They tried and they tried, but in the end, Arlington County Board members Christian Dorsey and Katie Cristol were unable to convince their three colleagues to move forward on more aggressive implementation options for the controversial Missing Middle housing initiative. “I’m deeply disappointed,” Dorsey said on Jan. 25 as board members voted to advertise, for ..read more

Editor: The Arlington Way and Ellen Bozman’s name have both come up recently in policy debates. The Sun Gazette recently reported on the County Board public comments forum on Missing Middle including a speaker citing Ellen Bozman, a long-serving member of the County Board. As Ellen’s daughter and granddaughter, we appreciate that her memory and ..read more

A lot of people probably wish they could turn back the clock to 2018 or 2019. And in a sense, the Virginia real-estate market already has. New data from the Virginia Realtors trade group suggest that the market – knocked higgledy-piggledy from its traditional norms by COVID – has returned to something akin to pre-pandemic ..read more

Add together the past five years – combining the pre-pandemic, heart-of-pandemic and getting-past-pandemic eras – and the Arlington apartment market has somewhat underperformed the nation as a whole, according to new data. But that’s largely owing to the steep initial decline in apartment rents at the very start of the pandemic in the first half ..read more

Critics howled and proponents cheered, but in the end, nobody was really the least bit surprised. Arlington County Board members on Jan. 25 formally set March public hearing to implement Missing Middle zoning/planning changes that would significantly alter — in ways not perhaps fully fleshed out — single-family neighborhoods in Arlington. Board members took off ..read more

Since 2020, the rental market has been on a roller coaster ride, characterized by abrupt swings. That ride continued in 2022, but the year also brought with it a slow return to normalcy in the market, as rent growth cooled and inventory opened back up. And for the past several months now, apartment rents have ..read more

It’s a significantly smaller slice of real estate than just a few months ago, but there still are portions of the Washington region where buyers continue to seek out homes in significant numbers despite the chill that has descended on the region and real-estate market. In the Sun Gazette coverage area, two ZIP codes ..read more

A modest drop in interest rates helped to end a string of 12 straight monthly declines in builder-confidence levels, although sentiment remains in bearish territory as builders continue to grapple with elevated construction costs, building-material-supply-chain disruptions and challenging affordability conditions. Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes in January rose four points ..read more

Arlington County Board members on Jan. 21 called it quits for the night, pausing public comment on Missing Middle housing/zoning changes for three days. Board members sat through about 170 speakers given two minutes each to make their case for or against the contentious policy changes. But at that point, as darkness had fallen on ..read more

2022 proved a year where the homes market started off hot-hot-hot and then cooled significantly, making analyzing the year as a whole a complex endeavor. Homes sales across Northern Virginia took their biggest year-over-year tumble since 2006, down 23.8 percent to stand at 20,398 – the lowest total since 2015. That’s according to figures from ..read more