Author: Andy Zipser

A former newspaper reporter and campground owner, I and my wife Carin have lived in Staunton since early 2021. After three years of maintaining a blog about RVing (renting-dirt.com), I became concerned about the lack of affordable housing and started a new blog (StauntonAskance.com) to focus on that, and other, local issues.

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 its 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.

It’s time to take off the blindfolds

A map of Staunton’s Area Deprivation Index shows the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, where residents are most vulnerable to disasters.

(Reading time: 14 minutes)

The timing could not have been tighter. On Jan. 22, the Staunton City Council adopted an update to its Emergency Operations Plan (EOP). On Jan. 23, City Manager Leslie Beauregard activated that very plan as a major winter storm battered the region with heavy ice and snow. The emergency declaration, Beauregard explained, “removes any barriers to our response efforts and allows us to mobilize additional resources, if necessary”—a prescient call, as it turned out, when the city had to call on additional contractors with beefier equipment to clear ice-bound streets.

How did it all work out? So-so. An after-action review of the city’s response detailed what worked well, what did not work so well and what “action steps” the city should take in response. Staff dedication, contractor response and communications all got high marks. On the other hand, the sheer enormity and unpredictability of the storm, as well as staffing shortages and equipment limitations, all hindered an adequate mobilization. Notably, despite its rating of communications as one of the things that worked well, the review conceded that a lack of radios in the field left the city with no way to track plow locations or coverage history.

There were other problems as well, followed by a list of 15 suggested corrective actions, from upgrading training and equipment to improving overall coordination and communication. Those action items include development of a winter storm public-facing webpage to show which streets have been cleared (as well as, inexplicably, an instructional video on how to shovel out a driveway), in response to perceived “unrealistic public expectations for immediate street clearance.” Most of the recommended actions seem worthwhile, suggesting that lessons were learned, yet taken in its entirety, the list falls short.

More on that in a bit.

STAUNTON’S EMERGENCY OPERATIONS PLAN is only one side of a coin, the “what do we do when we have a problem” face. The other side of that coin is the question, “what can we do ahead of time to minimize the consequences of a disaster?” 

The attempted answer is a 275-page document prepared by the Central Shenandoah Planning District, first drafted in 2005 and updated several times since, most recently this past spring. The Central Shenandoah Hazard Mitigation Plan covers five counties and the cities they encompass, with a general overview of the region followed by city- and county-specific recommendations. The plan identifies 12 hazards—severe winter weather among them—and prescribes a series of mitigation actions for each of the 21 jurisdictions it covers, including more than two-dozen for Staunton.

“To mitigate” means to reduce the extent, severity or painfulness of something. So, for example, among the mitigation plan’s recommendations for Staunton are stream restoration projects and creek daylighting to reduce flooding, or a program of vegetation management around buildings to create defensible spaces against wildfires. The mitigation plan, in other words, is preventative, whereas the emergency operations plan is reactive. But as with the EOP, the Hazard Mitigation Plan concentrates most heavily on the physical environment and on the city resources needed to manage it. Both plans give only passing mention to the beneficiaries of all this planning, making the mistake of treating city residents as customers or victims and not as collaborators.

In that respect, the mitigation plan overlooks one of its potentially biggest resources—which brings me back to the EOP.

IT’S ONLY NATURAL that an after-action analysis concentrates on the emergency just passed, and on the actions taken by those responding to it—natural, but myopic. That’s how armies end up fighting the last war, building defenses against historic attacks, only to be overrun by newer technology or an evolution in tactics. What’s needed is a bigger picture overview.

In that bigger picture, the January winter storm could have been much, much worse. The most obvious missed calamity would have been a widespread power outage, due to falling trees or a heavy truck sliding on ice-slicked pavement into power poles or transformers. Had that happened, restoring power would have taken hours and possibly days, given how thoroughly everything was locked down by implacable ice, trapping residents in their unheated homes in freezing temperatures. A rigorous after-action evaluation therefore should have looked not only at what did happen, but at what could have happened just as readily under the same circumstances, and whether the city would have been able to respond adequately.

Just because we missed a bullet once doesn’t mean we’ll miss it the next time.

Ironically, the Hazard Mitigation Plan recognizes there’s a high probability of power outages in our region, noting that Virginia ranks 42nd out of 50 states for electric grid reliability, with 50 being the worst. It also notes that the Central Shenandoah region had at least four major power outages in the six years through 2024, demonstrating “a clear pattern of recurring vulnerability.” Yet despite that assessment, there is next to nothing in the mitigation plan addressing power outages per se, other than to coordinate with Dominion Energy to “remove dead or hazardous trees near power lines.” Instead, the plan addresses a dozen threats by hazard type—flooding, wildfire, severe winter weather, drought, high winds, etc.—rather than by hazard impact, such as impassable roads, downed power lines or broken water mains.

Against that backdrop, it’s sobering to realize that 21.5% of Staunton’s population is 65 or older, many living alone and many relying on electrically powered medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators and CPAP machines, as well as on refrigerated (not frozen) medications.

Moreover, old age is but one marker of vulnerability. More than 15% of the city’s residents have a disability, and 12.4% live below the poverty threshold. Much of the city’s housing stock is decades old and in various stages of weather resilience, so that even as city real estate prices have been shooting up the welfare of its residents has been declining: the incidence of unhealthy or unsafe living conditions in the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro region jumped from 9.9% to 14% between 2019 and 2025, according to the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment prepared by Augusta Health.

These and other factors that exacerbate the impact of public emergencies have been combined nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into something called the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), a comparative measure that identifies communities most in need of support before, during and after disasters.  The SVI is intended to “help public health officials and local planners better prepare for and respond to emergency events,” according to the CDC—and residents of Staunton, as illustrated by the map at the top of this post, are in the front ranks of Virginians needing such help.

That rather alarming map ranks census block groups by averaging 16 variables, including income, education, employment, mobility and housing quality. Most of the city is ranked at the sixth decile or higher, which means those neighborhoods have a higher level of disadvantage—are more vulnerable—than half of Virginia’s population. Unsurprisingly, the most vulnerable of them all is the West End south of West Beverley, which is at the very highest decile, but large expanses of the city are at the ninth and eighth decile and may be expected to suffer disproportionately when disaster strikes. But with one generalized exception (about which more in a moment) you’d never know that from either the EOP or the Hazard Mitigation Plan.

The CDC, in promoting the vulnerability index, says it’s designed to be a tool for better emergency preparedness planning, but there’s little evidence that Staunton planners have paid it much heed. For example, these are the steps the CDC believes should be taken to formulate an effective plan: estimate the type and quantity of needed supplies, such as food, water, medicine and bedding; decide on the number of emergency personnel required to assist people; identify areas in need of emergency shelters; create a plan to evacuate people, accounting for those who have special needs, such as those without vehicles, the elderly or those with limited English comprehension.

Little of that is in the EOP, and especially not the part about an evacuation plan. Nor, despite being acknowledged by the Hazard Mitigation Plan, is there any indication that the SVI analysis factors into Staunton’s proposed mitigation actions, which largely treat the city as a monolithic entity instead of a patchwork of vulnerabilities. Had there been a widespread and prolonged outage during the January storm, for example, there would have been no evacuation plan for immobilized residents left without heat or power. And while the EOP designates the city’s public schools as emergency shelters for those who can get there, the schools are not stocked with bedding or other needed supplies, which the EOP expects the Red Cross to provide—which assumes, of course, that the Red Cross can reach the shelters.

Moreover, while the plan optimistically asserts that the schools have sufficient food stocks on hand—“optimistically” because each school is assessed as having adequate shelter for at least a thousand people—it also notes that there will be no food at the schools from about June 5 until after Labor Day, and that it will take about 48 hours to get refrigeration units back to operating temperatures.

The biggest information void, of course, will be knowing who needs help and how to match those people with the hoped-for volunteers who are expected to show up in their four-wheel drives. Nor does the EOP acknowledge the psychological and emotional resistance those volunteers may face when reaching out to the elderly and infirm, who historically have been the most resistant to leaving their homes and who account for a disproportionate number of deaths when disaster strikes.

There are other hurdles as well. The shelters are not supposed to admit pets, which will dissuade some people from going to them. The schools must be brought up to “operating temperatures” before they can accept evacuees, and although most are equipped with generators (Shelburne and Dixon apparently are not), ramping up heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer could delay their opening.

In short, as bad as the January storm was, it could easily have been much worse. Had that occurred, the after-action review would have been considerably more bleak.

WITH THEIR UNDERSTANDABLE FOCUS on city manpower, resources and command structure, both the EOP and the Mitigation Plan tend to treat the people they’re intended to help largely as afterthoughts. That oversight is evident not just in the lack of an evacuation plan or of the absence of any provision for mental health resources, but also in the lack of a granular understanding of which residents are most vulnerable, where they’re located and what kind of assistance would be most needed. In that sense, the plans are one-size-fits-all schematics.

But both plans have another, equally critical oversight, rooted in an assumption that members of the public are victims and plan responders are their rescuers. Instead of exploring how city residents could become collaborators, the plans create a binary rather than a continuous spectrum of helpers and the helped. Yet the stark reality is that in any true disaster, defined as an overwhelmingly large and complex emergency that could include mass casualties, the city’s personnel and physical resources simply won’t be up to the task. Staunton will need members of the public to help its public works employees, firefighters and cops, but it isn’t prepared for that eventuality.

Such a manpower shortage was already evident in the January storm response, a decidedly mid-level emergency as it actually played out but which, as the after-action review acknowledged, suffered from a lack of sufficient staffing in the streets. Only eight crew members were available, according to the review, presumably accounting  for an unexplained halt in plowing on Saturday night, “when snowfall was at its heaviest” and “when conditions demanded continuous operations.” That pause played a significant role in exacerbating an already difficult operation, allowing not only more snow accumulation but a compression and freezing of what had fallen to create an almost impenetrable ice shield.

But while a major disaster would require a robust community response, the Mitigation Plan gives only two brief nods in that direction, one that is largely pro forma and one that isn’t happening at all.

The pro forma nod is the plan’s recommendation “to coordinate with the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro Community Emergency Response Team” to “encourage and improve the disaster readiness of volunteers and the citizenry.” That’s misleading, to the extent that referring to a “team” implies there is some kind of trained and organized entity that can assist first-responders in an emergency. Although in fact there are CERT teams of that sort elsewhere in the U.S., the local CERT program is basically advanced first aid training offered by Augusta Health, together with tips for stocking up on emergency supplies. It’s useful information, and it may ultimately benefit a CERT participant’s immediate neighbors. It is not, however, a way to bolster direct city action in response to a disaster.

The second nod calls for creation of “an educational campaign on individual household preparedness and mitigation measures, particularly for affordable housing or Low-to-Moderate Income neighborhoods”—in other words, precisely those neighborhoods shaded the deepest red in the vulnerabilities map above. Unlike the CERT training, which apparently is offered only once a year to a limited number of people who have to make their way to Fishersville for seven weeks, such an educational campaign would go to the people where they are and offer them the information they need to better ride out a crisis. Things like how much food and water to stock. Alternative but safe sources of heat. How to stay up-to-date on disaster response. Creating neighborhood support groups.

Unfortunately, nothing like that is happening. Although the city notes that its Fire and Rescue personnel do extensive outreach to vulnerable communities, most recently installing fire alarms in people’s homes, there is no educational campaign on household disaster preparedness. And while every home benefits from having fire alarms, installing such alarms must be seen as providing a service, not as enlisting community partners against the day when Fire and Rescue will need a trained citizenry covering its back.

The thing about a major disaster is that it quickly drives home the point that we’re all in this together—think Venezuelans digging through rubble with their bare hands to rescue earthquake victims, or New Orleans residents paddling from house to house in canoes and rowboats after Hurricane Katrina to pluck their neighbors from the rooftops. People will respond that way naturally when circumstances become extreme enough, but their ad hoc efforts will be much more effective—and much safer for everyone—if they are trained and supplied in advance of calamity.

What can be done locally? Disaster planners should hold regular tabletop exercises to game out various scenarios, in some cases including local community members who can point out oversights or missed efficiencies. The city could maintain a contact list of residents with four-wheel drive vehicles who are willing to transport people and supplies in an emergency, and there could be inventories of other personally owned resources—chain saws, generators, freezers, tarps—that city residents would be willing to share. There should be an inventory of homes whose residents have voluntarily consented to get wellness checks in extreme circumstances.

And on and on, sometimes at absurdly mundane levels. During the winter storm, for instance, I wrote about the problem of buried fire hydrants—surely an obvious concern, but one that I think remains ignored. Other “doh” examples surely abound, and presumably would become evident during the tabletop exercises already mentioned.

The thing is, things are only going to get worse. The top three hazards addressed in the Emergency Operations Plan are all weather-related—flooding, wildfire and severe winter weather—as are four of the remaining nine, and all are trending in the wrong direction because of an increasingly extreme climate due to global warming. Other threats also are growing, such as the increased likelihood of a catastrophic failure in the city’s water supply because of its corroding, century-old delivery mains. Meeting those challenges is going to take all of us, and it’s way past time that we started.

Of drunken crows and pesky trees

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

When I was in my early 20s, Robin Hughes and I set out with passports, vaccinations and very little cash to explore the world. We got as far as Vancouver on our thumbs, at which point the romance of the road had worn thin. Robin wired her parents for money and flew back to the East Coast. I didn’t have that kind of backing, so I hitched my way south to look for work in Seattle—little realizing that I was walking into a Puget Sound economy The Seattle Times was describing as “the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression.”

I lucked out, though. Although jobs were scarce, I got hired as a gravedigger and all-around helper at a small Jewish cemetery on top of Queen Anne Hill. I was the only employee working under the head groundskeeper, a grizzled old guy with a permanent dab of tobacco under his upper lip and a habit of regaling me with stories about growing up in rural Oregon, spitting and talking while I was digging six-foot holes. We had no power equipment, so it was all shovel work and only enough room for one man at a time, which meant I shoveled and he talked. One story that stuck with me concerned his dad, who had a habit of soaking corn in alcohol and then throwing it out in front of the house for the crows to eat. Dad would sit in a rocker on the porch, shotgun across his lap, watching the crows have their fill, and once they’d gotten good and drunk he’d get to his feet and fill them with buckshot.

That pretty much summarized my boss’s approach to groundskeeping, too.

The older parts of the cemetery had traditional headstones, but at some point a decision had been made to allow only flat markers that laid level with the ground. Making that change meant greatly enhanced productivity, since chain mowers could now ride straight across the lawns instead of zigging and zagging while someone else worked around the tombstones with a hand mower or weed whacker. Not everyone took to the idea, however. Bereaved relatives would plant flowers on the graves, and in some cases would plant little bushes around the perimeter of the plot or stick in the occasional small tree. What should have been a wide-open expanse was getting broken up into an obstacle course, and a crusty old guy brought up on a practice of shooting inebriated birds certainly wouldn’t sit still for that sort of interference.

So for the six or seven months that I worked at the cemetery, there was a lot more death than could be accounted for by the occasional fresh grave. My supervisor hunted weeds relentlessly from a tractor-mounted sprayer, pouring untold quantities of herbicide on weeds—and to him, everything looked like a weed. Leaves wilted, flowers drooped, a brown tinge infected and overcame anything that wasn’t grass. But that grass! Vibrant green, thick, boosted by Seattle’s near-daily afternoon showers, standing in stunning contrast to the vegetative carnage all around it. And so easy to cut!

Decades later, and the spirit of that scorched-earth approach to managing the environment lives on in Staunton. Faced with the inevitable encroachment of plants of all sizes on its power lines and transformers, Dominion Power has again retained the services of Asplundh Arbor Assassins to beat back the jungle and ensure that no storm-driven branch will sever its connections to our homes. It’s a ruthlessly efficient business, limbs amputated without regard for what gets chopped off, what stumps are left behind, or how disfigured or lopsided the offending tree will be rendered. Indeed, some may not survive at all.

Crawling down our streets with their boom trucks and chain saws and chippers, the Asplundh horde is in some cases laying waste to trees that were here long before Dominion erected its poles and strung its wires overhead. There are alternatives, of course. Just a couple of years ago, for example, Dominion took a chunk of its service area in the Baldwin Acres area and converted its overhead lines to underground ones, boring laterally through the soil so it didn’t have to trench. But the real estate is more expensive over there, and the trees are thicker and bigger. Elsewhere, it’s faster and a helluva lot cheaper just to slice right through the landscape.

It could be worse. It can always be worse. In some rural areas, such as along railroad tracks, the state of the art is to use helicopters from which dangle long chains of rotating circular saws. Flying buzz saws, swinging against anything in their way. That’s not something you see every day. Or drunken crows.

Zombies in our housing market

(Reading time: 3 minutes)

One of the most puzzling aspects of the local housing market is the number of vacant homes in and around Staunton. Despite an ostensibly tight housing market, anywhere from 2% to 8% of the city’s housing stock sits empty (no one has a good handle on the actual number), in some cases for years on end. Some of that stock consists of second homes, owned by affluent city dwellers elsewhere who have the money to maintain a small-town retreat. Some is “vacant” only in the sense that the homes are unoccupied more often than not, owned by investors who use them as short-term rentals.

But some of those homes, it turns out, are simply waiting for someone to die.

That insight comes from an April story in The New York Times, which quoted an estimate from Flock Homes, a real estate investment service, that there are roughly 7.2 million vacant single-family homes nationwide that are deliberately kept off the market. These so-called “zombie homes”—it’s unclear from the article whether that’s the writer’s label, or whether he picked it up from Flock—typically are owned by retirees who have paid off the mortgage but no longer live there. Some may be in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, some may have moved in with their children or to a second, smaller home that better meets their needs.

Whatever the reason, the house sits empty because the tax bill triggered by a sale would far exceed the cost of leaving it vacant. That exit penalty primarily includes capital gains taxes, paid on the increased value of a home that’s sold, but in some cases might include depreciation recapture taxes, which apply to sellers of rental properties. In the biggest markets, the total tax liability can add up to more than $100,000, compared with annual costs of less than $10,000 for insurance, maintenance and real estate taxes on a vacant property.

Real estate that get passed down to heirs, on the other hand, is inherited on a “stepped-up basis” to the current market value, effectively eliminating the tax overhang. Under those circumstances, it makes perfect economic sense to leave a house sitting empty rather than putting it on the market, since even a decade in limbo may mean less of a financial bite than a quick sale. Indeed, Flock’s analysis concludes that in Los Angeles, where 34% of the homeowning population is 65 or older, it would take 19 years before carrying expenses exceed exit taxes.

Locally, our carrying costs and exit taxes presumably are lower, but that doesn’t mean Staunton or the wider SAW region have escaped the zombie problem. Indeed, real estate values have climbed so sharply since the pandemic that the temptation not to sell grows larger with each passing year. “Our market does have ‘zombie’ houses, even though I had not heard of that term,” a local realtor acknowledged for me in an email exchange. “I have my eye on two, and when I say ‘my eye on,’ it’s obituaries, because the families are waiting until their loved one dies in the nursing home they have moved into.” The realtor added that there’s no estimate of how prevalent the phenomenon may be locally, but it’s “probably more than we realize.”

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that vacant homes generally don’t fare well, and even less so when family members are trying to minimize maintenance expenses over a period of several years. Indeed, if you Google “zombie homes,” the top definition refers to bank foreclosures that result from properties being abandoned and subsequently becoming dilapidated and run-down. From there, it’s just a few steps to more widespread urban blight, suggesting that city officials and homeowners’ groups should take a livelier interest in identifying the zombies in our midst.

A cold shoulder for the heat-stricken

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Been hot lately? If you’re a farmer, you know all about that. Ditto for construction workers, city public works employees, high school kids in the marching band all decked out in their uniforms. But perhaps no group of people is more attuned to changing weather and temperature extremes than those who don’t have a home.

For these folks, where to sleep on any particular night is always an issue, of course. But so is figuring out how to shower and wash clothes, how to protect personal possessions from theft or confiscation, how to take care of relatively minor injuries or illness before they blossom into left-threatening maladies. All those efforts are complicated by extreme heat, such as we’ve been experiencing this summer, but also by extreme cold, snow and ice, as when Staunton was hammered this past winter.

So it’s encouraging, at this summer mid-point, to learn that Staunton’s government, the city’s faith-based community and its social service agencies have finally acknowledged that they have a responsibility to help this most vulnerable segment of our local population. Thanks to the outspoken leadership of several key community leaders and a vigorous fund-raising effort, augmented by a generous allocation of city funds and an outpouring of volunteer support, we can now expect . . . ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. None of that actually happened.

What did happen was very little, and the near-term outlook is for even less than that.

Here’s some of the good stuff. The Valley Mission continues to operate the area’s primary homelessness shelter, supplemented by other organizations providing limited shelter space for women. Trinity Episcopal in downtown Staunton is still serving free lunch each weekday (as does the Mission), thanks to a rotating roster of supporting groups of volunteer cooks and servers. After a fumbling effort last year, a cooling shelter has been open for eight hours each weekday since early July in the basement of Faith Lutheran Church, also in downtown Staunton.

Here’s some not-so-good stuff. Valley Mission continues to sit on a multi-million-dollar windfall it amassed, thanks to a surplus of pandemic funding, with no public indication of how it might use that money to expand its operation. The cooling shelter is scheduled to have its last day Sept. 4, long before daytime highs will be reliably moderate, but not before its volunteer staff dwindles to a fraction of its start-up numbers. The director of the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry, which provides overnight shelter in church facilities during the winter months, is stepping down for health reasons—even as church participation in the effort has been declining.

And looming over all of that is the federal government’s attack on social services funding of every description, from SNAP (food stamp) benefits to housing vouchers to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps most egregious, however, may be the Trump administration’s efforts to kick people out of permanent supportive housing and back onto the streets by changing the way the Dept. of House and Urban Development (HUD) grants more than $4 billion to homelessness programs. Although those changes have been enmeshed in months of court challenges and reversals, there still is no clear resolution in sight.

“HUD doesn’t know what’s going on,” said Crystal Stuck, chair of the Valley Homeless Connection (VHC), in a recent conference call of local service providers. “For now, things are going to stay the way they are—but we don’t know what’s coming down the pike.”

Meanwhile, the homelessness situation in our region is only getting worse. Because this past winter’s devastating snow/ice storm essentially torpedoed the annual Point in Time (PIT) census, limiting the count exclusively to sheltered populations, VHC for the first time decided to conduct an additional, summer-time census. Although the statistical analysis of the summer PIT isn’t expected until next month, the raw numbers July 15 were 101 people in shelters in the VHC service area of Augusta, Rockbridge and Highland counties and their cities, as well as 73 people living unsheltered, primarily in tent encampments or cars. That contrasts with 259 people that VHC has on its list of coordinated entry applicants for housing, suggesting that fully a third of the area’s homeless people could not be located.

(By comparison, the local PIT census last year turned up only 156 homeless people, of whom a mere 19 were unsheltered. Then again, the day of that count, Jan. 22, had a high of 22 degrees and a low of 4 degrees in Waynesboro, so once again extreme weather undoubtedly distorted the results.)

According to VHC vice chair Jackson Weatherly, the July PIT counters found “a lot of abandoned encampments” in Staunton and Waynesboro, presumably the result of their occupants being forced to move out. Consequently, he added, “there were many people we were unable to find,” with other homeless people attesting to the existence of new encampments that are staying under the radar. Crunching all the numbers, Weatherly concludes that the SAW region has less than 40% of the shelter space needed for its homeless population.   

Moreover, the shortage is more dire for some groups than for others. The Mission, for example, although a local mainstay, does not admit homeless people who are registered sex offenders and cannot accommodate couples or people with pets. Meanwhile, as both local and national statistics  attest, the homeless population is aging—according to the PIT count from this past winter, 29% of the sheltered population was 55 or older—which creates additional mobility challenges; half of the Mission’s beds are top bunks that may be inaccessible for much of that group.

So the squeeze is on—more homeless people living in more extreme circumstances but with dwindling prospects for more help. Indeed, it’s fair to say that after a whole lot of talking and hand-wringing locally about the homeless, the local people and institutions that ostensibly were coming to their aid are faltering, at best, and dropping away altogether at worst.

 Meanwhile, hard though it may be to envision in mid-August, there is another winter coming.

J. Blair, the man behind the curtain

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

At first blush, the City of Staunton demonstrates a remarkable accessibility for residents wanting to learn the ins and outs of their local government. Currently, for example, the city is taking applications for Staunton Citizen University, an annual 10-week course that introduces 25 of its residents to the city’s inner workings. It has numerous boards and commissions led by members of the public who supplement the city’s employees. Its city council and planning commission meetings can be observed remotely and are videotaped for those who can’t make the scheduled times. The city charter, annual budget, zoning code and lots of other documentation are accessible online.

All of which is praiseworthy, even as it also makes the city’s  reticence about its attorney so much more obvious. And inexplicable.

Go to Staunton’s website and click on “Departments,” and you’ll see a heading for “City Attorney.” Click on that link and what you’ll see is . . . nothing concrete. No name. No picture. No phone number or email address or even a physical location. There’s a single sentence of boilerplate explaining (some of) the city attorney’s responsibilities, and a whole lot more saying what the city attorney does not do and please take your questions elsewhere.

Contrast that with the way Roanoke presents its information, below, and it’s clear that there’s nothing in state law requiring such anonymity. So what’s with Staunton?

It’s not like John Blair’s role is a secret. Google a question seeking the name of Staunton’s city attorney and his name will pop right up, including mention of his former employment as city attorney in Charlottesville—whose website, by the way, doesn’t have a picture of its current attorney but does provide the incumbent’s name, plus a mailing address and phone number. Once you get Blair’s name from Google and return to Staunton’s website so you can reach out to him, however, you’ll find that he’s also not listed in the city’s directory. The man doesn’t exist.

Because I had a question about the city’s civil prosecution of property owners who don’t respond to notices of infractions, I asked a city council member why Staunton keeps the city attorney’s contact information out of sight. His brief response was that the position “by statute is an internal-facing resource for the city, advising Council and staff,” and presumably that’s why Blair doesn’t show up in the public directory. Which, when you think about it for even a heartbeat, is simply nuts. Neither the Virginia Code nor the City Charter create categories of positions that are “internal facing” versus their presumed “outward facing” counterparts, with different sets of rules applied to each. And while Blair’s duties do include legal counsel to the city, which is protected, the city attorney also has numerous “outward facing” duties, such as drafting contracts, leases and other documents, defending the city when it’s sued and prosecuting civil cases on its behalf.

All of which should be fair game for information requests and questions. And while presumably such inquiries could be submitted via the city manager’s office, as my city council member suggested, the city’s organizational chart explicitly keeps Blair’s office separate from the city manager and makes it answerable only to the city council. It’s therefore clear that keeping Blair behind a curtain is a de facto city council policy, not a city manager’s decision or a state mandate. Trying to reach Blair via an intermediary is an unnecessary hurdle quite out of step with the city’s otherwise admirable accessibility practices, but if that has to happen, such a gate-keeper role more properly rests with the city council and not with the city manager.

There’s another aspect of Blair’s position worth noting, the result of his taking on additional duties as clerk of council. The cost-saving move occurred earlier this year, following the resignation of former clerk Kiley Kesecker, when the city council decided that such a full-time position was no longer needed and that Blair could also be responsible for keeping all records of council and commission meetings. In making that change, of course, the council moved the clerk of council behind the same curtain that conceals the city attorney. Have a question or dispute about the minutes of last month’s city council meeting? Good luck figuring out how to contact the man responsible for them.

It should go without saying that both the city attorney and clerk of council are taxpayer-funded positions, which all by itself suggests a certain amount of public accountability that is undermined by making the positions unapproachable. The city attorney’s remuneration, set under Staunton’s pay classification system, is grade 25 and ranges between $130,361 and $195,541; the clerk of council is paid at grade 12, ranging between $54,167 and $81,252. It’s not clear whether John Blair is drawing two paychecks or just one, but the city has budgeted the two offices in the current fiscal year for $342,767 and $36,860, respectively—and in each office, Blair is the only employee.

I’d like to learn how all those numbers pencil out, and have some other non-privileged questions to ask as well. Now, if only I had a phone number or email address to send them to . . . .  

Aug. 7 postscript: Earlier this week, Staunton’s public information officer responded to this post with the information that a) John Blair does not draw a paycheck for his work as clerk of council; and b) that his salary as city attorney is $188,967.30 a year. No response or explanation for the lack of other information on the city’s website—and, again, no email address or phone number for John Blair to ask him for an explanation.

Where art thou, Habitat art?

Screen grab of one of the most widely known Polish posters, a giant 37 x 26 inches in size. This particular piece is advertised as an original 1980 print that was buried for seven years during martial law and is one of five copies numbered and signed by artist Jerzy Janiszewski. Price? You gotta ask.

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

When you give a buck to a panhandler, you do so with the understanding that your money may get spent on food or shelter—or on cigarettes or a cheap high. You have no control and no oversight. What is important to you may not be important to the recipient of your small donation, and vice versa, and you shouldn’t expect an explanation for how your buck will get spent.

What you also shouldn’t expect is for non-profit social service agencies to operate in the same way.

Donations made to charitable organizations known as 501(c)3s, for example, are accepted for a stated purpose. In the case of the SAW Habitat for Humanity, that purpose is to “build and restore homes, lives and communities through faith.” Stewardship of such contributions is vested in a board of trustees, drawn from the community, and the money is administered by a director who answers to the board. Public transparency for this process is provided in annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service, known as Form 990s.

Such filings are the quid pro quo accepted by charitable organizations in exchange for being tax exempt—they represent a compact under which an organization accepts the public’s money to perform a public good and in return doesn’t have to pay taxes. Form 990s, in other words, are not merely bothersome red tape. They are a window into an organization that allows for public transparency. By law, they are to be filed by the fifteenth day of the fifth month after the end of an organization’s fiscal year. Late filings can result in daily financial penalties, and missing three consecutive years results in automatic revocation of tax-exempt status.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. But then there’s our local Habitat, which at worst is busy covering up its financial misfeasance and at best is just financially incompetent.

Habitat’s financial stumbling dates back to the spring of 2024, when its executive director, Lance Barton, was given the boot for a variety of reasons too complicated to repeat here but which were amply chronicled in the Augusta Free Press. At that time, the most recent Form 990 that Habitat had filed was for its 2021 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2022.

Following Barton’s ouster, temporary control of Habitat was placed in the hands of David Wenger, who came aboard in September of 2024 and stayed as acting director until spring of 2025.  On May 13, 2025, in an apparent effort to clean up the organization’s books, Wenger filed a 2023 Form 990 for a changed fiscal year, defined on the form as the calendar year ending Dec. 31, 2023. In doing so, Wenger inexplicably overlooked any financial accounting for the latter half of 2022. Nor did he file a Form 990 for 2024, even though the due date for that filing was just two days after he filed the 2023 return.

Wenger was succeeded by Brad Bryant, who became Habitat’s director effective June 2, 2025. Under Bryant’s leadership, but over the signature of Habitat’s treasurer, Keith Clark, the organization filed a 2024 Form 990 that reverted to its former fiscal year: the 2024 filing is for the period July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. In other words, this filing also opened up a six-month gap, from Jan. 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024, for which there is no financial accounting.

Put another way, the 990s posted on Habitat’s website (scroll to the bottom of the page) seemingly show six consecutive years of reports, 2019 to 2024. But the actual years of the reports, as seen in the upper right corner of the front page of each Form 990, skip over 2022.

All this might seem like a lot of whoop-de-doo about nothing, were it not for the fact that the net result is a full year’s worth of money coming in and going out for which there is no acknowledgment or explanation. And just to be clear, this isn’t a matter a few dollars here or there: Habitat routinely pulls in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in contributions and has total assets in the millions. A missing 12 months of financial accountability is a huge deal.

And that’s only the beginning of it.

ASIDE FROM FAILING to report a year’s worth of income and expenses, the Form 990s that Habitat did file raise several questions. They also, perhaps inadvertently, supply at least one possible reason for the sloppiness: while the forms filed during Barton’s tenure showed a $14,000 expense for accounting, the 990s filed by Wenger and Bryant leave that line item blank. Moreover, the form acknowledges that Habitat’s financial statements were not “compiled or reviewed by an independent accountant,” leading to the conclusion that its financial data was compiled in-house, for better or worse.

That’s not to say that the 990s were entirely without oversight. While an independent accountant was not retained to compile the data, the latest filing asserts that its financial statements were audited by such an accountant—individually, and not on a consolidated basis. Separating them that way presumably avoided any questions about the changing fiscal years and gaps in information. And while the 2024 Form 990 also asserts that Habitat has “a committee that assumes responsibility for oversight of the audit, review, or compilation of its financial statements and selection of an independent accountant,” that committee clearly missed several red flags. Among them: an unexplained $33,942 payment to “former executive director Lance Barton” between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, or months after Barton had been forced to resign.

There undoubtedly are explanations, however weak or unconvincing, for all the obvious questions. The problem is that no one with the answers is willing to give them.

For example, why did David Wenger change Habitat’s fiscal year and in doing so skip over six months of financial reporting? And after filing a Form 990 for calendar year 2023, why did he not also file a Form 990 for calendar year 2024? Only Wenger can explain his reasons, but when I reached out to him via his former employer, the Central Valley Habitat for Humanity, the response—relayed by office manager Ittaty Coto—was that Wenger would not speak to me and that any questions about SAW habitat’s finances should be directed to Brad Bryant.

Bryant, of course, can’t speak to why Wenger made the decisions he did. But Bryant’s explanations for the decisions he’s made in the 13 months since becoming Habitat’s executive director, delivered in a July 8 emailed response to my questions, are no more illuminating than Wenger’s stonewalling:

  • Why is there no 2022 Form 990 posted on Habitat’s website? Bryant replied that he didn’t know but that he “physically put my hands on the hard copy this morning” and would get it up on the website soon. As of this writing, that has not happened. My request that he email a PDF directly to me went unanswered.
  • Why did Barton get paid months after he was no longer working for Habitat? If that was a severance payment, why was it not reported in the year it was incurred? Bryant wrote that he did not know but was investigating to find out.  
  • Why was Habitat’s fiscal year changed under Wenger, then changed back under Bryant, enabling the fiscal sleight-of-hand that buried a year’s worth of financial reporting? Bryant denied that Habitat changed its fiscal year, the Wenger-filed Form 990 notwithstanding, and wrote that he “cannot find anything that suggests or shows any voted-on changes from July 1-June 30 as our reporting year.”

Two subsequent emails to Bryant have gone unanswered. The second, sent a week ago, asked for the names of board members serving on the financial oversight committee and for contact information for the committee chair.

UNDERLYING AND WOVEN THROUGH all this confused financial reporting are the Polish posters. No one wants to talk about the posters, but it is the posters that triggered much of the drama of the past couple of years and it is the posters that hang over Habitat’s finances as a huge question mark.

“Police,” by Mieczyslaw Gorowski

That might sound obscure to most Americans. But just as select American comic books might be worth thousands of dollars to a discerning collector, so Polish poster art has a niche following of similar passion and valuations. Formally known as the Polish School of Posters, the art form had its heyday in the ’Fifties and ’Sixties, when its illustrations of movies, plays and daily life were slyly subversive of the Communist regime. Readily recognizable by their painterly quality and use of metaphors, hyperbole, flair and imagination, the Polish posters were a subversive rallying point “even in the darkest moments of Polish history,” as explained by one critic.

There remains to this day a lively market for such art, with contemporary posters selling on-line for $30 or $40 apiece, but rarer or more historically significant pieces can go for many hundreds of dollars apiece and are marketed with certificates of authenticity. And several hundred such posters now belong to SAW Habitat, although just how many and of what quality is unknown. Indeed, even current board members do not all know where the posters are being kept, with Bryant saying only that they’re under lock and key.

How Habitat came to possess the posters is a strange tale, but basically comes down to Lance Barton convincing his board that the art would make a unique and profitable fund-raising investment for the organization. That led to Barton and local artist Cleveland Morris traveling to the source, with Habitat covering Barton’s expenses for his Polish buying excursion. Although the Augusta Free Press, quoting Morris, reported that Barton spent $10,000 on posters, Barton himself claims an expenditure of nearly twice that amount—and that of the $18,000 he spent, a third was his own money. (Morris also declined my interview request.)

“King Lear,” by Walkuski

Not that Barton is eager to say much of anything. Not long after his return from overseas he was ousted from Habitat, all the posters were locked away, and repeated threats from Habitat of criminal charges have forced him into keeping a low profile. That he said anything at all to me was only the result of my surprising him May 30 at his Staunton home while he was mowing his lawn, an interruption during which he lamented that the only way he’ll be able to claim his third of the art will be to force Habitat into court. Since that brief exchange, however, Barton, like Wenger, has declined to answer my questions.

Barton’s claim to a third of the purchased posters, however, raises ownership issues and explains Bryant’s inability to come to grips with the subject. The only apparent game plan at Habitat is a hope that the whole affair will just go away. After more than a year as executive director, Bryant has yet to find a qualified appraiser for an art collection that conceivably could run into six figures and explains his inaction by saying that “it just does not have a priority in my world with the amount of things we are trying to move forward on.”

“Masquerade,” by Andrzej Pagowski

Meanwhile, Habitat’s refusal to acknowledge its art stash extends to its erratic Form 990 filings, which among other things ask “did the organization maintain collections of works of art, historical treasures or other similar assets?” Habitat repeatedly has replied no.  But as Schedule D to Form 990 helpfully notes, answering “yes” would apply to art held “for financial gain,” which presumably encompasses art acquired for fund-raising purposes.  

“I am going to look into that,” Bryant responded when asked about the untruthful response, “but I would guess it to be an oversight.” Easy to do, when everyone is busy ignoring the art elephant in the room.

IT’S HARD TO FIGURE OUT whether the unresolved Polish poster art saga is the result of embarrassment, legal uncertainties or misplaced priorities. Possibly a combination of all three. But the episode almost certainly feeds into the screwed-up filing of federal tax forms that followed and the unresolved question of what happened to 12 months of financial transactions, and it appears that one can’t be resolved without the other.

Much of the responsibility for presiding over this mess has to rest with Bryant, who despite his abilities as a builder seems to be in over his head with this aspect of his job. But at least as much responsibility resides with Habitat’s board of directors, who seemingly have not been asking the tough questions or providing the resources needed to resolve Bryant’s predicament. In that respect, at least, the current board seems to be cut pretty much from the same cloth as the board that green-lit Barton’s Polish expedition—which is to say, inattentive and easily rolled.

The Augusta Free Press, in originally reporting on Habitat’s travails with Barton, provided an extensive list of local organizations that have been hit with financial irregularities and outright embezzlement because of inadequate financial oversight, in some cases over a period of several years. For those that were governed by a board of directors, the failures were the result of a board that didn’t heed its three primary legal duties: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of obedience. The latter deserves special attention, as the duty of obedience is not to a specific person but to applicable laws and regulations, the organization’s own bylaws and to its stated mission.

Habitat skated right to the edge of that abyss but pulled back at the last second, largely on the strength of Bryant’s reputation. It’s a shame he’s now reduced to the 501(c)3 equivalent of a panhandler, looking for donations but unable to explain where they’ve gone in the past. Meanwhile, of course, the abyss is still there. You have to wonder what a Polish poster artist would have done with that image.