If the voters approve the referendum, a public housing authority would be allowed to operate in Arlington and could begin to improve efforts to preserve and add more affordable rental housing.

If you would like to help, you can print out the petition form on 8 1/2 X 14 sized paper (back to back), then get Arlington voters to sign in your presence. The petition is posted on this website. You yourself must be a registered Virginia voter (but do not have to be an Arlington voter yourself). Only Arlington voters may sign. The form must be notarized after completed.

Please contact John Reeder (email info@greensofarlington.org) for more help.

The most successful housing assistance program in Virginia in Arlington? Well, No. If one uses actual economic data and facts to compare jurisdictions on their rental housing affordability, Arlington has the one of the worst housing program in the State of Virginia, and among the worst in the Metro DC area. Arlington today has the least affordable rental housing in the entire state of Virginia and in the Metro DC area (except for the City of Alexanria), far worse than Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William or the City of Falls Church, and far worse than the statewide average.

The Va Tech Center for Housing Research reports an overall index of affordable rental housing for all jurisdictions in Virginia: Arlington’s index for rental housing affordability is 33.2 (the higher the index the more expensive is the housing); the index for Fairfax County is 28.8, City of Falls Church 23.0, and the overall index for the Metro Washington DC statistical area is 31.5. Only the City of Alexandria is more expensive than Arlington at 34.8. Arlington is considerably more expensive than the Virginia average of 26.0.

http://www.housingvirginia.org/tc.aspx?PID=344

Arlington does spend lots of money–$47 million annually ($28 million from local taxes and $19 million in HUD funds). But its housing assistance program is fragmented, disjointed and unsuccessful in meeting goals set to measure its progress. One modest goal was to add 400 subsidized apartments annually to offset the loss of about 1,000 private apartments lost to affordable rents every year. The county housing program has met that goal perhaps once in the past ten years. Arlington current housing program is a failure if one uses the County Board’s own adopted goals that Fisette himself approved.

Arlington Greens at their February 12th meeting at the Clarendon Silver Diner elected Steve Davis, a longtime Arlington resident and an environmental activist, as their chairman for 2013. Davis was an aviation analyst for several decades with the U.S. Department of Transportation until his retirement in 2004, and is a graduate of McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland where he has served with several alumni groups. He was the Arlington Greens liaison with the Arlington Community Energy Taskforce during 2010-11. He also worked extensively on on the Greens green jobs initiative for homeless and unemployed people in Arlington during 2009-10 and has testified on the need for a year-round emergency shelter. Davis is married and lives in the Tara-Leeway Heights neighborhood, and previously in Fairlington Villages. He attends Fairlington United Methodist Church.

Former Arlington Greens chair John Reeder stepped down after three years, and now is the 2013 co-chairman of the Virginia Green Party. The Arlington Greens have fielded candidates for local office since 2006, most recently Audrey Clement for county board in 2012. Arlington Greens meet every first Wednesday of the month in the community room of the Ballston Fire House.

Audrey Clement was also re-elected as the treasurer of the Arlington Greens for 2013.

This is an important meeting for us: we need to plan how our next steps on getting the Arlington housing referendum on the November ballot, and whether we intend to endorse any candidates for county board or any other open positions in this November election. Want to run for office or have the name of a good candidate?

The tentative agenda of the Arlington Greens meeting is below.

Treasurer’s report and minutes of prior month’s meeting

Old business reports

Election of 2013 officers – chairperson and treasurer

Re-activating Arlington Greens email listserve

Housing authority referendum for 2013

New business
Endorsement of a candidate for county board

Virginia law provides housing authorities with unique powers to help preserve affordable housing. Unlike Alexandria and Fairfax County, Arlington doesn’t have one. Please sign the petition to place a referendum on the ballot next November asking Arlington voters to approve a housing authority. Here’s why:

1. Preserve Existing Affordable Units
Since 2000 more than two-thirds of Arlington’s affordable rental units have disappeared. The Arlington Housing Authority will reverse this trend by purchasing rental properties and keeping them affordable.

2. Provide Housing for Public Employees
Most Arlington firefighters, police and teachers can’t afford to live here. The Housing Authority will set aside housing for public employees to buy or rent. This will make Arlington a better place to live and work.

3. Leverage Money for Affordable Housing
The Housing Authority will leverage money for affordable housing by issuing long-term tax-exempt bonds to finance low income housing.

4. Act as a Land Trust
The Housing Authority will preserve historic apartment complexes and their surroundings.

5. Operate Subsidized Housing Units
The Housing Authority will receive federal funding to build and operate subsidized housing.

6. Consolidate Low Income Housing Programs
County housing staff are now scattered among a lot of agencies. Under the Housing Authority, staff will report to one voluntary board of directors appointed by County Board. This will assure a unified approach to public housing.

7. Condemn Substandard Housing
The Arlington Housing Authority can condemn, acquire and renovate substandard properties slated for demolition or redevelopment, saving paying tenants from eviction.

8. Qualify for HUD Loans and Grants
The Housing Authority will qualify for federal loans and grants not available to Arlington’s existing non-profit housing providers. HUD provides extensive funds for U.S. housing authorities.house_sketch

9. Provide Economies of Scale
The Housing Authority will either contract directly or negotiate with existing non-profits to purchase and/or renovate properties at the most affordable price.
10. Advocate for Affordable Housing
The Arlington Housing Authority will advocate for affordable housing on a par with schools, recreation centers and libraries.

The loss of affordable housing has reached epic proportions. The Arlington County Board acknowledges that roughly two-thirds of the affordable rental units in the county have been lost to gentrification and redevelopment over the past ten years, and that the county has failed to meet its own adopted goals.

It’s been five years since the last referendum, and Arlington Greens have decided to go at it again. The recent acrimonious split among the five current board members over designating a fixed portion of higher tax revenues from the Columbia Pike redevelopment area to affordable housing shows new policy tools are needed. It’s time for Arlington voters to have a say in this matter: that is what democracy is all about.

It is going to be difficult to get the nearly 3,000 signatures required (versus for example fewer than 200 required to run for most local offices). However, we believe that majority of Arlington residents support affordable housing programs and want better outcomes than our current pattern of gentrification, and want a robust debate for better ideas for better programs that a housing authority referendum would bring.

The freak storm that descended on Arlington on June 29 and wreaked havoc on the region in a matter of minutes caused widespread power outages. As a result supermarkets had to rely on diesel generators that kept the stores open, but did not provide enough power to operate refrigeration equipment. So FDA embargoed all the frozen food. One HT manager estimated that tens of thousands of dollars worth of food were sent to the dumpster out back, and another employee estimated the loss to the area food stores in the millions. These losses could have been avoided had supermarkets invested in roof top solar. It has been estimated that solar panels can generate 10 to 40 percent of the power a store needs.

Newspaper accounts indicate that in other parts of the country chains like Kohl’s, Macy’s, Safeway, Whole Food, BJ’s, REI and Wal-Mart have invested in rooftop solar to cut costs by taking advantage of the surface area on the roofs of their big box stores. These stores have relied on incentives in the form of a federal tax credit to jump start the investment. But apparently the tax credit isn’t inducing area stores to invest in solar panels.

So I ask Arlington County Board whether it would consider amending its building maintenance code to require big box food stores located in the county to install rooftop solar backup generators? Not only would such a requirement further the county’s professed policy of going green, it would operate to reduce consumer panic during power emergencies and significantly reduce food waste and associated costs to grocery stores located in the county.
If the Dillon Rule prevents Arlington from so amending its code, can it ask one of its four state legislators to introduce legislation to amend the Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code to mandate backup power in the form of solar generators on big box food stores?

The New York Times reported in an op-ed by Robert Kennedy, Jr and David Crane on the need for all areas of the U.S. to begin getting solar panels installed. Not only would energy bills be sizabely reduced and carbon emissions reduced, but as hurricanes and severe weather in the U.S. disrupt the electric grid, many people could function much better with solar power from their own roofs.

Dec.12, 2012, The New York Times. Solar Panels for Every Home By DAVID CRANE and ROBERT F. KENNEDY Jr.
WE don’t think much about pitch pine poles until storms like Hurricane Sandy litter our landscape with their splintered corpses and arcing power lines. Crews from as far away as California and Quebec have worked feverishly to repair or replace those poles as utility companies rebuild their distribution systems the way they were before.

Residents of New Jersey and New York have lived through three major storms in the past 16 months, suffering through sustained blackouts, closed roads and schools, long gas lines and disrupted lives, all caused by the destruction of our electric system. When our power industry is unable to perform its most basic mission of supplying safe, affordable and reliable power, we need to ask whether it is really sensible to run the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles.

Some of our neighbors have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered generators in order to give themselves varying degrees of “grid independence.” But these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure. And they’re not much help during a failure if gasoline is impossible to procure.

Having spent our careers in and around the power industry, we believe there is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses. (Disclosure: Mr. Crane’s company, based in Princeton, N.J., generates power from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, wind and solar energy.) Solar photovoltaic technology can significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and our dependence on the grid. Electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, on the roofs of warehouses and big box stores and over parking lots can be wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails.

Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states. So why isn’t there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?

First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. Today, navigating the regulatory red tape constitutes 25 percent to 30 percent of the total cost of solar installation in the United States, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and, as such, represents a higher percentage of the overall cost than the solar equipment itself.

In Germany, where sensible federal rules have fast-tracked and streamlined the permit process, the costs are considerably lower. It can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany. In the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days. More than one million Germans have installed solar panels on their roofs, enough to provide close to 50 percent of the nation’s power, even though Germany averages the same amount of sunlight as Alaska. Australia also has a streamlined permitting process and has solar panels on 10 percent of its homes. Solar photovoltaic power would give America the potential to challenge the utility monopolies, democratize energy generation and transform millions of homes and small businesses into energy generators. Rational, market-based rules could turn every American into an energy entrepreneur. That transition to renewable power could create millions of domestic jobs and power in this country with American resourcefulness, initiative and entrepreneurial energy while taking a substantial bite out of the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases and other dangerous pollutants.

As we restore crucial infrastructure after the storm, let’s build an electricity delivery system that is more resilient, clean, democratic and reliable than the one that Sandy washed away. We can begin by eliminating the regulatory hurdles impeding solar generation and use incentives like the renewable energy tax credit — which Congress seems poised to eliminate — to balance the subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuel producers.

And as we rebuild the tens of thousands of houses and commercial buildings damaged and destroyed by the storm, let’s incorporate solar power arrays and other clean energy technologies in their designs, and let’s allow them to be wired so they still are generating even when the centralized grid system is down.

<>We have the technology. The economics makes sense. All we need is the political will.
David Crane is the president of NRG, an energy company. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/opinion/solar-panels-for-every-home.html?_r=0

This Isn’t Waht Democracy Looks Like, by Robert W. McChesney, Monthly Reivew November 2012, On the brink of the 2012 presidential election, and without considering that electoral contest itself, it is useful to comment on the state of U.S. democracy. The most striking lesson from contemporary U.S. election campaigns is how vast and growing the distance is between the rhetoric and pronouncements of the politicians and pundits and the actual deepening, immense, and largely ignored problems that afflict the people of the United States. The trillion dollars spent annually on militarism and war is off-limits to public review and debate.1 Likewise the corporate control of the economy, and the government itself, gets barely a nod. Stagnation, the class structure, growing poverty, and collapsing social services are mostly a given, except for the usual meaningless drivel candidates say to get votes. The billions spent (often by billionaires) on dubious and manipulative advertisements—rivaled for idiocy only by what remains of “news” media campaign coverage—serve primarily to insult the intelligence of sentient beings. Mainstream politics seem increasingly irrelevant to the real problems the nation faces; or, perhaps more accurately, mainstream politics is a major contributing factor to the real problems the nation faces.
…..
Depoliticization” is the term to describe this phenomenon; it means making political activity unattractive and unproductive for the bulk of the citizenry. This is, to varying degrees, an important and underappreciated issue for all democratic societies where there are pronounced economic inequalities. It moved to the fore when all the great battles over suffrage were won and there was universal adult suffrage. Scholars have pointed out that some, perhaps much, of the impetus for the creation of the field of “public relations” a century ago was to lessen popular understanding of and opposition to corporate power, and to discourage informed popular participation in politics. The idea was to “take the risk out of democracy” in a society where the majority of potential voters may not be sympathetic to the idea that government’s job was first and foremost to serve the needs of big business and the wealthy few.59 An omnipresent commercial culture that emphasizes consumption over civic values, and a lack of organized political power, go a long way toward greasing the wheels for depoliticization. Twentieth-century voting turnout among eligible adults in the United States has been low compared to much of the rest of the world and its own nineteenth-century standard. It has been a generally depoliticized society, even before Dollarocracy.

…..
The United States of the past generation is a classic example of a depoliticized society: most people know little or nothing about politics and are estranged from it except at a superficial level. Young people are constantly reminded it is not “cool” to be political, and the point of life is to take care of number one. The evidence suggests that most people, especially working-class and poor people, have no influence over politicians and policy, so to the extent people understand their real status they will lose incentive to participate. Regardless of which party wins it seems like nothing ever changes that much, at least for the better; elections are often fought over symbolic issues only loosely related to actual policies or actual political values. It is a game played by and for elites, where tangible issues of import can be in play. But it is a spectator event for others, who are seen by the elites as objects to be manipulated. http://monthlyreview.org/2012/11/01/this-isnt-what-democracy-looks-like

http://www.sungazette.net/arlington/news/political-notes-edition/article_be320002-2d9c-11e2-90a8-001a4bcf887a.html

GREEN PARTY GETS A BOOST FROM VOTERS, BUT CAN IT GO HIGHER?
Green Party County Board candidate Audrey Clement wasn’t catapulted into office on Nov. 6, but her double-digit showing in the race did raise the bar for future Green candidates.

While Clement’s 12.4-percent share of the vote was well below Democrat Libby Garvey (58.2 percent) and Republican Matt Wavro (28 percent), it roughly doubled the percentage of the vote Green candidates have received in previous County Board races when both Democrats and Republicans were on the ballot.

The better-than-before results for the Greens lead to two questions: Who is voting for the party’s candidates, and can the Greens take that vote percentage higher?

Conventional wisdom suggests that, barring some anomaly in a given race, Democrats in Arlington usually can count on between 57 and 63 percent of the vote in general elections, with other parties splitting the rest.

Garvey’s victory was on the lower end of that spectrum, so some of Clement’s votes probably came from disaffected Democrats. But with Republicans held to less than 30 percent of the vote in the race, Greens also may have picked up votes there, too.

“Clearly, most of my votes came from independents rather than Democrats, as Libby Garvey actually increased her margin of victory by 9 percentage points over the March special election,” said Clement, who was making her third bid in 12 months for County Board.

“I believe most of my vote came from those who are unhappy with the status quo, specifically the county’s reckless and irresponsible capital-spending program. So the question is, why the independents didn’t vote for Wavro?”

Clement said. “I think the answer lies in the uneasiness of many voters over the lack of affordable housing, and their general agreement with me that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are addressing the issue adequately.”

While their candidates’ fortunes have been trending upward, challenges facing the Arlington Green Party include the lack of significant political infrastructure and lack of “bench strength” from which the party could draw future candidates.

The Arlington Green Party largely has focused its efforts on County Board races; when there have been no Republicans challenging Democratic County Board candidates, the Green Party has won up to 32 percent of the vote. The party occasionally has supported candidates for School Board and House of Delegates.

The national Green Party did have a presidential candidate on the ballot in Virginia, but Jill Stein received just 0.23 percent of the vote statewide and just 0.31 percent in Arlington. The vote for Stein in Arlington was about one-third the total received for Libertarian Gary Johnson, representing a party that doesn’t have a significant local presence in Northern Virginia.