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alexgoyette.bsky.social
Alex Goyette
@alexgoyette.bsky.social
910 followers 740 following 8.3K posts
He/him. Dad x2, Immigration & GBV Advocate, Alexandria Lead at YIMBYs of NoVA. Go Bills.

Personal account only

Sign up for Alx YIMBY action alerts: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/join-yimbys-of-nova
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alexgoyette.bsky.social
Alex Goyette @alexgoyette.bsky.social · 5d
Time for my semi-regular thread on upcoming housing actions & events in Alx! 🧵

Starting off with something for any Virginian: elections are over, now email your state legislators to support statewide housing reforms in the upcoming General Assembly Session!

actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...
Ask Your Delegate & Senator to Support More Homes:
Virginia is short roughly 188,000 homes due to restrictive local zoning rules that limit home construction and prevents affordable homes from being built. This home shortage leads to bidding wars and ...
actionnetwork.org
Reposted by Alex Goyette
hells-beekeepers.bsky.social
i love Alexandria in the fall
November 16, 2025 at 7:02 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
New stickers arrived 😍

Calendar too but she’s in a drawer til new years
A zoning map of Alexandria various local politics joke stickers added around the edges. New stickers include Justin Beaver, Ewald Park Surveys, Del Ray Mafia, and Hazel
November 16, 2025 at 3:24 AM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
There’s not a house in the world that’s worth subjecting myself to 95 regularly

Brought to you by traffic on the way to Dumfries 😭

Build housing in alx so people don’t have to endure this
November 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
alexandriabrief.com
Update: The council approved a master plan amendment, zoning text amendment, and coordinated development district concept plan for several Potomac Yard properties.
Alexandria City Council approves development projects, restaurant expansion in Saturday session
Council unanimously passes office-to-residential conversions and La Pluma outdoor seating permit during morning session, takes recess before tackling remaining agenda items
open.substack.com
November 15, 2025 at 6:23 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
“Thank you for pronouncing Stephen correctly. I am sometimes confused with Steph Curry, but really the only similarity is we both have a great jump shot” 💀

Alas they also share opinions about opposing nearby housing projects but I appreciate the humor

sports.yahoo.com/nbas-steph-c...
And older gentleman in a blue shirt and yellow tie speaks at council
November 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
“I’m here to make sure you hear from someone who works in and loves La Pluma, not just from people who have never stepped foot in the coffee shop”

*side eye that would freeze an active volcano*
alexgoyette.bsky.social Alex Goyette @alexgoyette.bsky.social · 1d
The TEA is STEAMING in this hearing on La Pluma

Speaker alleging that the neighbor opposed to their permit has “fortified his house with cameras like a local Stalinist regime” to monitor the coffee shop and submit every minor violation for the city to issue citations
November 15, 2025 at 4:26 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Happening now
alexgoyette.bsky.social Alex Goyette @alexgoyette.bsky.social · 5d
3/ The Housing 2040 Master Plan process continues, with two virtual meetings for some of the Plan's sub-projects happening in November

On Sat. 11/15, 9:30am, learn about & provide feedback on the Common Interest (Condo) Communities project draft recs:

zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom ...
zoom.us
November 15, 2025 at 2:44 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Dela shares our room
Unless L has a nightmare
Those nights, she keeps watch
A young child sleeps in her bed with lots of stuffed animals. A night light illuminates the room as a black dog sleeps on the floor beside her
November 15, 2025 at 5:46 AM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
alexandriabrief.com
Alexandria’s DASH bus system is carrying 40% more passengers than in 2019, Vice Mayor Sarah Bagley reported Wednesday, part of a regional transit surge that has pushed ridership well beyond pre-pandemic levels.
DASH ridership soars 40% above pre-pandemic levels
Vice Mayor reports regional transit boom at City Council meeting, on same day that officials break ground on Union Station improvements
open.substack.com
November 13, 2025 at 9:02 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
👀 @alyia4alx.com and @yappelbaum.bsky.social will discuss Zoning for Justice and Affordability, hosted by @homeofva.bsky.social at the Lyceum in Old Town

Mon. 12/8, 6:30 - 8:00pm

Event is free but space is limited:
homeofva.org/events/lets-...
Let's Talk About Housing: Zoning for Justice and Affordability - HOME of VA
We'll examine how exclusionary zoning laws artificially constrain housing supply, driving up costs and perpetuatingsegregation. Our panel, including Yoni Applebaum, journalist and deputy executive edi...
homeofva.org
November 13, 2025 at 8:59 PM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
alyia4alx.com
Breaking ground on the new Samuel Madden Homes is a transformational step toward hundreds of new affordable homes for our community. Grateful for every partner making this possible. Learn more: www.alxnow.com/2025/... 📸: James Cullum
November 13, 2025 at 8:00 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
To mitigate rent growth we should increase competition among landlords by...forcing them to cut buildings in half?

alextimes.com/opinion/lett...
Slice the luxury apartment building cake To the editor: We should consider splitting up the apartment building monopolies in Old Town by slicing them vertically. Let me explain. There’s been a construction boom in Old Town lately of so-called luxury apartment buildings. Five new buildings have or are about to be up and running in the Braddock Road Metro area, and on Madison, Montgomery and South Patrick Streets. Combined with existing structures, I count a total of 13 luxury apartment buildings in or planned in the Braddock Road Metro area alone. Meanwhile, despite claims that these buildings will alleviate unaffordability, prices have soared. Of course they have; each of these buildings gets to monopolize their own city block. This gentrifying trend in urban planning has disguised compact development for the ability for fewer landlords to charge higher prices. We see the size and, at first glance, expect relief in rent prices. But this has not occurred. Why does the city expect this to change by continuing to consolidate the rental market with fewer and fewer suppliers? Old Town’s famous city block is the unit by which to measure market competition because the grid is the geographic equivalent of a food hall with cells for vendors. If one vendor is able to take up more physical space at the expense of four others, the relative market power of this single vendor has quadrupled. It’s no different from urban planning. These buildings are here to stay, this is true. Demolishing them would be costly and kneejerk. Working with what we have, the city should consider mandating the sale of these monopolies to a market pool of landlords and developers. The task? Retrofit the interiors of luxury buildings to erect walls and renovate apartment units, so that the finished product looks more akin to several adjacent buildings with several landlords. They would look like downtown streets of King Street or really any main street across the country. This development is tried and true, but modern luxury accelerates price hikes for the benefit of a concentrated class of landlords. By taking a cake knife to these buildings, we fulfill market-based principles of healthy competition. Competition breeds innovation, which is again affirmed in such a strategy because the new cadre of landlords and developers would have to get creative to compete with each other. Renters would benefit from increasing diversification of apartment unit layout, size, style and function. This is opposite of the modern luxury trend that has all but standardized apartment living as cellular and socially defunct, monotonous and institutional. Alexandria has a responsibility to its residents. We all need housing. Affordability is already embedded in that concept – it shouldn’t be the exception. The easiest way to accomplish this human mission is by assessing the problem, monopolizing power and taking the shortest path to solve it, by increasing supplier competition. -James Clark,
November 13, 2025 at 6:49 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Relevant to this: the regional Visualize 2050 transportation plan acknowledges that even with $30bn invested in roadway expansion (2x as much as transit), traffic is going to worsen in the region
maureencoffeyva.bsky.social Maureen Coffey (Arlington, VA) @maureencoffeyva.bsky.social · 3d
3) the least expensive market (PWC) was 62% of Arlington’s $ in 2019. Now it’s only 78% of the $

When people say “young families should just move further out/somewhere cheaper”…where? & at what cost? If you’re paying 75% as much and spending 100% more time in traffic on 66/95…why would you do that?
November 13, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
maureencoffeyva.bsky.social
This slide from BrightMLS says so much

1) at the median, Arlington is now LESS expensive than Fairfax and Loudoun county, but about the same as Alexandria - hazard a guess this is bc arl&alx have lower priced condos mixed in vs almost exclusively SFH in the exurbs

2) everything is more expensive
November 13, 2025 at 2:43 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
great article touching on a few of the pro-housing reforms we'll be supporting this session - though i wasnt aware of that Thomas legislation guarding against litigation 👀

link to email your reps in support:
actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...
November 13, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
NEW: @propublica.org investigated the Chicago apartment raid where kids were zip-tied and citizens detained for hours. They find:

- NONE of the arrested were criminally charged
- NO evidence the building was "filled with TdA terrorists."
- ZERO legitimate reason for DHS to rappel from a Blackhawk.
As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited to film the raid. Next to Caicedo, masked Border Patrol agents inspected another man’s tattoos and asked him if he belonged to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group. Until that moment, Caicedo’s only interaction with law enforcement in his two-and-a-half years in the United States had been a traffic stop two weeks earlier for driving without a license or insurance, according to the records we reviewed. Chicago police had run a background check on him and found no prior arrests, no warrants and no evidence that he was in a gang. Caicedo said he had a pending asylum application, a steady job at a taco joint and a girlfriend whose daughter attended elementary school across the street. None of that mattered. The U.S. government paraded him and his neighbors in front of the cameras and called their arrests a spectacular victory against terrorism. But later, after the cameras had gone, prosecutors didn’t charge Caicedo with a crime. They didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist. And after a brief hearing in immigration court, the government sent him back to the country he had fled nine years earlier. “I lost everything,” he said in a phone interview from his mother’s home in the Venezuelan city of Valencia. “For those fools, everyone from Venezuela is a criminal.”
November 13, 2025 at 2:08 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Title of my memoir
beckyhammer.bsky.social Becky Hammer @beckyhammer.bsky.social · 3d
Don't worry about it, he's just mad about zoning
November 13, 2025 at 4:00 AM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
It’s a shame that our cash-lite society has reduced the bliss of finding a crisp bill on the sidewalk

But I just found a full roll of dog poop bags on the trail and that’s pretty close
November 13, 2025 at 1:58 AM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
hells-beekeepers.bsky.social
what a pleasant time to be literate
November 13, 2025 at 12:15 AM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
kirkmcpike.bsky.social
Today, the lawsuit against the City's Zoning for Housing policies was dismissed by the courts. This is a great victory for those who need more affordable and better housing in Alexandria, and the many Alexandrians who advocated for these policies — which are a start, not an end, to our efforts.
Statement on the Zoning for Housing Decision by Councilman R. Kirk McPike: “The decision by the court to throw out the lawsuit against Alexandria’s Zoning for Housing ordinances is a victory for the people of our City. Bringing new housing supply — both committed affordable and market rate — to the market is the only way to slow the rise in housing prices. A more livable and affordable Alexandria is possible if we commit ourselves to expanding the housing options available to our residents. The passage of Zoning for Housing in 2023 was a vital first step, but more must be done to ensure that every Alexandrian has a high-quality and affordable place to call home.”
November 13, 2025 at 12:24 AM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
My shows on

(After I get the girls down, anyway)
ryanbelmore.bsky.social Ryan Belmore @ryanbelmore.bsky.social · 3d
Got my iced coffee and ready to go.

If you can't make it to City Council’s Legislative Meeting in person, you can watch it here apps.alexandriava.gov/Calendar/Det.... 7 p.m. Start time.
City Council Chambers at Alexandria City Hall
November 12, 2025 at 11:53 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Housing advocates celebrate indeed 🎉

I’m reheating some soup for dinner
November 12, 2025 at 10:38 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
“We’re excited to start on the next chapter of housing reform, which should include the launch of Zoning for Housing’s promised second phase” - me
November 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Alex Goyette
ryanbelmore.bsky.social
Case file just updated to "hearing order pending". I'm told by a source that I'll have something official tonight on this.
ryanbelmore.bsky.social Ryan Belmore @ryanbelmore.bsky.social · 4d
FYI - I'm aware of the Zoning for Housing case at Alexandria Circuit Court this morning. I've reached out to both parties for comments and additional information. Court documents have not been updated with the decision. Will follow up when I hear something official.
November 12, 2025 at 7:51 PM
alexgoyette.bsky.social
Item 7 - City Council General Updates Watch Party tonight
Alexandria City Council Docket for the 11/12 meeting including Item 7: City Council General Updates
November 12, 2025 at 7:07 PM