The weather forecast predicts a partly sunny day with a high temperature of about 63°F accompanied by a northwest wind blowing at 6 to 8 mph. At night, the skies will be partly cloudy with a low temperature of around 47°F and a gentle northwest breeze of 3 to 5 mph. See more from Weather.gov.
💡 Quote of the Day
“Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.” – Stanley McChrystal
🌅 Tonight’s sunset
Thanks for reading! Feel free to discuss the day’s happenings in the comments.
Tesla crash at Columbia Pike playground (photo courtesy Julia M.)
Tesla crash at Columbia Pike playground (photo courtesy Marcio S.)
Tesla crash at Columbia Pike playground (photo courtesy Marcio S.)
Tesla crash at Columbia Pike playground (photo courtesy Marcio S.)
Tesla crash at Columbia Pike playground (photo courtesy Marcio S.)
The driver of a Tesla careened down a hill and smashed into a playground over the weekend along Columbia Pike.
The crash happened around 1:45 p.m. Saturday on the grounds of the Wildwood Park apartments, on the 5500 block of Columbia Pike.
No other vehicles were involved, according to police, and no injuries were reported.
“The preliminary investigation indicates the driver was attempting to park in the 3400 block of S. Jefferson Street when the vehicle proceeded down a hill and struck a fence, wall and utility pole,” Arlington County police spokeswoman Ashley Savage tells ARLnow.
Scanner traffic suggests the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y with Maryland temporary tags — overturned at least once while going down the hill but came to rest upright.
The playground, which is “usually packed with kids,” was empty amid a steady rain, a tipster tells ARLnow.
The driver, a 59-year-old Maryland woman, “was issued a summons for reckless driving,” according to Savage. She works at a nearby senior living facility, online records suggest.
Police car at night (file photo courtesy Kevin Wolf)
Arlington County police are investigating shots fired in the Green Valley neighborhood.
The gunfire rang out around 10 p.m. Friday night near The Shelton apartment complex. No injuries were reported but a bullet damaged a window in a nearby residential building.
SHOTS FIRED, 2025-10100198, 3200 block of 24th Street S. At approximately 10:01 p.m. on October 10, police were dispatched to the report of possible shots heard in the area. During the course of the investigation, officers recovered evidence confirming shots had been fired in the area and property damage to the window of a residential building was located. No injuries were reported. There are no suspect(s) descriptions. The investigation is ongoing.
The same block was the scene of a shooting in November 2024. The teen victim of that shooting survived his serious injuries.
The Arlington County Board during its Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023 meeting (via Arlington County)
A document envisioning the long-term development of most of Langston Blvd is one step closer to adoption.
On Saturday, the Arlington County Board set public hearings by the Planning Commission on Monday, Oct. 30 and the Board on Saturday, Nov. 11, when members will hear from the community and deliberate the document, dubbed Plan Langston Blvd. The Board will ultimately decide whether to adopt it.
Board members unanimously approved the request to advertise hearings next month after nearly 50 people spoke and the Board asked questions for about an hour and a half.
Renderings of Cherry Hill Road in front of the Lee Heights Shops in the draft Plan Langston Blvd document (via Arlington County)
Board member Matt de Ferranti proposed and received majority support for two revisions before the final document was passed. One is intended to hasten a review of planning for the East Falls Church and Cherrydale neighborhoods and the other removes language calling for the consolidation of community centers.
East Falls Church and Cherrydale were excluded from Plan Langston Blvd because they already have neighborhood plans that have yet to be fully realized. Since this decision was made, however, some community members, Planning Commissioners and County Board members have stressed these communities need a second look — sooner rather than later — as they can help the plan meet its own affordable housing goals.
“This is a burning priority for me and so, this almost rises to level of office vacancy rate for me,” de Ferranti said, acknowledging that in the case of East Falls Church the county will have to keep applying pressure to VDOT and Metro while relying on private developers, too.
“What you see here is an attempt to signal to the community that these two parts of the plan should be considered sooner,” de Ferranti said.
County Manager Mark Schwartz said he will “never say no to the Board” on a request like this but it will require them to reconsider how county staffers prioritize their work.
“I’m working right now on [a budget]… that’s going to have cuts in it. I’m not going to have additional resources available. The team available here, once they finish up with this, they have two to three things to turn their attention to,” he said. “If you want to find additional resources, absolutely, we will move it higher up on the list, but that means something has to move lower on the list.”
The plan’s most recent iteration said community centers should be consolidated to better address the needs of a growing population, a goal espoused in the county’s Public Spaces Master Plan.
De Ferranti, however, argued that the goal is not in the county’s best interest because of the expected population increase. The lone dissenter to de Ferranti’s motion, Board Chair Christian Dorsey, countered that consolidation will not mean a reduction in services.
The corridor currently has 1,936 market-rate and committed affordable units, said county planner Natasha Alfonso-Ahmed. That includes 1,088 that are affordable to people earning 80% of the area median income (AMI) and 900 are affordable at 60% AMI.
The plan aims to increase the number of affordable units to 3,200-3,800 units by 2075, focusing especially on units affordable up to 60% AMI. Some argue the county does not have the tools to get there nor does this plan consider people who earn 30% AMI or less.
“Many of these low-income residents provide our community with essential services — child and health care, restaurants and retail, maintenance and construction and more,” wrote Anne Vor der Bruegge, the director of grants and initiatives at the nonprofit Arlington Community Foundation, which has also advocated for deeper affordable housing elsewhere in the county.
“If we want to create a truly equitable Langston Boulevard corridor for the future, we need to proactively support creating and preserving homes that serve the lowest income residents,” she said.
Marriage plans never include divorce, but if your relationship needs rearranging, Aether Mediation stands ready to mediate your divorce and finalize your Separation Agreement. Aether’s virtual divorce mediation typically takes 4 hours of active sessions and costs a fraction of the cost of the national average of $80,000 plus for acrimonious separations.
We provide Divorce and Family mediations virtually from the convenience of your kitchen table in a process perfected over the last two years.
Fear nearly prevented Scott Love from starting his data analytics firm, Arlington-based Lovelytics.
“I always wanted to start a company… There was always an excuse not to do it, like, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough money. I don’t know how to do that,” he shared during a panel hosted by Rosslyn-based tech acceleratorUnstuck Labs in August.
While Love admitted these were real challenges, he said navigating them became easier after tapping into Arlington’s business community.
“From the time I was one person… Arlington made me feel like I was going to be a 6,000-person company,” he said.
Anything Love needed, whether it was advice or introductions to investors, he said people made themselves available to help.
Natalia Micheletti, who co-founded Pryze, an app that encourages employees to minimize phone use at work, agrees.
“It just felt like we had a million opportunities,” Micheletti, the CEO of the Arlington-based startup, said during the panel.
Despite starting companies in different fields, both founders faced similar obstacles, including fundraising and managing employees effectively. They said talking through their struggles with startup founders who had been there before helped them persevere.
Unstuck Labs CEO Wa’il Ashshowwaf (left) speaks to local startup founders Natalia Micheletti and Scott Love during a panel discussion in Rosslyn (staff photo by James Jarvis)
For instance, Love and Micheletti noted securing investors was a “draining” process. Micheletti said she heard “No” from 100 people before finally getting that “Yes.”
“And being able to take feedback from all these people who are in the industry, or you think no more than you, without losing your essence, without losing, like what’s making you special and what made you like be crazy in the first place to start this one thing… is hard,” she said.
But Micheletti said she and co-founder Tim Hylton were able to push through that wall with support from their peers in the start world and Unstuck Labs, which gives founders like Micheletti mentorship, office space and investment.
“I think what’s keeping us here, other than Unstuck Labs… I think it is the roots that we’re planning in the community as well,” she said.
Love said pitching to investors was hard work but another challenged he faced, as his company grew, was refining his leadership skills.
“I think one of the weirdest things for me when I started, it was like, you change your title, and all of a sudden people care a little bit more about what you say and trust you… It’s a completely uncomfortable position,” he said.
Love, who oversees a team of 82, said talking with other Arlington founders made him realize the difference between delegating and leading.
“And I thought I was delegating. But in reality, I was just having them do all the work and come back to me and ask for approval. And that gets me nowhere,” Love said.
Instead, Love said he needed to learn to step back and trust his employees to handle tasks independently.
The mentorship the two founders received from Arlington’s business community appears to be paying off.
Pryze hired its third employee and plans to expand its services after raising nearly $1 million in venture capital, Micheletti previously told ARLnow.
Meanwhile, venture capital firms Databricks Venture and Interlock Equity made “strategic investments” in Lovelytics this June. These investments, for undisclosed amounts, will help the company deepen its expertise healthcare, media, financial services, retail, and manufacturing, Love said in a blog post.
“This investment will accelerate the growth of Lovelytics’ team and expand its technical offerings related to enterprise data environment creation, AI and [language learning models], business intelligence, data science, and cloud infrastructure,” a press release said.
