Andy Zipser

The deadly combination of fire, ice

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There are many ways to be miserable when winter turns this extreme, but one of the worst is to be called out to fight a house fire. Such calls more often come at night, when the temperature is at its most frigid, because people do stupid or desperate things to stay warm and the physics of their efforts gets away from them: overloaded extension cords, space heaters too close to flammable objects—whatever.

For the volunteer and career firefighters that end up responding, the result is a treacherous landscape of icy footing, back-spray from hoses that freezes on everything it touches, bone-numbing cold that deadens reflexes. Everything is heavier and slipperier than it should be, face masks are blurred by ice, icicles hang from helmets and fire apparatus. Fire ahead, ice all around. What could be more hellish?

Well, try this on for size—a little thought experiment. Next time you’re driving around, today or tomorrow, see how many fire hydrants you can spot.

If you live in the city, you know they’ve got to be out there. And if you’ve been paying attention, you might even know the location of the hydrant closest to your home—but that doesn’t mean you’ll see it. Odds are, it’s buried under an increasingly impenetrable mound of snow and ice, thrown up by snowplow drivers more intent on clearing the streets than on maintaining access to the lifeline you’ll need if it’s your house that catches fire tonight. And while you could get out there with a pickaxe and a shovel and dig out the hydrant, chances are you haven’t given it a thought.

You should. You really should. The time to make your nearest hydrant accessible is before a fire breaks out, not when it’s already underway and every second wasted in an effort to create a hydrant connection means that much more loss to the flames.

The city was quite diligent in reminding everyone, early days, about its ordinance requiring that sidewalks be shoveled clean within 24 hours but made no mention of ensuring access to fire hydrants. And while the Virginia Statewide Fire Prevention Code requires that “a 3-foot (914 mm) clear space shall be maintained around the circumference of fire hydrants,” the city’s fire marshal has shown no sign that he intends to enforce the rule.

So go ahead. Take a look around. This one’s on you. If there’s a hydrant in front of your house—or in front of your neighbor’s house, or the house beyond that—that’s entombed within a block of chunked ice, it’s your home that’s at risk. That problem isn’t going to fix itself.

What we should be learning

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Four degrees this morning, according to my outside thermometer, which with a mild breeze of six miles per hour pushes us into sub-zero wind chill territory. That white stuff on the ground stopped being snow—if it ever was that—several days ago, compressing into an ice cap you can walk across without breaking through the crust. The city finally realized that this is not your normal snowstorm and brought in massive farming and road-building machinery to break up the ice still coating most roads, impervious to workaday snowplows mounted on pickups and garbage trucks. The deep freeze will extend into next week.

And yet, this could have been far worse. Had we had a widespread power outage, caused by storm-toppled transmission poles or a fried substation, many hundreds of city residents would have faced a life-threatening situation. No heat, no light, and often no way to get out of the house to seek help—if any help could be found. In many cases, the extreme cold would have resulted in burst pipes, which not only would have meant no water now but too much water later, when a thaw eventually arrives. And those in greatest danger, as always, would have been the most vulnerable: the elderly and disabled, those relying on medical devices, families with small children.

What would they have done? Who could they have called, and what help would have been provided?

A day before the storm hit, the city put out a press release announcing that it had declared a state of emergency. This apparently was intended to provide some kind of assurance that matters were well in hand, with references to the activation of an Emergency Operations Plan and a claim that it “removes any barriers to our response efforts and allows us to mobilize additional resources, if necessary.” Just what that was supposed to mean for the average Staunton resident was never explained, however, and aside from advising people to call 911 in an emergency, the only direct communication to the public was a stern reminder about shoveling out the sidewalks. As if!

Meanwhile, the city’s lack of foresight and advance emergency planning was captured in microcosm by its response to the unsheltered residents who live on our streets—which is to say, no municipal response at all. Whatever resources are unleashed by the Emergency Operations Plan, apparently none are extended to people sleeping in their cars or huddled in a tent somewhere. If a declared state of emergency is in any way meaningful, that umbrella doesn’t cover those who need it most.

That’s not to say nothing was done. To her enormous if paradoxical credit, Michele Edwards spearheaded a mobilization effort last week to find, transport and shelter the homeless before they froze to death—but she did so as a private citizen, not as the city’s mayor. Edwards’ initial outreach was an email, written “with urgency and with hope,” to approximately 40 local religious leaders, homeless advocates and social service agencies, seeking their help “in an 11^th-hour effort to protect life and dignity.” But as Edwards also made clear, “I am writing as a local government leader, and I’m not representing the City of Staunton. So, I am not writing with local government solutions.”

Why this official hands-off policy was necessary was not explained. Equally inexplicable was the distinction Edwards drew between acting as a local government leader and as a representative of the City of Staunton: is not the local government she leads that of Staunton?

That confusion aside, Edwards’ outreach resulted in roughly a dozen participants meeting online Friday night to brainstorm a last-minute response to a humanitarian crisis. Thanks to their efforts, an emergency shelter was thrown together at Central United Methodist Church (CUMC), under the direction of the Rev. Won Un. Food donations were received, as were 17 cots on loan from the Boy Scouts at Camp Shenandoah. The YMCA made a large donation of bedding, sleeping bags and pillows, and others also donated blankets. Volunteers to staff the shelter were recruited from Mary Baldwin University (MBU), and Edwards recruited a friend, Bill Woodruff, to supervise them for the first three nights.

All good, right? Five homeless people were housed by the shelter Saturday night, including one who was transported from the current WARM shelter in Waynesboro because it’s at full capacity. (Another three people were provided emergency shelter at the Valley Mission, a high-barrier shelter that serves people working toward permanent housing and does not normally offer transient services.) The headcount Sunday night increased to nine, including one woman and a Vietnam vet that Staunton’s own Spiderman—who was walking home after volunteering at the shelter the first night—found in the snow and escorted back to the church. Two-dozen or so volunteers, many from MBU, signed up for eight-hour shifts at CUMC.

But as with most such reflexive volunteer mobilizations, interest and commitment wane with time. People eager to help at the outset of an emergency become distracted by other, more pressing needs on the home front—driveways to shovel out, children who must be tended because schools remain closed—or believe the situation is well in hand and they’re no longer needed. Communications begin to break down, with group chats suddenly funneled through a single person—supposedly in the interests of efficiency—but with daily updates becoming first scarce, and then non-existent. Energy dissipates, and the few people still working at the center of it all become over-stretched and frazzled.

The danger here is not that the current effort will crumble, although that’s certainly a possibility, but that nothing changes going forward—that the next time we’re in a similar situation, the people who stepped forward this time will be a little less eager to do so again. For that not to happen, we have to learn that extreme conditions must be met with advance planning and an organized response, and that’s really a government function. No church or nonprofit social agency has either the resources or the authority to marshal what’s needed when the general population is fragmented and isolated by extreme weather or other disasters.

What should we have learned from current events? At the very least, the following:

Meaningful communication with the public is crucial. General, nonspecific assurances about disaster declarations and emergency operations plans don’t convey any useful information. Nor does hectoring people about shoveling their sidewalks demonstrate any understanding of how much outside the norm a situation has become.
Any city emergency plan should include a centralized relief center that is opened to the public when a disaster is declared. In Staunton’s case that could be the gym at Gypsy Hill Park, or it could be the National Guard Armory—but wherever it is, that information should be widely communicated to the public, and ideally it should be widely known before there’s a disaster.
A centralized relief shelter should be stocked with, or have ready access to, cots, bedding, food and water. Of less critical importance, but still desirable, would be showers, cooking facilities, accommodation for pets, and games, books and other activities, especially for children.
Both paid and volunteer staffing are needed at a relief shelter. Paid staffing is needed to assure reliable oversight and accountability, and could consist of cross-trained city employees who are not front-line responders and are recruited ahead of time. Volunteers are needed to fill the many roles that would stretch paid staff too thin, but also should be recruited ahead of an emergency (more on that below) and contacted via a master list maintained by the city.
Transportation, of both volunteers and people in need of emergency shelter, is a critical but overlooked necessity when people are trapped in their homes. The city should have an emergency list of residents with four-wheel-drive vehicles they are willing to operate in such circumstances, to ferry volunteers, refugees, food and other supplies as needed. This may extend to National Guard equipment as well.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to observe that in a different time, extreme situations like the one we’re confronting—and inevitably will be confronting again—resulted in the creation of civil defense organizations of various sorts. Although often associated with wartime conditions, civil defense forces were designed to supplement the military and civilian first-responders by fielding volunteers to do the more mundane tasks of shepherding people to shelter, cooking and serving meals, driving and delivering people and goods where needed, checking in with refugees to ensure their needs are being met, and so on.

The irony is that an organization like this is on tap in many communities around the country—and until a few years ago was available locally, as well. Known as Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), the FEMA-sponsored program at its most ambitious trained and organized groups of community volunteers into emergency teams, with an internal command structure and in a subordinate position to first responder agencies. A watered-down version of the concept was taught locally by Rebecca Joyce, currently the city’s housing planner but at that time an employee of the Central Shenandoah Planning District, which apparently terminated CERT training without public explanation. A shadow of the group lingers on, primarily to recruit volunteer victims for local disaster drills but without any presence when the real thing strikes.

Whether reviving CERT is either feasible or desirable is open to discussion, but it’s clear that something of the sort would have been an enormous help in recent days. But that’s not a program that can spontaneously combust: it, or something similar, requires advance government initiative and government resources, as do the other elements of a meaningful disaster plan sketchily outlined above.

This won’t be our last rodeo (and indeed, this one isn’t even over yet), so the question that must be answered is, what have we learned from it? And how will that education inform our actions going forward? Failure to respond is not an option.

Jan. 29 postscript, 4 p.m.: the CUMC emergency shelter reports it is full.

It’s not just the weather that’s chilly

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Well, this is a fine mess we’re in—or, more accurately, Fern mess we’re in. (Who names a winter storm “Fern”?) Seven inches of “snow,” actually tiny and therefore densely packed crystals that have frozen into slabs of ice. Sub-freezing temperatures that will drop into low single digits every night this week and won’t break above 32 degrees for at least another week, which means all that ice isn’t going anywhere for quite a while.

And a tone-deaf city government whose main concern is that you follow its rules about clearing the “snowfall” from its relatively few sidewalks.

That was the general gist of the notice issued this morning, when the city announced that the snow removal clock had started ticking at 8 a.m., when the storm had “officially ended.” The by-the-numbers announcement that followed took pains to note that the total accumulation of 7 inches necessitates a 24-hour removal of white stuff from public sidewalks. It acknowledged that “this is heavy, frozen precipitation and the temperatures are dropping,” but rules are rules and safe pedestrian access must be ensured. “We want to solve this through community cooperation, not citations,” city manager Leslie Beauregard assured everyone, displaying just a hint of steel.

Meanwhile, my street remains untouched by a snowplow, and undoubtedly it is not unique. No telling how many shopkeepers or other business owners there are in Staunton whose commercial properties are some distance from their similarly blockaded homes, but somehow they’ll have to navigate from point A to point B to clear the way for all those pedestrians just waiting to use their sidewalks. Either that or face possible citations, although good news: as today’s announcement took pains to explain, citations are “a civil penalty rather than a criminal misdemeanor.” Whew!

All that sternness is in marked contrast to Friday’s notice that the city manager had declared a local emergency ahead of the storm. Just what the declaration meant for the average Staunton resident wasn’t exactly clear, beyond encouragement to stay off the streets, but it did note that it activated the city’s official-sounding but entirely inscrutable Emergency Operations Plan: no link to that plan was provided in the announcement, and good luck trying to find it on the Staunton website. Apparently it does endow the city with superpowers, however, as it “removes any barriers to our response efforts and allows us to mobilize additional resources, if necessary,” according to Beauregard.

Nothing in the state of emergency suggested that anyone would be giving the public any slack, but that didn’t dissuade the city from asking residents to be gentle. “Please be patient,” the emergency declaration beseeched. “Clearing substantial snow accumulations across the city will require more time than usual.”

Indeed it will, and all the more so when the “snow” is more like ice and the temperature here is barely above that in Anchorage (21 degrees) at this writing. But that patience, it should go without saying, should run both ways. It would have shown some understanding of the Fern mess we’re in if—instead of bolting out of the gate with a finger-wagging admonition about its residents’ responsibilities—the city had used its newly declared power to “determine the use of materials, goods, services, and resource systems” to let the public know what help it might expect.

Homeless folks get short shrift again

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Here’s poetic timing for you: the next nationwide Point in Time (PIT) count of homeless people is scheduled for Wednesday, following on the heels of local forecasts of ice and snow, abundant advice on stocking up with food, water and batteries, and schadenfreude-laden commiseration from the lucky few for those who haven’t already installed back-up generators. But really, the only thing we know for sure is that it’s going to be cold. Really, really cold.

Most of us will get along just fine. The notable exception will be people who no longer have a home and make do by staying at homeless shelters or by sleeping in their cars, tents or church vestibules. The PIT count is an annual attempt to take a snapshot of just how many such people there are, but the irony is that the worse the weather when the census is taken, the less reliable its results: those without access to a homeless shelter burrow deeper into whatever hole they find, prevail on friends or acquaintances to let them couch-surf, or scrape together enough money for a short motel stay. Not only are the homeless harder to find when the weather is most extreme, but it’s only human nature in the face of such adversity for the census takers to be less diligent than they might otherwise be.

So we’ll get some numbers, of questionable usefulness—eventually. The unfortunate reality is that while a “snapshot” connotes immediacy, these annual exercises are taking ever longer to collate. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, for example, which you might expect to be as up to date as anyone, has a dashboard that ostensibly serves up 2025 homelessness data but the numbers it reports are from the 2024 PIT count. That means the statistics are two years old and increasingly irrelevant. Mary Frances Kenion, Chief Equity Officer for the alliance, says this is because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has not released last year’s data, which sounds par for the course these days but probably should be spelled out on the alliance website.

Locally, here’s what we can expect next week: that the PIT census will find 80 to 90 people staying at the Valley Mission, another 30 to 40 in a WARM overnight shelter (more on that in a minute) and up to a dozen others in emergency accommodations, including the New Directions Center for survivors of domestic violence and motel rooms paid for by social service agencies. Only an additional score or so will be identified in the usual gathering spots. including several tent encampments in Staunton and Waynesboro, as well as the parking lots of Sheetz, Walmart, Cracker Barrel, Martin’s, Lowe’s and similar commercial outlets.

All told, the final count for the SAW area of Staunton, Augusta County and Waynesboro will come in between 140 and 160, and to the extent that anyone makes an effort to publicize this finding, much will be made of what a high percentage of that number were sheltered for the night. The implication will be that the circumstances aren’t too dire, even though the actual number of unsheltered people most assuredly will be higher than reported—perhaps much higher. WARM executive director Alec Gunn, for example, as close to local homelessness reality as anyone, contends that “there’s easily at least a hundred” unsheltered people in the SAW region.

A misleadingly low count next week will, however, dull any sense of urgency to do something about a problem still firmly on the backburner of civic or social concern. Last year’s bitter January weather prompted some hesitant steps toward creating a day shelter, as a suitable alternative for people otherwise forced to find refuge in the library, YMCA, fast-food restaurants and other public spaces. Alec Gunn ostensibly was point-man on that effort, but says it went nowhere because the Staunton city council wouldn’t offer more than a year’s funding—and a miserly amount at that, of just $30,000—and he didn’t want to start something that would have to shut down a year later. Moreover, he added, the day center’s proposed site, the First Presbyterian Church, turned out to be inappropriate for a low-barrier facility because its premises are used for two children’s schools.

So. No day shelter. But also fragile provision of an emergency night shelter, since the roster of churches willing to work with WARM to provide week-long accommodations is noticeably shorter than last year. The season began with two unclaimed slots for host churches, forcing at least one to extend its commitment by a week, and even today the schedule has multiple openings for overflow sites, which are needed when the primary host has insufficient room to meet demand, usually around 30 people. And this next week, when the weather will be at its most unforgiving, the host church will be not in Staunton or Fishersville or Waynesboro, as is the norm, but in Mt. Sidney, creating additional transportation headaches. Nor is there an overflow site on next week’s schedule.

Bottom line: be appropriately grateful if you have a warm, weather-tight and amply stocked refuge in which to ride out the storm, and even more so if you don’t get pushed into the cold to fend for yourself for 10 hours until you can return. But remember also that there are dozens among us who don’t have those bare necessities, after yet another year of handwringing but not a bit of increased help—if you’re on the street, all you’ve received is blah, blah, blah. Thin gruel indeed.

Jan. 23 postscript: According to a note from a WARM board member, the sheltered count now approaches 50. First Baptist Waynesboro, the host church this week, has been staying open some days, depending on the weather, but thus far there’s no word on whether Salem Lutheran in Mt. Sidney will follow suit next week.

You can’t get everything you want

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There’s a sign posted in many small businesses that reads more or less like this: “Fast. Cheap. Quality Work. Pick any two.”

That brevity gets at a simple truth. You can get things fast and cheap, but the quality will suffer. Or you can opt for good quality and fast turnaround, but it won’t be cheap. And maybe, just maybe, you can get good quality at a cheap price, but you’ll have to wait for it.

A different but similar set of trade-offs bedevils efforts to resolve the affordable housing shortage. We can build cheaper houses, for example by increasing zoning density, but at the perceived cost of dragging down overall real estate values—almost invariably provoking local opposition from existing homeowners. Or we can build homes more quickly but at market rates, staving off NIMBYism but failing to meet the need for housing at prices that most people can afford. We can, in other words, view housing either as a form of wealth accumulation or as essential shelter. It’s not at all clear that we can do both.

Because of that simple disconnect, virtually every housing “solution” being tossed around not only misses the mark but often promises to make things worse. In recent weeks, for example, the Trump administration has floated the ideas of allowing 50-year mortgages, of banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes, and of having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds, a purchase we are assured will “make the cost of owning a home more affordable.” None of these proposals, you’ll note, do anything to increase the actual housing supply. All will, almost assuredly, increase the cost of housing.

“Whenever we subsidize mortgages, guess what? It all gets capitalized into home prices,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, real estate and finance professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of business, told The Wall Street Journal. “All these demand subsidies don’t really work in a world where you don’t supply new housing.”

Given a generally agreed-upon shortage of 4 million homes nationally, housing “solutions” that don’t increase housing supply only prolong a game of musical chairs: someone will always be left out, regardless of mortgage terms or rates or whether corporate investors are barred from competing with individual homebuyers. And as in any market in which demand continues to outstrip supply, prices inexorably will move in only one direction. That’s presumably great news for anyone lucky enough to have grabbed a chair, but it’s a growing hardship for those without, and a tragedy for society overall.

Here’s how extreme things have become: Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, last week introduced a bill calling on the Trump administration to declare a national emergency over the housing crisis. For a Democrat to urge this administration to declare any kind of national emergency is like handing a gallon of gasoline to an arsonist, but the National Housing Emergency Act nevertheless seeks to prohibit state and local governments from imposing regulations that place “a substantial burden” on housing production, including many traditional zoning and other regulatory restrictions. The “period of the emergency” is to last until 2031, or until a goal of 4 million new housing units is met.

Slotkin’s bill springboards off the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950, which gives the U.S. president the authority to require businesses and corporations “to prioritize and accept contracts for materials and services as necessary to promote the national defense”—shifting housing intervention under the same umbrella of federal overreach as the Trumpian rationale for bombing fishing boats and its incursion into Venezuela. So, for example, the proposed National Housing Emergency Act would extend the DPA’s “materials and services” coverage to include not just lumber and steel but also manufactured housing.

But the act goes further. It also introduces a “pro-growth requirement” for state and local governments to receive federal block grant funding. And, significantly, it pushes states and localities to change their laws to allow commercial properties to be turned into housing, eliminate single-family zoning and allow for accessory dwelling units, sometimes referred to as “in-law suites” or “granny flats.” It also bars states and localities from passing laws, rules or regulations that would impair the build-out or rehab of housing during the emergency—arguably all desirable provisions, but at the cost of severely slashing local autonomy in an area long regarded as outside of state and federal control.

It’s too early to tell whether Slotkin’s bill will make any headway, although its lack of bipartisan support suggests not. But think of it as a canary in the coal mine, a warning signal of a growing sense of helplessness and frustration at the national level over a crisis that historically has been beyond federal purview. It also attests to the willingness of at least some Democrats to have the federal government throw its weight around at a grassroots level, in which case we’ll have only ourselves to blame. Zoning, building codes, land-use patterns—these are all local responsibilities, or have been until now, but failure to meet those responsibilities adequately invites intervention.

Fast. Cheap. Quality work. There are always trade-offs. We can act on an understanding that everyone needs a place where they can live within their means; or we can continue to view our homes as wealth generators that must be protected as investments. If we don’t mediate that conflict at a local level, and soon, we run the risk of having someone else do it for us.

Who has the Death Star plans?

“What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?”—Padmé, in Revenge of the Sith

Lest anyone remain skeptical that life imitates art, the past week’s events should dispel all doubts. In the space of just a few days our very own Emperor Palpatine unleashed his storm troopers with deadly effect, both at home and abroad, killing more than 80 in an unprovoked attack on Venezuela while also shooting a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman in the head. Two more people—Venezuelans, as chance would have it—were likewise shot in their car, in Portland, Oregon, albeit with less fatal consequences.

Palpatine, a/k/a Darth Sidious, was beside himself with glee at the mayhem he had unleashed, marveling at how much the aerial assault on Caracas and its swarthy inhabitants, which he watched live on multiple TV screens, looked just like a real movie. The summary execution of a very non-swarthy woman as she sat behind the steering wheel of a Honda Pilot was a little more difficult to spin as some kind of triumph, so Darth Sidious instead fell back on the time-honored ploy of blaming the victim. Renee Nicole Good had “weaponized” her car, he claimed, supposedly propelling it— at walking speed—toward a Storm Trooper whose automatic response was to put a bullet in her face before stepping aside.

Neither of these incidents were one-offs, nor was the official response merely the exuberance of a single unhinged mind. This is in fact the new normal for a government that views itself as entitled to take whatever it wants and to trample anyone who stands in its way. As our emperor’s in-house thug, Stephen Miller, explained to a bewildered Jake Tapper on CNN: “We live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Cue Darth Vader’s “Imperial March.”

Renee Good was shot just 24 hours after the fifth anniversary of another woman getting shot to death by a law enforcement officer. That would be Ashli Babbitt, of course, who was among the hundreds of rioters who invaded and ransacked the U.S. Capitol in an ultimately futile effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results. Babbitt was shot as she attempted to climb through the shattered window of a barricaded door well inside the building, and has since been elevated to martyrdom by a mob that Darth Sidious insists was just a peaceful, loving assemblage. Indeed, widely disseminated video coverage notwithstanding, a lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s family claims she was “ambushed,” as though she had been taken out by a sniper while walking down a city street.

The parallels between the shooting deaths of both women are many, even as the actual circumstances were markedly different: Renee Good was alone in her car, surrounded by several ICE agents, whereas Ashli Babbitt was part of a surging mob that quite literally was attacking an overwhelmed police contingent. But that only underscores the hypocrisy of the Empire’s response, with Darth Sidious-wannabe JD Vance contending that while Good’s death was “tragic, sure,” it was “also a consequence of her choices. Don’t interfere with federal operations and don’t try to run over officers.” In one instance, a heroine cut down as she battled for democracy; in the other, a domestic terrorist who had only herself to blame for her violent death.

Violence and the threat of violence are of course the animating force behind imperial expansion, creating both uncertainty and fear in the subjugated population, whether foreign or domestic. It also knows no restraints. Our very own Emperor Palpatine, asked on Wednesday if there are any limits on his power, replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” This from a man who is a convicted tax cheat, sexual predator and serial liar, a man who is the very embodiment of unbridled id.

Most people find that repellant, but there are those who are enthralled by such unleashed depravity and give it sustenance. Just look at the craven Lindsey Graham, for example. But the craven ones also get a huge boost from the ineffectual ditherers in Congress, the courts and our corporate executive suites who don’t recognize, or won’t accept, that we’ve been thrust into the throes of a foundational battle. This isn’t about political differences or policy disputes. It’s not a matter of right vs. left, populist vs. elitist, conservative vs. liberal. It’s all about power: who has it, and who submits to it. Just like Miller said.

Violence is an effective tool, insofar as it creates fear that mutes opposition, but it also is an addictive drug whose doses must be increased over time to generate the desired effect. And fear, as Yoda observed, “is the path to the dark side,” a downward spiral into an ever deeper void. Just when you think things can’t get worse, a fresh new horror will be perpetrated. The Emperor will not be denied his every impulse or libidinal craving.

Bleak? Yes. But as Yoda also counseled, “In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights the way.” The knowledge, in this instance, has to be the understanding that we are being ruled not by an extremist or an ideologue, but by a vile and completely self-absorbed reptilian brain. Once that realization sinks in more broadly, the Resistance can be fully activated.

“Plant hope now; harvest courage later.”—Luke Skywalker

This is what stagnation looks like

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To understand how Staunton got caught with its pants down when it comes to having an adequate supply of affordable housing, it’s helpful to look at how the city’s population has fluctuated over the years. The graph above, prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is eye-opening: from 1980 through 2024, the city’s population grew an average of 0.15% per year. Put another way, over a span of nearly half a century, Staunton’s population increased by just 6.4%.

Nothing in the world grows that slowly. Not tree trunks. Not snail shells. To put things in perspective, Virginia quadrupled its population over the same period, from 2 million to 8.81 million. The U.S. population grew by 50%.

But the reality is even more extreme than that, because as a cursory look at the chart illustrates, all of the city’s population growth has come in the past five years. After the slightest bump in 1982, to 24,796 residents, Staunton’s population began a jagged decline that didn’t regain its previous heights until 2019, when it reached 24,916. That stagnation, it’s further worth noting, occurred despite the city more than doubling in area in 1986, when it annexed 11.1 square miles from the county. By 1987, a mere year later, the city’s headcount had slipped again, to 23,933—even as it was now on the hook for providing city services to a much wider area.

So: lower population density, but more roads, water and sewer lines to build and maintain.

A key significance of these dates is that Staunton’s Comprehensive Plan, which currently is being updated and revised, was most recently adopted in July of 2019—in other words, just as population growth in the city was beginning to take off. A 20-year roadmap for how the city should grow, the Comprehensive Plan views “effective planning” as a “dynamic process” that apparently doesn’t apply to housing, because why make plans for something that isn’t dynamic? Not only was there no population pressure for more housing, but as the plan blithely asserts, “Housing is primarily a private system that is influenced by factors beyond those controlled by local government.”

So: no planning for zoning, taxation, transportation or other infrastructure changes that might promote more housing construction. Leave that to the market to sort out.

The predictable result, however, was that the stagnation in Staunton’s population growth has been pretty much matched by stagnation in new housing, even as the city’s existing housing stock continues aging. (Indeed, 43% of all housing in Staunton was built prior to 1960.) Here’s how much housing grew over the past 35 years:

Note that this is how many units of new housing of all sizes, from single-family homes to duplexes and townhomes, were permitted in the city. Despite a five-year surge in the early 2000s, presumably driven by the larger U.S. real estate bubble that ended in a recession, all but two years saw only a few dozen permits issued annually. The 35-year total was 2,790 permits—of which more than a third were issued roughly 20 years ago.

Small wonder, then, that Staunton has an inadequate housing supply, especially at the low end. And while the city has gained several new apartment buildings over the past couple of years, roughly 30% of city residents will find them unaffordable at their income levels.

Monday morning quarterbacking always sees things with greater clarity than is possible in the moment, so it’s a cheap shot to now conclude that the 2018-2040 Comprehensive Plan should have anticipated a sharp break in a decades-long trend and come up with proactive policy changes. But the Comprehensive Plan review now underway won’t be able to make that same claim, nor will a laissez-faire dismissal of the city’s role suffice to sidestep housing issues. We’ll see this spring just how much the revised plan learns from its earlier oversights and substantively addresses its shortcomings.

Zoning: new wine in old wineskins

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

It’s only human to think that the way things are is the way they’ve always been—until they’re not. That may seem like an incongruous statement, given the extraordinarily dynamic world we’re living in. Constant social and political upheaval, as well as ever-changing rules about appropriate behavior and how we maintain relationships, can seduce us into thinking we’ve mastered this change thing—that we’ve learned how to be light on our feet as we bob and weave through everything that’s being thrown at us.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes. But learning how to respond to shifting expectations and responsibilities is not the same as learning how to effect change. Adaptation is all about reaction, not about proactively creating the world we want to see—to being able to think outside of the box, changing our circumstances to better serve our needs rather than merely responding to the world’s demands on us.

What brings all this to mind is a subject I’ve touched on in the past, albeit briefly, which is the realization that our zoning code is a decades-old strait jacket that almost invisibly shapes our built environment. Decisions that were made in the 1960s about how Staunton should be laid out, and its various land uses apportioned, have become so engrained that we rarely think about how they constrain our efforts to meet modern challenges. As a result, discussions and studies about how best to create more affordable housing, or how to make Staunton more walkable and bicycle friendly, or how to better integrate small businesses, homes and professional offices, invariably overlook root causes.

Because of this blind spot, city planners can make absurd statements about Staunton’s lack of available land for further development. The Staunton housing strategy group can meet for a year with only short mention of the zoning code, and then only to acknowledge its restrictions, without any discussion of whether those restrictions still make sense or how they can be changed to meet contemporary needs. The city’s recently adopted 11-point housing strategy mentions zoning only once, as part of an “exploration” of what might be needed to encourage additional housing options on existing properties. And it remains to be seen whether Staunton’s revision of its Comprehensive Plan will address this most fundamental issue.

That the city’s demographics and housing needs have undergone significant changes since 1969, when the current zoning code was adopted, should go without saying. Households are significantly smaller and the population overall skews significantly older. The city itself has more than doubled in geographic size, following the 1986 annexation of 11 square miles from Augusta County—yet while both Augusta County (+76%) and Waynesboro (+35%) have seen not insignificant population increases over the past half-century, Staunton’s has inched up just 5%, and all of that over just the past decade. The amount of new housing permitted in a city with 12,352 housing units is measured most years in mere dozens (see graph above or here).

One way to describe all this is “stagnation.” Indeed, at the most recent Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference, one of the supposedly most cautionary statistics—because of its implications for future housing needs—served up by a keynote speaker was the projection that by 2050, 22% of all Americans will be senior citizens. Staunton has all but reached that mark already, at 21%—more than two decades ahead of schedule.

Older people neither want (in most cases) nor need as much house as they did when they were raising families. Smaller households—the result of more adults of all ages living alone, or with just one other person—likewise need smaller homes. And Stauntonians of all ages have emphasized repeatedly their desire to have homes within walking distance of essential shopping, as well as of cultural and recreational amenities. But none of that is possible in more than half of the city, where zoning allows only bigger homes than needed on lots that are spaced more widely apart than is conducive to walking. Moreover, that limitation means rents and home prices in the other, more desired half of the city are at more of a premium than they otherwise would be.

All this suggests that a comprehensive review of Staunton’s zoning code should be a fundamental prerequisite for any serious attempt to tackle the city’s shortage of affordable housing, but the city’s blind spot in this regard has left it spinning its wheels. Although it’s been more than five years since the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) directed its staff to analyze Virginia’s affordable housing needs, its conclusions have gone largely ignored locally—including the observation that “local zoning ordinances can be a substantial barrier” to “construction of new affordable housing.”

As the JLARC report also observed, “Very few localities zone more than 50 percent of their land for multifamily housing, which is the housing that is most needed in Virginia.” Although that finding is aimed primarily at the state’s more urban northern crescent, it’s worth noting that less than a fifth of Staunton’s zoned land fits that description.

Our zoning ordinances are much to blame for the fix we’re in today, but they also can ease the way out—once we recognize just how much they’re hobbling our housing market. What man has made, man can change.

Macy’s ‘tough crowd’ was just rude

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Crystal Graham’s article in the Augusta Free Press today, about the curtain-raiser on the most promising effort to date to depose Rep. Ben Cline, ran under a curious headline: “Beth Macy faces tough crowd in Waynesboro, first stop on listening tour.” I didn’t think so—and have to hope Macy didn’t, either.

A Roanoke resident, former reporter for the Roanoke Times & World News and author of several books on contemporary social issues, Macy last week became the third Democrat to announce a bid to challenge Cline in next year’s mid-terms. This is her first foray into politics, so give Macy credit for skipping the easy stuff and plunging right into the belly of the beast: the Congressional Sixth District, despite embracing a handful of Democratic cities, is as reliably red-meat MAGA country as you can find, and the oleaginous Cline has oozed into every one of its Republican crevices. Since winning his seat in 2018 by thumping a hapless Jennifer Lewis, 59.7% to 40.2%, Cline has not had a lower margin in three subsequent elections.

So Macy’s appearance Monday night at the Faded Poppy, on East Main Street, can be fairly characterized as only the most tentative testing of the waters. A “tough crowd” it was not. While Waynesboro has been a reliably red city, it broke blue in this year’s election for the first time, even as it recorded the state’s highest percentage increase in new voter registrations. Perhaps the color switch was thanks to all those new voters, especially as Waynesboro increasingly becomes a bedroom community for notably progressive—and expensive—Albemarle County’s employees. Perhaps it was because of Trump fatigue. Or both. In any case, Macy’s day of reckoning with a salivating MAGA crowd still lies ahead.

But with Graham conceding that “the 40 or so people in attendance were a friendly audience and mostly fellow Democrats,” what prompted the headline assertion about a “tough crowd”? She didn’t explicitly say, but presumably that was a nod to the two audience members who demanded to know why they should expect Macy not to become yet another Washington insider, more intent on satisfying industry lobbyists than on serving her constituents—just another version of Cline, in other words. Macy’s response, which essentially amounted to “trust me,” drew disbelieving sneers. “I’m old enough to have heard that one too many times in my life,” one responded.

Indeed, there is no conceivable answer Macy or any other candidate can provide to such a hypothetical that would satisfy a determined skeptic, given how debased all political discourse has become. No one can predict the future. All we can do is assess a candidate’s character by what he or she has done and hope it’s rooted deeply enough to stand up to future challenges and temptations, and in that regard Macy seems to tick all the boxes. She’s wicked smart, articulate and poised. Her published work is a testament to deeply held concerns and compassion for those who are poor, downtrodden and exploited, affirming a fixed moral compass that is so notably lacking in her putative Republican opponent.

At the end of the day, all any of us can do can do is look at a candidate and trust our ability to take that person’s measure—to trust ourselves, in other words, more than we trust someone else. Without that trust, no assurances of the other person’s merit or integrity will ever fully satisfy.

How well Macy will conduct herself when venturing deeper into the MAGA waters remains to be seen, of course, but her courage in deciding to do so requires at least the benefit of the doubt, if not full-throated endorsement. That can come later. At this point, however, Macy has done or said nothing to merit the skepticism she encountered yesterday—although I don’t think as much can be said of her second interrogator. Holding a cell phone in front of her face throughout the entire “exchange,” apparently so she could record her insightful analysis, the second skeptic speechified for several minutes and was noticeably more interested in how she sounded than in recording the little bit of Macy’s response she grudgingly allowed.

That’s not a tough crowd. It’s an immature, rude crowd of one.

Zoned out over affordable housing

What a difference a line makes: in the purple areas of this map from the Virginia Zoning Atlas, ADUs good. In the white areas, which have the greatest need for more housing, ADUs bad.

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

If there was one dominant theme at the Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference, held this past week in Roanoke, it was zoning—zoning and how it gets in the way of creating sufficient affordable housing. Two plenary sessions were devoted to the subject, one featuring a self-styled “zoning whisperer,” the other debuting a zoning atlas for the entire state. Zoning issues were integral to several break-out panels. Housing Forward Virginia, a non-profit research and policy organization, announced it will be doing a road-show next year throughout the state to educate civic leaders, planners and the general public about this antiquated approach to land use and why it needs to be revisited.

That’s a lot of attention to a subject that is as esoteric for most people as debentures or polychlorides. Yet as I coincidentally wrote less than a week before the conference, “developers aren’t building affordable housing because our zoning code makes it prohibitively expensive to do so,” making this the elephant in any room where the lack of affordable housing is being lamented. Because zoning codes that were written two and three generations ago (Staunton’s dates back to 1969) dictate what we can build on land today, the result has been what Eric Kronberg, an Atlanta-based developer featured in the opening plenary, succinctly summarized as “legally mandated scarcity.”

Rattling through a fast-paced presentation that drenched his audience with numbers and statistics, Kronberg’s analysis hinged on two basic observations. First, that today’s zoning maps and codes were drafted largely in the 1950s, when 43% of households comprised nuclear families and only 9% were singles living alone, compared with 20% nuclear families and 28% singles today (the balance in each case is attributed to couples without kids or single-parent families). A 1950 household averaged 3.8 people, compared with 2.5 people in 2017, indicating a need for half again as many homes for a static population—which, of course, it has not been. Yet in 2022, 70% of all housing starts were of single-family homes, as if builders were oblivious to such changing demographics.

Second, Kronberg laid out the greatly higher municipal costs of single-family zoning. Two or three homes on an acre have the same infrastructure requirements—sidewalks, curbs, utility poles, streetlights, water and sewer lines, storm drains, paved roads—as an acre zoned for high density, but an acre with 18 housing units provides a far more robust tax base to fund all those improvements. Moreover, denser multi-use zoning creates more walkable neighborhoods than drive-only suburban-style housing, resulting in a real estate premium that fattens tax receipts. So in addition to stifling construction of the housing that’s actually needed, current zoning codes are a bad economic deal for the cities that have them.

Just how skewed land use has been could be seen most vividly in Sara Bronin’s presentation of the National Zoning Atlas, a multi-year work in progress whose Virginia component was completed just days earlier. As summarized by Bronin, a law professor at George Washington University who’s been overseeing the project, the state is short 165,000 homes but its developers are building only half as many homes annually as they were 20 years ago. One consequence of this imbalance: housing now costs too much, with nearly half of all renters paying more than 30% of their incomes for shelter, up from 34% of the renting population in 2000.

The atlas is worth a leisurely perusal, especially its filters that map selected variables, such as “show me where people can build” apartments, or accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or various forms of single-family housing. Meanwhile, atlas statistics indicate that of Staunton’s 10,988 zoned acres, 64% are reserved for single-family homes “by right,” meaning you can build a house on that land without needing special permits or discretionary approvals. Nearly three-quarters of the residentially zoned land allows only single-family housing. That leaves 2,005 acres where duplex and three-unit housing is allowed “by right,” but according to the atlas there is no zoning provision for larger “missing middle” housing of four or more units, or for apartment buildings, ADUs, planned residential developments or other denser housing. Nor are there any areas permitting housing by right without a parking mandate, which further constrains urban development.

As was made clear by both plenary speakers, as well as numerous break-out panelists, there won’t be any progress toward creating sufficient housing for working families and people with below median incomes until this zoning stranglehold is loosened. That will require reducing lot minimums and setback requirements, expanding multifamily options, streamlining approval processes, encouraging multi-use developments, allowing ADUs by right and reducing or eliminating parking mandates altogether, as has occurred in Charlottesville. It also will mean responding to the inevitable backlash from established homeowners who want to maintain existing levels of city services and low taxes and low housing density—something entirely unattainable in the real world, according to Kronberg, who said you can have any two of those but never all three.

Staunton has made tentative steps in some of these areas, such as modifying—although not eliminating—parking requirements for new housing. And it does have ADUs on its radar, although the city’s newly formed Housing Commission doesn’t plan on proposing a zoning code amendment on the subject to city council until the end of next year. But as long as Staunton avoids dealing with root causes, this merely amounts to tinkering at the edges. If the city is going to get serious about opening the door to developers willing to build housing at prices that Staunton residents can afford, it will have to question why it’s handicapping itself by relying on your grandparents’ zoning code.

* * * * *

In addition to the Virginia Zoning Atlas, another useful online resource that came out of the conference is the Virginia Rural Opportunity Dashboard. Its name notwithstanding, the “rural” dashboard maps the entire commonwealth and provides a handy, centralized data bank of demographic, health, economic and other data by county and city. Like many mercantile sites that permit comparisons across possible purchases, it also enables side-by-side comparisons of municipalities, such as all three SAW (Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro) components, which can provide some surprising insights.

For example, although Staunton is often perceived as being better off than Waynesboro, 12.6% of Staunton residents fall below the federal poverty level, compared to 11.7% of residents in Waynesboro—who also have a higher employment rate, at 64.1%, compared with Staunton’s 60.2%. More revealing statistics await the curious.