September 2026 – Looking askance

Virginia goes where Staunton falters

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Why are local land-use decisions, as defined by building codes and zoning ordinances, left up to cities and counties? Why do federal and state governments generally relinquish their claim over this aspect of our lives?

The answer is seemingly obvious. The residents of Staunton (and Waynesboro and Augusta County) are far more aware of their local land-use needs than a bunch of politicians in Richmond or Washington, D.C. City councils and county boards of supervisors are closer to their constituents, and thus more responsive to their concerns at the grassroots level—and what is more grassroots than the homes we live in and the businesses we support? Local control is democracy in its purest form.

And yet. . . .

In just a couple of weeks we’ll reach the three-year anniversary of the first SAW Housing Summit, followed six months later by a second such assembly, the two events attracting scores of participants seemingly united by their concern over the area’s homeless population and the lack of sufficient affordable housing. Working groups were created, ideas were brainstormed, regular public luncheons on housing topics were scheduled. The city of Staunton assembled a housing strategy group that met for more than a year, culminating in the creation of . . . a housing commission that meets four times a year, apparently to continue talking.

That’s hardly gangbusters. All those consultant-driven meetings and community energy and self-satisfied hype produced not one additional affordable home, failed to remove even one homeless person from the streets. If local control is rooted in the idea that the lowest levels of government are most sensitive to the needs of their constituents, what Staunton’s political leadership has demonstrated is an understanding that its constituents need to talk about problems but not necessarily do something about them.

It’s sobering, therefore, to realize that the Virginia Assembly seemingly is more attuned to our local housing needs than we are. While we dithered locally, our state’s political leadership stepped into the breach this past year by adopting three bills that revoke local authority over certain housing issues and pass the initiative to the private sector. By doing so, the state essentially has concluded that local authorities are more of an obstacle than a constructive force in meeting their local constituents’ housing needs. The irony is that local officials are still waking up to the implications of what that means and of what lies ahead.

Here’s the rundown:

a) Manufactured Housing

An amendment to the Code of Virginia, effective as of this past March 31, explicitly prohibits localities from regulating manufactured homes more strictly than traditional “sticks-and-bricks” site-built homes. That means manufactured homes now may be placed on any lot that already permits single-family use; prior to this amendment, manufactured homes were restricted primarily to agricultural zoning districts, which is why you see them in the county but not in the city.

That could now change, and to the extent that “manufactured homes” are synonymous with “travel trailers,” the results may not be to everyone’s liking. Although the city’s planners are recommending a code amendment to require such homes be affixed to a continuous perimeter foundation, eliminating the unsightly skirting that conceals the space beneath them, the state’s amendment otherwise opens the door to single-, double- and even triple-wide trailers to be moved into residential neighborhoods. And while the state change limits issuance of certificates of occupancy to five years following the date of manufacture—meaning you couldn’t bring in a 10-year old trailer and try to have it approved as a permanent residence—the fact remains that many house trailers are constructed according to the CATNAP principle: Cheapest Available Technology Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution.

On the other hand, the state change also opens the door to innovative construction methods that can be faster, cheaper and more efficient than traditional on-site construction. “Manufactured home,” as defined by state law, simply means a structure that is transportable in one or more sections, each eight or more feet wide and 40 feet or longer, that is designed to be used as a single-family dwelling. That definition includes not just conventional house trailers, but prefab housing that is built in panels or modules in a controlled environment before being transported and assembled at their final destination.

That sort of thing is still a novelty in the U.S., thanks in part to the kind of zoning restrictions that are now struck down, but is far more common overseas. About 15% of Japan’s new housing is built this way, as are nearly 80% of the homes in Sweden, a country that has refined its approach out of climatic necessity. A factory setting offers numerous possibilities for automation, standardization and quality control, and there are some fledgling efforts in the U.S. to adopt this model for obvious reasons of lower cost and product consistency. Whether prefab housing will get a local foothold is an altogether different question—although as an aside, it sure seems worth investigating, by someone with just a bit of vision, as a possible manufacturing tenant for Staunton Crossing.

b) YIGBY housing

Officially known as the Faith in Housing Act, the “yes in God’s backyard” legislation requires that localities permit qualifying affordable housing developments “by right”—meaning no special permits or review are required—on properties owned by tax-exempt religious organizations and 501(c)3 nonprofits. The new law will become effective Jan. 1, when it will supersede any local restrictions on building density, height or setbacks, in an effort to help declining church congregations make better use of their underutilized property. (It should be noted that the law sunsets after four years.)

The problem of once-robust congregations struggling to maintain buildings and property they can no longer afford is particularly acute in Staunton, which has 76 churches by one local count, or roughly three times the national per capita ratio. Some, like the Marquis Memorial United Methodist Church, have multiple vacant buildings and sit on a couple of acres of lawn and parking lots devoid of more than a handful of cars. But Marquis Memorial is hardly singular, and the Central Shenandoah Planning District, which encompasses the SAW area, has 970 parcels owned by faith-based organizations, totaling more than 2,700 acres.

The new state law smooths the way for congregations wanting to build housing on their property, providing that at least 60% of the homes are reserved for affordable housing, defined as no more than 80% of the median income for rental units and 120% of the median for homes that are sold. With Staunton’s median household income at approximately $66,000 and “affordable housing” defined as no more than 25% to 30% of household income, that would result in monthly rents of no more than $1,100 to $1,320.

Those are still relatively high housing costs for individuals at the low end of the wage scale, but manageable for working couples. But as with the manufactured housing initiative, there are aspects of this code change that may irk some Staunton residents. For example, the city will have to allow a minimum of 20 housing units per acre, as well as building heights of 45 feet (with exceptions in historic districts), regardless of surrounding land use. The developments also may use up to 30% of their floor area for publicly accessible non-residential uses that are “ancillary” to the organization’s mission, including child-care centers, health clinics, coffee shops, fund-raising thrift shops, and so on.

The Staunton planning commission, presented with these changes in state law, authorized city staff at its Sept. 17 meeting to draft the necessary zoning code amendments, so watch for more developments here.

c) Accessory Dwelling Units

If there was one housing initiative that the city’s nascent housing commission seemed to take seriously, albeit in the same ponderous manner with which the city has approached all housing issues, it was the idea of breathing life into accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Incredibly, the state proved itself more nimble in getting there first.

Virginia’s authorization of ADUs basically doubles the carrying capacity of almost all residential land by allowing a second single-family dwelling on the same property, regardless of other zoning limitations. An ADU can be an attached or detached dwelling, must provide facilities for sleeping, eating, cooking and sanitation, and must be allowed under the same site plan and other approval procedures already required for traditional single-family homes. The state law permits localities to exercise only a few discretionary options, including the possibility of requiring that ADU leases must be for 30 days or more—in other words, seeking to ensure that ADUs can’t be built simply as income-generating short-term rentals.

The law also quite clearly states that localities may not “require compliance with any other requirements except as provided in this section,” a prohibition that the Staunton planning commission apparently decided to ignore.

Having wrestled with the ADU provisions for the past three months, the commission this past Thursday decided to ban short-term rentals in a primary dwelling “if the property contains an ADU.” That restriction, planning commission members contended, is a necessary “clarification” of the state law that closes the “loophole” created by the commission’s decision to ban ADUs from being used for short-term rentals. After all, what would prevent a homeowner from building an ADU—then moving into it as his own residence and turning his primary residence into a short-term rental? If the logic works in one direction, why not the other?

There are at least a couple of problems with that reasoning, starting with its disregard of the express prohibition on adding restrictions the state hasn’t already enumerated. But the bigger problem is that Staunton doesn’t have a permitting process for short-term rentals—nor, for that matter, does it have much of anything at all to say about the practice, in keeping with the city’s general aversion toward addressing housing issues. The only thing you need to operate an Airbnb in Staunton is to fill out a quaintly named, one-page “Homestay Registration” form with the city’s revenue commissioner and pay a $50 annual registration fee. Even that low hurdle may be getting ignored.

While the planning commission’s possibly impermissible amendment was offered on the pretext of honoring the intent of allowing ADUs—to create more permanent housing, a problem about which the planning commission has previously had little to say—both the commission and the city have avoided paying any attention to the root problem. It’s been nearly a decade since Staunton reluctantly addressed the issue of short-term rentals, and the number of Airbnbs in the city has proliferated ever since. Revisiting the phenomenon is certainly worthwhile, since short-term rentals indeed are whittling down the city’s available housing stock, but shoe-horning a limited backdoor limitation on them in this manner is just asking for a legal challenge.

Meanwhile, as planning commission members obsess over details over which they have no control, it appears they’ve been completely oblivious to the honking big problem in the language they’ve approved regarding ADU size. The state’s legislation does not cap the size of an ADU but does allow localities to do so, provided they allow a minimum of either 350 or 500 square feet, depending on lot size. That’s enough for a comfy cottage. Staunton’s ADU language, however, states simply that the ADU’s size “shall be less than” that of the primary dwelling—which is to say, there’s nothing to prevent the owner of a single-family home of 2,000 square feet from building a second home (lot size permitting) of, say, 1,990 square feet.

Interesting.

The ADU law won’t go into effect until July 1 of next year, so the planning commission has time to continue poking at the thing and doubtless will, regardless of how futile that might be. Then again, no one else seems to be paying much attention. No one spoke at Thursday’s public hearing on the matter, suggesting that the default mode on housing issues at the local level is indeed inaction—but just wait. Wait until the first single-wide pops up on one of those nice half-acre lots in Baldwin Acres. . . .

The data center runaround continues

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Just one week after the chairman of Staunton’s Economic Development Authority tried to assure city residents that when it comes to data centers they have nothing to worry about, Staunton’s mayor followed suit. Michele Edwards’s three-page calming of the waters, read into the record (see here, starting around the 49-minute mark) at the Sept. 10 city council meeting, was considerably longer than the brief remarks offered Sept. 3 by Billy Vaughn, but otherwise covered the same ground:

There is no data center being built at Staunton Crossing, nor has an application for such a center been received;
The idea of recruiting a data center for Staunton Crossing dates back to 2019 (in reality, 2018), when it became part of the city’s marketing plan for the industrial park;
Despite the marketing plan, the city’s zoning code does not permit data centers and would have to be amended to allow such a project;
Any necessary changes to the zoning ordinance would have to go through an appropriate review process, including public hearings—so, in essence, no need for Staunton residents to be concerned about a data center sneaking into town.

If only it were so simple.

In addition to the above similarities, Vaughn’s and Edwards’s assurances both ignored the fundamental question of why a data center is being pursued in the first place—thereby raising all the angst to which they have half-heartedly responded. It’s as though the two of them were poking at an ant hill while simultaneously saying “Don’t worry—they won’t bite. Look at the length of my stick!” But why poke it in the first place?

The “stick” in this analogy is the city’s zoning code, which is more of a slender reed than either Vaughn or Edwards will admit. Staunton Crossing is zoned partially B-2, General Business District, and partially I-2, Heavy Industrial District. Both classifications incorporate the permitted uses of their more restrictive counterparts, which means that any use permitted in I-1, Light Industrial District, is also permitted in I-2. None of these district ordinances make any reference whatsoever to data centers. Indeed, Staunton’s entire zoning code is silent on the subject, presumably because such centers were never envisioned as a possibility.

That’s important to remember when Vaughn states that Staunton Crossing’s zoning “does not permit data centers,” or when Edwards echoes with the assertion that “data centers were not, and still are not, a permitted use in the City of Staunton.” The agnostic zoning code neither allows nor disallows such centers. It simply turns a blind eye to the very idea, leaving the whole thing open to speculation and wild-assed interpretation.

By comparison, Staunton has had no problem articulating just what kinds of industries it does not want. The I-2 zoning description includes 53 prohibited uses, much of it reading like a century-old inventory of industrial processes, from candle and gunpowder manufacture to fat rendering and leather tanning. Yet for all that specificity, there is not one prohibited use that can be associated with high tech, such as semiconductor manufacturing. In most respects, the zoning ordinance is an antiquated tool that hasn’t kept up with the times.

(As an aside that speaks to the sensibilities of those who crafted these rules: among the permitted uses in the I-1 district are “adult businesses,” which receive a page-and-a-half of rules micromanaging their operations—far more than for any other endeavor.)

There also are various loopholes carved out for the heavy industrial district, starting with the caveat that its “regulations are designed to permit the development of the district for almost any industrial uses”—a invitation so broad that it presumably led to the highly specific list of exceptions. The industrial ordinance also asserts that, after review, “other uses of the same general character and compatible with those uses” already permitted in the ordinance also may be allowed. It’s worth noting, therefore, that those permitted uses include public utility service yards or electrical receiving or transforming stations—uses one could claim are analogous to a building full of electrical switches, which is one definition of a data center. Other potentially analogous permitted uses include warehouses and solar energy facilities (a rare contemporary note).

A general business district, meanwhile, allows “processing and manufacturing establishments that are not objectionable because of smoke, odor, dust or noise when the processing and manufacturing activity is conducted entirely within a completely enclosed building and where there is no storage or supplies or equipment on the premises outside the building.” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how that passage alone could undergird an argument about processing establishments—data centers—that are never mentioned by name or specific function within the city’s guidelines.

The point here is not to provide a road map for someone seeking to build a data center in Staunton, but simply to point out the hollow nature of the reassurances our local officials are providing. In doing so, they frittered away an opportunity for leadership on an increasingly contentious issue—one so of the moment that Congressional candidate Beth Macy, for example, recently pledged to work toward a moratorium on new data centers until new guardrails can be built around their development.

“Up and down the Shenandoah Valley, big tech developers are coming into rural communities, getting local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements, and steamrolling local opposition,” she wrote on her campaign Facebook page following a visit to Shenandoah County, where a hotly contested 2-million-square-foot data center has been approved for construction by the Strasburg town council. That project is being planned for the town’s 80-acre industrial park, which is a third the size of Staunton Crossing.

Our local officials can tell us until they’re blue in the face that we don’t need to worry about that sort of thing happening in Staunton because our zoning ordinances protect us. But that claim becomes at least questionable to anyone who reads the ordinances, and it becomes farcical in the context of a Staunton Crossing marketing plan that promotes itself as “the perfect destination for businesses in a range of industries, including . . . data centers.”

That’s perfect, all right. Just perfect.

Renting in Staunton? Caveat emptor

(Reading time:14 minutes)

There are government agencies to ensure that the gallon of gas you pump at a service station is actually a gallon. Multiple government agencies assess—however imperfectly—whether the food you buy is safe for human consumption. Government agencies license barbers and hairdressers so you have some assurance they won’t accidentally cut your throat. Cars, airline flights, prescription drugs, amusement park rides, restaurants—almost anything or anyone to whom you entrust your body has some degree of government oversight for your safety and well-being.

Everything, it seems, except for rental housing.

Rent a house or an apartment and you must take it on faith that your new home won’t harm you or your family. That it’s not a fire trap because of faulty wiring, or a petri dish of mold and mildew, or that rotten floorboards won’t give way as you cross a room, or that cockroaches won’t be swarming your kitchen after the lights go out. In Staunton (or Waynesboro or Augusta County), there is no seal of good housekeeping from an inspector who has evaluated rental premises to determine that they’re decent, safe and sanitary. What you see is what you get, and if you don’t see something objectionable when you sign a lease, you’re on your own when trouble develops.

And it will. Not always, of course, but often enough. “Sewer leak in basement, decaying subfloor bathroom, broken/bowing flooring bathroom,” a city building inspector wrote in July last year about a single-family home in Staunton. “Electrical hazard—stove plugged into extension cord,” a Staunton inspector noted the previous month about a local apartment. “Gutters, paint, fascia, soffits, porches, windows,” reads a May, 2025 drumroll of nonspecific but failed inspection items at yet another single-family home.

Those and other reports, alas, came after the fact. They resulted from complaints, not as part of a proactive approach to identifying housing problems before someone was placed at risk. It’s as though we had decided that the best way to ensure a healthy food supply is to wait for people to get sick before inspecting food processing plants and agricultural operations. Or that public health is best served by letting pharmaceutical companies put whatever drugs they want on the market and then see what seems to work and what doesn’t—even if that means people die.

Put in those stark terms, most people will conclude that it makes sense to test and review for safety and efficacy before releasing any number of products and services on the market. Except for rental housing. Rental housing is the inexplicable exception.

THERE ARE LOTS OF REASONS to be concerned about the condition of Staunton’s rental housing, starting with its age. Roughly 40% of city residents live in rented quarters, which exceeds both state (33%) and national statistics. Staunton also has an above-average number of old homes: one-fifth of its housing predates 1939, and 41.6% of all Staunton homes are 65 or older. Age alone is not an indicator of problems, of course, but according to this year’s report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, nearly 50% of renter-occupied units built before 1939 have repair needs, as do 46% of rental units built between 1940 and 1969.

Staunton’s approximately 4,600 renter-occupied dwellings therefore may reasonably be expected to include upwards of a thousand homes that need some amount of repair. That isn’t merely a matter of discomfort—it’s a health issue. Homes in disrepair can result in people getting sick, and rental homes are far more likely to fall into that category than owner-occupied dwellings. The 2025 Augusta Health assessment of community health needs, for example, found that 14% of local residents reported living in unhealthy or unsafe housing during 2025, a proportion “significantly higher” than in 2019. But a closer look at the responses reveals greater extremes: 19.5% of renters reported unsafe conditions, or double the proportion of homeowners. And very-low-income respondents were even more likely to fall into that category, at 31.4%.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition released in June a national renter survey that found 49% of the nation’s 46 million renter households were cost-burdened last year—and 26% were severely cost burdened, meaning they were paying more than 50% of their income for shelter. Moreover, two of every five of those renters lived in homes that needed at least one repair, according to the survey, while nearly 8% lived in homes with multiple physical deficiencies. Leading the list of top complaints: pests (cockroaches, mice, rats, bedbugs), electrical problems, and broken or missing essential fixtures, including sinks, bathtubs, windows, doors, locks and steps.

Alarming though that is, one of the coalition survey’s more illuminating findings was that despite these problems, nearly a third of renters avoid asking a landlord for help when they have a problem. (And more than a quarter of those who did complain said their landlord either responded but didn’t do anything or failed to respond altogether.) Why the reluctance to complain? Simple economics. Renters who wouldn’t raise their concerns said they feared the landlord would respond by raising the rent (18%) or would actually charge the tenant for fixing a problem (14.2%).

People with relatively comfortable incomes simply might opt, under those circumstances, to look for someplace else to live, but that’s a far less likely option for the economically disadvantaged. Not only is the local rental market extremely tight, with few listings and high rents, but more than three-quarters of all low-income renters are burdened by low or no credit scores, according to the coalition. A significant fraction, 15.7%, also have an eviction history—often for missing rent payments—which further limits their mobility.

So what’s a renter faced with substandard and even potentially hazardous living conditions to do? Most, unsurprisingly, will just suck it up and tolerate their situation, regardless of threats to their health and safety. A few—a very few—will complain to city officials, with mixed results, as noted in a section below. And the great majority presumably will nod in agreement with the coalition’s survey finding that “about four in every five renters (79.9%) agreed that rental homes should be required to pass periodic inspections conducted by an authorized agency to ensure those homes are safe to live in.”

Just don’t look for that in Staunton.

IT’S NO LONGER REVELATORY to observe that Staunton has a long tradition of a hands-off attitude toward housing issues. This remains true even where Virginia has loosened its regulatory grip, as with its provision in the Statewide Uniform Building Code that empowers state localities to adopt a rental inspection ordinance “to promote safe, decent and sanitary housing for its citizens.”

To be sure, only 18 Virginia localities, as assessed by Charlottesville Tomorrow in a recent series by Erin O’Hare, have in fact taken up that offer. State history suggests that rental inspection is a political hot potato that most municipalities either quickly drop—as Waynesboro did three years ago—or that can take decades to enact. Roanoke, for example, took almost two decades to adopt an inspection program, in 1996, and did so only after an apparently preventable fire swept through a house divided into apartments, killing four children and their grandmother. The blaze broke out just months after a group of 72 landlords, owning a total of more than 3,000 properties, had banded together to oppose such inspections, declaring they would fight the city all the way to the Supreme Court to protect their property rights.

Adding to those difficulties are the law’s attempts to walk a regulatory tightrope by imposing various restrictions that discourage some officials from pursuing the idea. Most notable among these is the requirement that an inspection program cannot be applied to an entire locality but only to a specified “inspection district” within a city or county—presumably a blighted or lower-income neighborhood deserving of such government scrutiny. Just defining such a district therefore can become a politically charged exercise, and even if that’s accomplished, the law is vague on just what kind of compliance can be required from the district’s landlords.

Yet whether these obstacles are worth tackling in Staunton in pursuit of a greater good is not part of any conversation. Instead, the city’s attitude was summed up by John Glover, before his recent retirement as Staunton’s Building Official, when he wrote in an email that such a program “has been explored in the past and staff decided it was not necessary.” A rental inspection program would require additional city staffing and possibly result in higher rents, “which is detrimental to affordable housing,” Glover contended, adding: “We think our complaint-based enforcement of the Virginia Property Maintenance code (which is optional in the state of Virginia) is adequate to ensure safe sanitary rentals to our residents. . . . This approach has proven to be very effective for many years.”

There are, however, at least three problems with these assertions, the first two already identified above. The first is that a complaint-based system is not prophylactic. It allows an adverse situation to develop to the point at which it creates a hazard, threatening health and safety, instead of seeking to nip such hazards in the bud.

The second is that a complaint-based system requires some of society’s most vulnerable members to call attention to themselves in a way that many will find threatening. As already noted, people with marginal incomes, often with physical limitations because of poor health or old age, are unlikely to risk losing their homes in the forlorn hope that the city will compel a remedy of their unsafe or unsanitary living conditions—and are even less likely to do so when a likely outcome is that they’ll end up on the street.

But the third and biggest problem with Glover’s rationale is that it’s made without any factual evidence to back it up. There are no city statistics about the extent or severity of housing deficiencies—indeed, the city still has no inventory of vacant homes, much less occupied homes that have serious deficiencies. A claim that Staunton’s approach to property code enforcement “has proven to be very effective for many years” is akin to saying that the city’s wolf eradication campaign has been a smashing success: we have no unaddressed problems of unsafe and unsanitary rentals, and we have no wolves. The statement is absurd on its face, but say it loudly enough and with sufficient conviction and you’ll win over those who are just looking for an excuse not to do anything.

IF THERE’S ONE THING at which Staunton excels when it comes to housing, it’s the city’s ability to avoid gathering data that might force some kind of reckoning. So if, for example, one were seeking to determine just how many complaints of violations of the state’s Maintenance Code have been filed by renters, under the city’s “very effective” complaint-based enforcement policy, the answer would be—a null set. The city does not “keep or document who makes the complaint,” according to David Smithgall, Glover’s successor as Building Official as of July 1, nor does it record who’s a renter. On the other hand, he added, the number is undoubtedly very low—on the order of 1% to 3%, according to an estimate from Matt Sheaves, the city’s property maintenance inspector.

As it turns out, the city keeps remarkably little documentation of any kind about its inspections, and the little it was logging became even more limited late last year, when apparently it changed the reporting format. So, for example, a request for all property maintenance inspection records for a 12-month period produces one kind of spreadsheet through early August 2025 and a second spreadsheet thereafter. The more recent, more concise spreadsheet no longer includes a brief description of the complaint, such as those quoted at the start of this report, restricting itself to one-word categories like “unsafe” or “sanitation.” The new format also completely eliminates any reference to the source of a complaint, how a complaint was made or anything identifying the complainant.

Most critically, the newer spreadsheet identifies the name but no longer provides the address of the property owner.

That last point is important because it offers a way, albeit an imperfect one, to identify most rental properties. Any house owned by a limited liability company is all but guaranteed to be an investment property. So is a house owned by someone who doesn’t live in it. Fortunately, while those addresses are no longer conveniently provided in the building department’s spreadsheets, they can be obtained from the city’s GIS website. It just takes a little work.

So what can be gleaned from the city’s complaint investigation spreadsheets? Starting on Feb. 10, 2025 and ending Feb. 6, 2026, the city received a total of 187 complaints of possible violations of the maintenance code. More than half were for “grass and weeds,” and approximately a dozen were for non-residential properties. Stripping both those categories out of the spreadsheets and concentrating on the more serious alleged deficiencies leaves 77 residential complaints over those 12 months—and of those, 44 met the criteria of likely rental properties. In other words, far, far more than 1% to 3%.

How serious were the violations? Hard to say since last summer, because that information is no longer recorded, but the excerpts quoted at the start of this report from the first few months of this study suggest some can be very serious indeed. How have the violations been remedied? Also hard to say, because while some were marked as coming into compliance, others didn’t have an inspector assigned even a year later—even, in a couple of cases, two rental houses marked simply “unsafe.”

But here’s another notable finding to be extracted from this mishmash of data: plot the 44 likely rentals on a map, and 26 of them fit squarely within the confines of the West End study area. Which, of course, is where the preponderance of Staunton’s oldest homes are located. A potential rental inspection district for Staunton couldn’t be more obviously designed.

IT’S NOT A STRETCH TO STATE that 44 rental properties with alleged maintenance code violations are just the tip of the iceberg. Staunton’s aging housing stock suggests as much, as do national statistics, as does Augusta Health’s assessment—indeed, as does common sense. Yet building officials who one might think would be closest to the problem seem most deeply in denial, low-balling the numbers, cutting back on documentation and declining to question the obvious deficiencies in the city’s record-keeping.

The two main arguments against a rental inspection program that John Glover advanced—that the city would need more inspectors and that inspections might drive up rents—are from a standard playbook that is quoted by municipal employees every time such a proposal is made. Indeed, those were exactly the main points made by Waynesboro’s city manager in 2023, when that city’s chapter of Virginia Organizing was calling for a rental inspection program and thought it had the city manager’s support—right up to the moment he cut their legs out from under them.

Of course, both those arguments could be made about any program that safeguards the public. Programs cost money and staff to implement. Compliance requirements affecting the private sector often will increase costs that may then be passed on to consumers. Yet those increased costs, both public and private, are rarely as extreme as opponents would have us believe. And whatever incremental costs are incurred should be balanced against the benefits derived, although that’s hard to do fairly when those expected benefits are dismissed out of hand as negligible.

Virginia cities both larger and smaller than Staunton, recognizing that they have an obligation to their most vulnerable residents, have implemented rental inspection programs, from Colonial Heights (population 18,200) and Hopewell (23,100) to Winchester (28,000), Petersburg (33,000) and Roanoke (100,000). But if concern for one’s neighbors isn’t sufficient motivation to follow the path these cities have taken, maybe a more self-serving one will do the job: failing to ensure that homes are adequately maintained inevitably leads to urban blight and lower property values for everyone nearby, in an ever-widening gyre. Maybe enlightened self-interest can show the way where compassion falters.

On having a cake and eating it, too

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

Staunton has a coming-of-age problem. Like a teenager who desires to be one of the cool kids by hanging out with a fast crowd, while simultaneously being repelled or frightened by what that might entail, city leaders are tying themselves up in knots over just what they should do about data centers. And as anyone familiar with teenage angst can tell you, getting all wobbly about core values usually doesn’t end well.

Here’s where we are right now:

Just shy of eight years ago—on Nov. 8, 2018—a group of 30 city and business leaders was convened by the Timmons Group, a civil engineering consulting firm, to come up with a plan for developing a 300-acre economic development site on the east end of Staunton. After a second, similar meeting that tweaked the results of the first, a resulting master plan for Staunton Crossing was approved by city council. The plan envisioned a mix of advanced manufacturing, office, and small retail use—and, yes, a data center.

Eight years later, the master plan remains unchanged even as data centers have fallen into public disfavor, their size and numbers exploding across the American landscape. As loud, voracious consumers of electricity and water, such centers have become widely stigmatized as an environmental burden that exists primarily to serve an artificial intelligence industry viewed with even greater public apprehension. And while the primary purpose of Staunton Crossing ostensibly is to create well-paying jobs, data centers require shockingly few employees once they’re up and running, which begs the question of why the city is pursuing them in the first place.

To be fair, little of that was understood in 2018, when data centers still enjoyed a reputation as a clean industry. But as they’ve proliferated and their hidden costs have become better understood, public concern and opposition have grown nationally and locally. Alarms have sounded, red flags raised. Although the plan for Staunton Crossing contemplates a data center of less than a million square feet, or just a fraction of the size of hyperscale centers capturing today’s headlines elsewhere, that’s still a lot of stress on a city with an aging water infrastructure and on an electric utility with dependability problems. (See here for a good overview of Dominion Energy.) So why even go there?

Moreover, this isn’t a one-and-done. Newly recognized problems associated with data centers keep cropping up, such as the recently announced results of an Arizona State University study that found that the cooling plumes emitted by data centers can raise surrounding community temperatures by four degrees. Or consider industry efforts to deal with the cooling issue by going to two-stage heat exchangers that use far less water—by relying on Pfas “forever chemical” gases. Although the gases are contained in closed-loop systems with no direct emissions, fugitive emissions and the possibility of industrial accidents resulting in environmental releases are raising numerous legal challenges.

Within that context, Staunton’s approach to data centers has been downright two-faced. On the one hand, the city’s marketing materials continue to promote Staunton Crossing as “a prime location for data centers” because of the city’s low risk of natural disasters, as well as the availability of “low-cost and reliable electrical service” from Dominion Energy”—which may come as a surprise to the folks at the Central Shenandoah Planning District, who recently updated the local hazard mitigation plan and noted just how unreliable electric service has become in our area.

On the other hand, city officials repeatedly try to soothe public concerns by observing—correctly, but misleadingly—that the city’s zoning code doesn’t include data centers as a permissible use in its light industrial and general business areas, which is how Staunton Crossing is zoned. So, for all you nervous nellies out there—no reason to worry. Right?

How weirdly passive-aggressive is that? The city recruits data centers for Staunton Crossing—but placates local concerns about data centers by noting that such uses aren’t allowed at Staunton Crossing.

Such reassurances are obviously superficial, since zoning limitations can be undone by amending the code or via a special use variance. But by clinging to such a hollow rationale for maintaining the status quo, city leaders maintain a “having our cake and eating it, too” position, leaving open the possibility that a data center might fall into their laps without their having to take a position on whether that’s actually a good idea. Were that to happen the zoning issue would then have to be addressed, of course, which would mean public hearings and passionate arguments and lots of hard feelings, but with all that sturm und drang overshadowed by the dangling bait of a multi-million-dollar development proposal that the city itself had solicited.

That sounds an awful lot like a strategy ripped from a teenager’s playbook—the one about begging for forgiveness rather than asking for permission,.

Just such juggling was on display at this past Thursday’s meeting of the Economic Development Authority, which had been expected to include a presentation by the Timmons Group of an updated Staunton Crossing business plan. Such an update was teased in early April, when Tim Davey, the group’s director of economic development, conceded to city council that much had changed since the plan was first approved and that it was long overdue for a face lift. But while he acknowledged that data centers have become enormously controversial, Davey nevertheless urged city leaders to leave the basic marketing mix unchanged, suggesting that there are workarounds for perceived problems—workarounds like, say, a small nuclear reactor to meet data center energy needs.

Davey also assured the city council that a refreshed business plan could be ready in as little as 90 days. Five months later, however, the update won’t be aired before the EDA’s next meeting, on Oct. 8, ostensibly because the Sept. 3 meeting had an overly subscribed agenda. Indeed, the data center question would not have arisen at the meeting at all if not for a short statement read at the end of the public session by authority chairman Billy Vaughn, who opened by acknowledging that there have been “numerous inquiries, comments, and questions regarding the current or potential siting of a data center in Staunton Crossing.”

Without describing those concerns, Vaughn went on to claim that since the business plan and its inclusion of a data center “was prepared after public input, the document should not change until public input has been provided.” Repeating the rationale that Staunton Crossing’s zoning is industrial, “which does not permit data centers,” Vaugh concluded that any zoning change would require “public hearings by the Planning Commission with final decision by City Council.”

In other words, let’s kick this can down the road just a wee bit more.

That this kind of temporizing unnecessarily increases stress and anxiety among those paying attention to such things should be obvious, so here’s an idea: why not seek an amendment to the city’s zoning code now, before civic sensibilities get clouded by high-pressure utility and AI lobbyists promoting a data center already recruited by the city’s economic development staff? Why not make the Staunton Crossing pitch for data centers meaningful by holding public hearings to remove the chief regulatory hurdle such a center must clear before one gets enticed to the city? And if those hearings instead unleash widespread and vociferous opposition to making data centers a permitted use, in business or industrial zones or anywhere else, why not amend Staunton Crossing’s marketing plans accordingly? And. Stop. Wasting. Everyone’s. Time.

Such a preemptive move might require political courage and leadership, but one developmental benchmark that marks the transition from bewildered adolescence to adult maturity is the recognition that everything has a price. That there is no free ride. That a crucial trick to living well comes from divining, as best we can, the true cost of something before taking it on.