February 10, 2026 Housing Committee - Feb 10, 2026

meeting

Fairfax County Board Committees 1h 6m 5 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 2 days ago official recording ↗

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What is the purpose of the February 10, 2026 Housing Committee meeting and who is chairing it?

Unknown 0:02

I used to have the power of when I was coaching for. All right, we're gonna get started. Welcome back from lunch, everybody. So I want to welcome everyone to this first meeting of the housing committee for 2026, and my first meeting is committee chair, so very grateful for that. Just a couple things before we move on to presentations. Similar to earlier, I want to first thank Chairman McKay for his faith in me. I know this is a huge priority for the board, and so I'm really honored to be chairing this committee. And a really big thank you to Supervisor Palchek also for her years of outstanding stewardship leading the housing committee. As we all have talked about, housing affordability is at the core of many challenges that our community faces today and a huge impact for two reasons and two imperatives: an economic imperative, an economic development imperative to have a wide range of housing so people can live and work here, and a moral imperative grounded in our commitment to one fair facts.

Unknown 1:01

And so with those two imperatives in mind, I'm really appreciative of the board matter brought by Chairman McKay in twenty twenty five. Um regarding housing initiatives to increase housing production, as well as the twenty twenty two board matter to set a goal of ten thousand affordable housing units. Those are all really, really great initiatives to address our housing issues. And I'm deeply excited to work on this very fundamental matter. So today we will have two presentations led by our housing director Tom Fleetwood. And I know he's supporting his work by um Deputy Director Anna Shapiro. And director of real estate and community development finance, Callie Selt Seltzer. I hope I said your name right.

Unknown 1:36

The first presentation will feature highlights of the recently completed housing needs assessment, which I'm gonna anticipate is gonna generate a lot of discussion today. And the second presentation will provide updates on the work towards a ten thousand unit affordable housing goal and the work of the interagency staff housing task force. So before Mr. Fleetwood begins, does anyone have any comments on the summary of the July twenty twenty five housing committee meeting? Seeing none, I'll turn to Mr. Fleetwood for your presentation. Thank you. Madam Chairman, uh good afternoon. Tom Fleetwood with the Department of Housing and Community Development. Uh and uh on behalf of the staff, I'd like to thank you to uh and welcome you to uh to this work, and we're uh very uh very much looking forward to working with you going forward.

Unknown 2:20

Thank you. Uh today's uh today for today's agenda, we're going to be addressing two issues. Uh as the Chairman said, uh highlights of our housing needs assessment, uh, as well as high. highlights of our progress on our housing initiatives and recognizing that there's probably going to be uh a significant discussion on the first, I'd like to go ahead and uh get started. Uh I will note that in addition to Ms. Shapira and Ms. Seltzer, we're also joined by Philip Cash of HRNA Associates that worked on the um the housing needs assessment, as well as Megan Van Damme of the Department of Housing and Community Development. Right. So um just taking a step back uh in terms of where we stand on this issue, uh the challenge of housing affordability is a national issue.

Unknown 3:08

It's a state issue and it is uh especially an acute challenge here in Fairfax County. Uh as the board is aware, housing for all income levels, a healthy housing market is essential to our economic success and affordability, uh for job creation, retention, s and success for low and moderate income families as well. The headline concern here truly is that not addressing the challenges in our market uh could lead to an out migration of people and jobs. And that's why this is so terribly important for our for our community. Go ahead to the next one. Um we have essentially two housing markets, one for home ownership and one for rental. And neither of those markets is meeting the needs in our economy, especially for low and moderate income working families.