June 2026 – Looking askance

West End suffers from city’s ADD

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

Rereading the West End Revitalization Plan, as I did over the past week in preparing my last post, was a stark reminder of how much we suffer an institutional version of attention deficit disorder. Two examples from that document will make my point: the brownfields study, and the tax increment financing district.

The brownfields study has been cited repeatedly in Staunton planning documents as a critical tool for redeveloping the West End. Funded by $300,000 from the EPA, the three-year Brownfields Assessment Grant was intended to “return vacant or underutilized properties to productive reuse” by assessing West End sites for possible environmental hazards. That would be followed by remediation, which, grandly, would “incentivize investment and jumpstart redevelopment and area-wide revitalization.” Study oversight was to be provided by a consortium of nine West End groups and organizations. Monthly and quarterly reports would keep everyone apprised of the progress made.

Or not.

Because as I wrote a year ago, local oversight never occurred because the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group never met, there have been no monthly reports, and the quarterly reports are remarkably repetitive while also being short on detail. The initial three “high priority” sites targeted for assessment became just one, which in fact was developed and now is home to the city’s new court building on West Beverley, but of the other two sites there has been no public accounting. The good news, if you can call it that, was that at least the grant money was not completely squandered—indeed, so little of it was spent that by the end of the three-year grant period more than half was still available. That led to a requested one-year grant extension—and then to a second.

With the now five-year grant period set of expire this coming Sept. 30, as of the end of April—the most recent available account—the city had yet to spend almost a fourth of the original grant amount. What it might be doing with approximately $70,000 is anyone’s guess. From the skimpy documentation that’s available, city officials in April were still trying to find suitable sites to assess, with four possible candidates lined up—none of which, it bears noting, are actually in the West End, with the possible exception of an old pump station building near the main entrance to Gypsy Hill Park. The others, however, include the former Coca Cola bottling plant on North Augusta Street; a site on Richmond Road [sic]; and the art school at 219 West Beverley Street, adjacent to the Central United Methodist Church.

It’s possible some or all of these sites should be assessed for environmental contamination, although “brownfield” is not the first image that comes to mind when contemplating a park pumphouse or an art school. But whatever the merits of these four candidates as posing environmental hazards, the bottom line is that federal money once touted as a needed economic shot in the arm for the West End is going to be funneled elsewhere, apparently because there are no more environmental hazards to be found in the West End itself.

But let me not quibble. Let’s instead take a look at tax increment financing, which one might think would interest a city council that often cites the Dillon Rule as a major reason why we can’t have nice things. (Without getting too much in the weeds, the Dillon Rule is a governing principle that essentially means city and county governments in Virginia don’t have the authority to do anything that hasn’t been explicitly permitted by the state legislature. Which means, among other things, that the city council can’t just levy whatever taxes it wants.) Yet tax increment financing (TIF) is one of the taxing authorities that the state has given the city, and among the West End Revitalization Plan’s key recommendations is for Staunton to “research and establish a TIF district” in the West End to “finance infrastructure needs and improve public amenities.”

From page 35 of the ignored West End Revitalization Plan

As the revitalization plan explains, TIFs have been used throughout Virginia since 1988, typically to “finance infrastructure improvements in blighted and disinvested areas.” Here’s how they work: a “TIF district” is established via a city ordinance, in this case encompassing much of the West End, from which property tax revenue to the city is capped at existing levels for the life of city-issued bonds. Revenue from those bonds pays for eligible projects in the TIF district, including public infrastructure like streets, sidewalks, and sewer and water lines, as well as land acquisition and demolition, structured parking or plazas and, yes, brownfield remediation. As new buildings are constructed and renovations occur, property values in the district rise, as does the amount of property taxes collected—but the difference between the capped tax revenue and the increased revenue due to improvements is used to retire the bonds that funded them. This difference is the “increment,” hence the name.

Such a self-financing mechanism would address one of the biggest obstacles to Staunton’s efforts at revitalization, which is its lack of financial reserves. It’s also, despite being explored at some length in the revitalization plan, a concept quite foreign to city planners and officials. The Staunton Housing Strategy Group, for example, despite reviewing literally dozens of possible funding mechanisms as it laid the groundwork for what is now the city’s Housing Commission, never once considered TIFs. The city’s Economic Development Authority likewise never examined the possibility. It’s not as though city officials considered the pros and cons of such an approach to the West End’s needs and reached a reasoned conclusion—they just ignored the concept altogether.

None of this is to say that TIF is a panacea. While creating such a district in the West End could short-circuit the on-again, off-again piecemeal approach to revitalizing the area that has characterized Staunton’s efforts to date, it would tie up incremental revenue increases to pay off the bonds instead of using that money for other critical public services, some of which would face increased demand precisely because of TIF-enabled growth. Yet it scarcely needs to be pointed out that without the TIF approach that growth is less likely to occur in the first place, and with it a growth in jobs and in the long-term tax base.

More to the point, the lack of discussion about TIF districts raises the question of why efforts like the Revitalization Plan are undertaken in the first place. Staunton hardly needs more dust-catchers, which is the fate that awaits ignored plans and recommendations (take heed, those of you laboring on the Comprehensive Plan update). City councilman Jeff Overholtzer, the council’s liaison to the Economic Development Authority, said in response to my questions that he will “start a conversation” with that body about a possible TIF approach, which is certainly overdue more than 18 months after the city council signed off on the Revitalization Plan. But then again, given the city’s track record with its brownfields grant spending, maybe we shouldn’t expect too much even now.

Warring against willful ignorance

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Staunton’s census tracts, showing homeownership percentages (in black) and poverty levels (in red), with Census Tract 2 highlighted in pink at left; from Anna Leavitt’s presentation to Staunton City Council on June 25.

For several weeks now—ever since the latest American Community Survey statistics were released—I’ve been thinking about writing something tentatively titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” The piece would have focused on the West End generally, and on Census Tract 2 specifically, and on the various disparities between that area writ small and Staunton overall. And then this past week Anna Leavitt beat me to the punch, at least partly, with a presentation to city council that was an unexpected and bright counterpoint to Staunton’s generally sluggish approach to such matters.

Leavitt, former director of CAPSAW (Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro), apparently has an affinity for complex acronyms: these days she identifies herself as Staunton’s EMOSA, which stands for Economic Mobility and Opportunity Special Assistant. She’s been in that position only since January, yet already has done more to fill in the terra incognita portions of Staunton’s demographic map than any of the numerous studies and plans generated over the past decade. That’s truly good news. But it’s only a start.

The bottom line in Leavitt’s presentation on Thursday was that it doesn’t matter where you live in Staunton, a median household income is no longer enough to buy you affordable housing. That holds true regardless of whether you’re a lower-income single parent with one child, a two-earner moderate- or middle-income household with two children, or a retired senior living on a fixed income: in each case, expenses outstrip income by several hundred dollars a month. In some parts of the city, however, the deficits are larger than others, and Leavitt’s analysis thus far is only scratching the surface of what that means.

Look at the statistics for Staunton’s seven census tracts, and you’ll be immediately struck by the extremes of Census Tract 2. This is the area south of West Beverley Street often recognized as a major part of the West End, which as defined by the city also includes a hefty chunk of Census Tract 3, on the north side of West Beverley. But Census Tract 2 is considerably more immiserated than its counterpart, as evidenced by median household incomes—$49,470 for tract 2, $80,914 for tract 3—and other indicators of economic well-being. As a result, discussions about the West End generally blur many significant variations; they also obscure the even more stark comparisons between Census Tract 2 and Staunton overall.

For starters (and as Leavitt pointed out), Census Tract 2 has the highest poverty rate of any Staunton census tract, at 19.2%, compared to the city’s overall rate of 12.6%. It also has one of the city’s lowest homeownership rates, at 43%, compared to a citywide average of 61%. That means nearly three of every five homes in Census Tract 2 are owned by someone who lives elsewhere, whether that’s in the house next door or in Virginia Beach, accounting for the large number of complaints from area residents about absentee landlords and neglected properties. It also means the tract’s 4,000 residents have limited financial resources, and therefore limited mobility, to improve their living conditions.

Moreover, the housing that exists, for renters and homeowners alike, ain’t that grand. Of the census tract’s approximately 1,120 rentals, nearly half have what the Census Bureau calls a “condition”: either a lack of complete bathroom facilities, a lack of complete kitchen facilities, an occupancy higher than one person per room, or rent that takes more than 30% of their tenants’ income. Homeowners aren’t faring a whole lot better, with nearly a quarter living in a home with a “condition.” Overall, then, it’s safe to conclude that a huge chunk of Census Tract 2 residents are living in crowded conditions or are paying way more for housing than is financially sustainable for the long term.

Other Census Tract 2 statistics further underscore the challenges its residents face. Eleven percent of the population was without healthcare coverage in 2024—a percentage sure to have climbed this year because of the federal government’s decision to end Obamacare subsidies—as against 6.4% for Staunton overall. Sixteen percent of Census Tract 2 residents are disabled, which is not that much higher than the city’s rate of 15.2%, but which is more consequential in the context of all the other problems they face. It’s also noteworthy that 45.5% of Census Tract 2 residents have never married, a metric typically associated with household stability and individual health and longevity, compared with a citywide average of 33.9%. And a bit more than 15% of the area’s adults older than 25 don’t have high school diplomas.

The residents of Census Tract 2, in other words, face numerous obstacles that are more limiting than those found elsewhere in the city.

THE POOR HOUSING SITUATION in the West End generally, and in Census Tract 2 specifically, is no secret. Indeed, having recognized the area’s potential to go into an economic tailspin, the city in 2020 embarked on a four-year exercise to forestall disaster by studying the area and formulating a remediation plan. The result was the 115-page West End Revitalization Plan that the Staunton city council formally adopted at the end of 2024. Woven throughout the plan are the concerns and complaints of area residents about a lack of available and affordable housing, as well as the widespread deterioration of existing housing stock.

But housing, as it turned out, was only a small part of the plan’s remit. And the final plan’s remedial housing recommendations are . . . superficial, to say the least. The leading “action item” regarding housing, for instance, calls for connecting West End homeowners “to existing resources” that would help them address “building and property maintenance code violations.” Only one of the plan’s proposals directly addresses renters, and then by suggesting they should be educated about their rights, presumably so they could hold their landlords accountable for providing decent, safe and sanitary quarters. Indeed, when you parse the handful of housing-related recommendations, it all boils down to a lot of talk but no action or any commitment to provide new city assistance.

It should go without saying that people one step away from being homeless are hardly in a position to insist that their rights be respected. When you’re scraping by at a job that pays less than $20 an hour but still have to fork over more than $1,000 a month for rent because there’s nothing available for less, your airy “rights” take a back seat to more pressing concerns when your landlord won’t get around to fixing the AC. You suck it up. And as I wrote 18 months ago, while the wool-gathering that went into the West End Revitalization Plan encountered repeated complaints of unscrupulous landlords and neglected properties, little of that got more than a passing acknowledgment in the plan itself, apparently because anecdotal stories are easier to ignore than hard numbers.

The lack of hard data should by now be a matter of civic embarrassment. Roughly six years after the revitalization study was started, city planners still do not have an inventory of vacant and developable land in the West End, or an inventory of deteriorating or abandoned dwellings that should be refurbished or condemned. (The city tax assessor presumably has that data, but that speaks to another city problem, of siloed information.) The city has no idea how many rental properties are owned by people who live outside of Staunton. And then there’s the problem of information bias creeping into studies like the Revitalization Plan: of approximately 170 responses to a community survey conducted for the plan, for example, only 78% were from people who actually live in the West End—and of those, nearly 90% were homeowners. In other words, responses from the renters comprising the majority of Census Tract 2 residents were vanishingly few.

Little wonder, then, that the revitalization plan’s proposed remedies regarding housing instability are so toothless. A meaningful recommendation, for example, might have called for adoption of a rental inspection program specifically targeting Census Tract 2, similar to programs operating in Roanoke, Winchester, Hopewell, Colonial Heights, Petersburg—cities throughout the Commonwealth that are both larger and smaller than Staunton. Such programs focus on specific areas in each city where older residences, absentee ownership and low incomes create an environment conducive to property neglect and housing deterioration.

Although the Virginia Landlord and Tenant Act makes landlords largely responsible for the living conditions in their properties, it doesn’t have a mechanism for tenants to enforce its provisions when a landlord ignores complaints. So a tenant’s options when faced with an intolerable living situation are to move—not exactly an alternative in the current market—or to file a lawsuit, which is an even more burdensome proposition. In cities that have rental inspection programs, however, rental units are subject to periodic inspections to ensure they conform with the state’s Maintenance Code, providing some assurance that such problems are less likely to crop up in the first place.

Waynesboro seemed about to adopt such a program three years ago, but then scrapped the effort amid claims that it would be too expensive to implement and that it would raise the already high cost of housing. That sounds remarkably like the fallacious arguments often made against increasing the minimum wage, serving mainly as a rationale for paying people slave wages or, in this instance, keeping them in blighted housing. But it gets repeated uncritically by those who don’t believe government should get involved in housing issues in the first place.

So, for example, asked why Staunton doesn’t have a rental inspection program, John Glover, whose job title is Building Official in the city’s Community Development department, replied that city staff had looked at the possibility in the past and “decided it was not necessary.” Having such a program, he wrote in an email that echoed Waynesboro’s rationale, “can increase the cost of rentals, which is detrimental to affordable housing.” It would require additional staffing, “which can be costly for the city.” A more cost-effective approach, he maintained, is complaint-based enforcement of the state’s Maintenance Code, which can result in the city taking legal action against property owners who don’t remedy violations.

Without providing any specifics about how many complaints have been investigated or how many times a property owner has been taken to court, Glover concludes that “this approach has proven to be very effective for many years.” Perhaps. But as with so many city responses to the West End’s problems, that assertion is made without a factual grounding. It assumes that people living in deficient housing not only know of the city’s complaint-based enforcement of the Maintenance Code—a code that gets only a single, unexplained mention in the Revitalization Plan—but that they have enough courage or desperation to risk calling attention to themselves by filing a complaint. A scarcity of complaints does not necessarily indicate the lack of a problem.

ALL OF THE ABOVE presupposes that indeed there are unattended housing problems in Census Tract 2. Given the area’s general economic data and the anecdotal feedback received by the Revitalization Plan, that seems like a pretty safe bet. But that very wobbly assertion also attests to the city’s willingness to not look at things too closely.

If you can say with a straight face that you don’t see a problem, then no one can fault you for not fixing it, and that’s pretty much how Staunton has approached its housing problems in the past. That’s true city-wide, but especially so in the West End, and Census Tract 2 more specifically. That’s why the hard data is so spotty. It’s why city staff can so blithely declare that city intervention or oversight “is not necessary.” It’s how residents’ feedback can be superficially acknowledged but ignored when spending and policy-making decisions are made. It’s why planning study after planning study ends up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

That changes are afoot, albeit at a glacial pace, is not due to any sudden epiphany, but because at some point being oblivious stopped being an option. Our homeless population is not going away, and indeed—as may be confirmed mid-July in a special Point in Time census—appears to be growing. The state, which historically has left zoning decisions up to localities, is now mandating that Staunton and other cities allow construction of accessory dwelling units—essentially a second home—anywhere they allow single-family homes, an option over which Staunton has been dithering for at least the past year. Another state initiative, signed into law last month, allows churches and other tax-exempt nonprofits to build affordable multifamily housing on their property without prior city approval. And meanwhile the gap between what people are paid and what they have to pay to keep body and soul together is widening.

Staunton’s new EMOSA seems intent on plugging some of those data holes, which will make a deliberate ignoring of the problem much, much harder to sustain. Good luck, Anna!

Staunton’s curse of low expectations

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

It’s been a week since Staunton’s city council got together with members of its Comprehensive Plan Committee to review the status of the comprehensive plan update, and I’m still trying to figure out what that was all about.

One problem facing city council members is that they can’t just sit around a table and discuss the issues of the day. Aside from a limited set of circumstances, any occasion in which more than two of them exchange views becomes a public meeting, subject to all the constraints that implies. That’s great from the viewpoint of public transparency and avoiding the appearance of back-room deals, but not so great when it comes to a frank exchange of ideas and opinions on issues that require foresight and leadership. So when the council scheduled a meeting about the plan that’s supposed to guide the city for the next 20 years, the implication was that this would be a chance for Staunton leaders to air their concerns and offer suggestions for a supposedly seminal document.

Nah.

The June 3 meeting was held not at city hall but at the public library, where apparently it was not videotaped. No more than a handful of Staunton residents observed the session, which was notable mostly for its low energy and a PowerPoint presentation punctuated by long silences in response to the question, “Any questions?” To be fair, however, the bar was set incredibly low right from the start, when Rodney Rhodes, Director of Community Development, explained that the Virginia Code doesn’t actually require the plan to be updated. All that’s needed is a “review” of the plan every five years, which in essence could amount to a quick flip of the pages of a document adopted in 2019 and an equally quick “yup, looks good.”

Or not. Point being, anything that the Comprehensive Plan Committee had come up with was already far more than mandated, so don’t sweat the small stuff. Or that’s pretty much how it sounded.

It also was in marked contrast to the stress placed on the document by Will Cockrell, the consultant with EPR PC in Charlottesville who ran the PowerPoint. The comprehensive plan “is not a policy document—it’s the policy document” undergirding all other city policies, spending choices and investments, Cockrell emphasized, before lapsing into an increasingly monotoned overview of a revised plan that is “significantly shorter” than the original. Indeed, the revised plan’s greater brevity, generous use of artwork, larger type and more graphic design were all lauded as major improvements over the original, which by implication has been moldering in a musty drawer somewhere, unread and unappreciated.

To be fair again, the council was not completely without comment, starting with the revised plan’s glaring omission of any reference to Staunton Crossing. Noting that the city faces $300 million in unfunded capital needs, councilman Jeff Overholtzer pointed out that getting some tenants into Staunton Crossing could go a long way toward generating much-needed additional revenues for those needs—although what businesses should be pursued, and how, remained unspoken. Councilman Adam Campbell echoed that concern, but also noted the plan’s silence about Staunton’s unhoused population and its many vacant buildings. Councilwoman Alice Woods said she worried about the plan’s failure to more rigorously address the city’s lack of sufficient “middle housing” for its essential teachers, firefighters, cops and other service workers.

Yet such observations were relatively few and elicited scant discussion, suggesting little consensus about the purpose of a comprehensive plan. Indeed, Mayor Michele Edwards opined that the comprehensive plan isn’t a plan at all—that it’s “more a guidepost, a vision.” She received no push-back on that interpretation, just as there was no back-and-forth on any of the few other comments or opinions. The evening was, as already noted, a rather low-energy event—which only begs the question: why was it even held? What was the point?

One possible answer is that this meeting, like so many of the others having to do with the comprehensive plan, was more about process than content. About establishing a paper trail attesting to public input and official attention, regardless of substance. The June 3 city council meeting was merely one of a string of get-togethers dating back to Sept. 19, 2024, when the 11-member citizen steering committee met for the first of 15 sessions, not to mention several public presentations and workshops, all of which seems to attest to weighty substantive debate. Yet a close reading of the minutes—when they’re available, that is—suggests that much of the time was devoted to discussions of “branding,” how to word various outreach materials, reviewing survey results, and other logistical matters. As for the plan’s actual content? That seems to have been generated largely by the consultants, who presented committee members—and later the public—with menus from which to choose their preferences.

(Apparently the consultants were unable to come up with a branding idea that would “honor Staunton’s past while looking towards the future,” so it remains the “Comprehensive Plan 2045.”)

The comprehensive plan isn’t supposed to be just a gauzy vision of the future. Nor should its scope be defined by outside consultants, who despite their best efforts at tapping into the local zeitgeist are necessarily limited by what is reflected back to them. In that sense this whole process has been a hall of mirrors, with the consultants conducting polls and issuing questionnaires to learn what city residents want, then drafting proposals that summarize the feedback they received and asking residents what they think. If nothing else, we can conclude that city residents who have kids in school and have to get from home to work and back again don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Staunton Crossing—or about homeless people or vacant buildings or a host of other issues I raised a month ago, and again more recently.

That’s where political leadership should play a role, and thus far has not. Just as the 2019 comprehensive plan suffered from the lack of anyone at a policy-setting level stating that the plan needed to address housing issues, the current review/update has numerous blind spots that limit its effectiveness. The $300 million in unfunded capital needs mentioned by councilman Overholtzer is just one stark example—but now that it’s been raised, what’s next?

Looks like Cline won’t have to worry

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Would-be politician Beth Macy spoke before a packed and supportive Staunton audience last night, in what should have been a rousing call to arms to unhorse the horse’s ass currently representing Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District. Unfortunately, the former journalist seems to have forgotten one of the prime directives drilled into all cub reporters, “Show, don’t tell.” In doing so, she foreshadowed yet another easy win for MAGA Republican Ben Cline.

Holding forth at The Frenchmen restaurant in Staunton’s old railroad station at an event hosted by the Staunton Democratic Committee, Macy appeared not to have received the news that she has no primary opponents—that a May 15 U.S. Supreme Court decision had put a last nail into Virginia Democrats’ redistricting efforts. That ended any chance the Sixth District would be reconfigured this year to make it less of a red swamp, resulting in an exodus of potential contenders. And, just like that, Macy became the last Democratic candidate standing in a district that Cline has carried by 60% or more in four consecutive elections.

So why is Macy still so intent on introducing herself as if this were last November? Given an opportunity to rally several dozen potential shock troops with an impassioned denouncement of her only opponent, Macy instead chose once again to put her major focus on burnishing her working-class credentials, while also—yet again—recounting her risk-taking journalism in going after Big Pharma. She had grown up Appalachian-poor in a small Ohio town. Her dad was a military vet, her husband a schoolteacher. She had raised one child who is trans and another who is gay. All her life and that of her family has been a struggle, Macy kept repeating, and that’s why she’s a fighter and that’s why she’ll be a fighter on behalf of the rest of us.

But someone else wrote Hillbilly Elegy first, and it’s all old news by now, anyway. And for all her talk of being a fighter, Macy landed only a single, glancing blow against her opponent, in lambasting him for taking corporate campaign funding.

That’s not to say that Macy didn’t offer the expected round of complaints about the abysmal state of the union, from cuts to Medicaid and food stamps to the diminished helpfulness of Pell grants to the evisceration of the Veterans Administration and its medical resources. But it was all rather bloodless, with few connections linking such carnage to Cline. Where was the itemization of particularly callous Cline votes, the recitation of Cline’s dismissive statements about the very real needs of his constituents, the detailed condemnation of Cline’s coziness with political and religious extremists and zealots? And on other pressing issues of direct importance to a largely rural, agricultural district, there was barely a murmur. What, for example, has Cline done for farmers battered by soaring costs of fuel oil and fertilizer—or just as much to the point, what would Macy do in his stead?

We’re past the point of introducing ourselves to voters. With less than five months until the election, it’s time to re-introduce Cline to his constituents, and in such a way that even his most ardent supporters understand just how much he has waged war on their best interests.

In failing to unleash the dogs of war and taking the battle to Cline, Macy lost an opportunity this week to hone that message with a much friendlier audience than the ones she’ll confront this summer in huge swaths of the Sixth. Out in the rural precincts, where the Stars and Bars are still more prevalent than the Stars and Stripes and MAGA’s stench has yet to penetrate, Macy’s “I’m one of y’all” pitch will come across merely as Cline-lite. Unless, of course, she comes out swinging and shows herself to be the fighter she claimed to be this week. Unless, that is, she does more than merely ask us to take her word for it.