To the editor: The following is a quote from Natalie Roy’s “EHO Watch” newsletter sent on June 4:
“ . . . owner purchased the 7,025-square-foot site of a single-family home for $560,000. The newly constructed four-bedroom units [on the lot] will be marketed at $1.2M-$1.25M each, depending on the finishes. This does not meet any reasonable definition of affordability.”
The final sentence above is an apt summary of a major point of EHO Watch’s effort.
Natalie Roy is a progressive (I’m definitely not, and I don’t know her personally) who has expended a prodigious amount of energy to prepare and distribute EHO Watch because the present County Board stubbornly insists Missing Middle is the way forward for more affordable housing in Arlington, even though Missing Middle cannot meet the lower-cost-housing need that most everybody recognizes exists.
Plus, the County Board is irresponsibly squandering tremendous amounts of TAX money for attorneys to fight TAX-paying residents of Arlington on this issue.
You can say Ms. Roy has only been working on EHO Watch because she’s running for the County Board. But so is Tenley Peterson, who, according to GazetteLeader coverage of the recent NAACP candidate forum, “opted against wading into the controversy over [NAACP chair Michael] Hemminger’s remarks [about housing].”
Perhaps Peterson is still drinking the Kool-Aid that Missing Middle is going to produce a bunch of lower-cost houses.
Hemminger and Peterson should go to the EHO Watch Website and read up on the topic.
Roger Fritzel, Arlington
