ARLINGTON, TX - So now Arlington City Council members finally decide they want to get tough on more multifamily development. The Huffines company, developer of the 2,000-acre Viridian development across the Trinity River and into the trees, would like to include about 900 apartments in the project, at which a majority of council members have balked. They want fewer. Or maybe none. The rationale? Too many apartments in Arlington, and particularly the city's north side, already.
Trimming back the number of low-end apartments in the city probably isn't a bad idea, though incubation of this particular concept might be a little late hatching. Twenty or 30 years too late. Isn't this the same council that listened less than patiently to pleas from both the Arlington and Mansfield school districts to not zone for more apartments? And then ignored both of them? Indeed it is, though there won't be any gripes from those school districts this time. Viridian is in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district.
Just to catch everybody up on housing statistics, according to the city's own Web site, there are currently 144,486 housing units in Arlington, of which 136,539 are occupied, which means the overall vacancy rate is 9.4 percent. Don't be particularly alarmed at this data bite because empty houses are always on the market and some rental units are always in between tenants. Whether the domicile is single-family or multifamily, more families rent in Arlington than is commonly assumed. In fact, 47.8 percent of Arlington households rent. The proportion is rising. In 2000 it was 45 percent. Who says? Census studies say so, the same ones that are on the city Web site. Renters will soon be a majority.
But back to the apartment proliferation issue. Though new home construction has tended to be dominated by single-family houses rather than apartments in recent years, the nitty-gritty is that Arlington has more than 50,000 apartment units, not counting duplexes. That's based on a BBC Research study commissioned by the Arlington Housing Authority in 2005, though by now no doubt a few more units have been added. About 36 percent of residences in Arlington are apartments. The percentage increases slightly if duplexes are also counted as multifamily. This runs considerably ahead of the national average of apartment renters, which the National Multi Housing Council says is 22 percent of all households.
From this vantage, the problem wasn't so much that too many apartments were built as that construction standards were too lax, as is evident from the advanced deterioration of some of the older complexes. To the city's credit, those standards have been upgraded considerably. All that being taken into account, does that mean the Viridian project should now be built without apartments?
Alas, the answer is that it could be but shouldn't be. These days, households making more than $50,000 annually make up the fastest-growing component of the apartment market, exactly the economic demographic that Huffines wants to capture, and one Arlington needs. There are other realities changing as well. Married couples with children have been steadily declining since 1970, now about a quarter of households. They stay in apartments longer. Also, higher-end apartments tend to have fewer children per capita than single-family neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, baby boomers are becoming empty nesters, often downsizing to condos or apartments. This also tends to be a somewhat affluent populace the city needs. The so-called echo generation, ages 20 to 29, is also steadily increasing in size. This demographic fits the model for traditional renters. Clearly, whatever obligation Arlington had to provide low-income, multifamily housing it took care of long ago. But it's unreasonable to expect that a mixed-used development like Huffines proposes would not have at least a fe
Source: Star-Telegram.com