1. l met a land use activist from the Town of Vienna who spends a lot of time in Reston with Reston friends. He said that the "at risk" neighborhoods are apartment complexes thirty or forty years old. They have reached the age of needing to be refurbished. As apartments, they do not entail any ownership rights in the units, as do, say, single-family dwellings. This makes sense to me, not that I know what can be done about it. It makes sense in that Fairway Apartments, currently before the Reston P and Z Committee for re-development, exactly fits his description. With Fairway re-development Reston is apt to lose a chunk of lower-income, affordable and workforce housing, even though the owner will be required to replace some of the units (not all) that fit this description currently.
2. There's a long waiting list for RA garden plots in Reston. Garden plots contribute to sustainability and should be expanded, yet the coming of Metro makes the expansion quite unlikely, as land values rise and the town core urbanizes. Here's an idea, which I think has been successful in other parts of the country: get re-developpers to permit (perhaps as a proffer?) garden plots on the flat rooftops of their highrises ( office or residential).
I was under the impression that the garden plots were all on RA property. In order for any RA property to be sold there has to be a referendum of the homeowners. That should be enough to protect garden plots. It's part of our open space. People will protect their open space.
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