March 2025 – Looking askance

We have to know what we don’t know

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

One of the underlying issues pervading all aspects of the affordable housing discussion we’ve been having locally is the lack of reliable, timely data. There’s a lot we don’t know, and much of what we think we know is flawed.

There is, for example, the recently released regional housing study, which not only lacks a lot of needed information but is burdened by a significant load of outdated and incomplete statistics. The problem this poses is a false sense of authority. Statistics just look so damn definitive. They’re precise and official looking, and they do such a nice job of reducing complexity into the numeric equivalent of a soundbite that it’s hard to put them aside. They brook no argument—even when they send you off on a wild goose chase.

But the regional housing study is far from unique. A couple of more recent pronouncements about the housing situation illustrate how apparently authoritative sources can paint a picture that on closer examination is at least questionable. Yet because such statements fit so well into a broader understanding of our circumstances, they get adopted and repeated and eventually blend into the background narrative without a challenge. They become accepted wisdom, shutting down further discussion.

Consider, for instance, the question of how much government regulations add to the price of a newly built home. Developers may have to pay for environmental impact or traffic studies, as well as zoning, impact, utility hook-up and other fees, and have the additional costs of complying with OSHA regs and specific design standards. Builders must comply with building codes and architectural design standards, as well as foot the bill for permit or inspection fees. Could relaxing or amending some of this regulatory burden allow for cheaper housing to be built?

To ask the question is to answer it: of course it would. What that doesn’t tell us is how much of a cost-saving is possible, and whether that reduction would be significant enough to prompt the construction of more affordable housing. Are regulatory costs so high that they are a major disincentive for more housing development? Or are they relatively minor, in the overall scheme of things, and therefore unlikely to produce more than marginal gains if cut back, possibly at the price of lower quality?

We don’t actually know. All the meetings and conversations locally about “solving” the housing shortage have been remarkably unbalanced, in the sense that the people sitting around the table overwhelmingly are from the demand side of the housing equation. The supply side—developers, builders, lenders, underwriters, property managers—has been remarkably rare.

So when attendees at a recent SAW housing group meeting heard that $92,000 of a new home’s price tag is attributable to regulatory costs, it might have seemed that a significant information void had been filled. Moreover, given that this statistic was generated by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), it certainly sounded authoritative. And the implications are seemingly huge: with a new home in the SAW region going on the market for upwards of $326,000, as much as 28% of a new home’s selling price might be trimmed solely by government fiddling with the various requirements it imposes on builders and developers.

A closer look at that NAHB calculation, however, suggests otherwise. The actual regulatory cost calculated by the association was $93,870, of which it attributed $41,330 to developer’s regulatory costs and $52,540 to regulation during construction. The study was conducted four years ago. The developers’ costs were based on a survey sent nationwide to 2,071 NAHB members—with a scant 57 providing “complete and useable responses.” The association provides no information about which markets were represented in the responses, nor how widely they were distributed. The $41,330 number, in other words, is a wild-ass guess that has little to no relevance to the SAW region in 2025, despite its apparent precision.

Meanwhile, the survey based its conclusions about builders’ costs on 280 “complete and useable responses,” which sounds better than the developers’ stats but with no indication of whether this was a higher rate of return, since the NAHB doesn’t say how many builders were polled. And, again, the study provides no information about which markets were represented or what kinds of homes the builders were erecting. Nearly half of the increased costs those builders attributed to regulations were due to “changes to building codes over the past 10 years,” so there’s no applicability to localities with few or no changes to their building codes over that period. In addition, a substantial chunk of increased regulatory costs was attributed to “architectural design standards motivated by aesthetics, or possibly even, in some cases, a desire to price less affluent residents out of particular neighborhoods.” Is that relevant to the SAW region?

In short, the applicability of this extremely limited “study” to any particular housing market is less than zero— “less than” because using a misleading statistic can create a false sense of comprehension. But with the NAHB distilling a complex issue into a seemingly authoritative data point, there’s the temptation to think there’s no need to research the issue any further. The regulatory cost burden on new housing construction? Asked and answered.

A different kind of false certainty based on an apparently authoritative source was seen at the Staunton city council’s March 13 work session, at which the planning staff was asked what role developers play in terms of the city’s housing strategy. As just indicated, an accurate answer would have been “little to none.” The staff response, however, was to assert that “most of the land for larger developments has already been purchased, so they are looking at more of the low hanging fruit of the single lots and other smaller cottage-type developments.”

That answer not only was unresponsive, but highly questionable. Even a cursory look at a map of Staunton will disclose an abundance of undeveloped and open land, especially in the city’s northern reaches. The city’s 2018 comprehensive plan, currently being updated, noted that of Staunton’s 12,800 acres, nearly 3,000 acres was vacant land zoned for residential use. Some of that land undoubtedly has been developed in the past seven years, and a significant chunk of it is undevelopable because of steep terrain or flooding hazards, but even with that there’s clearly a lot of room within city limits for more housing.

But land availability isn’t subject merely to physical constraints. Land use ultimately is subject to political choices, notably over zoning. Those 3,000 vacant acres are apportioned among four zoning classifications, with the lowest-density classification claiming nearly a third of the total. Medium-density zoning, meanwhile, had 415 vacant acres, while high-density zoning weighed in with 325.8 vacant acres—all more than enough, one would presume, for at least some significant housing developments. But if that’s not enough, how much more housing could be built through upzoning? Is that something that should be at least examined, without a prior dismissal of the possibility?

Other political choices are reflected in the city’s decision to set aside considerable acreage for an ag-forestal district, “intended to support the growth of active farm, forestal, nursey and related enterprise.” Given Staunton’s location within a heavily agricultural county, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether preserving still more farmland within the city’s boundaries is the most appropriate use of such property, especially if doing so penalizes development of sufficient affordable housing. How many hundreds of acres of the ag-forestal district could be carved out for other uses while still preserving its most attractive natural features, such as the Bells Lane corridor?

Then there are the decisions that went into designing Staunton Crossing, the city’s premier economic development effort. Early on, planners for the project contemplated housing as part of its development mix, presumably in recognition of the need for new businesses to have adequate housing for their employees. But then, for reasons never made explicit, the housing idea got dropped, even as plans for an AI data center shrugged aside criticism that such centers provide only modest employment gains—the ostensible rationale for building Staunton Crossing in the first place. Meanwhile, in the seven or so years since those choices were made, new data centers have grown exponentially in size and become omnivorous consumers of water and electricity, raising the question of how well suited such an industrial application is for a region that has had frequent drought scares. Should that part of the project be reexamined to assess its suitability for housing?

None of this is to say that the city should be upzoning any particular area, that the ag-forestal district should be trimmed or rezoned entirely, or that Staunton Crossing should stop trying to recruit data center providers. But it does point to the fact that these and other land-use decisions are inherently political, made at a specific time for reasons that may change or become obsolete, and that new priorities—such as the growing need for affordable housing—may take on greater importance. To dismiss a question about new housing developments by saying, in effect, that there’s no room for big projects is therefore untrue. It also is needlessly self-limiting, forestalling fresh thinking that could open new possibilities.

Winter is coming

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

In another sign that the universe has a dark sense of humor, the Valley Homeless Connection announced last week the results of its annual Point in Time (PIT) survey of the local homeless population. That was on Tuesday. Three days later, the Trumpian chainsaw approach to government slashed funding to an additional half-a-dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The council, Trump said, was “unnecessary.”

As government agency budgets go, this won’t save more than pocket change: $3.6 million a year. But as far as meeting a social need, the cut eliminates the only federal agency charged with implementing “the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.” And yes, there actually is such a plan, adopted Dec. 19, 2022, one that sought to reduce homelessness by 25% by this year. That it has failed to do so is as much a statement about the size of the problem as it is about the government’s effectiveness in addressing systemic issues without adequate funding or political buy-in.

The local PIT count underscores the point. The annual snapshot of how many people are sleeping in homeless shelters and on the streets, in one capacity or another—tents, cars, cardboard boxes—found little change from a year ago, when the 2024 PIT found 157 homeless people in the SAW region of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. This year’s survey, conducted on one of the coldest nights in many years—the temperature in Waynesboro dropped from a high of 22 to just 4 degrees—counted 146 homeless adults in the SAW region (another 10 were counted in Lexington and Rockbridge County). Nine of the adults also had custody of 16 children younger than 18, adding to the total.

The good news is that a greater percentage of the PIT-counted people this year were in emergency shelters, with 82 staying at the Valley Mission, 40 in the overnight shelter operated by WARM, and five staying at the New Directions Center, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. All the children were sheltered, as well, and two people in the SAW region were put up in motel rooms paid by social agencies. That left just 17 people in the SAW region toughing it out in the cold, compared with last year’s 30 or more. Then again, as observed by Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection, the severe weather may have forced any number of homeless people into other alternatives, such as couch-surfing with family or friends. And as always, there’s the question of how many unsheltered people were simply missed in the count, with the extreme cold forcing people to burrow in more tightly wherever they were.

Among the PIT findings that Campbell highlighted was an increase from 51 in 2024 to 71 in 2025 of people who reported they were homeless for the first time. “That is a wild thing,” Campbell said, reflected in such vignettes as the woman who sleeps in a car parked outside her husband’s Verona workplace while he works inside. Indeed, the PIT found “lots” of people sleeping in their cars in the Sheetz and Walmart parking lots, as well as at Cracker Barrel, Martin’s and Lowe’s. Meanwhile, as the number of newly homeless people suggests, the pipeline is filling up faster than it can empty out: the national plan to end homelessness reports that on average, 908,530 people became homeless each year between 2017 and 2020, while 900,895 exited homelessness each of those years. That’s a remarkable turnaround from the period of 2010-2017, when national homelessness declined 14%.

Meanwhile, meeting the national plan’s goal of a 25% reduction in homelessness would require that this year’s PIT count not exceed 437,000, down from the 582,462 counted in the 2022 PIT census. The trend, alas, has been precisely in the opposite direction, topping out at 770,000 in 2024—and if the local numbers are any indication, the national 2025 PIT results are unlikely to have improved. But because it takes many months to compile all the national data, just how much worse things have become nationally won’t be known until late this year.

Locally, the outlook is grim. The advent of spring inevitably pushes away concerns about people freezing to death, and the leafing out of the landscape tends to obscure homeless encampments: out of sight, out of mind. The slash-and-burn practices that are hollowing out—if not completely eliminating—social service budgets and agencies are still to be fully felt locally, but Campbell says Housing and Urban Development funding for permanent housing is already drying up, and an array of services to help people cope with joblessness, substance abuse and poor health is evaporating. Even those who don’t lose sight of the problem can feel hamstrung and helpless to respond in any meaningful way.

Yet as often intoned in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” Even now, on the verge of the spring equinox. What then?

Long-awaited housing study a bust

(Reading time: 12 minutes)

The much-awaited regional housing study was finally released at the end of this past January. It is, to say the least, underwhelming.

Divided into two segments, a “consumer” version marked by larger fonts and a liberal use of photos, plus a so-called “technical” version, the study was marketed as providing “a deep understanding of the housing market dynamics in the Central Shenandoah Planning District,” which encompasses five counties and five cities. The study was originally promised for a June 2024, release, and was eagerly awaited by various local housing groups hoping to use its data as a springboard for further planning. Instead, those expectations were repeatedly put on hold, as first one delay was announced and then another, until in some cases the study became an afterthought.

So why the eight-month delay? It wasn’t because new data was being assimilated, or existing data was being reanalyzed. Indeed, it’s a fair guess that the study itself was barely tweaked at all during this long dry period, as it contains several references to future events that had already occurred by the time it was made public. Instead, the recurring delays were vaguely attributed to foot-dragging by unnamed localities in the planning district that hadn’t “signed off” on the study in a timely fashion.

Which right there should have been a big red flag that the “regional housing study” was actually a political football. In fact, it’s now clear that this is not a “study” as much as it is a “plan”—and plans need buy-in from those charged with implementing them. Indeed, while a study suggests an effort to gather basic information from which plans can be developed, this study explicitly states that its findings were predetermined. As explained on p.9, study planners “met with staff from each county and city” who “described each jurisdiction’s housing stock, housing challenges and potential opportunities.” The study’s parameters, in other words, were established from the outset. Instead of conclusions flowing from the data, the data followed the conclusions.

Moreover, the “housing” aspects of the plan are only a minor part of its data base, which includes far more information about the region’s demographics than about its housing stock. A more accurate description would be to call this a “householder” study, its glaring gaps in actual housing information acknowledged by the study’s own repeated recommendations for still more study, such as its call for Staunton to “conduct a detailed housing demand analysis,” or that it “conduct a detailed survey and inventory of vacant/underutilized properties in the city.”

“Plans” are recommended courses of action, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But plans need legs, which is to say, they need to be built on a solid, factual base if they’re to have merit. Anyone reading their recommendations should be able to see how those proposals were derived from the available evidence. Yet in this case the cart precedes the horse, with the technical report dedicating just 79 pages to facts and numbers, compared to the 218 pages of proposals for how that information should be applied. Nor are those 79 pages weighed down with dense data dumps and spreadsheets: much of what’s there consists of generalized observations and broad conclusions, unburdened by the kind of detail that would allow readers to develop alternative understandings.

Take, for example, a section in the technical report headlined “Age and Condition of Housing Stock” that opens as follows: “Stakeholders across the Central Shenandoah footprint mentioned concerns about housing conditions. Focus group participants discussed dilapidated single-family homes that need to be demolished; for-sale inventory that needs updates and in some cases, substantial repair; housing that need [sic] rehabilitation and modifications for current residents; multi-family rental housing that has been neglected by landlords; and mobile homes that need replacement, among other conditions-related challenges.”

That reads like a précis for the section that should follow, a quick summary of compelling issues that can then be explored in more satisfying detail. But it’s all a tease. How many dilapidated homes are ripe for demolition? Where are they located? How extensive are the repairs needed by the for-sale inventory, and how quickly should they be undertaken before these homes fall into the “ripe for demolition” category? What would be the estimated cost of such intervention? Which multi-family housing units need remedial attention, and how many families are affected? Good and reasonable questions all, and all of which go unanswered here or anywhere else in the study.

But even on its own meager terms, the study’s scant data is only part of the problem. This is not just an issue of quantity, but of quality: what’s offered is so far past its “sell by” date that it might as well be tossed into the trash.

While many of the study’s conclusions are based on unidentified focus groups and interviews with anonymous “experts”—their identities cloaked, for inexplicably dark reasons, to “protect the anonymity” of participants—its main statistical underpinnings are drawn from U.S. Census Bureau and HUD surveys that largely or completely predate the Covid epidemic. This choice presumably was one of convenience, since such federal data are widely available and require far less effort—or expense—to obtain than more region-specific information. But because these are federal sources, which encompass the whole country and therefore have to distill enormous data quantities, what’s available is neither granular enough or timely enough to be especially useful at a local level.

As a result, most of the regional housing study’s findings are based on American Community Survey estimates, which are five-year averages spanning the years 2017-2021 (and in some instances 2018-2022). Others are drawn from more dated 2019 Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy data, another five-year averaging of surveys spanning the even earlier 2015-2019 period. In other words, the study’s assertions about current housing cost burdens, as just one example, describe a world in which there has been no pandemic, no dislocation of job markets and spike in unemployment, no subsequent inflation and jump in mortgage rates, no moratorium on evictions and no billions of dollars of government assistance pumped into the economy to avert economic collapse. All, it goes without saying, producing massive distortions in housing markets.

Even when the study does (rarely) cite alternative data sources, what it provides lags current information by at least a couple of years. For example, it references the 2022 Point in Time survey to discuss the extent of local homelessness, even though 2024 data—collected in January of that year—was available long before the report was issued. Similarly, although the study turns to sales data from Virginia Realtors to explore time-on-market and related issues, it uses information that is drawn from 2015-2022. By contrast, a realtor who participates in one of the SAW housing groups does a comprehensive sales analysis of local markets every month and has years of more timely information and analysis at his fingertips, some as recent as a month ago.

Just how much difference a couple of years can make is evidenced by the study’s assertion, based on 2022 Realtor sales data, that the median home sales price in Staunton is $250,000. That claim should fail the straight-face test, following the 43.85% run-up in the city’s real estate property tax assessments for the period 2021-2025. Indeed, the local realtor mentioned in the previous paragraph observed that the average home sales price in the SAW region was $324,403 at the start of 2024, following an approximately 9% per year average appreciation over 17 years.

Relying on data that is many years old to describe the present in such a dynamic context means losing nuance, at best, and completely mischaracterizing current developments at worst. Yet at no point does the housing study acknowledge this limitation, or attempt to assess which of its conclusions are therefore least reliable. Like an AI hallucination, it confidently asserts a reality that doesn’t exist, mapping out future action based on staring fixedly into a rearview mirror. It does so by withholding basic data needed for a critical examination of the study’s assessments and conclusions. Indeed, it goes out of its way to obfuscate outside analysis, as when it acknowledges that it “has not documented the source of each estimate discussed” for “readability” reasons—a claim made in the “technical” report, which presumably should be loaded up with “technical” information but isn’t.

So, for example, all discussion about household income is restricted to comparing wages for different job categories, which can encompass widely ranging job titles and pay levels, rather than examining the more useful baseline of the minimum wage. In Virginia that would be an especially helpful metric because of the state’s significant boosts to the minimum, from $7.25 an hour in 2020—where it had been stuck for many years—to $12 in 2024, a time period squarely within the study’s information black hole. The pitfalls this poses was recently illustrated by Staunton’s Consolidated Plan, which overlooked the increase and thereby completely misstated the affordability of the city’s housing stock.

In its unwillingness to cite specific data, the housing study falls back on generalities that are too sweeping or obvious to be useful. Housing “that is for sale or for rent (aka ‘on the market’) is scarce.” Staunton “continues to grapple with providing adequate housing infrastructure for its most vulnerable residents.” When it comes to housing, “there is not enough supply to serve renters with extremely low incomes.” And in a surprisingly cautious assessment, “the rental market is approaching a too-tight scenario.” All true—notwithstanding the hedge about “approaching”—and all well-known for quite some time. This study does little to go beyond the obvious.

EVEN ON ITS OWN (limited) terms, the housing study makes some questionable assertions while also raising legitimate issues that it then ignores.

On p.64, the study notes that focus groups “explained that a substantial amount of the region’s housing stock needs critical home repair.” Although “critical” implies a matter of urgency, this observation does not lead to a further analysis or remedial recommendations beyond a suggestion for “enhancements to rental inspection programs in Staunton and Waynesboro.” Both cities have opted to enforce the state’s property maintenance code, giving tenants in substandard housing some recourse, but Augusta County has not. The housing study doesn’t feel a need to point that out.

On p.66, the study acknowledges that the area “continues to grapple with providing adequate housing infrastructure for its most vulnerable residents, including those experiencing chronic housing insecurity [i.e. homelessness], mental health conditions and substance use disorder.” The study then quotes a 2023 report from the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services calling for the Valley Community Service Board to more than double its existing 120 units of supportive housing—but goes no further in developing the recommendation. The consumer version of the study, meanwhile, does call for development of “a strategic plan” to help “those experiencing homelessness.”

The study elsewhere finds that roughly 3% of SAW housing stock—more than 1,800 housing units—consists of long-term vacancies, which is to say, empty housing that is not being held for seasonal, recreational or occasional use. Some of these vacancies “may represent an opportunity to increase the available housing stock by encouraging owners to rent or sell their units,” the study suggests, without further elaboration. The consumer version of the report, meanwhile, concedes that Staunton has “vacant and abandoned properties that contribute to blight and hinder community growth”—but since the housing study doesn’t know how many such properties exist, or where they’re located, the best it can do is urge the city to find out.

There’s much more of this kind of thing. The point here is not to nit-pick, but to point out that the housing study raises many more questions than it answers—questions not of the “how shall we cope with this” variety, but of what’s actually happening. Questions, in other words, that a regional housing study may reasonably have been expected to answer. Instead, the study’s center of gravity is defined by extensive menus of remedial actions that undoubtedly will keep city planners busy for years to come, calling for additional studies, for development of new taxes, bonds, grants and other financing vehicles, and for seeking out public and private partnerships—all of which is well and good and even essential, but all of which could have been initiated without this document.

Meanwhile, it’s too easy to lose sight of why the regional housing study—at least as it was widely understood—was so anticipated. One clue is on page 17, which observes that “there are approximately 5,000 households at risk of homelessness in the Central Shenandoah footprint.” Already preceding them are “an estimated 265 people comprising 186 households who are unhoused.” Given the current political onslaught in Washington D.C. on anything that even remotely looks like compassion for one’s neighbors, it’s not fanciful to think that the 5,000 households already at risk may have their ranks diminished—by sliding into the unhoused category.

The regional housing study, in either its consumer or “technical” versions, makes us no better prepared to deal with that.