The challenge of providing affordable housing in Fairfax County spans decades. Amid policy sparring and power conflicts among local developers, politicians, and officials, racialized policies were allowed to continue guiding county land use regulations. As the county population shot up following World War II, debates raged over whether and where to permit the building of more apartments, trailer parks, and manufactured homes. The single constant thread emerging from the county’s mid-twentieth-century land use battles was a lack of commitment to affordable housing, leaving its most economically disadvantaged residents, White and Black, to endure precarious circumstances mostly invisible to county officials.

In the fray among traditional public and private interests, including planners, elected officials, land developers, farmers and business, a new type of faction emerged in the mid-century, born of suburbanization itself: citizen-led homeowner and civic associations. However, another group of residents, despite deep roots in Fairfax, was sidelined. Owing to their communities’ antiquity and often informally structured origins, many Black proprietors lacked formal deeds. Certainly, they lacked access to expensive attorneys and, due to decades of disenfranchisement, political influence to advocate for their needs.