First, I want to thank staff. You all deserve tremendous credit for the work that brought us here tonight. Thank you.

Last fall, you laid out an ambitious and transparent process for how this would unfold. You have spent months listening to residents, accurately capturing feedback from across the city, and continuously refining both the zoning language and the RFP—now on its fifth iteration. You’ve shown patience, professionalism, and a willingness to adapt as Council and the community have worked through difficult questions and kicked this RFP vote out a month. The fact that we’re here tonight is a testament to that listening and hard work.

And hopefully, this is just the first of many milestones and the beginning of the work ahead.

When we talk about the future of Virginia Village, I get why people have questions and anxiety. This is one of the most significant affordable housing opportunities our city has seen.

For those just coming into the process or feels this is too rushed – you should know for the past five years, we’ve been thoughtfully acquiring the quads – each one of those were public decisions that re-emphasized our long term goal and commitment to affordable housing. We didn’t just decide to do this overnight. Across the city, we’ve doubled our committed affordable housing units within the new mixed-use buildings. Last summer, we adopted an Affordable Living Policy that set ambitious goals for who we want to be as a city. To the comment we received over email – “Council members should develop zoning that represents their constituents goals and vision for the community” – that’s actually what we’re doing tonight.

And now the moment has arrived.

The question before us is simple: are we willing to follow through on the vision and values we’ve already embraced?

I believe we are. In our hearts, we all know that this is the right thing to do for the city’s future. 

And in this moment, I really want to encourage us to be careful without being fearful. Because that is mostly what I hear.

Whenever communities talk about housing, it’s human nature to focus on what could go wrong. We spend so much time imagining worst-case scenarios that we lose sight of the very real challenges that already exist today.

Today, families struggle to find housing they can afford. Seniors who want to downsize and stay in Falls Church often have few options. Teachers, first responders, healthcare workers, restaurant employees increasingly find themselves priced out of the community. Students and young professionals find it impossible to return to the hometown they grew up in, maybe to only return to their parents’ basements or hopefully backyards.

Many of those people are not in this room tonight.

Meanwhile, communities across Northern Virginia and the US are having these same debates. Years of meetings. Years of hearings. Years of worrying about every possible downside. Years before anything gets built.

And then we wonder why housing costs keep rising.

The status quo is not risk-free. It has consequences too.

What happens if housing costs continue to rise faster than incomes? What happens if more families are priced out? What happens if our workforce has to commute farther and farther away? What happens if we miss an opportunity like tonight to create a community that is more inclusive and invests in the future to be who we say we are? 

And yes, what happens if we write rules so restrictive that we never receive the creative, high-quality proposals we’re hoping for?

Those are risks too.

So addressing the final concerns I heard tonight:

1/ On process – I believe the sequencing of the RFP and zoning changes to inform each other is a feature, not a flaw as staff has designed.

Planning in a vacuum rarely produces the best outcomes. We need community input, but we also need real-world feedback about what is feasible and achievable. Given the ambitious timelines we are trying to hit – the purpose of issuing the RFP after first reading of zoning is not to lock anything in. It’s to test our assumptions, invite creativity, and learn something before final adoption of zoning. We are setting the guardrails now and can tweak and tighten as necessary when we finalize the zoning at second reading this fall.

That’s not abandoning planning, in my opinion. That’s smart planning.

2/ Similarly, I know some up here have concerns about by-right zoning because it feels like we’re giving up control. Hence some of us directed staff to add a special use permit (SUP) process tonight to add more control back in. And hopefully we decide to only apply that process to the non-city owned quads so we really can invite maximum creativity and not scare people away with a discretionary, uncertain process on the other side.

I will remind us though – even when you have control, you don’t achieve flawless results. 

For those of us who have been around for multiple special exception (SE) approvals and or those who feel like public trust in Council over development is an issue – I’d like to remind us that SEs that City Councils cast votes on are not mistake and complaint free. We now lament about the architecture or tree canopy at Founders Row, the traffic signals and new intersection at Broad Washington, the lack of pull off zones at Founders Row 2. Those were all SE projects that took 5-15+ years and had plenty of public input and debate. In the end received majority support from Council and created new homes, lively businesses, gathering areas, bring in millions of revenue annually we wouldn’t otherwise have, and improved what was there before – we learn from each one, but clearly they weren’t perfect. 

So I really would caution us into falsely believing that SEs, where City Council has some control, create perfect outcomes.

And that is for large projects that can afford the time or money a SE or SUP processes demand. Predictability matters if we actually want affordable housing, infill or smaller-scale projects, and innovative proposals. A city that relies exclusively on discretionary approvals – because we think we’re the best at negotiating – often creates delay, uncertainty, and higher costs. And again if we care about affordability, those higher costs ultimately get passed on to future residents.

Finally, I’ll end with where I started. 

I believe we can be careful without being fearful. 

Leadership is about keeping a keen focus on our policy objectives, our goals and commitments we made to the community now and to future generations. 

Years from now, no one is going to remember whether the RFP was issued before or after a particular vote. No one is going to remember the exact wording of a setback or bulk plane calculations.

But they are going to remember whether we had the courage to do something tonight – to match our actions with our values. Whether we created enough homes for families who otherwise couldn’t afford to live here. Whether we preserved the opportunity for future generations to call Falls Church home.

This is a generational opportunity, much like the bold decision to invest in a new high school and reimagine the land around it that helped pay for it. We can approach it with caution and thoughtfulness as we did 8 years ago. That was a much bigger leap. But we should not let fear make the decision for us.

As leaders, we should set guardrails, not eliminate possibilities. And we should have the confidence to believe that the future of Falls Church can be even better than its past.