(Reading time: 9 minutes. Written to the city council.)
Imagine you’re planning a lavish themed gala. You obsess over every detail. The driveway, decorated with torches and flower stands, valets dressed in period attire. The dining hall, with its linens, centerpieces and place settings specified to the smallest escargot fork. A small dance orchestra inside, complemented by a string quartet on the outdoor patio. An elaborate menu of multiple servings of hot and cold entrees and side dishes, preceded by consommé and followed by flambéed desserts.
Everything neatly planned—everything, that is, except for the actual guest list.
That’s pretty much what you’ll be considering at tomorrow’s city council meeting, when you’ll be asked to lay the groundwork for amending the city’s Comprehensive Plan 2018-2040 by incorporating the West End Revitalization Strategies Plan as an addendum. A favorable vote will allow scheduling of a public hearing, to be followed by a council vote Dec. 12 to make it all official.
I have two thoughts about this that I hope you’ll consider.
First, the process of updating the Comprehensive Plan has just started. Assuming this is a goodwill effort to rework a flawed document, as briefly outlined in the white paper I submitted to you last week, it would seem that the comprehensive plan’s committee should get first crack at this revitalization plan as part of its overall mandate. As it is, the council is building an addition to a dwelling even as it’s being renovated, which is putting the cart before the horse (pardon the mixed metaphor).
But the greater concern I have is more substantive than procedural. The West End Revitalization Strategies Plan, while more comprehensive and detailed than most city planning efforts, falls woefully short in addressing the needs of those whose most pressing needs made the plan necessary in the first place: the people who live in the West End. It’s as though the consultants who prepared the plan, EPR, had planned a banquet down to the smallest detail but had inexplicably forgotten to devise a guest list. Who’s coming? What food preferences or allergies do they have? Who shouldn’t be seated next to whom? Will any of the guests have disabilities that must be accommodated?
Yes, there is a brief nod to the area’s demographics: older, poorer, with a higher proportion of non-white residents than is true in the rest of Staunton. And there’s an equally succinct summary of the homes these residents inhabit—homes that on average are valued at less than two-thirds the overall median for the city overall. (A median, statistics buffs will note, that would be even higher were it not dragged down by this millstone.) But throughout the document, the implications of this soft (to use a kind word) housing stock are ignored. At best, the West End is glibly dismissed as having “more affordable housing than the city,” implying that there’s lemonade to be made from these lemons but without any attempt to ascertain how many of those lemons are long past their sell-by day.
Sometimes “affordable” just means crap.
But how could it have been otherwise? The West End Revitalization Strategies plan, like most such efforts, built on what came before. And as I’ve already established, housing historically has not been viewed by Staunton and its planners as a proper city concern. Consider the many plans that EPR consulted in formulating its conclusions: the Cole Avenue stream restoration plan, the intersection improvement study, the long-range transportation plan, a brownfields assessment, the greenway plan, the Gypsy Hill stream restoration plan, the bicycle and pedestrian plan, a city flood analysis, the Comprehensive Plan itself—what’s the common thread here? Not one of these plans or studies examined the condition and distribution of the city’s housing stock, or where it might benefit from timely city intervention.
Small wonder, then, that the revitalization study’s “vision” is as blind to housing issues as those other documents, the statement focusing almost exclusively on multimodal transportation needs, local shops and commercial corridors, and the condition of streets and sidewalks. These concerns are propelled by a “local narrative that the West End feels ‘run down,’” a theme that “was persistent during the engagement process” and therefore a driver of “this planning effort to revitalize the area.”
It’s not that the feedback EPR solicited didn’t include housing concerns. Time and again the plan refers to the “persistent” demand for help with housing. “Throughout the engagement process, community members expressed concern about vacant or unmaintained properties and believed they were reducing the West End’s appeal,” the report summarizes at one point, adding, “those participating in the meetings expressed concern for absentee landlords and renters’ rights violation.” Similarly, the study elsewhere notes community “concerns about the expense of renovating their homes and the appearance of homes in their neighborhoods.”
Yet when the study states that the community “requested additional housing rehabilitation resources,” city staff “noted several programs already exist.” Nothing to see here!
Ironically, that last quote is followed a page later by this observation: “The city currently does not have a program that helps homeowners and landowners improve their properties’ sustainability, health and affordability.” That apparent contradiction presumably may be attributed to the plethora of non-profit and charitable groups—some of which, to be fair, receive some funding from the city—that form the basis of the plan’s only “action” item under “Support Home Renovations”: “Connect Residents to Existing Resources.” (Having a heart attack? Here’s a list of local health providers, but you’ll have to figure out which ones may actually be able to help you. Podiatrists? Not so much.)
Are those existing resources adequate for the job of improving housing “sustainability, health and affordability?” The plan doesn’t say, because it doesn’t evaluate either the size of the job or the finances, manpower and management skills needed by those numerous agencies. Nor does it suggest how best to coordinate those disparate efforts, to minimize duplication and leverage what resources are available in the most efficient manner, beyond speculating that the Booker T. Washington Community Center “could” help local residents “access various local, state and federal programs and services for housing needs.” But however and whenever that might work out, the strategy plan makes it clear that the city sees no reason to get more involved than it already is.
This kind of “you got into this mess, now you figure out how to get out of it” approach is not, of course, what EPR outlines in the rest of the plan. The section on creating a “vibrant commercial center” prescribes three action plans, all involving the city’s direct involvement, while its advice to “raise awareness of existing programs”—the only “action” item under home renovations—is in this more favored subject area relegated to a secondary, “other action” mention. Meanwhile, the section on health and safety connections has five action items, four which require city funding; and the section on green neighborhoods likewise has five action items, at least three of which require city funding. One has to assume that the creativity well had run dry by the time EPR reached the end of its problem categories.
It should go without saying that if the driving force behind this study is “a local narrative that the West End feels ‘run down,’” then that perception must apply just as readily to housing as to commercial and public properties. Fixing up storefronts and painting some murals won’t be sufficient to turn the eye away from overgrown vacant lots, houses with peeling roofs and crumbling porches or rusted-out vehicles sitting in unkempt front yards. (The phrase “lipstick on a pig” would come to mind, were it not so overused.) As long as the revitalization study overlooks this significant area of concern, its job is only half-done and the study should be returned to EPR to finish its work. The gala banquet has been fully prepped, but where, oh where, are the guests?
Which brings me to my final point. You would never know, from reading this revitalization study, that part of the reason why the West End may feel run-down is the small but readily visible number of homeless people on its streets. You would never know, from the study, that there is a homeless encampment behind the Food Lion. You would never know that the area has several social agencies targeting the homeless and the near-homeless, including the Valley Mission and the Salvation Army. You wouldn’t know that the West End is where much of the city’s subsidized and public housing is located. You have, right there, a reverse description of the slippery slope on which people living in homes they can no longer afford may find themselves, sliding through Section 8 rental units (if they’re lucky) to a homeless shelter and then onto the streets. All within a “revitalized” West End.
The homeless also have needs, and meeting those needs would go some way toward shedding some of the area’s “run-down” appearance. For example, the need for more shelter space similar to the Mission’s temporary housing is obvious, but there’s also a need for overnight warm shelters and for “cold shelters,” where homeless people can go during winter days. Without that, they end up congregating anywhere they can find some warmth—riding Brite buses, hanging out in fast-food restaurants, the library, the YMCA or the community center in Verona—undoubtedly discomfiting the “regular” patrons of those establishments or services. Moreover, as summers get hotter, there will be a growing need for cooling shelters, not just for the homeless but for the many poverty-level residents of the West End without air conditioning.
The West End Revitalization Strategies Plan has many admirable and even exciting proposals, but it suffers from the same blind spots that afflict other city planning documents. Central to all of them has been Staunton’s distorted embrace of government’s role in the private sector, in which it is all for providing tax incentives, zoning concessions, planning services, and recruitment and outreach to commercial interests, but becomes myopic when turning its gaze on the working poor and the impoverished, who together make up a majority of the West End population.
Quite simply, more is needed. This plan should be returned as incomplete, and while it’s being reworked, maybe updating of the Comprehensive Plan can proceed in relative peace.
Looking askance 