Mike Maguire / DCist/WAMU
The neighborhood off of Mount Vernon Ave in Alexandria is a mix of old brick garden-style apartments, new or renovated single-family homes, and the odd duplex. As we walk around, it’s the golden hour, and there’s an end-of-the-day hush: a few cars passing by, and a couple of big shady trees rustling in a light breeze.
“You can like, take a nap in the middle of the road and probably be fine,” says Luca Gattoni-Celli, the founder of the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia. “There’s birds, there’s trees, there’s kids and yoga mats and dogs and all that good stuff. You can walk to the grocery store. It’s extremely desirable.”
“And that comes with a lot of demand,” adds fellow YIMBY Peter Sutherland.
It’s an undeniably nice place, which makes it ripe for questions like: what underlying urban policy makes it so nice, exactly? Gattoni-Celli and Sutherland, unsurprisingly, have plenty of thoughts about that — and about why Del Ray is so expensive as a result.
“But it only comes with demand because we made it illegal in most places,” Gattoni-Celli replies. “We could have this in a lot more places, but we lack imagination.”
“This” is the unique combination of different housing types — garden apartments, townhomes, triplexes, single-family homes, accessory dwelling units — that you can find all over Del Ray, within walking distance of the Braddock Road metro station. It’s also the kind of housing mix Gattoni-Celli, Sutherland, and the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia —...
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