Month: February 2026

A solid ‘A’ on Staunton’s report card

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Staunton city council received its biannual report card this past week, giving council members every reason to feel downright chipper. But it’s not all wine and roses, and a couple of red flags popped up.

The report card was Staunton’s second National Community Survey (NCS), which every two years polls city residents on a wide range of topics about city services and quality of life. The survey also compares Staunton’s responses with those of more than 400 other cities that the NCS also surveys, as well as with a smaller subset of that group that more closely matches Staunton demographically. The good news? Staunton’s residents overwhelmingly feel good about their community, and in almost every instance give it higher marks than they did just two years ago. Moreover, Staunton residents rate their city as high or higher than their counterparts in the comparison groups, with only a couple of exceptions.

City residents should look at the survey results to draw their own conclusions, but there are a handful of findings I think are worth singling out. Most encouraging, perhaps, is the great increase in public confidence in city government after several new council members took office in 2024, ending a turbulent few years of contending factions on that governing body. As a result, more city residents think their government is honest, open and transparent, up 15%, and more of them believe their government is acting in their best interests and welcomes resident involvement, up 14%.

Although the great majority of responses were similar to those of two years ago—this year’s survey has a 95% level of confidence, but in its comparisons with 2024, the difference has to exceed 5.97% to be statistically significant—27 items had an upward trend and five ratings decreased. The drops, notably, included a 10% decline in ease of travel by public transportation and a 9% decrease in the overall quality of utility infrastructure. More about both those downturns in a moment.

In addition to overall trends, a key measure in the NCS survey is the gap between the quality of a service or resource and its importance to the respondent. In most cases the weights given to those measures are quite close to each other, but for the two most important categories, there’s a yawning chasm between importance and quality: the city’s economic health was rated at 94% for importance, but got only a 49% rating for quality—and that’s down from 53% two years ago. And the city’s utility infrastructure, rated at 92% for importance, was dinged at merely 57% for quality.

The economic health rating was consistent with the answers to other, similar questions. While Staunton got high marks for the quality of its business and service establishments and the vibrancy of its downtown, those rating its economic development as excellent or good declined to 47% from 51% in 2024—not statistically significant, but suggestive nonetheless. That response also dovetails with a remarkably low 15% replying positively to the question, “What impact, if any, do you think the economy will have on your family income in the next 6 months?” That’s down from 23% two years ago, and while it’s not a Staunton-specific question, it does attest to a broader anxiety that colors local perceptions.

Meanwhile, the gap between the importance of the city’s utility infrastructure and its quality points to two problems with this kind of survey. One is the lack of precision, leaving it up to the respondent to decide what “utility infrastructure” means: does that refer to city-owned and operated utilities, principally water and sewer? Or does it include utilities in the city that are non-municipal monopolies, such as gas and electric, over which the city has little control? The second problem is one of timing, which in this case might have influenced the answers of city residents who lost water shortly before the survey was conducted because of a massive main rupture—or who might have been disgruntled instead by a sudden spate of street closures due to work by Columbia Gas, which also occurred around the time of the survey.

In other words, are Staunton residents waking up to the long overdue need to upgrade a century-old water distribution system, or are they simply unhappy because of ill-timed work by a private utility?

Finally, no summary of high- or low-points would be complete without mention of two of its lowest-rated aspects: the availability of affordable quality housing, which came in at 23%, and the city’s care of its vulnerable residents, down from 44% last year to 38% now. No surprise there, albeit distressingly so. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that both those findings are similar to those of other cities—which only means that we’re no worse than anyplace else, although that’s hardly praiseworthy.

The bottom line, it’s fair to say, is that Staunton’s residents really, really like living here, they feel that the city government is working in everyone’s best interests, but they’re also economically anxious and unsure about the future. Sounds like a solid ‘A,’ but with room for improvement.

P.S. I said I’d get back to the decline in ease of travel by public transportation. That’s another of those questions that is clouded in ambiguity, but I’ll submit again the roundly ignored recommendation I’ve made before: after spending more than a million bucks on upgrading the BRITE Bus hub on Lewis Street, would it be a budget breaker to post maps and schedules on the bus shelters? “Ease of travel” begins with knowing where the buses go, and when.

The homeless population is graying

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

As the number of people pushed into homelessness keeps growing, a worrisome subset of that population is expanding at an even faster pace. Locally, we’re not paying nearly enough attention.

Nationwide, there are more than 16 million people 65 or older living by themselves. That represents 28% of our oldest age group, and the older you are, the higher the likelihood you’re living alone: more than half of households with someone 75 and older consist of only one person.

Being old and alone doesn’t necessarily result in homelessness, of course, but it does increase the odds considerably. Living alone is riskiest for the elderly, who tend to have more accidents, are more prone to neglect their health and are frequent targets of financial scams, all of which can result in the loss of a home. And while many Baby Boomers are living in comfortable retirement, 5 million people over 65 live below the poverty line and an additional 2.6 million were classified in 2020 as “near poor,” meaning their incomes were less than 25% above the poverty line—and far below the amount needed to rent an apartment.

Put it all together, and the number of elderly people becoming homeless for the first time is swelling. Add that to the number of chronically homeless people who are “graduating” into the older population, and the ranks of elderly homeless people are growing to levels not seen in decades. The 2024 national Point in Time (PIT) census, the most recently available, found more than 146,000 homeless people who were 55 or over, or 18.9% of the 771,480 total. And here’s the kicker: more than half of those elderly homeless people were unsheltered, compared with just 36% of the overall homeless population.

Locally, the percentages are even more skewed, in keeping with a population that on average is older than at either national or state levels. (In Staunton, we have more people over the age of 65 than we have under 18.) That same 2024 PIT count, conducted by the Valley Homeless Connection, found 47 people ages 55 and older who were homeless, or roughly 26% of the total. Eight were unsheltered, sleeping in cars, a church vestibule and other make-shift accommodations.

Why do elderly homeless people sleep on the street rather than in a shelter? One obvious reason is that there aren’t enough shelters to go around. In recent weeks, for example, the emergency shelter space offered by the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministry (WARM) has been fully subscribed, with 60 or more people filling both primary and overflow churches.  But even when shelters are available, they often aren’t a good match for a population with mobility and other health issues. Getting in and out of bunks, such as those used at Valley Mission; managing medications, like insulin, that might need refrigerating; or making it to a shared bathroom in time for those with incontinence issues, are just some of the major challenges facing older people.

Conversely, older people are more wary of entering shelters because they recognize how vulnerable they are, and because of their generally lower tolerance for conditions that a younger, more resilient population can handle more readily. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, for example, cites the biggest reasons given by people for avoiding homeless shelters as overcrowding (37%) and the related issues of bugs (30%) and germs (22%).

But recognition of the special needs of an elderly homeless cohort has been slow in coming. The national PIT count, for example, only recently started breaking out the age demographics of those it surveys, after years of lumping everyone older than 24 into one giant category. USAging, a national organization that issues periodic assessments of services for the elderly, as recently as 2020 limited its housing focus primarily to home modifications and repairs that help older adults stay in their homes, thereby preventing homelessness. Last year’s report, on the other hand, finally acknowledged a deeper problem, observing that “more older adults are experiencing housing instability or even homelessness,” the insertion of “even” suggesting a previously unimagined condition.

USAging’s findings are based on a national survey of what are known as Area Agencies on Aging, or AAAs, which were established throughout the country by Congress in 1973 to respond to the needs of Americans age 60 and older. Its 2025 Chartbook includes a new “spotlight” on housing issues that charts “the top housing-related challenges facing older adults.” Number one on the list, submitted by 94% of the AAAs, is a lack of affordable housing, while more than a third (35%) cited “increasing homelessness” as among their top dozen concerns.

That concern, however, has yet to filter down to this part of Virginia in any meaningful way. Our local AAA is the Valley Program for Aging Services (VPAS), which serves a five-county area and its cities, including Augusta, Staunton and Waynesboro. Among its better-known programs are Meals on Wheels, but VPAS also helps the elderly with case management services, Medicare counseling, respite and transportation services, and health and wellness programs. When it comes to housing, however, VPAS comes up blank. Its strategic plan for 2025-2027 doesn’t even mention the word.

VPAS executive director Beth Bland said last week that her agency is “certainly aware” of the housing issue, but contended that the problem is “bigger than any one organization can tackle” and added that VPAS doesn’t have the financial or staffing resources to make a difference. Asked why VPAS doesn’t at least provide leadership in bringing community attention to the problem, Bland demurred. “We are not prepared to be, nor would it be appropriate for us, to take the lead on this issue,” she replied, suggesting that the Community Fund is already doing this. The Community Fund, alas, while it has tried to put a spotlight on the overall lack of affordable housing, has had little to do with homelessness.

Putting aside Bland’s unwillingness to have VPAS take the lead on an issue that clearly falls within the AAA mandate, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the local agency is squarely within the national mainstream. As documented in the 2025 Chartbook, only 8% of the nation’s AAAs have a formal partnership with homelessness or emergency shelters, 7% with coordinated entry systems for the homeless and 6% with an affordable housing coalition. The problem of old people living on the streets apparently will have to become much more egregious before we start paying attention.

There is one slim ray of hope locally, although it’s still many, many months from fruition. The Staunton city council last week approved a rezoning request for a property on West Beverley that has been vacant for at least the past 40 years, changing it from an R-4 to a B-5 zoning category. The R-4 category had frustrated multiple development proposals over the years because of its parking requirements—requirements that are much looser in a B-5 zone, so poof! a bureaucratic hurdle was vanquished just like that. Sometimes all it takes is someone with vision to make things happen.

The rezoning clears the way for the former Dunsmore Business College to be redeveloped as 15 one-bedroom apartments for “extremely low-income” senior citizens. The project is being led by Stu Armstrong, a former Staunton resident who owns the brick building and has a history of renovating other residential properties in the Newtown area. Although he estimates the renovation will cost at least $3 million, Armstrong says he can raise sufficient capital through multiple layers of grants, federal housing programs and private equity funding—and a good thing, too, because if he had to cover his costs through rent income, the apartments would have to list for approximately $2,000 a month.

To be sure, were those apartments available today, they would make only the slightest dent in demand. The Staunton Redevelopment Housing Authority, which is lending its support to Armstrong’s efforts, has a waiting list for its subsidized apartments that includes 137 elderly people with annual incomes, on average, of slightly under $14,000. That’s not enough to rent anything in today’s market. But even if Armstrong’s project reduces the housing authority’s waiting list by just 10%, that’s 15 people who otherwise could very well end up on the street.

And maybe, just maybe, Armstrong’s success could point the way for others to follow suit. Let’s wish him well, because the need he’s addressing is only going to keep growing as all of us keep aging.

Put your money where your mouth is

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

If you want to understand a person’s core values and priorities, don’t listen to what they say: look at how they spend their money. Cash has a more honest vocabulary than cheap words.

As much can be said for governments. Staunton is now formulating its spending plans for the next fiscal year, and they speak volumes about the problems and opportunities the city recognizes—and those it chooses to ignore or simply not see. Anyone thinking of living in the city beyond next year should be looking at those numbers and realizing what they mean, for them and for their neighbors. What does our municipal spending say about what we think is really important?

Much of the city’s annual budget is devoted to operating expenses—paying for past decisions—but it also includes a Capital Improvement Plan that in many cases accounts for decisions yet to be made. Known informally as the CIP, this running five-year wish list that gets updated annually describes what city planners think we need, how much they think it will cost and how they think we should pay for it. To see their conclusions, you can review the current 153-page draft online, or you can attend the Feb. 19 meeting of the city’s planning commission at city hall, where it will hold a public hearing on the CIP before submitting it to city council a week later.

What’s in the CIP? A tad over $47 million in spending, which is a $3.4 million increase over the five-year plan adopted by city council just a year ago. Where that money is to be spent can be loosely grouped into three categories. One is the things for which Stauntonians have been clamoring for years, such as more sidewalks, improved park facilities, revitalization of the West End and Uniontown, etc. A second is things that the people who run and operate our city say they need to do their jobs more effectively, from relocating the police department from city hall to a yet-to-be-built headquarters building (with an estimated price tag of $23.4 million), to buying new fire trucks and maintenance vehicles, to reroofing various city facilities. Both those categories have some wiggle room, since they’re largely based on “good or even prudent to have or do” items but are not “essential must-haves right now.”

The third general category is less forgiving, encompassing either imminent or already real infrastructure failures. The current poster child for this category is the flood-damaged tunnels in the Wharf district, for which the CIP is reserving $8 million for repairs. That’s a strong statement about how the Wharf district is viewed as a critical aspect of the city’s commercial and economic health, and it’s hard to rebut that premise.

But now consider that the CIP proposes to set aside a mere $250,000 for its “affordable and workforce housing fund,” which was established last year in response to the city council’s “Staunton Plan,” in which “affordable housing and housing for working families was prioritized.” It’s not unreasonable to observe that reserving less money over six years than would suffice to buy a single average-priced home in Staunton suggests the city’s “priorities” in this case exist primarily on paper—a perception strengthened by the laziness that went into crafting the description of this initiative, which was lifted directly out of last year’s CIP and so describes future events that have already happened.

A further indication of how this is a token effort is seen when the stingy housing fund is contrasted with, oh, I don’t know—how about the $360,000 reserved over the same six years to buy new golf cars? I don’t play golf, but I have nothing against spending tax dollars on golf cars that become a revenue generator, and which provide yet another amenity that makes Staunton a special place for so many people. The problem is that amenities fall into the “nice to have” bucket, whereas affordable housing veers perilously close to the bucket into which we put the city’s commercial and economic health.

So there are problems with how capital improvements are balanced against each other. But an even bigger problem is how some capital spending is avoided altogether, despite what might appear as a screaming need to address an issue before it becomes a full-blown crisis. Exhibit A in this regard are the unfunded projects in the water fund CIP, which is separate from but issued in tandem with the much larger general-fund CIP. Those projects—there are four of them—are not only unfunded but also unscheduled, despite appearing in the CIP year after year, presumably because no one has been willing to tackle the ginormous problem of finding an extra $50 million or so to ensure Staunton’s water supply remains uninterrupted.

That water supply is delivered via 16- and 20-inch cast iron mains that are now 100 years old, which is at or beyond their expected service lives. Half of the water Staunton consumes is piped from a reservoir in the George Washington National Forest, 14 miles away. Replacing that pipeline, plus the one that feeds the city from Gardner Springs, would cost an estimated $41.5 million. Developing a backup well system to tap groundwater in a crisis, as recommended in a 2018 study that the city commissioned, would cost an additional $7,950,000—and while that may seem like an unnecessary “extra,” it bears pointing out that our part of the state is already under a drought warning.

Springs can run unexpectedly dry. So can reservoirs, at which point it will be a little late to start wishing the city had drilled those wells. But it’s all too tempting to kick big projects and capital expenditures like this down the road, when some other city council will be forced to deal with it—and with the angry city residents who will be demanding to know why there had been no planning for such a predictable calamity. The short answer will be that it was easier to respond to the many more voices lifted on behalf of other, cheaper improvements.

We’re not moving the needle

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Maybe it’s just the cold that’s slowing everything down, with much of Staunton still sheathed in so much ice it could be the setting for “Dr. Zhivago.” Nearly two weeks after a devastating winter storm hit the region, we’re still digging out and only weakly reestablishing life’s normal routines. A lot of important things have been put on hold.

But attention fatigue and disengagement with issues of affordable housing and homelessness, of such prominent concern in 2023 and 2024, had already set in before the storm.  Where once scores of people attended the two housing summits hosted by the Community Foundation of Central Blue Ridge and the Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro, only a few dozen soldiered on in two working groups that were spun off to address issues of housing stability and housing stock. Monthly workgroup meetings soon bogged down into every-other-month events, attendance dwindled, the focus blurred.

Most recently, when the oncoming storm threatened a housing stock working group meeting scheduled for last week, the meeting was scrubbed altogether. Not postponed for a week or two, which one might expect if weather were the only problem, but canceled outright. That created a four-month gap between meetings, but it’s doubtful anyone views that as a problem—not when there’s so little to show for the past two years.

Then there’s the much-heralded Staunton Housing Commission, which after a similarly lengthy gestation, was scheduled to meet for the first time in early January. Instead, supposedly because just six of its nine members have been appointed to date, the commission’s inaugural meeting will occur later this month. Or maybe in March. With only four meetings per year, there’s really no rush—although it’s fair to ask how this leisurely pace fits in with the city’s “housing strategy,” for which an 18-month clock started ticking last July 1, and for which the housing commission was to be the lead advisory board.

And here’s an ironic twist: the Point in Time (PIT) count, which attempts to enumerate all the homeless people who can be found on one specific night per year, was scheduled for last Wednesday. But because of the extreme cold and generally impassable roads, any homeless people who might have been stuck in their cars, tents or other improvised shelters were given a pass—the only ones who (were) counted were those who reached homeless shelters, like Valley Mission or that week’s WARM emergency facility, which was in Waynesboro. So the “good news” in this year’s PIT count will be that 100% of those who are homeless were sheltered—no unsheltered people were found!

We may hope there will be an asterisk after those numbers.

One good thing that did come out of the storm was a last-minute, hastily assembled temporary emergency shelter thrown together by Staunton Mayor Michele Edwards—although she did so, she struggled to explain, as a private citizen and not as a city official. At least I think that’s the distinction she was trying to draw. Housed in the basement of the Central United Methodist Church, the emergency shelter was full to its limited capacity right up until it closed this past Monday morning, when presumably the emergency was over and the “temporary” aspect of its existence kicked in.

Anyone looking at a landscape torn from Boris Pasternak’s novel might have been puzzled—local schools wouldn’t reopen for another couple of days, after all—where the people who had stayed at the Central United shelter would go that day, or even that night, but that’s how the icicle crumbled. As Edwards emphasized, “temporary means temporary.”

The thing that’s clearly not temporary is Staunton’s ongoing lack of sufficient affordable housing, which persists despite the two years of chin-wagging mentioned above. Also not temporary is the lack of additional resources to cope with the inevitable consequences of that housing shortage. The emergency shelter program operated by WARM has an increasingly shaky roster of local churches willing to have their facilities used for a week at a time. The Mission continues to be backed up, as its supposedly short-term residents are unable to find permanent housing. And despite months of shambolic efforts at creating a day shelter for the homeless, we’re no closer to having one today than we were a year ago.

All that talking and meeting and feel-good assertions of what we’re going to do have made not one bit of progress in either stemming the tide of homelessness or of providing for the most basic needs of the unsheltered. We’ve just been treading water.

The online meeting that came up with an eleventh-hour plan to create an emergency shelter for the homeless took place two weeks ago today. There was much agreement, among the dozen or so participants, that this stop-gap measure should serve as a teaching moment—that the lessons learned from this intervention should result in better planning for the next emergency. Doing so, it was remarked both at the meeting and in subsequent emails, would be best served by sharing insights and observations as soon as possible after the fact, while memories were still fresh.

Two weeks later, and a week after the emergency shelter was closed, that conversation has yet to take place. The temperature tomorrow night is predicted to drop back into single-digits, and the ice and snow won’t melt significantly until mid-week, when the climate rollercoaster we’re riding may push us into the 50s. It is not outside the realm of possibility that when the melt occurs it will uncover someone who did not make it to a shelter, who was not found by a non-existent PIT count, who believed with good reason that there really was no refuge to be had.

That would be depressing, if, we may hope, unlikely. What’s more depressing, precisely because it is more likely, is the thought that a year from now essentially nothing will have changed.