Developments like Penrose Square are already dotting Columbia Pike, which could be big trouble for the area's older, affordable apartment houses. (Photo: TBD Staff)

After a year and a half of study and meetings, a group of Columbia Pike residents and county planners are finally reaching agreement on how to hang on to their enviable mixed-income neighborhood.

That, it turns out, wasn’t the hard part. The challenge will be in finding ways to achieve what will likely be very aggressive affordable housing targets.

A citizen group putting together the plan under the Columbia Pike Housing and Land Use Study has set a goal of maintaining 4,900 affordable rental apartments in the area through 2040. That’s more than three-quarters of the current stock of affordable, market rate apartments — those that are not income restricted but are still affordable.

But mechanisms don’t necessarily exist in the county to preserve this much affordable housing in the face of redevelopment, says Inta Malis, an Arlington planning commissioner who also chaired the working group charged with coming up with Columbia Pike’s affordable housing goals.

“We were willing to present to you goals that today may be infeasible, because we didn't want to limit what we can do in the future,” she told the larger plenary committee behind the study Monday night.

The county will not have enough units in its affordable housing coffers to preserve this number of affordable apartments on its own; nor will density trade-offs work everywhere. “The biggest challenge is money,” County Board Vice Chairman Chris Zimmerman said. “The rising land values, which is the reason there's a problem in the first place.”

Yet development is already underway, and the potential for more is exponential. Two new high-end residential buildings have opened in the past few years, and two more are under construction on Columbia Pike. "We've learned, you're not going to be able to keep things as they are if you do nothing," Zimmerman added.

The committee plans to hold a “housing tools forum” in November where other experts and groups from around the country can share their success stories and identify other potential methods of preserving affordable housing.

The draft of the affordable housing goals calls for “retaining or replacing 100 percent” of the units currently affordable for households making 60 percent of the average median income for the greater D.C. area. For a family of four, that means an income of just over $60,000 per year.

It also calls for preserving about half of the apartments affordable to people in a slightly higher income bracket, meaning between $60,000 and $80,000 for a family of four. For affordable ownership opportunities, the group calls for Columbia Pike to “increase the number and type of ownership units available and priced for households” earning anywhere from 60 percent to 120 percent of the average income.

These goals will be "put to the test" by a number of economic and housing consultants over the next few months to see if it's even possible, Malis says. The group is aiming to finish its housing strategy and identify a number of ways to implement it by the spring of 2011.