Seminary Hill Association
Alexandria, Virginia
- Details
The city is moving forward with its Zoning for Housing initiative. The city cites historical restrictive deed covenants on single-family homes and zoning provisions that were written out of Alexandria's code decades ago as the principal reasons for making changes.
Notwithstanding this canard, the city is moving forward to, among other things, allow multiple apartment units to be built on single-family home (SFH) properties and targeting SFH neighborhoods like those in Seminary Hill, North Ridge, Clover College Park, Seminary West, Brookville-Seminary Valley, Seminary Ridge, Rosemont, Strawberry Hill and Taylor Run.
City officials are also moving to eliminate time-honored practice of involving citizens on zoning and small area plan committees. Your civic association will be fighting for greater citizen involvement in zoning and planning changes and against the new provisions that will adversely affect many of our neighborhoods in Seminary Hill. We ask all of you to raise your voices with city council and officials of the Planning & Zoning and Housing departments. Stay abreast of these issues and stay involved.
There is one other thing you should do. While restrictive covenants based on race were ruled unenforceable by the US Supreme Court in 1948 and outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, they still may exist on your deed. According to a local historian, if you own a single-family home and it was built prior to 1963, a restrictive racial covenant, although totally illegal and unenforceable, may still exist on your deed. If you find that to be the case, here is the link to the form you can complete and file with the Alexandria City Clerk to remove the covenant: https://www.vacourts.gov/forms/circuit/cc1508.pdf
Consistent with our values, let's make sure that Seminary Hill is completely free of restrictive racial covenants!
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Seminary Hill Zoom Meeting
April 13, 2023
Emmanuel Church-on-the Hill, 3606 Seminary Road
Meeting ID: 997 180 0975
