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Affordable housing dwellers protest law changes
A few years ago, Ezzeldin Ezzeldin was contemplating a move to a bigger house. The Ezzeldins owned a house in the Reston neighborhood of Amberlea, in Great Falls Crossing.Unsure of how the price controls in his neighborhood, put in place to provide affordable housing, would affect his plans to move, Ezzeldin called someone at the county Department of Housing and Community Development.
“They told us not to sell, they said you only have a few more years and than you can sell it for a lot more money,” Ezzeldin recalled. They were wrong.
The county creates low-cost “affordable dwelling units” by binding homeowners with price controlling covenants that restrict the price the homes can be resold for and funnel some of the profits from ADU home sales back to the county.
Due to a confluence of lost or ignored paperwork and miscommunication, Ezzeldin and about 30 of his neighbors have based their lives around the belief that their houses would revert out from under ADU price controls in 2013, allowing the properties to be sold at market price.
“We made life-changing decisions based on that control period. ... What schools to attend, what jobs, whether to stay 10 years or leave now,” Amberlea resident Fernando White said.
Two years ago, the Board of Supervisors changed the zoning laws to extend the covenants on ADU homes to 30 years, expiring in 2036. When notification of that change reached the Amberlea community, homeowners discovered the mess they were in.
It turns out that Ezzeldin's home, along with many of his neighbors' homes, is still under a control period that stretches until 2047. In almost all the cases, the homeowners would be under the 2013 control period if they or the previous owners of their houses had formally filed to have the covenant changed by a series of deadlines.
All the homeowners claim they weren't correctly notified by Fairfax County, pointing to incidents like Ezzeldin's call to the county housing department. The county maintains that notices of changes to the covenants were mailed to every homeowner and advertised in the local newspapers.
“We feel like prisoners in our homes,” White said.
At a recent meeting with the Amberlea homeowners, Hunter Mill District Supervisor Cathy Hudgins (D) was sympathetic to the neighbors' problem but cautious.
“The reality is, they're homeowners, they got the opportunity to make an investment in a house at an affordable price. ... They're still allowed to sell their house, just at the controlled price,” Hudgins said.
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