and the rate that you see on your screen going down into the 350 and lower range is that even without nonprofits or the community stepping in and doing something to turn these over, most of these, and I think we've seen articles in the post recently on this, most of these are being bought by exactly the type folks you're talking about. First time home buyers, teachers who are being able to buy these for the first time. So the market itself is conspiring to have that occur, which is they say the silver lining. They call that the silver lining. And in fact Fairfax County has a program called Silver Lining in which they are dealing with nonprofits and these folks. But we'll try and get back to you with more information on that. Great, thank you. Mr. Chairman, well, first of all, thank you very much. It's for bringing his information. My thoughts are going all over the place, but I have three. First of all, I'm very concerned, frankly. If it continues, for example, in the data that you have presented, a number of older folks are increasing in the city, and a number of younger people are increasing. So the demand for school is going to increase. The value of the housing is going down. So the revenue for the city will be really flat or going down. Now the question is how that will affect the basic services, how the schools are going to cope with the shortages. Another question is now, city have been very generous and kinder place to live for senior citizens who have less than 75,000 are in income that they will really get a break on tax on the property tax. Now how that will impact will that city all of a sudden will become a, you know, not friendly to the senior citizens are retirees. And then also in addition to the first responders, I see that there are a lot of immigrants, the first generation immigrants are moving. For them, even $300,000 home is not a bargain. Because the rule of thumb is, what is this? 17, 20% of your income. So if there is a $300,000, will be almost $3,000, housing cost. So there are not many people who are making $5,000 a month. When I say $3,000, I'm talking about the payment, the insurance and all that. So those are really floating in my head that how is going to effect our city, the quality of life for all our citizens. Then, and I am not expecting any answer, but I'm just commenting, the really that concerns me. The other thing that I'm, two on the planning as a planning commissioner. I was under the impression, three impression number one, that city of Fairfax was 95% built. So what my knowledge and understanding was that we have very small ocean in the city of a new development. Is that true or false? Well, it's both. 95% build if you do not count the country club. I mean, the country club is, you know, the big question. There's no plans whatsoever to redevelop the country club, but obviously you're looking at an enormous parcel without any building on it. Take that out of the consideration. Then your second statement is correct that the majority of development that we are going to see is either redevelopment of tearing something down, building something up, or relatively small lot subdivisions or small acreage subdivisions of taking an older house with one or two acres and getting the subdivision out of it. That takes me to my next step really, but I was thinking that the planning commission then really should focus on infill developments. And we should have a some kind of policy, some kind of a plan of action, either to encourage the infill development, but then there was one question that we have been facing in the past that one wealthy person comes in and brings a mention. The Mac mention was the issue. So somehow when we do the infill development or redevelopment, we need to, you cannot legislate taste, but we need to do some very strict guidelines. So it doesn't change as number one affordability, nature of the neighborhood, and we should have some clear guideline on the infant development. And last thing that I was really thinking that I was, well, I think I understand this, problem in the Fairfax counties much swear than we have in the city. And maybe due to their large sizes, because I heard their rows and houses are really empty, and they are on four closes. Here we have only 85 homes for four closes. But amazing part was that fair, this very rich place was the, you know, that most expensive one, fair craft. I was surprised that you have more four closes there. I was surprised that you have more four closes there. And I was also surprised to just understand that single family home are more four closed. They were under more four closes than really than townhouses and others. The bottom line I think that to conclude my comments, next year really will be very challenging for the Planning Commission, for the city, for the city schools, for the services. And if this spiral doesn't stop, I mean, there's a, you know, if it stops, still it will be difficult. But if it starts going down, then really it will have a serious impact on all of us in one way or the other. Thank you, Mr. Kadez. I remember some of my colleagues may remember when a particular property on Route 50 was proposed for redevelopment as a residential complex. An economist from a major university came in and represented to us that in fact strong planning activity relies on residential development, not commercial development. I mean, we are in a rough economy for our business community as well. We have to acknowledge that right now. But the best overall tax base is a diverse one with a robust business base as well as residential. And we have a lot of thinking to do in the weeks ahead. Mr. Bartolome, let me turn to you. Yes, Mr. Forman, I've just got a question about time. The as the chairman just brought up commercial versus residential. And I understood that the commercial taxation on the commercial property was what was supporting our basic services inside the city of Myron on that. We have a much higher proportion of commercial, commercial taxation income than any other jurisdiction in northern Virginia, so that's correct. So it is providing a lot of our basic services? That's correct. As far as the real estate tax base off the top of my head, I think the real estate tax base is split roughly evenly 50-50 between residential and commercial. If you compare that to Fairfax County, the county is about 80 percent residential, so that's a pretty significant difference. And that was in effect prior to this bubble bursting and residential coming down, which meant, and the commercial is still where it was, so it had a crossover. Yes, that's correct. Okay. I have a question about if George Mason does come in and buy some of our property and use it for their housing, you know, housing their employees, do we get taxes on that? Or does that become a state property and not ours anymore? I think that all depends on how the deal is structured because you see with universities a lot now that they, with universities a lot, now that they, at universities and everyone else enter into public private partnerships. So frequently, even dormitories now that are being built with universities are actually run by private companies. In those cases, they would be on tax rolls, just like anything else. I don't think the discussions have entered that stage. I'm not privy to those discussions, but I think it really all depends on how the actual units are structured. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, Mr. Landis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Awesome presentation. You said there are two dozen sales in the city per month. Was that during the bubble or is that now? Is that an average? Actually, during the bubble, the number of sales, I think, was in the 30s more often. And this is, sales here would be on the blue line. So number of sales would be in 30s or 40s during the bubble since 2005 has trended mostly in the 20s. Okay. And are the short sales are actually recorded as such and maybe you could just talk really briefly about what a short sale actually is. I think I understand and what it in some ways to me it sounds almost as bad if not worse than foreclosure. That's right. It could be worse than a foreclosure from a number of standpoints and particularly from the buyer because they're very confusing deals to close. A short sale, and now to the best of my understanding, and I don't know if anybody understands the short sale market well, but when a house is in danger being foreclosed, sometimes it will go into a trustee that the bank will pass it off to a trustee that's not recorded on real estate records. So that means that if the house sells that it needs, when you see these ads, real estate ads that say require a third-party approval, third party is a trustee, gets very confusing. So a lot of these folks who own homes that are in danger of being foreclosed on will try to sell it and most often will happen with some kind of agreement with the lender. So that sale depends on the lender saying yes that's a good price for it. So sometimes the house will go on the market for an outrageous price that's you know out of touch with reality and it'll say short sale and you've got to wonder if there's really a concerted effort to sell the house or if there's an effort to just keep the house on the market for a long time to stave off the foreclosure. Sometimes the short sales are very competitively priced and in a lot of those cases to my knowledge, sometimes the lender will say, no, that's not a good price. We could get a better price by just foreclosing on it and selling it ourselves. So there are so many aspects to the short sales. In regards to your question as to whether they're coded as such on records, my understanding is that the real estate office has started doing that this year because there's been so many of them. Prior to this year, they've not been coded as such. I think they've started coding that at least for some cases that are not within the parameters of the market. I see. The trick for the assessment office is both with short sales and with foreclosures is faradding out those sales that really are outside of the parameters of the normal market so that they don't unduly bring down the assessed value more than they already have. Exactly. You showed the number of times the assessed value and then the sale price, particularly during the bubble, there was a huge separation. That's right. I've only owned my home a few years and that's always been the case for me. Historically, has that been a lot closer in the city? Now, you're talking about these places. Absolutely, yeah. Historically it's much, much closer. Really? And you typically would not get financing for a home, buying it for much more than the assessed value because the banks would be worried of something like this happening. During the housing bubble, those standards, along with many other standards, just went out the window. People were able to do this kind of thing. Now, ordinarily, with a market rate sale, the sale price is a little bit more than the assessed value for a few reasons. The assessed value is done once per year. And in a typical situation, home prices keep going up, even if it's at a modest pace. So home prices, if it's at all in August, are going to be a little bit above the assess value that was assessed in the beginning of the year. And also, the assess value tends to be just a little bit below market rate, just to keep people from complaining that their assess value is too high. So it does tend to be a little bit more, but nothing like what we saw during the bubble at all. And then one more question. Thank you. At the end, you made a recommendation, and that was regarding townhomes, I believe. Do you have a recommendation for the proportion of rental units versus owned units? As far as apartment versus condominium. Yeah, yeah. I think the current mix is with an acceptable range. I think it gets much more slanted towards apartments. And we're just talking about apartments versus condominiums. And I think one thing to keep in mind is a lot of condominium units themselves are rented out. And a lot of condominium complexes kind of become de facto apartments. So what we have now of the total multi-family units in the city, a little bit less than 60% of those units are actual apartment units. And you figure you want to keep that range somewhere within the 40 to 60% to keep some kind of balance there. Adding more rental apartments to the mix without redeveloping the existing rental apartments would push that more towards the rental category. That, of course, is one of those policy decisions. Is that the direction the city would like to go in? There's a lot of successful communities that are heavily rental dependent, so it's not necessarily something that's bad. It's just something that really ought to be thought of from a policy consideration. Thank you. Great. Mr. Chairman, two questions. One specifically for the city. My understanding is that if you look I mean if I look my own value of my home The price of land is still going up the price of the building is going down so as I aggregated The my assessed value really didn't change much. I was expecting it to go down. So why it is the value of the land is still going up? I'm just asking. Is it true? Yeah, that's really a question for the real state assessor's office. I wish I knew the intricacies of how the properties were assessed, especially regarding that. And unfortunately, it's just something I can't speak to. Okay. I think if you'd speak with a realtor they would tell you location, location, location. The other just to comment that in last 10 years my observation has been that in the 10 years ago the gap between the market value and the assessed value was always lower. Assessment was always lower, market value was always higher. And I think what has happened is many of the municipalities or many of the local governments have somehow tried to bring them closer to the market value. So the result is like again I can give you my own example. The result is that the market is down, the tax is still up. And it has, I think it has affected many, many, many homeowners. Actually, the market value is not that high as the assessed value is in some cases. And I think a lot of that has to do with the issue of declining home prices. You know, that once again, the assessment is set accurately. We hope that one part of the year, but prices on general tend to are tending to decline for the past two years. So that means in a few months that houses in your neighborhood would start selling for under what is the assessed value. So that's the situation we're in today. I think it's just a factor of the declining home prices. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Cuttingham and Mr. Mochelli. Good. Okay. Thank you. Going back to our current complaint, one of the sections in it is labeled neighborhood Renaissance Program. And as of, again, five years ago, we had talked about 71 permits being issued from 93 or 95 timeframe and 36 permits being issued in 2002. So the numbers over a longer time period have been growing up through five years ago or so. Is it possible to bring us up to date that program over the last five years and the health of it today. As noted, we've got significantly older housing stock in this city and the Renaissance loan program was designed to give people up to $200,000 to make home improvements with the city picking up the interest for a two year time period on it, to enable people to update their existing housing stock. And I think the health of that program is important to the city and important to our view of the co-plan going forward as we're looking at the neighborhoods and the older housing stock. So that if we could get an update there, I think it would give us a better picture of how that program is working working whether more emphasis should be put on or how it's meeting current needs. Please. If I may, we will bring you something on that. I think there's two things that affect that mix. One is the, first of all, let me say I think it's fortunate that we have this law in the market in many ways because it gives us an opportunity to get a real handle the breathing space that we need to deal with the mix of housing and what we should do about dealing with our older housing stock and also about what to do with infill housing and bringing up the stock. With respect to Renaissance and that's a program where we are effectively subsidize the interest to encourage properties to develop concurrent with that, we have a tax abatement program. And one of the things we have to look at is that was put in place at the same time as Renaissance to encourage these upgrades. What is the effect of that? How many, you know, folks have gone through this and the hard thing to get a hold of is would this have occurred with or without these programs and what is it costing the city for both of these programs particularly in tight times and that's something that will bring to you. Right and the tax abatement side of it was one of the more innovative aspects I think the city of the Fairfax was the first in the nation to do that. Yes. Mr. Bydichelli. Yes thank you. Chairman. I just, this may not be for you or Ms. Godlesle, but I was wondering, do we have a way of determining in the city the difference between a pure commercial development in an area as opposed to a mixed development, putting in a lot of residential with the commercial? Do we have an idea of what, what, what, I guess, total revenue and taxes that either one would generate. We could work that up just through an average square foot analysis of what a, you know, if we're talking about a mixed commercial and condominium development, for example, you could work off, you could average out what you think a condominium development, for example. You could work, if you could average out what you think, a condominium complex would be on a per square foot basis, and what a commercial complex would be on a per square foot basis, and the other revenues such as sales tax and whatnot that would be derived from that. You can work it out for rental property. For rental property or for ownership property. Yeah, be on one of what and be the same. But it'd be close. Interestingly, and this is something that Mr. Foreman is an expert in, you know, all of this economic analysis. But often the way properties are valued, rental properties are often valued by the income that they generate versus sort of the standard square footage of approach to other types of housing. So we would have to account for that. But I'm sure that he could bring you a good analysis. Mr. Cullian, could you open? Okay. One, I guess my next question falls in an area that has had significantly more discussion in recent years. The City Council in looking at the Fairfax Boulevard Master Plan that was developers in an August work session. What the developers recommended for two locations, at least one in the North FACC center, one in the Camp Washington center, or large upscale rental units for construction. I think that the question I have that would take significant discussion from the comprehensive plan update, should the issue of mixed use housing be mentioned in the housing stock portion of the comprehensive plan update? How should that be related then to a section talking about the Fairfax Boulevard Master Plan and the recommendations and core principles stated in it? And with the suggestions made there, the character of the housing that we would be recommending and looking at should probably be discussed. Do you have a sense or recommendation on how we should approach that as we're moving forward? Well, I think it should be approached for sure, and I think that falls in line with what Mr. Landis was mentioning earlier as far as coming to that optimal mix, you know, that's appropriate for us. From this add, you know, clearly when you're talking about mixed use, you'd be talking about a multi-family development. Most of the time, should that, the rental apartment, should it be condominiums? And that's really the question of the hour as far as the housing mix goes on the multi-family side. And I think including a mixed use component, if that's really the direction that we want to go, would be very important in the You know in the complaint review I'd just like to jump in there as well. Me and Montgomery County for decades Well at least two decades now has been celebrated for its PUD program where in developments in fact affordable housing Well, it was rental our ownership was included in larger developments as a mixed use component. Whether it was for teachers, firefighters, blue collar workers, whether it was for seniors in the community, that is something we should be looking at as well. Because while we speak about rental housing, most of the rental housing stock in the city, not all, but most is rather upscale and not affordable even for those looking to stay and pay a rent in the city as well. So again, that should be part of our, I think, our zoning discussion. I just want to follow up quickly on Mr. Landis' question about short sales. In fact, a short sale has many attributes to it, which are much more favorable than a foreclosure. First, often when a consumer homeowner has an agreement with the lender for the short sale, they are avoiding the stigma of a foreclosure on their credit rating. And that is second, they are continuing to be a resident in that property and they at almost universally are maintaining that property. So that from all surrounding perspectives, that's an occupied home that's cared for. Unfortunately, in the foreclosure situation, often these properties become REO properties and the servicers, and certainly the investors have very little interest in maintaining those properties. And I think it's been widely reported in many newspapers about the appearance situation that that creates, as well as the added costs on the local localities to, in fact, go in and often mow the lawns or deal with mosquito and infestations and pools and so on and so on. So the problem with the short sale environment right now, though, and many realtors are speaking to this quite publicly, is in fact they are proposing literally thousands of short sales right now, though, and many realtors are speaking to this quite publicly, is in fact they are proposing literally thousands of short sales right now across the country, but the servicers and the investors cannot keep up with the pace. And it's part of the overall problems in the mortgage marketplace right now. But generally, you would get more value out of a short sale, but because of the lack of credit liquidity in the marketplace right now, we're just in a really tough spot. I hope for, you know, residents in the city neither is an option that we all just sort of stay put in whether this crisis things will turn around. It's been said, real estate leads the economy out of recession. And that's historically a fact. So at some point, as was said during the presentation, the state of affairs will change. The difficulty right now for everyone in city government staff, our city council, all of us is to make some wise decisions to position us for the future right now. I'd like to suggest that we move on to the next agenda item but before we do, are there any final questions? Okay, great. Thank you very much for that. And so the next item on the agenda is in fact the discussion of our demographics in the city. I was wondering, do we get a copy of Eric's presentation? We can get this to you. That would be great. Thank you. Well, it's interesting that the demographics presentation will follow the housing presentation because these two are related so closely and it's not just because people live in houses. Both demographic and the housing market have really been in an off-heaval in the last two years, and it's been to the extent that those who studied the market a lot, studied the demographics market a lot, really had no idea what was coming when it came. So it's an interesting thing to talk about. And as part of the overall comprehensive plan review, I think it's helpful to understand at least what are the latest trends in the city's demographics and try to get as up to date as possible. So for the next few minutes, we'll talk about some of the latest data estimates from the Census Bureau and also take a look at an analysis of where people are moving to and from. And hopefully this analysis will kind of shed some light on some larger scale population trends that we've been seeing throughout Northern Virginia. Rather than delve into the minority of census statistics tonight and there's plenty of statistics out there, rather than giving percentages of each age group and ethnicity and whatnot. What I'll do is I'll give a very brief overview of the Census Bureau estimates for 2008, how they've changed since 2000. And then spend some time talking about migration patterns. And migration patterns is really a very interesting tidbit of information. I think you'll find it interesting and we'll see what it could mean to the city in the coming years. Now, in the comprehensive plan, the demographic data that's in the comp plan right now are from the 2000 census. Much of the information that is in there is only updated during the decennial census that happens once every 10 years. Some, including just the raw population numbers and age and whatnot, is estimated in the interim. So that's what we're really going to be talking about tonight. A lot has changed in the past eight years and hopefully will be keeping you informed of what's going on. 2,000 census in the city indicated the city had approximately 21,500 people. The proportion of seniors living in the city was much greater than the proportion of seniors living elsewhere in northern Virginia. The number of young children was about 6% and can keep that figure in mind for our next discussion. And over the decade of the 1990s, ending in 2000, the city population increased by approximately 9.6%. Now we're at 2008. and the 2008 census estimates are pretty interesting. Raw population, the Census Bureau estimates that we're up to about 23,300 and think of the new housing units that we had talked about in our previous discussion, you know, people moving into new housing units and then some more folks who will talk about a little bit later. This is up about 8.6 percent since 2000 and that's somewhere along the lines of what you'd expect judging by past trends. At no surprise that the proportion of seniors has increased to 14.5 percent. This is no surprise because folks in the 55 to 65 age bracket are now largely in the over 65 age bracket. And this is about 50% larger than the number from Fairfax County. Now what is very interesting is the last point here, the number of young children, young children are fascinating from a demographic standpoint because obviously, you know, people in their thirties were in their twenties, ten years ago and whatnot. Children under five were in here. And so it's very challenging to estimate what the population for young children is going to be. And what the estimates through the two thousands were was that from the two thousand census about halfway until about halfway through the decade, the number of young children in the city decreased. All of the sudden over the past two years, and especially the past year, this is rebounded very substantially to the point where between 2007 and 2008, it's estimated that the number of young children, and this is under five, increased by about 10 percent, and that's really outstanding. This is very surprising to a lot of folks. No folks are surprised more than the school district, and obviously this is an enormous issue for the schools. Now, keep in mind, these are Census Bureau estimates. The Census Bureau does the best that it can with birth records and a whole lot of other information, but they are just estimates that they're not carved in stone yet until 2010. But I think it's most interesting to look at these estimates and supplement it with information from other data sources. And the reason to do that is to get to the very critical question of why has the population of children increased so much? And for this, we turn to a somewhat unusual source that people usually don't associate with demographics. And believe it or not, the Internal Revenue Service is really a great source of demographic data. The IRS makes some data available for the purpose of tracking migrations. And for the purpose of this discussion, migration means only domestic migration and only some domestic migration. And there's a lot of very technical reasons why this is so. People tend to see the word migrant think that we mean immigrants from foreign countries. Immigrants are not dealt with in the IRS data at all. But getting that out of the way, the internal revenue service data is really wonderful because it's only one year old. It's extremely accurate, and it's especially accurate for tracking patterns as opposed to actual raw numbers because you can't really correlate it with the Census Bureau numbers but you can see very interesting patterns emerge and it's very useful for spotting these trends and so let's take a look at what the IRS has been up to as far as tracking migrations. Now what we're looking at here is migrants who are moving from Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Now the reason we're looking at the city and the county together is to come out to more of a definite pattern because the city, once again, like the housing market is so small that the numbers tend to spike up and down. But what we're seeing here in this chart is 10 years worth of migration patterns to other counties in northern Virginia. So we're looking at regional migration. And what the chart shows is that the estimated number of people who moved from Fairfax, again from the city and the county, two various other counties in the region. Now take a look at the red and the blue lines, which are the top lines here. These show the number of people moving from Fairfax to Loudon County and to Prince William County. And it's very interesting, look at it in correlation to the years beneath. And you see that there is a spike of people moving outward from Fairfax during the housing bubble. All of the sudden, starting in 2005 and accelerating between 2006 and 2007, which is the last available year, you see that this rate of out migration decreases dramatically. For 2007, there was about one-third less out migration to Prince William and to Loudon counties than we saw during the height of the housing bubble. Now this is something demographics is usually a very, you don't see spikes in demographics all that often. So this is something that's very unusual. So what is this show? Well, it appears to show that a major reason for the increase in the number of children in Fairfax isn't necessarily children moving in to Fairfax, but it could be the result of families with children not moving out who ordinarily would have. And part of what we're seeing, it may be due really to a reversal of a previous trend rather than a new trend emerging of folks moving into the city. Now it's probably that as well, but this has a lot to do with it. And it's a very, very recent trend that really isn't picked up in a lot of other demographic sources. Now there's obviously another aspect to migration, which is people moving in. Folks moving in to Fairfax, again, the city and the county. When you look at this together, you see a definite pattern of migrations. Folks tend to move in to Fairfax from the inner jurisdictions, from Arlington and Alexandria. Arlington on this chart is kind of that dirty yellow color in Alexandria as pink. They're both at the top of the chart. The trend tends to be folks move from Arlington and Alexandria to Fairfax, folks move from Fairfax to Loudon and Prince William. Another interesting component to this and at the risk of being mind-boggling with the charts, I didn't include this, with the average size of households who are moving from these jurisdictions into Fairfax. These are much smaller households in size than the folks moving out to Loudon in Prince William. Now you notice here we see a similar decrease in the recent two years of folks moving into Fairfax from the outer jurisdictions. And at the same time you see a slight uptick of folks moving in from Prince William and Loudon. So the big story here is Prince William and Loudon. The Prince William and Loudon tends to be a recipient of Fairfax's outmigrants, and particularly families. In the recent years, that's reversed. And not only that, but the number of in-migrants from, fair from, from, Lauden and from Prince William, has increased a little bit the number of out-migrants has gotten much lower. At all of these lines, this confusing array of lines together, and you get something like this. The red line here is the estimated number of out-migrants from Fairfax City and County. The purple line is the in-migrants, and these could be coming from anywhere. And you see between 2006 and 2007, there's a very sharp drop off in the number of out-migrants from Fairfax. And again, this brings up a very good question. Why is this so? There could be a whole lot of reasons why this could be, and a lot of it goes back to the housing issues that we had talked about before. The big questions are households staying in place as opposed to moving and our families and children living in Fairfax and most importantly, how long will this pattern last? Well, let's take a look at this in some brief detail. Household remaining in place, there could be a few reasons why households would be remaining in place instead of moving out as they typically had done. Getting back to the housing market folks may not be able to sell their existing homes and may think that staying in a house that they'd ordinarily not plan to might be the best course of action for a little while or for a long while. There may be new households moving in who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to afford to move in, but with house values declining, now they are. So families who may have been priced out may be moving into the city in a, again, a reversal of trends. And again, we have foreclosures. And the foreclosure issue with demographics is very interesting, because the question, if you go to foreclosure meetings, for example, this question is asked a lot, nobody has the answer to this. When a house is foreclosed, where do the people go? And it sounds like a very simple question, but nobody has the answer to it. We don't know if people are living with relatives, if people are moving into rental apartments, if people are leaving this area entirely. We just don't know that that adds another element of uncertainty into the demographics market and can really add to very localized spikes that we've been seeing throughout North and Virginia. And in talking to other folks who work in demographics, what they've been seeing is spikes on a very, very localized level by a school level, for example, the one school, one elementary school, but see a sudden spike in students for one year while the adjoining elementary school would not see that spike. So it's very interesting material. I would love to be able to give a prediction about what to expect for next year, what to expect for the next five years in Fairfax. Unfortunately, the only prediction that we can really make with any accuracy is that things are probably going to change again rapidly. And this again has to do with largely with the housing market, that until the housing market settles down into a more predictable pattern, we will likely see demographics continue in a similarly unpredictable pattern. And once the economy stabilizes, we expect to see return to a more calm and a more normal pattern of demographic growth. But until then, we're in some pretty interesting times. And we're doing the best to keep up with it and hope that the migration data was a little bit of good information. And we hope to keep an eye on this information as we go forward with this year and hopefully give another update as we go on. Again, very interesting, Mr. Foreman. Thank you. I just want to share a thought which I've, during my tenure on the commission, I've stayed at several times. As we move ahead to the conference of plan, it's my hope that the language in it can be updated to embrace and celebrate the city's diversity in a much more affirmative way than we currently are doing. And I'll leave that discussion to the appropriate time in the contemplate process. Let me turn to my colleagues. I'll go from right to left this time. Another great presentation. Thank you. I was just curious. You emphasize that the number of young children is growing. Have any data on whether these children are being sent to public schools or private schools and what the proportion is? That's a very interesting question. And when we get into items like kindergarten enrollment, that becomes very interesting, because the general thinking is that private school enrollment is declining with the economy. And unfortunately, it's been happening so quickly just within the past year that I haven't seen any actual hard information on that. But a lot of folks think, especially around North and Virginia, when communities grapple with a larger than expected kindergarten population, that a number of those children a few years ago would have gone into private school systems, but their parents opted to send them to public school for kindergarten instead. And it tends to impact kindergarten more than other grades, because when a child is already in private school, the parents are less likely to pull them out and put them in public schools, opposed to starting them in public school from the kindergarten age. So I would love to see information on that. The private schools tend to release enrollment data at a slower pace than public schools. And so we'll have to wait a little bit. That's a very pertinent question. Thank you. Mr. Bochelleck. Yes, I just know from one example of a preschool. Private preschools are really jammed right now. They're hard to get into. So I don't know what's going on in that effect, but we're having a hard time getting a grandchild and that's the only reason why I know that. Let me ask you about the migration, especially this year, especially in the beginning of next year, we're going to have a flux. I mean, we see it coming in a new administration and with that comes a whole host of people. Do we typically see a big migration in the city when that happens? I can always say, what was it eight years ago that had happened? Actually, I wish I could answer that question. The typical role of thumb in the Washington area is that the changing of the administration does bring a flux. And the reason that I've heard is that you would tend to think, well, the new people are coming in and the out people are moving out, the old people are moving out, but the old people don't move out because the folks who work in the political theater kind of like it and they want to stay in the political theater even if it means changing from the administration to a law firm or a think tank or whatever. So you do see a spike in housing demand when administrations change. It's very interesting. It would be interesting to go back eight years to see if we saw that type of a spike with the incoming administration in 2000. I don't know that question. It would be a very interesting thing to research. Thank you. Mr. Cunningham. As noted in the back when we talked ethnicity and tie it into family sizes and the demographics as well as the number of families moving in and out and you've indicated that families moving out tend to be larger than families moving in. With the spike in children and that and I know it in related to housing a couple of years ago, we had the issue of multiple generations living in the same house or large occupancy houses. Is that enough that it affects the city's population or is it quantified in any way? Is that still an issue? That's not quantified in any way outside of the 2000 census. Now, that's one of those pieces of information that we really don't have in the interim period. And the Internal Revenue Service said, so everyone can rest at ease with this. They don't go down to that level of detail. And in fact, when they track households, they don't track households as you and I think of households, they track households, they don't track households as you and I think of households, they think of, they track households by filing unit. So if you have a multi-generational household, they may have two or three different tax returns, you know, with people being heads of households and whatnot, and they would not be shown up as one unified household unit. So that's one of those pieces of information that we really have to wait till the 2010 census to get a good grasp on. Okay, so it'll be 2012 before we get that out of the 2010 census. That's right. Or 2012 will be the next. Right. The 2014 year conflata will be what's dealing with that. Okay. And is that the same with income data which we had indicated in the people portion? That's correct. We can track income data through other sources such as through the state unemployment compensation records. It's a little bit iffy because you never really know if they're measuring the City of Fairfax accurately as the problem that we have with a lot of data sources but we can track that it's a different number than the Census Bureau but when trying to examine the issue that you had raised earlier about housing affordability versus income that's the source that we would go to if it's available by here. Okay. And the employed population in the city is tracked independently through other sources. That's correct. That's tracked through the state and that's updated every month. Okay. And so we have an ability to track the number of people that are employed in the city and see whether that's changing and what impact. That's correct, and we do keep that information on the city's website. And to, I wish I knew that off the top of my head, but I think it's within the two to three percent range. Okay. Before we move on to the other side of the day, I'd like to make a request that we have a work session with the school board to discuss what the school board's assessment of this demographic data is and what their needs will be relative to the comp plan. I think that's going to be very important, particularly as we have a limited availability of space to expand schools. The rebuild of our two existing elementary schools, which was beautiful, was also done with a representation that it would meet our needs for a substantial period of time as a community. And clearly that is not the case, both now with some of the challenges to space that the elementary schools are encountering, and in particular, are looking at the demographic data. So I think this becomes a very important issue for us. Anich Dotal data, very interesting that I've seen from the local planning group, is that there are a lot of multi-generational families, in fact many families selling two properties to move into one larger property together now. So this is going to be a very interesting issue to Mr. Cunningham's point to follow as we move ahead. Dr. Cun. Thank you. First thing to question in the comments, see, when I recall when I think it was President Clinton time and he brought a lot of people from the Army, people here, peace, dividend, whatever they call 200,000 Army people came. And there was a spike of population in this area. Now the question is, do you think that if there is a war ends in Iraq and Afghanistan and people are brought back here, will that have any impact on our area? MR. Well, in northern Virginia in general over the past decade, the population has followed government spending. Now, if you think that – and government spending being federal government spending, now, if you think the federal government spending being federal government spending, now if you think the federal government spending is going to decline in the foreseeable future, that you could see, you could probably see that result from northern Virginia population. People naturally move where the jobs are. If federal government spending and spending in general not necessarily just depends spending, if you think federal government spending is going to increase, that would probably result in an increase in our population. The two are really tied very closely together. Okay. Thank you. The other other, I was questioned, you're talking about the population from Prince William County. I think my own analysis and the news paper is that because Prince William County is very anti-immigrants. The rules, the way they treat them really, people don't want to go there. And in the past, people were going from Fairfax to Prince William because the rises of the home were cheaper. So now I think the immigrants, even the houses are cheaper. They don't want to go there because the working condition is tough for them. Is that true? There's a lot of speculation about that and there have been a number of newspaper articles despite the number of articles about that. We haven't seen any concrete evidence as far as where are you know, are people moving out of Prince William County into other jurisdictions? It's mostly anecdotal. And we would love to see concrete information, you know, to either verify or debunk that theory, but we haven't seen it yet. The speculation from this migration data is exactly what you would say that folks tend to move from Fairfax to Prince William and Loudon for the more affordable housing. And we don't know. And just in the past year, especially with school populations, there's been a lot of speculation that the increase in school population has been a result of folks moving from Prince William County. But again, there really hasn't been any empirical evidence to prove that. Two other small comments. You know, on the ethnic population, I'm surprised to really read here that Hispanic children between the age of zero to four has declined. You know, normal, you know, conventional wisdom will be that they won't decline. So is there some unique reasons? Just... If there's a unique reason, I'm not aware of it. And that again is the Census Bureau estimate. And that is what the Census Bureau has been estimating actually within a pattern, and it's not a spike of activity, but it's been a gradual pattern since 2000 that the proportion of Hispanic residents in the city has not increased. The proportion of Asian residents in the city has increased. On that aspect, my last comment, Mr. Chairman, is interesting to, if you read this, they have tracked Hispanic and Asians, but they did not track African Americans. They did not attack, I mean, a track, not a track, track like Middle Eastern population. Because if you go to, in our our schools and here when we have this, I was stuck and surprised that there were so many children from Middle East. There are so many Arabic speaking. But, so in this population, what I'm saying is, I know the Asian population increased because due to a lot of Koreans and Chinese, the other part of the Asia is pretty static, so to speak. They have not tremendous increase. But question is, why African Americans, Middle East, or not tracked? I'm just asking. The African-American population in the cities maintained almost steady at about 5 percent. It is tracked by the Census Bureau just without racial and ethnic groups. I didn't include it in the summary just because it had an increased or decreased, you know, significantly. As far as Middle Eastoners, Middle Middle Easterners are a group that really falls through the crack as far as the Census Bureau does. Middle Easterners are not considered, and this is all Census Bureau lingo, are not considered a racial group along the lines of white, black, Asian, et cetera. And on the Census form, although Middle Eastern's are considered an ethnic group similar to Hispanics, it is not asked as a question on the census form if somebody is Middle Eastern of origin. So Hispanics are considered an ethnic group and are tracked by the Census Bureau Middle Easterners or not. And whether we, you know, at some point when the number of Middle Easterners increases to a point where the Census Bureau thinks it's necessary to track them, I'm sure they will. As of now, it's a group that really falls through the cracks and is not tracked. So you're correct about that? The other just interesting fact is that when you really do that, check on that. Racial, they'll say like Asian and if you like, for example, if you, I'm looking for Pakistani Indians. So they'll say you are Islander, you know, Pacific Islander. So are they released in that category? Indians in Pakistan is to my knowledge or considered Asian in Census Bureau, Lingo. Okay. Considered South Asian. Okay. Thank you. And keep in mind this is all self-reported. And especially when you're talking about the disenial census and folks who are South Asian or folks who are Middle Eastern and frequently folks who are Hispanic really don't have a good answer to the question of what racial people belong to. So it gets to something that's very confusing and it's something that we always have to take into account. Yeah. I would frankly agree with the Chairman that we need to do something because I'll, you know, what's the word here? Diversity is improving in the city. So diversity means strength, frankly, in terms of culture and intellectual integration. I would love it if the Census Bureau would expand its terms. It would make our jobs a lot easier. And, you know, maybe we will add And maybe we will let every census period, they tend to add a few more categories. So they may in the future. Thank you, Ms. Jeff. There's no question having a diverse community adds to our economic wealth and our power with even resources. I recently had the pleasure of attending both the graduation at Fairfax High School as well as more recently an honors program. And we had a world of surnames at that program. People of all backgrounds, of all colors, they spoke multiple languages. And the honors that these students were receiving, it was just wonderful to behold the quality of the schools. How in fact, they were translators present, how everyone was just running up those steps, you know, it's just a great success here in northern Virginia, celebrating our diversity. And I took your report with regard to the absence of African-American or other groups, meaning is that we were simply at the same level. And that's how I took the report. But I'm glad the question was asked because it's something we should be mindful of in these discussions and this Robinson one would turn to you. I have a laundry list. I have a question. So I'm just going to ask and as I find them on my notes here. The subject of children and family in the city is something that's near and dear to me both as a parent and This is very loud. Sorry in 2005 As the mother of two children and a very fresh newborn I approached city council with my concerns that I Myself and a lot of my friends were finding was that we didn't really see the city as a resource for families. We didn't see it reaching out to families the way that we would want them to. And I proposed a task force or committee on children and family and lo and behold, they granted my wish and made me the chair. So we spent that year really looking at we had representatives on the task force from FPYC, from Prague, from various community groups. And through that we realized it wasn't that the city didn't have a wonderful assortment of offerings. It was just that they weren't doing the best job of marketing it. So fast forward to 2008. And I think we would all agree that under the leadership of Mr. McCarty, Parks and Rec has done a great job of advertising, getting information out to everyone, changing some of the systems, bringing things online. What I tried to stress to the mayor and then City Council at the time was that, obviously there was no housing slump. It wasn't enough to just attract people to the city. We had to make sure we were retaining them. Because high turnover in a city doesn't benefit the community from a tax perspective, from a community perspective. Turnovers just not good at those serious rates. People coming here as a five-year starter plan and then moving out and giving the rest of their money to another jurisdiction. And I think the city has done a really good job of really trying to retain people between the Renaissance programs to encourage you to build out your existing house versus go move up to a bigger one. The city, despite the inflated prices even back then, is still in this area an affordable place to live, more affordable than most. And so you ask, or the city asks, whoever, you know, does the studies ask why do we have so many young children? I will say, and I think I'm representative of a lot of people with children my age, seven, five, and three, this is a great place to live. This is one of the few places in northern Virginia where you can have a decent backyard. The amount of land our older homes have. It's, you might hate it if you're someone who doesn't like yard work, but if you're someone who has kids and don't necessarily want to schlep down to the park every day, you've got almost a quarter of an acre on the average lot in the city if you're in one of the older homes. That's, that's unsurpassed in Fairfax County. You can move up and move out and get a bigger house. But the price you pay is you lose pretty much all of your backyard. You get a little patch. We have great parks here in the city. We have reciprocity with the county. So when you're trying to register for a county program, you're treated as a county resident. So you get the county discount. In Arlington, if you're in the Arlington city part of Arlington versus the Fairfax County part of Arlington, you don't get that. So you have people from Arlington getting up at three in the morning to get in line, to try to get online and register for the park takes programs. There's a lot of things that the city does, right. And the best way that this is evidenced, I think, is one of the things on the task force that we worked with in conjunction with the Commission on the Arts was the Monday Morning Performance Series that happened at Old Town Hall. Every first and third Monday now, if you go to Old Town Hall at 1030, there's a children's performer there. And the place is generally packed packed and there was a lot of speculation that it wouldn't be that no one was going to come we had tried it in years past 10 years ago they tried something similar didn't work well house surprised was everyone still three almost three years later it's a full house I think people are choosing to stay here because George Mason is booming the city is booming with the redevelopment. I don't think we're ever going to be as young and hip as Clarendon or Roslyn. We can strive for that, but I think that's a different demographic of people. But I think what's attractive to people here are the schools. The idea that when you go in for the Thanksgiving day lunch at Daniels Run, which is where my kids go, you know everybody. It's your neighbors. There's this sense of connectedness here in the city that you just don't get in the county because it's too far, it's expanded. There's a loss of relatedness in the county. Or just in general, in jurisdictions, this is a unique place to live. So I think as long as the city continues to do everything that it's doing right, you're going to continue to see people stay or people move in with families because there is people put a very high price on quality of life. And I think my final point, I want a second in concur with Mr. Chairman about the need to work with the school board. I think the number that we pay per student to Fairfax County to run our schools is $14,000. Somewhere in that ballpark. That's a huge number to not know or not be able to speculate in the future what the needs of the city school. How our budget is going to be impacted by housing market, by job losses. If we have to come up with $14,000 per student to give the Fairfax County, we have to have a handle on what our future population is. So with that, I will end my comment. Thank you, wonderful presentation. Thank you, Ms. Robinson. And forgive me, I was in a side conversation, but I just want to submit to my colleagues as we're looking at the Fairfax Boulevard Plan, we have to consider that it be hip now. OK? Let's keep that in mind. All right. We want to compete. I'm sorry. Did you want to say something? I think one of the questions in terms of the accuracy is to the schools and what observation that can be corroborated by school board of that But I believe Daniels Ron is a hundred percent city children and I believe Providence is about 50% city children and the other 50% is county children so How that will work in terms of displacing county children if the city population is going to explode and and may May change the boundary within the city for who can attend Daniel's Toronto Providence, I think would be an issue, but those are important things and have a cost of cash with it. And actually those debates impact both within the city as they redistrict people having their favorite school, maybe it's closer to home, I've been through that discussion. And frankly, it also significantly impacts in the county, because there are many county residents who want to come into the city as well, because of the amenities that are new schools, where ahead of the curve compared to many of the county schools, what we have. And that's a very significant discussion, and thank you for your thoughts on that. And I also concur, I think our parks, our amenities, our services are what make us a small town environment and that's something that we can never lose sight of. It's true. I mean, our cities are very much public centers, our schools rather, within the city are very much public centers. I'm always amazed at the high school, all the activities that go on day in and day out at all of our schools. Any other remarks about demographics or just discussion items in general before we move to closing the meeting this evening? Ms. Kalei, is that any final thoughts for us? No, just we've got a lot of good thoughts, a lot of good comebacks to you with this information as we move forward, looking forward to getting into that as we begin the next new year. Great. And first I want to thank staff. This was a very informative presentation this evening. The data was very rich with information for us to consider and think through as we move ahead into this planning process. I'm hoping that in the near future we can learn more about our business community as well. The nature of the businesses, the number of employees, their footprint, their impact on the tax base, and as well engage some of our business trade associations who are active in Fairfax to bring their involvement to this process as well. And I want to thank my colleagues for staying late this evening, but I think it was well worth it. And I look forward to seeing all of you on December 1st, and we are adjourned. Thank you.