To the editor:

We need to unpack the right lessons from the primary if we are going to wrest our city back from the rampant densification catastrophe toward which its elected government is determinedly driving it.

Opponents of the 301 N. Fairfax St. project turned out their supporters, resulting in the City Hall precinct being the only one Amy Jackson carried, and Steve Peterson broke 100. They connected with arena and Zoning for Housing opponents in promoting Charlotte Scherer, Jimmy Lewis and Jonathan Huskey.

The political establishment backing the winning candidates, however, took those of us struggling against rampant densification very seriously: Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in from special interests, including reportedly $200,000 in union political action committee spending for paid campaigners and glossy door lanyards.

One c a n d i d a t e lamented the difficulty of campaigning against apathy, but those apathetic voters are apathetic mainly because they are content. The alarms many of us are raising are falling on deaf ears. In a city of well-educated transients, abolishing single-family zoning means their single-family houses suddenly become worth more as teardowns for quadruplexes when they sell to move somewhere else for their next job, so why should they be upset? While all the money poured into the primary couldn’t turn them out, imagine if it had.

This is now the third election in which candidates committed to rampant densification have prevailed, each time by a slightly larger margin. Older voters, attached to a vision of Alexandria as a small, intimate city, have been replaced by younger, more transient ones onboard with providing more “vitality” and additional housing to support the employment base the metropolitan area keeps generating. Elements of that employment base seem to be the source of much of the money being poured into the city election.

Einstein’s maxim – “if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, expecting a different outcome is insanity” – means we have to start doing something different. The arena fight taught us that the answers to these challenges lie in Richmond, so the various groups fighting various issues need to pool their resources and go to Richmond seeking election-by-district or proportional representation and protections against manipulating zoning to pack in more people, among other reforms.

While we still need to challenge city hall in court, we also need to stop wasting our time at city hall where we already know what will happen and go someplace that can legislate relief for us.

-Dino Drudi, Alexandria