Kadija Warsame was sitting on a chair outside her townhouse on a quiet Vienna cul-de-sac looking through her mail and watching three of her four children play on the front lawn. Three children's bicycles lay at her feet.
"It's a good place," she said of the neighborhood. "Quiet. The area has nice schools."
Warsame and her husband, a cab driver, live in Briarcliff II, a public housing project run by the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority. They've lived in the three-bedroom house for eight years and have no plans to move.
"It will be hard to find a place," she said. "It's an expensive area."
Warsame spent two years on waiting lists before she could move in. During that time, her family lived in two bedrooms in Alexandria.
"It's hard," she said. "I used to call [the FCRHA] every month or every other week."
Warsame's neighbor, who declined to give her name, is not as pleased with her townhouse.
"It's not great," she said. "If you are in problems financially, it's OK."
She and her family used to live in Annandale, paying rent in a private development. But they had to move to public housing after her husband developed health problems.
The family has been on the waiting list for federal Section 8 vouchers for four or five years, she said. The voucher would let her move to a private housing development that accepts the federal subsidy. Part of her rent would be paid by the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development (HUD).
"I'm still waiting," she said. "I think they should build more houses. They should build bigger houses."
THESE TWO families are relatively lucky to have found a place to live in a county-owned property. More than 7,000 families are waiting for a spot in public housing.
Affordable housing, notoriously hard to find in Fairfax County, has grown more scarce as the real estate market remains strong.
The trend started in the early 1990s, during the high-tech boom, when professionals flocked to the area. The dot-com economy soured, but the hot housing market it spawned remains strong. The average rental price in Fairfax County was $1,690 a month between 2002 and 2003, according to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors.
This means that property owners who once took part in programs designed to help lower-income families find a place to live are bailing out, renting their units for full market value instead. When the housing market is soft, Section 8 and other vouchers can be attractive to owners because it guarantees them a steady rent. Property owners who participate in the Section 8 program agree to charge tenants 30 percent of their incomes. The rest of the rent comes from HUD, which will pay up to a set amount based on the number of bedrooms. HUD will pay up to $1,154 for a two-bedroom apartment, for example. Families who are categorized as "Very very low income" — $26,100 a year for a family of four - receive priority in the program.
When the market is good, property owners can remodel their complexes and sign leases with renters willing to pay higher rates.
As a result, the county lost 1,030 affordable subsidized units between 1997 and 2002, according to a Department of Housing report. Those units were part of either HUD programs or county programs. More units could also be lost in the next few years. The Department of Housing has identified 353 Section 8 units that may no longer be part of the program when the contract with the property owner expires. An additional 452 units that are kept affordable through a county bond program are also considered at-risk.
In the next 20 years, 2,660 Section 8 units in Fairfax County may leave the program, said Erik Hoffman, director of real estate finance and grants management at the Department of Housing and Community Development. That represents 90 percent of all the stock of Section 8 housing in Fairfax County.
"Once the legal restrictions fall away, the private owners have no motivation other than their profits and their own beliefs," said Hoffman. "We do our best to intervene and appeal to their better angels and offer them other subsidies to maintain those properties."
Meanwhile, unsubsidized units with modest rents have also been disappearing. The number of rentals available to households who make less than half the median income - roughly $43,000 – has decreased 37 percent since 2000, affecting mostly those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
THIS IS A PROBLEM everybody in the county should be concerned about, said Sharon Kelso, director of the nonprofit group United Community Ministries.
The people affected, she said, "are people that we desperately need to have in our work place and these are people that are moving farther and farther away from our work center."
"Imagine your life without these people," she added. "When you want to run in to get the last minute things for your breakfast or your lunch there won't be anyone there to sell you what you need. You go to get gas ... but the gas stations are closing down left and right because they have trouble keeping them staffed with people that are willing to do this kind of work. Sometimes you don't even see them and they're all paid under $25,000 a year."
As affordable housing gets more scarce in Fairfax County, lower-income families move further and further away. Eventually, said Kelso, they will find jobs closer to home and will stop commuting to Fairfax County.
"The problem is even standing still is going to become difficult," said Chris Johnston, executive director of Catholics For Housing, a regional nonprofit based in Manassas.
"I THINK WE HAVE reached in a sense some crisis level," said Supervisor Catherine Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill). "It is a battle that we're fighting out there."
When lower-income families cross county lines in the search for affordable housing, "it changes the dynamic of who we are as a community," said Hudgins. "How do they afford to live in the community and how do we protect some semblance of who we are as a community?"
In an attempt to protect what's left of the county's affordable housing stock, the Department of Housing this month kicked off a program that would make it easier for nonprofit groups to buy up affordable units to make sure they don't get more expensive.
Under the program, the housing department will provide loans to nonprofit groups to help them protect moderately-priced homes.
"Rather than us trying to go out and preserve those units one on one, we're trying to empower nonprofits that already have their own philanthropic mission," said Hoffman.
Johnston said the program is a step in the right direction.
"It's really getting out of hand because no one entity can make it all happen. It needs everybody working together."