May 12, 2026 Land Use Policy Committee - May 12, 2026

meeting
Fairfax County Board Committees 1h 23m 4 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 2 days ago official recording ↗
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What is the purpose of the Housing Task Force Action Plan presented today?

Kathy L. Smith 0:03
their seats please, I'd appreciate it. I thought I was gonna. I y you know the story about me doing that to my Sunday school teacher, don't you? Yes. I do. Oh my god. It just came up in a family discussion yesterday.
Kathy L. Smith 0:47
Okay, it's still good morning. We've had a great discussion in the first work session. I'm gonna call the land use policy committee meeting to order. Uh we have our minutes from the last meeting. If I don't hear any corrections, those will stand as accept it. Okay, I am gonna keep us moving and turn it over to uh Jen Miller to get us uh kicked off on the Housing Task Force Action Plan overview.
Jen Miller 1:13
All right, excellent. Uh Jen Miller, Deputy County Executive for Community Development. And for those of you who were in the prior meeting, of course the board, um, that kind of laid the foundation for the need for Fairfax County to focus on economic competitiveness. Out of that August board matter arose uh housing element that then of course was developed into the September ninth board matter on housing initiatives to increase production and sustain our economic advantage. Housing is a key element to economic competitiveness. We've heard this from our business community and the board knows this well. So one of the key elements in enabling our economic competitiveness is to address housing. We stood up a housing task force, and Ben Aiken has been the lead project manager for the housing task force.
Jen Miller 1:54
So I will turn it over to him as well as the other subgroup leads that we have at the table who will brief their various elements. Last meeting was a lot of information. There's a lot of information here. We did make public on the website that Tony will talk about later, the housing task force action plan. It's that's really more of an internal county document because it includes a lot of like uh the ha the um Economic Opportunities Task Force. It includes the elements of what is the initiative, what are our objectives, what are the key performance indicators, what is our action timeline, and then we have a very complicated GAMP chart that measures the timeline for that. So that will be our internal document.
Jen Miller 2:32
This is intended to be an overview of those key elements that uh we'll address today that are supplemented by the Housing Task Force report. So with that, over to you, Ben.
Unknown 2:41
Thank you, Jen. Do I have my presentation? I'll just wait for that. Thank you.
Ben Aiken 2:48
As Jen said, my name is Ben Aiken. I'm the Deputy Director for the Department of Code Compliance. And for the past eight months, I've been serving as the project lead for the Housing Task Force, or what you may hear me refer to as HTF during the presentation. I'm joined by our task force agency leads, thank you, who will be providing details on a selection of key initiatives later in the presentation. The work of the task force reflects the efforts of over 50 senior staff, dozens of participants from the private development community, and input from planning. Commissioners and members of the Board of Supervisors. Eight months ago when I was asked to lead this task force, I think some people wondered why the Deputy Director for Code Compliance was do what was what I was doing managing a housing production initiative.
Ben Aiken 3:25
Perhaps that was a fair question. Uh but to me, the connection between housing production and maintaining compliance in our existing buildings is very clear. Over the last eight months I've been involved with HTF, my agency has investigated more than 50 properties where owners were either creating multiple dwellings, where there should only be one, or allowing over-occupancy beyond one family limitations. And these are often unpermitted and unsafe situations that we come across. DCC cited at least another 250 properties with various maintenance violations. Over the same period, and I know we're catching only a fraction of those. Some might call that lawbreaking for profit or just the expected results of deferred maintenance, but I don't see it that way.
Ben Aiken 4:02
Fundamentally, what I see in many cases is people under pressure trying to solve housing problems the market isn't solving for them.

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