To hear the Housing Commission, True Ground and a host of others tell it, demolition of the historic Leckey Gardens Apartments to make way for a massive ten story complex in the heart of Waverly Hills is the best thing since the buzzword “affordability”.
Comments At Arlington County Board Meeting, February 21, 2026.
Leckey Gardens redevelopment meets the densification requirements of Plan Langston Blvd., providing more than 200 additional affordable housing units at the site. What’s not to like about that? Surely not the traffic impacts on an already compact residential neighborhood, populated with modest homes, small lots and narrow streets.
The transportation study done for the project dismissed the traffic impacts as inconsequential because the “southbound approach of North Woodstock Street and North Glebe Road operates at failing conditions and will continue to do so in the future with or without the proposed development. (SP #482 / SPLN25-00007- 27 Leckey Gardens Site Plan, GLUP Amendment, and Rezoning)” In other words, since this key intersection is already failing, the addition of 129 cars queuing up during peak periods doesn’t matter.
While the site plan acknowledges that the project will generate an additional 114 students, there is no provision to mitigate the impact on neighborhood schools (Site Plan, p. 35). As for cultural concerns raised by demolition of an architecturally significant property, Arlington never saw an historic property it didn’t want to demolish, just as it never saw a park it didn’t want to pave over.
Witness the demolition of Civil War era Rouse estate and its replacement with a stable of cookie cutter MacMansions on Wilson Blvd. This abomination was done with the blessing of Arlington County Board in 2021, followed shortly thereafter by razing the Victorian era Fellows-McGrath “Memory” house on Washington Blvd. to make way for more cookie cutter MacMansions.
Aside from the Waverly Hills Civic Association, which opposes the scale of the project (Site Plan, p. 39), and C2E2, which objected to the lack of LEED Gold construction (Site Plan, p. 41), the only serious objection came from Housing Commission chair Kellen MacBeth, who was concerned that current residents of Leckey Gardens had not been consulted. MacBeth said: “We’ve got to find a way to get tenant representation — they need to be involved.”
Much as I respect MacBeth’s position, his ask was clearly out of line. As far as the County is concerned,True Ground not only speaks for Leckey Gardens tenants, it speaks for the entire Waverly Hills neighborhood. In a word, True Ground gets what it wants, because that’s how decisions go down in one-party states.