Consultants outline two-year comprehensive-plan process, ask council to prioritize walkable nodes and mixed housing

Consultants leading Arlington’s comprehensive-plan update presented initial findings and asked the City Council to identify places and policy priorities the plan should advance.

MIG principal Jay Rankins and D'Angelos, a trends analyst with partner firm Nao, told the council the effort — branded Innovate Arlington — is structured as a roughly two-year process that is moving from baseline visioning into a planning and development phase. Rankins said, “we're talking about a 2 year process overall,” and asked council members for input on where the city should direct public and private investment.

The presentation summarized Phase 1 engagement: five steering-committee meetings, about nine stakeholder interviews so far, several focus groups, six community workshops with more than 200 participants and a community questionnaire that had received “over 300 responses” and was expected to reach 400–500. Rankins said the team will begin Phase 2 engagement later this month and will use workshops, pop-ups (including a planned pop-up at UT Arlington), focus groups and a board game-style public exercise called “Growing Better Places” to vet scenarios.

The consultants described several early technical findings from the existing-conditions work. Land-use mapping shows about 45% of Arlington’s land area is single-family residential, parks and open space about 10%, and roughly 6.5% of land was classified as vacant and developable. Rankins noted Arlington is “close to built out” but has pockets of vacant or underused parcels and older building stock — particularly near and east/west of downtown — that could be prioritized for reinvestment or redevelopment.

D'Angelos highlighted economic and demographic trends: steady population growth, rising educational attainment and a diversified employment base that includes aerospace, manufacturing and healthcare. He said commuting patterns show a substantial share of residents continue to travel outside the city for work and that fewer than 1% of commutes use public transit. He added Arlington ranks among the most affordable places in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area for housing, based on 2024 data cited in the trends analysis.

Council members focused questions and comments on housing, walkability and targeted reinvestment. Councilmember Rebecca Vauxhall urged housing “desegregation” by type (mixing housing forms across neighborhoods) and more walkable commercial areas. Councilmember Peel emphasized the city’s “existential” challenge is aging homes from the 1960s–1990s and asked the consultants for actionable policies to attract younger buyers who will renovate older houses. Several council members said they want the plan to identify specific corridors and nodes for higher density and to propose tools to encourage redevelopment of aging commercial strip centers.

Rankins described the team’s “place types” approach — a future-land-use palette that pairs land use with expected form, mobility priorities and infrastructure needs — and said draft place-type palettes and redevelopment scenarios will be produced in Phase 2 for metric testing (e.g., vehicle miles traveled, fiscal impacts, affordability and greenhouse gas implications).

Next steps included a vision-and-goals report summarizing Phase 1 input, a phase-specific engagement strategy to reach underrepresented groups (including youth and high-school outreach), place-type palettes, scenario testing and a fiscal impact analysis of redevelopment scenarios. Rankins said Phase 2 will be the most robust phase for drafting recommendations, and a Phase 3 drafting and public-review period is planned for 2026.

Council members requested more granular data on commuting figures and asked staff to provide additional demographic and market evidence behind assertions about diversity and affordability. Rankins agreed to supply supporting studies and to include cited sources as footnotes in public materials.

The consultants and staff encouraged the council to promote the live community questionnaire at ArlingtonListens.com and noted a pop-up at UT Arlington would occur while classes were in session.

The presentation did not include any formal council actions or votes; it was an informational briefing and a request for direction on priorities that staff and the consultant team will incorporate into the next phase of work.