December 4, 2025 PC Land Use Process Review Committee - Dec 04, 2025

meeting

Fairfax County Planning Commission 47 min 8 speakers 5 agenda items transcribed 7 days ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What is the purpose of the Land Use Process Review Committee meeting?

Candice Bennett 0:00

We are now convening our second committee meeting of the evening, the Land Use Process Review Committee, and we're joined by several members of our fabulous Zoning and Ordinance Division to talk to us tonight. Do we need to do introductions? I think we all know each other. Yeah? Okay. Then I'm going to let Ms. Bishop and Ms. Judge take it away.

Casey Judge 0:26

Great. Thank you so much. Good evening, everyone. Good to see you all again. Casey Judge with the Zoning Administration Division, and I'm joined by my co-lead, Carmen Bishop, and we are here to talk to you about Accessory Living Units, or ALUs for short. So this topic is a priority one item on our Zoning Ordinance Work Program. It was carried over from the previous fiscal year's work program. And so ALUs were last heavily modified as part of our Zoning Ordinance Modernization Project, or ZMOD, back in 2021. And since then, we've issued two status reports on the accessory living units. So you will probably see some concepts that are familiar from those status reports where we did analysis and we provided some general concepts and recommendations within those reports as well.

Casey Judge 1:14

So what is an accessory living unit or ALU? Unlike other jurisdictions, we do not call them ADUs or accessory dwelling units because we have our ADUs, our affordable dwelling units. So we have a different acronym you'll be hearing throughout the presentation for ALU. So an ALU is a secondary dwelling that is in conjunction with and clearly subordinate to a single family detached dwelling. So that detached distinction is important here. So right now we only allow them with detached. No townhouses, no duplexes can have either an interior or a detached ALU at this point. So an ALU does have to have the provisions for eating, sleeping, living, and sanitation. And it does have to be occupied by somebody as their principal residence as well.

Casey Judge 1:58

So we see a variety of occupants in ALUs ranging from in-laws to au pairs to renters. So the zoning ordinance does have a variety of standards currently. We do allow interior ALUs meeting set standards to be approved with an administrative permit, or an AP for short. We also have a special permit option to either modify some of those standards for interior ALUs or for detached ALUs. Now, in order to apply for that special permit with the Board of Zoning Appeals, you do need a minimum lot size of two acres. So that is obviously something that we will talk about a little bit later to something we want to look at. So for both sets of ALUs, interior and detached, they are limited to two people and two bedrooms as a maximum, and those standards cannot be modified.

Casey Judge 2:48

The interior is limited to 800 square feet or 40% of the size of the dwelling, whichever is less, and detached has a 1,200 square foot maximum cap. Now, the 800 square feet can be modified by the BZA with special permit, where the 1,200 square feet cannot currently. We have other standards as well. Just wanted to mention a couple others. We do require either the principal dwelling or the ALU to be owner occupied. We also have limitations on newly proposed external entrances and curb cuts, and that was really to get at preventing a duplex look, as well as the requirement to provide one additional off-street parking space beyond what is required by the zoning ordinance. we also have a requirement that that permit whether it be administrative or a special permit be renewed after the first two years and then we look at you know have they complied with the standards of the zoning ordinance there's no violations and then we can re-issue it and renew it for succeeding five-year periods

Unknown 3:46

since the ale regulations went into effect in 2021 we've had 203 ALU is approved by an administrative permit. This includes 134 that are currently in that approved status and then an additional 69 that were approved but have since expired following their initial two-year approval period. Now we do send applicants a notice and a reminder that it's time to renew before they expire. We also have 24 ALUs that have been approved by special permit.