According to the Washington Business Journal, the pace of home building in Alexandria, a Northern Virginia city that’s in the direct line of fire from the effects of Amazon HQ2, is keeping up, so far. The latest numbers come from the city’s recently released fiscal 2019 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. The city added an estimated 2,300 residents in the last year, along with 2,900 total residential units – mostly rentals.
The city’s population is likely to swell further as Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) continues to build its second headquarters in Arlington and Virginia Tech embarks on its $1 billion innovation campus in Potomac Yard — not to mention all of the ancillary development expected to follow those projects.
And yet Alexandria, according to the CAFR, now registers fewer single-family homes than in 2015. In fiscal 2019, it counted 21,683 single-family housing units — a category that includes detached, semi-detached, rowhouses and condo townhouses. That’s down 827 units from 2015.
During that same five-year period, the number of apartments has climbed by nearly 8,000, from 32,209 to 40,188 units. Just in the last year, the city’s apartment inventory jumped by more than 3,700 units, and it will continue to grow rapidly as redevelopments in Potomac Yard and Eisenhower East come online in the next several years.
