My comments from the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s 2025 Livable Communities Leadership Award Event – May 14, 2025

Good evening everyone!

First – thank you to the Coalition for Smarter Growth for this incredible honor.

And to our federal workers and contractors – who have been impacted, who are worried, or who keep showing up – we stand with you. You are the quiet engines behind so much of what keeps our country running. We see you and we appreciate you.

Thank you so much to CSG. I am thrilled to be here to share the Little City story – and deeply humbled.

As mayor of Falls Church – aka The Little City, or the Little City with Big Ideas – this award isn’t just mine.

It belongs to the entire community of people who show up to meetings in City Hall, who lead walking tours, paint rainbow crosswalks, who inspect new buildings for safety, march in our Memorial Day parade, repair sidewalks, plan Halloween bike parades, or plant trees on Arbor Day together. And some of you all are here tonight. So I want to make sure we recognize everyone.

Some of my City colleagues – 

• Vice Mayor Debbie Hiscott Councilmember Justine Underhill
• Former Mayor Dave Tarter
• Former Councilmember and current Planning Commissioner Phil Duncan
• Vice Chair of Planning Commission Tim Stevens
• Former Chair of Planning Commission Rob Puentes
• EDA Chair Ross Litkenhous
• Phenomenal city staff led by long time City Manager Wyatt Shields,
• Akida Rouzi, Zoning Administrator
• Amanda Stout Brain, Public Works Director
• Kerri Oddenino from Planning
• And some of my favorite planners and visionaries around, Jim Snyder and Paul Stoddard, who are great examples of how we often import and then export talent around the region

All of us are here tonight because we passionately share the idea that where we live, how we get around, and who gets to be part of our communities matters.

It shapes our health, our economy, our climate, and most importantly, our sense of belonging. And we share a collective responsibility on how we’re going to leave it better for the next generation.

Now, if you’re not familiar with Falls Church – first of all, come visit! We’re known as The Little City because we clock in at just 2.2 square miles. We’re small but mighty. But what we lack in size, we make up for in heart – and ambition.

And grocery stores, I might add 🙂 I did the math and I think we might have the highest grocery store per capita around.

And I truly believe that’s why we’re being recognized tonight — the heart and ambition part (not the grocery stores part!)

In Falls Church, we’ve embraced smart growth – not as a trendy buzzword, but as a guiding principle.

• We’ve been working to be a 15-minute city – the idea where you really can get your daily needs met within a 15 minute walk, bike, or bus/transit ride – before it was cool – or before we knew it was cool.
• We’ve rezoned to allow more mixed use and housing. Over the next few years, we’re adding 25% more housing supply, doubling our affordable housing stock, and welcoming 20% more population – who will be our new neighbors, friends, and customers.
• And we’re tackling middle housing pragmatically – 8 years ago we were the first on the east coast to allow for cottage housing. And because we wanted to allow for infill and smaller development and hadn’t built townhomes in the city in over 20 years, we modernized our transition zoning last year and have 2 townhome projects underway now.
• And just last month, we got our ADU ordinance over the finish line – with what Mercatus has told me was the most progressive in the Commonwealth, without the poison pills of parking requirements and owner occupancy.

Can we finally say that housing and density aren’t bad words?

But none of this happened overnight.

For 10+ years, we’ve been relentless at getting things done and adding supply – the idea of abundance is not new to us in Falls Church.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on how we got here. This success is made possible by 5 different things:

1. It’s been years of ambitious plans and progressive direction – thank you Jim, Paul, and others for being visionary and reminding us that cities need to evolve, parking codes need to be modernized, and we can’t pull up the ladder after the last zoning change is done.

2. Elections have consequences – we clearly know that now. In Falls Church, we’ve had consequential voices like Phil Duncan and Ross Litkenhous, urging us to add and diversify to our tax base – that we should build our way to excellent services and infrastructure vs tax our way there. I’ve been fortunate to serve with and learn from them and others.
3. Persistence and work by professional staff – thank you for the diligent, steady leadership starting from the top. Wyatt, especially for your patience with me. Especially when I don’t take no for an answer – and you smile and nod and hope I don’t ask again 🙂
4. Public engagement and accessibility – projects are made better when we listen. But we also are learning how to go to the people, so we’re not just listening to the loudest voices in the room and what it means to give people a voice but not a veto.
5. Thoughtful, fact based decision making. As a data nerd, I make decisions anchored in facts and write about it in my blog, hopefully informing a few more people each week. But if nothing else, even if you disagree with me, maybe you can appreciate that I engaged with you and see how I came to my vote. While not every decision can be based on numbers only – it certainly helps that I can rely on good fiscal modeling from staff and actual data that combats all the FAQs about traffic, stormwater, parking, school capacity. And then we go back, measure how we’re doing, and learn from that to move forward.

Facts and yes voices in the room helps us on the dais take the brave votes.

And the results show it.

• Besides new buildings, restaurants, a growing tax base and population, we’ve also managed to build generational investments in new high school, city hall, library, sidewalks, parks, trails while lowering the tax rate 14 cents over the past 5 years (and it will be another penny lower when the next fiscal year starts in 2 months).
• We’re consistently ranked as one of the best places to live, we have a terrific and intimate school system, decreasing traffic volumes according to VDOT data – because as Rob Puentes reminds us – more people doesn’t always mean more cars when you also invest in multimodal transportation.
• And we’re ranked by US News and World Report as the healthiest community in the US, because I truly believe smart urban planning leads to better physical and mental health.

My favorite gauge of our progress is the “Letty coffeeshop metric” which some of you may have heard before.

When I first ran for City Council in 2016, we just opened our first independent coffee shop. One of the special things about the Little City is all of our small businesses, with coffeeshops among them.

Since 2016, we now have 6 – with 3 more on the way and all of them are packed daily. I share this with you, not because I run on coffee, but because coffeeshops are those third places that create opportunities for social connection.

It’s because welcoming more people, giving them an opportunity to live where there are jobs, transportation, and amenities, and building great places – means those people also become the customers to help sustain the small businesses we cherish. This is a virtuous cycle that not only supports business, reduces sprawl, and is more equitable and greener.

Growth is not mutually exclusive from being green.

At its core, creating a livable community means creating places where people can thrive – and truly, Falls Church is special. We have come a long way, and I try not to take it for granted.

Because when I try really hard to listen to who’s not at the table, they remind me – in the nicest possible way – that there’s still work to do.

We need to keep leaning into a future that’s inclusive, sustainable, and community focused. 

I challenge all of us to hold up our progressive values in the mirror and decide if we’re doing enough to take real steps to welcome more neighbors of different incomes and backgrounds. Or are we just resting on our laurels of being affluent, educated, and centrally located?

And are we doing enough on climate change – and making our city resilient to this existential issue and doing enough in the region to transition our buildings and transportation modes away from high carbon emissions?

And I can’t ignore what’s happening at the federal level. Is our region resilient enough over the next few years? Will we be able to protect the most vulnerable and weather the storm?

In times of uncertainty, I go back to what’s in my sphere of control and that’s at local government. Local government is where we can get things done.

And at the end of the day, I believe that most people want to see progress – so I try to be a builder. There is so much good we can do, individually and collectively as a region. We have the opportunity to create believers in democracy again if we focus on delivering results and making government work for people, solving problems that matter vs kicking the can down the road, and reversing the fear of scarcity politics.

The work is incremental and pragmatic – I’ve learned there is no silver bullet, otherwise we would have done it long ago – but the little things do add up. Change doesn’t happen all at once – it happens one policy, one sidewalk, one brave vote at a time.

Let me end with this: if Falls Church can lead on these issues – if our Little City can take bold steps toward big goals – then we all can. We’re proof that political courage and community vision are not measured in square miles. They’re measured in values – and in action.

Thank you again for this incredible recognition.

Let’s keep going.

Thank you.