Andy Zipser

When data centers pull the plug

(Reading time: 2 minutes)

Although my biggest concern about a data center possibly setting up shop in Staunton has been the enormous amount of water such centers consume, their voracious consumption of electricity also is top of mind. It’s notable, therefore, that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. yesterday issued its highest level of warning about the risks that data centers pose to the electric grid. The rare Level 3 alert followed several incidents over the last two years in which more than a gigawatt of data center load simultaneously and unexpectedly disconnected, destabilizing the grid and creating a potential blackout.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), often described as the continent’s “grid watchdog,” issued its alert after analyzing disruptions of electric service in Virginia and Texas caused by data centers abruptly pulling the plug in 2024 and 2025. Such disconnects may occur when data centers respond to relatively minor grid disturbances, such as a local lightning strike or line fault, by switching to backup power supplies so they can maintain consistent voltage flow to sensitive computing equipment—but the sudden load loss stresses grid infrastructure, like transformers, that consequently may shut down as well, triggering a cascade of system failures.

Currently, data centers don’t have to follow the rules that require power plants to inform grid monitors when they are going on- and off-line, even though some centers can add or subtract as much or more power than a power plant. And while the data center contemplated for Staunton is hardly on that scale—measured in megawatts rather than gigawatts—it could be part of a wider network of such centers triggered by a common disruption. An analysis by dozens of scientists from the largest AI companies warned last year that their industry’s power swings could physically damage the grid.

Yesterday’s Level 3 alert was only the third in NERC’s history. It was followed by the corporation’s call for transmission planners to develop a detailed list of “modeling data, settings and parameters needed from computational loads” and to study the grid stability “margin” at least annually in areas with large AI infrastructure, such as Virginia.

Staunton’s cross(ing) is hard to bear

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

We’re now more than three weeks into the 90-day timetable Tim Davey gave Staunton City Council for updating the Staunton Crossing master plan, and so far there’s been no word on how or when this process will begin, or how the city’s residents will be included. That’s a problem, and more so if the city is seriously thinking of trying to land a data center.

For those who missed my earlier write-up on the subject, Davey, director of economic development for the Timmons Group, addressed the city council April 9 to acknowledge that “a long time” had passed since Timmons designed Staunton Crossing. Despite that lengthy hiatus, during which data centers have exploded in number, size and recognized adverse environmental impacts, Davey argued they should remain in the recruiting mix, if only because of the tax revenue one or more such centers would generate for the city.

Along the way, Davey also mentioned, almost parenthetically, that a data center might need its own on-site electrical plant, which these days is the industry response to widespread uproar over the higher electricity rates such centers cause. That would be a new and seemingly significant change to the Crossing’s master plan, especially since the industry’s default option in such cases has been gas-fired generators, which add to local noise and air pollution. Then again, Davey did mention the possibility of a “small” nuclear reactor. Either way, it seems that Staunton’s residents might have some thoughts on the subject.

Davey was equally blithe—and seemingly misleading—in his response to concerns about how much of the city’s water supply would be consumed by a data center. Those concerns have at least two sources. One is the city’s fragile, century-old system of feeder mains that increasingly is prone to catastrophic breaks and which already can’t account for 28% of the water pumped into it. The second is an increasingly erratic climate of precipitation extremes that includes periods of severe drought. The city doesn’t have the $50 million or so needed to beef up its water system, and it has no idea or plan for how to obtain it. And despite some recent showers, all of Virginia has been in a drought since last fall described as the most extreme in two decades.

But not to worry, Davey counseled—there’s always the possibility of recruiting a data center that uses a closed-loop cooling system, thereby limiting water demand. Note the tenuous nature of that “possibility.” Although closed-loop systems are indeed possible, most data centers don’t use them because they’re more complicated, involve higher upfront costs and typically require up to 40% more electricity to operate their additional pumps and heat exchangers, effectively swapping water and electricity burdens.

More to the point, it’s questionable just how much water is conserved by closed-loop systems. A closed-loop system simply means that the water used to cool the processors that comprise the bulk of all data centers—and which, incidentally, run at average temperatures of more than 188 degrees Fahrenheit—runs through a closed loop that passes through a heat exchanger. The other half of the heat exchanger is not a closed loop. The water in this outer loop absorbs the heat from the closed loop before passing through a water-cooling tower, in which it evaporates and thereby releases its heat into the atmosphere. Cooling towers require a constant water flow to work, each day releasing hundreds of thousands of gallons into thin air.

That’s obviously a concern when long-term water availability is a question mark. But a similar concern can be raised by pharmaceuticals, which Davey threw out as a new, possible recruitment target for the industrial park. To be fair, it was just a passing mention, so seemingly off-the-cuff that it provoked little follow-up from council members. It’s worth noting, however, that pharmaceutical manufacturing also is a thirsty business—so much so that the industry acknowledges it faces “major challenges in terms of water consumption with potential impacts on the environment and sustainability.”

That’s not to say that the possibility of a pharmaceutical manufacturer setting up shop in Staunton Crossing should be discarded. It is, however, a reminder that there are no silver bullets and that any industry will bring drawbacks as well as advantages. The trick is to publicly and honestly identify assets and liabilities alike, without minimizing costs or overstating benefits, so that everyone is given an opportunity to weigh trade-offs and draw his or her own conclusions about what is or isn’t acceptable. Thus far, at least, that seems not to have happened with Staunton Crossing—or not in nearly a decade, at any rate.

It’s also worth noting that the past decade has seen the development and even explosion of industries that scarcely existed when the Staunton Crossing masterplan was being drawn up—industries that Davey did not mention and that council members didn’t raise, but which should at least be in the mix of any “update” review. One obvious industry group sure to gain momentum in the years ahead, for example, is anything to do with renewable energy: photovoltaic panels, storage batteries, even electric vehicles of various sizes and applications if Staunton Crossing is large enough for their assembly plant. This sector includes newly developed perovskite-silicon cells that achieve 34% efficiency, solar paint, solar windows and thin-film solar panels—all technologies still in their early days, with lots of development potential ahead, unlike the data center boom that even Davey says is nearing an end.

Another industry group that has been ignored—and one that could have additional benefits for our affordable housing-starved area—is manufactured housing, with a particular focus on factory-built or prefab housing. Unlike data centers, which move electrons rather than physical products, a manufactured housing plant could take advantage of Staunton Crossing’s accessibility to rail and highway transportation networks, one of the industrial park’s presumed selling points. Moreover, off-site modular housing construction, like renewable energy products, is an industry of the future, with the U.S. playing catch-up to countries like Sweden, where prefabrication accounts for 84% of the residential market. The Netherlands (20%) and Japan (15%) likewise have a significant share of their homes built this way, compared to just 5% in the U.S.

There may be, on closer examination, convincing reasons why neither renewable energy nor factory-built housing (nor an unknown number of other industries one might think of) is a suitable match for Staunton Crossing. It may also be that they are desirable industries to recruit, but that finding and wooing them will take more work than simply opening the doors to the data centers that are sprouting up everywhere in Virginia like mushrooms after an (increasingly rare) soaking rain. But that’s why a three-month “refresh” of the Staunton Crossing master plan, off to a slow start at that, doesn’t seem like a sincere effort as much as a rush job toward a foregone conclusion.

The housing squeeze, part two

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

I recently wrote about the housing affordability crisis in our region (although we’re hardly unique) that can be summarized in just two numbers: a median home sales price in February of $330,000 (jumping to $347,250 in March) vs. a median Staunton wage income of $55,023. That puts the average home out of affordable reach of most two-earner households, never mind single-parent households, who then have no recourse but to lease a home—where, no surprise, they put greater upward pressure on that market, pushing local rents above $1,300 a month.

If wage incomes and housing costs were in balance, the market would respond by building more housing until equilibrium is restored. But while a lot of housing is in fact being built, it won’t do anything to relieve the affordability shortage because it costs too much. That’s not because developers are greedy, but because local incomes haven’t increased as much as have labor, materials and the other costs of building new homes. Those new homes will be sold to people moving in from elsewhere—and working elsewhere, where they’ll get paid more. In other words, what we have here is a broken economy.

When other aspects of a local economy are broken, we don’t expect it to miraculously heal itself. We turn to government, with its size and scale, rule-setting powers and taxing authority. If roads must be built or repaired to facilitate commerce, government does that. When economic inducements are needed to lure industry, government provides those. But when it comes to helping people get into affordable housing, well, that’s historically been a different story. People were expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even when they didn’t have boots, and while that attitude is changing, it’s a long, slow process.

To be sure, there are government programs to help with housing—it’s just that they’re relatively few in number and rarely up to the task. Community Development Block Grants, for example, often are touted as one such source of help. But while Staunton has received such grants for several years, you’ll be hard-pressed to point to even one affordable housing unit that exists because of CDBG funding, with most of the money going instead to projects such as fixing sidewalks or getting a new kitchen for the Salvation Army. With the Trump administration now seeking to defund the CDBG program altogether, even those limited expenditures may soon seem fanciful.

Indeed, Trump’s budget proposals are consistent with a stubborn insistence on the extreme right that we’ll never have sufficient affordable housing until government gets out of the way. “The states should reduce barriers to multifamily housing investment by cutting property taxes and liberalizing zoning and building regulations,” urged a Cato Institute spokesman in Congressional testimony last May, apparently oblivious to the fact that property taxes are set at the local level. Or, for that matter, oblivious to the necessity for raising property taxes in many localities.

Unfortunately, many of the libertarian Cato Institute’s simplistic remedies, and those of its philosophical soulmates, are given legs by their more telling critique of today’s status quo. Take just one example, made topical by a recent legal threat to derail an affordable housing project in Waynesboro, the first in our region since 2020 to benefit from the federal low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). LIHTC apartments rent at below-market rates to families with incomes below the median income, which in our area are legion. They’re also nothing new to the area, in which developers used LIHTC funds for the first time in 2001 to renovate Fairfax Hall in Waynesboro, and subsequently added 968 rent-subsidized apartments and town homes at 11 separate locations in Waynesboro, Staunton and Augusta County. But getting to that point wasn’t easy, and now is becoming less so.

The way LIHTC works is thus: each year, the Internal Revenue Service distributes credits to the states, which in turn award them to developers to cover part of their costs of constructing or rehabbing apartment buildings. In exchange, the developers agree to cap rents for low-income tenants. The developers then sell the credits to investors to raise cash with which to start construction, giving investors equity in the projects and credits to apply against their tax returns over a 10-year period. That sounds like a win-win for most everyone—except that this process has grown into such a bureaucratic nightmare over the years that most builders won’t even pursue LIHTC projects.

It also provides Cato and other critics with their most powerful ammunition against “the growth of the welfare state.” For example, the LIHTC statute and related IRS regulations are 442 pages in length, the IRS auditing guide for the LIHTC is 344 pages, an IRS guide for LIHTC building compliance is 214 pages. An industry guidebook to the program runs to 1,942 pages. That’s a whole lot of deterrence against even applying for LIHTC certification, and it doesn’t end there: once such a project is completed, building owners must adhere to rent caps and tenant income limits for 30 years and keep records of each residents’ income, assets, and family composition.

Because of these and other LIHTC requirements, the cost of such units is significantly above those of non-subsidized housing. Those requirements also result in increasingly complicated financing packages, referred to as “capital stacks,” to underwrite construction. Such stacks consist of an array of government and other subsidies, each of which comes with its own rules and fees, and each of which takes time to cobble together, thus adding to the bottom line. The LIHTC cost disadvantage, according to various estimates, is around 20%, although it can be twice as high in more rural areas. That’s just so much raw meat for the free-market crowd.

No wonder, then, that the LIHTC train ground to a halt locally over the past six years, despite a dozen successful projects completed in the previous decade. Who can handle that kind of aggravation when there’s plenty of demand for new housing at more profitable market rates?

Last year, however, a non-profit developer of affordable homes, Enterprise Community Development, announced it would build Alston Court, a $35 million 96-unit apartment complex near the Texas Roadhouse in Waynesboro. All 96 units would be rented at affordable rates, according to Enterprise, meaning tenants would not pay more than 30% of their income for housing. Eight units would be reserved for households making less than $18,000 a year, which is just 30% of the local median income. An additional 75 units would be set aside for those making less than 60% of local median income, and 13 units would go to households making between 60% and 80% of the median. All that works out to monthly rent topping out at $1,200 a month—and dropping to less than $450 at the low-income end.

But having secured its LIHTC package, Enterprise Community Development had to assemble the capital stack needed to make it all work. It acquired $4.4 million from the state’s Affordable and Special Needs Housing program, a $560,000 grant from the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission, a commitment of $125,000 from the Community Foundation and another $125,000 in smaller, three-year loans of $10,000 to $25,000 each from a variety of local organizations. It got a commitment from Valley Community Services Board to support 12 to 14 units through its permanent supportive housing program, and a promise from the Waynesboro Redevelopment and Housing Authority to likewise provide housing vouchers for the project. But that still left it $500,000 short of what was needed . . .

. . . and that’s when the City of Waynesboro agreed to pitch in with a grant to meet the shortfall. That’s also when city resident Mary McDermott, a retired telecommunications attorney, decided to get her dander up. As chronicled by the Augusta Free Press, McDermott fired off a letter April 15 protesting a city council vote to “donate” taxpayer dollars and threatening to sue the city in Circuit Court. No grounds for such a suit were outlined in McDermott’s letter, which lacked the rigor one would expect from someone educated at Harvard Law School and which seemed to consist primarily of McDermott’s belief that the grant should have been a loan. Moreover, the whole kerfuffle quickly blew over when McDermott decided just days later—also without much of an explanation—that she wouldn’t sue, after all. If nothing else, however, McDermott demonstrated how precarious such initiatives can be, thanks to their underlying complexity.

Meanwhile, as these numbers illustrate, even an experienced subsidized housing developer like Enterprise Community Development, which already has built more than 19,000 homes across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, can be hard-pressed to keep its costs down because of the additional costs associated with LIHTC. Alston Court, it should be noted, will pencil out to nearly $365,000 a unit—more than the median sales price of new homes locally, and therefore just the kind of bloated initiative that gets the Cato Institute and its ilk all revved up. Forgoing subsidized housing, on the other hand, only means more people forced to live beyond their means in over-priced housing, many of whom invariably will end up on the street.

Rather than tossing the baby out with the bath water, isn’t it better to repair and streamline the rickety bureaucratic structure that makes affordable housing possible? Because, really, what else is there?

United Way: new bottle, same vinegar

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

All of a sudden United Way is in my face with fund-raising appeals in a big way, hyping its “Power Hour”—occurring as I write these words—to help it reach a $25,000 goal during its “Great Community Give.” The blessings such money will bestow on our community are multiple, we’re assured, with prominent mention of free tax-preparation assistance (presumably, at this point, for next year’s filers) and back-to-school backpacks stuffed with the supplies kids will need a few months hence. Worthy projects all, to be sure, but color me skeptical.

First, a little context. These appeals are being made by the United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley, which until last June was known as the United Way of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. The name change, and its accompanying turf expansion, followed the late 2024 collapse of the SAW United Way amid a swirl of rumors and allegations of financial impropriety. That, in turn, opened the door for the Harrisonburg-based United Way to expand its domain and thereby broaden its fund-raising base—nature does abhor a vacuum, after all.

The demise of the SAW United Way was no great loss in the overall scheme of things, as I wrote a year ago. Although in its last year the local agency disbursed $196,405 to a dozen or so area social service providers, that represented only a third of the amount it had received in contributions and donations. Virtually all of the balance went to maintaining the office itself, including an $83,250 salary for the executive director. So while Valley Supportive Housing or Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta undoubtedly felt the sting of their lost United Way contributions, local residents who had been contributing to United Way could still provide such agencies with direct donations without propping up a bloated middleman.

But as last month’s IRS filing suggests, the new United Way is only marginally an improvement over the old one.

First, the numbers. For the fiscal year that ended April 30, 2025—which is to say, just as it was swooping into the SAW region—the United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley received donations of $625,909, a 9.5% decline from the previous year. Total expenses, boosted by a 7.8% increase in wages for eight employees, were up 4.3%, to $765,725. Which, yes, means expenses exceeded donations by nearly $140,000, a hole that was partially offset by $25,746 the United Way received in interest from more than $900,000 it has stashed away in investments. The shrinking inflow of donations, meanwhile, continues an overall five-year slide from the $905,253 received in 2020.

What did our now-local United Way do with its money? It gave its executive director, Amanda Leech, a 7.5% raise, to $70,863 a year. It spent more than $7,000 on investment management fees, $42,000 for accounting fees and $103,104 on fundraising expenses. And it expended $197,945—or just 30 cents of every dollar received in donations—on donations and grants to others. Of that, $129,490 went to six community organizations “focused on sliding scale scholarships for local families,” and $68,455 went to support an unspecified number of low-income families with financial emergencies.

United Way, in other words, is a tail wagging the dog. To the extent that people want to support the organizations to which it is contributing, a direct donation will triple the impact. And while its other activities are more or less worthwhile, potential donors should weigh whether its priorities align with theirs. Helping people prepare their income tax returns is not nothing. Nor is there a lack of merit in coordinating an effort that send kids back to school with supplies that they may not otherwise be able to afford. But people contributing to United Way should understand that the lion’s share of their donations are underwriting an organization that is scrambling to justify its continued existence by taking on relatively secondary social needs.

At a time when growing numbers of people are struggling to obtain life’s most basic essentials, including medical care, sufficient food and adequate shelter, numerous local organizations are desperately trying to meet those needs with scant resources. They are leaner, they are more focused and they will make every dollar go further than can be said of United Way. Moreover, unlike United Way, almost all of them will provide you with either a direct link to their latest IRS Form 990, so you can see for yourself how they’re managing your money; or at least their EIN number, which you’ll need to find the forms yourself.

The EIN for United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley, by the way, is 54-0632716; you won’t find it on the website. Or check out its latest filing here—then go back a year from now to see the financial consequences of the agency’s southward expansion.

The housing squeeze, part one

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

To the casual observer, it must seem that we’re in the middle of one heckuva residential building boom—and indeed we are. In Staunton, several dozen apartments have been carved out of what were once commercial buildings, 130 apartments have been built off Middlebrook Avenue, and the planning commission is reviewing an application to build 267 single-family homes in a planned residential development at the end of Richie Boulevard. All that pales when compared to what’s going on in Waynesboro, however, where more than 1,200 new apartments, town homes and single-family homes are being built or have been recently completed, and several hundred more are being discussed.

So what’s with all the local angst about a lack of affordable housing? Aren’t we being swamped by new homes and apartments?

The answer to that lies in the word “affordable.” Yes, there’s a lot of ongoing construction, but all of the examples mentioned above are of homes that will be sold or rented at market rates—and the market is a beast. The house price index in Staunton, for example, rose from 100 in the year 2000 to 185 in 2020, which is to say, home prices rose 85% in that period, or an average of just over 4% a year. But by 2025 the index had jumped to 299.48, zipping along at a brisk 23% average annual increase. Translated into dollars, that boosted the February median home sales price in the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro (SAW) area to $330,000, according to local realtor Rick Kane, who’s been tracking these stats for a couple of decades.

Nor is renting a bargain. According to the city’s most recent consolidated plan, prepared as a requirement for receiving federal community development block grants, the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment—appropriate for a family with at least one child—in 2024 was $1,149 a month. Apartments.com, meanwhile, currently shows Staunton rents as averaging $$1,151 for a one-bedroom and $1,264 for two bedrooms. (Parenthetically, it’s noteworthy that 45% of all Staunton households with children have only one parent present, according to latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics.)

To put those numbers in perspective, consider that the federal standard for housing affordability is less than 30% of household income. Spending more than that puts you in the “cost-burdened” category, while spending more than 50% pushes you into “severely burdened” territory. To reasonably afford that market-rate two-bedroom apartment, a household would have to be earning $46,000 a year. Homeownership, no surprise, is even pricier: the $330,000 median home sales price will require a six-figure annual income unless the buyer comes in with a downpayment upwards of $66,000—and even then he or she will need an annual income of roughly $80,000.

Now consider this. The median annual wage income for Staunton’s full-time, year-round workforce, according to the most recent U.S. Census report, is $55,023. See the problem?

Unless a household has two wage earners, local homeownership is out of reasonable reach for most. So are rentals for the 1,651 full-time workers in Staunton that the U.S. Census says make less than $35,000 a year. A look at the city’s job openings illustrates how new employees almost invariably will be forced into the rental market: elementary school teachers, for example, start at $53,000, police officers at less than $51,000. The starting wage for a water treatment plant operator is $20 an hour, which works out to affordable rent of just $1,000 a month. Good luck finding such a place.

Many households, of course, have more than one wage-earner, which is why Staunton’s household median income is $11,000 higher than the median for wage-earners. And, of course, there is nothing ironclad about the 30% rule. People routinely pay more than 30% of their income to put a roof over their heads—but that’s the problem. The more someone spends on housing, the less there is for all of life’s other essentials, including food, transportation, health care, clothing and childcare. Small wonder, then, that the 2025 Community Needs Health Assessment prepared by Augusta Health reported that 25.8% of Staunton residents don’t have enough cash on hand to cover a $400 emergency expense.

One of the problems with such statistics is that they paint with a broad brush, glossing over the glaring disparities among various subgroups. This is especially true in any discussion of housing affordability, as illustrated by the graph above. Relatively few people making more than $75,000 a year will have trouble finding affordable housing, not only because they make more money but also because the housing market will have more choices for them. Conversely, those who make less than $30,000 are overwhelmingly cost-burdened, not only because they can’t afford much of a home but because they’ll be lucky to find anything in their price range. As a result, two-thirds of them get pushed into the “severely burdened” category, putting them one misstep away from being homeless.*

(While these bar charts are for the U.S. as a whole, they track the local situation pretty closely. For example, a statistically dated Central Shenandoah Planning District housing study released last year reported that more than 42% of Staunton and Waynesboro renters were cost-burdened, or roughly the percentage for 2019 shown above for “all renter households.”)

All of which raises the question: who’s going to be buying or renting all those new homes that are popping up in our two cities? And the obvious answer is: for the most part, not people who are already here. They can’t afford it.

Some of the new housing in Waynesboro undoubtedly will be snapped up by employees of Northrup-Grumman, which has a new plant that is filling more than 300 new jobs paying an average of $94,000 a year—but an estimated 80% of those jobs require four-year college degrees or more, suggesting many if not most will be filled by employees from elsewhere. But Waynesboro also has become increasingly attractive to a better-paid Charlottesville workforce searching for housing that’s more affordable on this side of Afton Mountain—and once you’ve crossed the Blue Ridge, Staunton is just an additional 20 minutes down the road. So presumably the developers behind all the new construction have looked at all that and concluded there’s a market demand they can meet.

The unmet market—the housing market for median wage earners already here—is another story. As the above analysis should illustrate, there are two sides of the affordable housing equation that can be addressed to make things equal: pay people more money, or build cheaper housing. Neither is about to magically happen, but there is a workaround: subsidize housing builders so they can sell or rent at below-market prices.

Unfortunately, that strikes some people as being, um . . . too much like socialism?

*The statement about homelessness is not hyperbolic. The usefulness of this year’s Point in Time (PIT) count of homeless people in the SAW region was limited because it coincided with the extreme ice storm that paralyzed the region, preventing census takers from seeking out those who were unsheltered. But even surveying just those who were in shelters underscored some troubling trends: 39% of the 157 respondents were homeless for the first time, and 29% were 55 or older. Unemployment and eviction were the two most common reasons they provided to explain their homelessness.

Next up: The housing squeeze, part two. Waynesboro leads the way toward a socialist utopia. Can trouble be far behind?

Data center FOMO with a side of nuke

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

What’s going on with Staunton Crossing?

Fifteen years and tens of millions of dollars after it was first conceived, the 300-acre industrial park at the corner of I-80 and U.S. 250 has finally achieved Tier 4 status, which signifies it is ready to do business. Which raises the question: what now?

What kinds of businesses should be recruited for Staunton Crossing, and how will the city measure the project’s overall success? Should Staunton put more emphasis on job creation—or on increasing its tax base? How much disruption to its infrastructure and social fabric can the city tolerate, and what’s a fair trade-off for the jobs and tax dollars that result?

These and other issues were raised last week at a regular city council meeting in a rapid-fire presentation by Tim Davey, a professional engineer and director of economic development for the Timmons Group, which had created Staunton Crossing’s master plan by late 2018. “In the marketing world, six years is a long time,” he conceded Thursday, explaining why the plan should be updated. Seven-plus years is an even longer time, but Davey was not one to get bogged down in details, rushing through his remarks as if by doing so he could somehow turn back the clock. Along the way, he managed to toss a couple of hand grenades.

The most obvious casualty of time’s passage has been the master plan’s inclusion of a data center, an industry that was all the rage last decade but which has since lost much of its luster, and which dominated much of last week’s discussion. Just how much of a data center was being contemplated in 2018 is hard to tell from the documents produced at the time. Maps of the site allocated 831,250 square feet to a data center that Timmons projected would be built in the fifth year—which is to say, before now. Elsewhere, however, in a chart that includes water and sewer consumption, the data center was inexplicably reduced to 375,000 square feet, shrinking its hefty water needs below those of a light manufacturing plant. And water, as the master plan noted, is key: “Nothing else matters more than water.”

The intervening years have had other implications for the master plan, which includes a modest level of retail but a significant amount of office space among its target end-users—two categories, as pointed out by Mayor Michele Edwards, that have seen significant post-Covid shifts in demand. Such changes, in turn, affect bottom-line calculations about how many jobs and how many tax dollars Staunton Crossing might generate. Office space, for example, requires relatively little taxable capital investment but generates a lot of jobs when compared with light manufacturing, which requires more taxable spending on equipment and facilities but hires fewer people. Back when the master plan was first assembled, the outlook was for “3,000 quality jobs,” apparently considered a sufficiently high return on the many millions of state tax dollars lavished on the site in the name of job creation. But whether that’s still in the cards remains to be seen.

Data centers completely flip the calculus. Once such a center is built, typically by a transient workforce, its employee headcount is measured in dozens rather than hundreds. A data center’s potential boost to the city’s tax base, on the other hand, is enormous, thanks to its capital-intensive nature. In one sense, then, Staunton’s financial interests are at cross-purposes with Virginia’s, since state-funded land development allocated to a data center essentially transfers state capital to the city’s coffers—a nice offset for Staunton taxpayers, if not so great for the Staunton workforce.

A questionable transfer of tax dollars aside, data centers over the past decade have evolved in public perception from a relatively benign, low-impact and “clean” form of industry into power-guzzling, water-sucking vampires that can be noisy neighbors and a threat to local air quality, thanks to their reliance on diesel- and gas-fired emergency generators. With residential electricity rates climbing and water scarcity exacerbated by such developments, progressive Democrats are pushing a national moratorium on the construction of data centers nationally. A growing number of municipalities are following suit on a local level.

Despite all that, however, Tim Davey clearly believes that data centers should stay in the mix for Staunton Crossing—and not just a data center, but possibly an on-site electric plant to supply its energy needs, up to and including a “small” nuclear reactor.* Data centers and their associated energy sources are “things that people are asking about, and I’m not advocating for it, I’m just telling you that it’s just one of those things that people are asking about and you need to have an answer for that,” he counseled.

City councillor Corrie Park pushed back on such assertions, citing all the drawbacks associated with data centers and the resistance she has encountered from city residents on the subject. It would be “inefficient of us” to pursue a data center at this time because Staunton residents “won’t go for it,” she contended, a waste of time better spent going after more acceptable land uses. Davey, on the other hand, wasn’t having any of it, suggesting various work-arounds for some of the objections, offering for example that some data centers are using closed-loop cooling systems to reduce water consumption. And, of course, there was that whole nuke thing to avoid distorting local energy costs.

But the bottom line for Davey seemed to be . . . the bottom line. The Virginia boom in data centers will have run its course in another five years, he predicted, so it would be in Staunton’s best interests not to miss the gravy train. “I pose the question to my clients, do you want to be the only jurisdiction in Virginia without one, and the tax revenue that could come from it?” he asked the city council, leaning into fear-of-missing-out anxieties. “If the answer is yes, then that’s great—but the tax revenue is pretty impressive.”

What happens next is not clear. Davey’s presentation ended with several recommendations, starting with development of “a diverse, internal marketing team” and creation of “a target marketing portfolio,” which presumably would revisit the kinds of industries the city would try to recruit for Staunton Crossing. Yet the overall package smacks of a rush job staffed by insiders. There is no suggestion that public input would be sought—even for so weighty a subject as the desirability of having a “small nuke” within city limits—and the whole business plan refresh could be done within just 90 days, Davey assured the council.

Doubts about data centers aside, other questions about Staunton Crossing abound. For example, a key question raised by Davey on behalf of Staunton Crossing prospects is, “Where will my employees live?” To that, Davey replied, “I believe you guys are in a very good, healthy position to answer that,” which may come as news to the recently created Staunton Housing Commission and various local groups grappling with the inadequate supply of affordable housing—and all the more so if Staunton Crossing delivers on its promise of 3,000 new jobs. That’s a lot of fresh housing demand!

It’s also worth noting that whatever goes into Staunton Crossing, whether light manufacturing plants or a data center or both, will put additional demands on a water and sewer infrastructure that is already under stress. It’s ironic, therefore, that Davey’s presentation was immediately followed by a request to increase utility rates by 5% to 7% to pay for long overdue water and sewer improvements and maintenance. The increased amount, everyone agreed, will raise only a fraction of what’s actually needed.

There were no comments made at the public hearing on the rate increase, which was then approved.

*Once you’ve picked your jaw up off the floor and want to get the full context of the casual reference to nuclear reactors, you can find Davey’s comments here, starting at around the 54-minute mark. It should go without saying that any onsite power plant, nuclear or otherwise, would need additional coolant water.

Rethinking Staunton Crossing

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Much of tomorrow’s (April 9) Staunton city council meeting, which starts at 7 p.m., will be focused on next year’s budget and proposed increases in utility fees, neither of which is insignificant. But an even weightier matter, because of its long-term repercussions, will be taken up by council members at their work session preceding the regular meeting, when they will be presented with a long overdue “business plan update” for Staunton Crossing. What’s unclear is whether the “update” will include a reexamination of what should be built on this rather expensive chunk of real estate.

For the uninitiated, Staunton Crossing is a 300-acre site at the intersection of I-81 and U.S. 250 that is readily identified by its million-gallon water storage tank, perched on a concrete pillar abutting the interstate. The city purchased this acreage back in 2009 and spent nearly a decade figuring out what to do with it. A comprehensive design was finally prepared by the end of 2018, and millions of dollars have been spent before and since to pave the way for . . . well, that’s the question. Because while this project inched along, the rest of the world was hurtling into a once unimaginable future.

Case in point: one of the four core businesses envisioned for Staunton Crossing was, and is, a data center of the sort that has exploded across the country generally, and in Virginia most notably—indeed, the state now leads the nation with 579 such centers. As originally designed, Staunton Crossing’s data center would total more than 800,000 square feet, far exceeding the square footage occupied by offices (375,000), retail (162,300) or advanced manufacturing (a paltry 13,000 square feet). Various alternative options were also advanced, but in all of them the data center component remained unchanged—and, apparently, unchallenged.

There are several problems with this, not so much because of bad planning but because what seemed reasonable in 2018 is at least questionable today. Less than a million square feet of data center space might have seemed ambitious eight years ago, but today it’s quite a bit on the small side. The proliferation of data centers, primarily in northern Virginia but in other parts of the state as well, not only makes the Staunton site unremarkable but puts the city at a disadvantage for an industry that tends toward clustering. Most significantly, the metastasizing and increased size of these centers has highlighted just how environmentally taxing and destructive they are, driving up electricity and water consumption—and rates—while threatening air quality with their reliance on fossil fuel generators for back-up power.

The precarious state of Staunton’s water supply has been widely chronicled, due both to the aging-out of its supply infrastructure and because of our repeated drought alerts. Local electricity rates, meanwhile, have started climbing after years of being noticeably below those of other states, with Dominion Energy’s overall prices growing 11.6% over the past year and the generation portion of its bill increasing 16.8% over the same period, largely due to rising demand from all those energy-sucking data crunchers. Over the next year, Dominion ratepayers can expect to see another rate hike of around $11 a month.

There are, in other words, so many red flags popping up around the data center explosion that state lawmakers are mulling a slew of proposed regulatory and legislative constraints, raising the possibility that they will make Virginia an increasingly unattractive option for the industry. The feeling in Staunton should be mutual, but whether tomorrow’s business plan update will go in that direction remains to be seen. One line in the power-point presentation prepared by the Timmons Group is suggestive: on the “Current Trends” slide, item 4 is “AI Site Elimination vs Site Selection.” My vote would be for the first half of that equation.

One final note, sparked by that same slide. No. 6 on the list of current trends is the perennial question, “Where will my employees live?” Ironically, the original discussion of what should go into Staunton Crossing included the possibility of workforce housing—a possibility that was inexplicably dropped, with no known record of the thinking behind the exclusion. Eight years later, that looks remarkably short-sighted.

Staunton council is in a tax squeeze

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

As Staunton wrestles with the math of trying to make revenues match expenses, its options are actually quite limited. Roughly one-fifth of its income comes from the state, while a quarter or so comes from a grab-bag of smaller taxes that can’t be pushed much higher, primarily the local sales tax, restaurant meals tax and lodging tax. But the biggest slice of the income pie, at just under half, comes from general property taxes, and by far the dominant segment of that category is real estate taxes. It’s therefore disconcerting to realize, after even a little analysis, just how self-defeating it is to pin our city’s fortunes on such an economically stupid way of raising money.

Not that Staunton, or any other city, has much choice. Real estate taxes are the one significant revenue tool left to municipalities by a state that reserves for itself the lion’s share of other taxes, such as taxes on income. Even with that, however, a city’s taxing ability is severely circumscribed by Virginia’s embrace of the Dillon rule, which essentially prevents any kind of municipal initiative that isn’t explicitly allowed by state law. The result is a rigid set of constraints that strangle innovation.

That’s too bad, because the way real estate taxes currently function has at least two hugely deleterious effects. One, as briefly explored in my post Sunday, is as a brake on Staunton’s ability to raise sufficient revenue to fix aging municipal infrastructure before it becomes unserviceable. The second is the way real estate taxes contribute to housing blight while simultaneously raising housing prices overall, making a significant contribution to the affordable housing crisis we’re currently experiencing.

To understand why that is, take a minute to consider how property taxes work. The rationale behind them is that the bulk of city services—roads, sewers, waterlines, fire protection and, to a significant extent, police protection—go to property, not people. And as the value of property rises, so too does the value of the services it receives, so the tax should increase accordingly. That seems straightforward enough, but here’s the question that tends to be overlooked: why does a property’s value increase?

Why, for example, does property in an urban core get valued more highly than in agricultural areas? As should be readily evident, a parcel’s value is highly dependent on what’s around it. You can buy a larger house on more land in a rural part of Augusta County for the same price you’ll pay for a smaller home on much less land in Newtown, largely because of the latter’s proximity to downtown and Gypsy Hill Park. Ready accessibility to shopping, recreation and cultural pursuits is worth a lot, as is not having to foot the bill for maintaining a well and septic system. A significant portion of land value, in other words, is collectively and publicly created.

Meanwhile, the value of what’s on that land also goes up as improvements are made, be it an addition, a renovated kitchen or bathrooms, new windows and doors or a new roof. As a result, the owner of a well-maintained home pays more tax than the owner of a poorly maintained house across the street, even though the city’s cost of maintaining a paved road and the utilities between them remains unchanged. In purely economic terms, therefore, a real estate tax provides a negative inducement for improving one’s property. A slumlord who neglects his property because he views it in cash-flow terms, not as a home that is building generational wealth, nevertheless profits from the improvements made by surrounding homeowners, who by their stewardship raise the value of all the properties in the area.

But that’s not all. When housing is in short supply, as is true in Staunton and most cities today, cheaper homes will appreciate faster than more expensive homes because of increased pricing pressure caused by unmet demand. In simple terms, a million-dollar home may appreciate only a couple of percentage points from one year to the next, while a home that a few years ago may have gone on the market for $150,000 will be listed today for nearly twice that amount, as anyone following Staunton’s real estate listings can attest. That makes real estate taxes extraordinarily regressive, with low-income people getting priced out of homes they can no longer afford because their market value has gone up even as their actual value, measured by their physical condition, has deteriorated.

For numbers nerds eager to explore this subject more deeply, the University of Chicago’s property tax project provides a granular analysis of the subject nationally, with a look at Staunton’s 2023 property tax rates and their regressivity available here. This is truly wonky territory, but the bottom line is this: Staunton three years ago ranked as the 45th least regressive of the 131 Virginia cities and counties in the project’s sample, as its home values were above average nationwide and regressivity levels were in the bottom quartile. So compared to others, Staunton has been fairer than most.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the data is three years old, and since then the city has seen a 14.45% increase in the median residential assessment. More to the point, pressure on the city to raise revenue is only going to increase as its infrastructure demands keep growing, but hiking real estate taxes—the one significant revenue source over which the city has any control—would fall most heavily on those who can afford it least. Is there no escape?

TO BE SURE, there are a few workarounds Virginia has made available to taxing localities, chiefly in the form of tax exemptions for low-income homeowners. But that approach, while individually helpful, must be seen as a limited patchwork that only underscores how unevenly real estate taxes are applied and doesn’t solve the bigger problem.

One theoretical, if politically unlikely, solution would be to make real estate taxes explicitly progressive, in the same way that income is taxed progressively—those who make more get taxed at a higher rate. Under that approach, homes appraised below a certain level would be taxed very little or not at all, while higher appraisals would be taxed at progressively higher rates. Instead of the current rate of 91 cents per $100 of assessed value, for example, Staunton could have a rate of 85 cents per hundred for homes assessed below the current median value of $251,240, then increase the rate by 5 cents for every additional $50,000 in assessed value, to a maximum of $1.35 per hundred dollars for homes assessed at $750,000 or more. Which, as it happens, is the tax rate in Alexandria, which is no stranger to homes in that price range.

Yet another approach, and one with some academic credentials, is to tax land but not the improvements—or as summarized by conservative economist Milton Friedman (yes, yet another University of Chicago reference point), “the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land.” That would at least eliminate the tax disincentive for investing in one’s property, even if it would not address the underlying problem of speculators benefiting from their neighbors’ investments. Moreover, a land value tax (LVT) instead of the common real estate tax would be a huge deal for small land developers and builders, who don’t have the political muscle to push for tax abatements or other incentives. That could make a major difference for a city like Staunton that is trying to incentivize in-fill projects.

The curious thing about our current real estate taxes is that we already assess land and any improvements on it separately—but then combine the two into one assessment to which a single tax rate is applied. Theoretically, then, it would be a simple matter to separate the two and tax land at a higher rate, determined by its development potential, while dramatically reducing the tax rate on improvements that have already been made. Theoretically. Whether that’s even possible under the state’s Dillon rule is, however, questionable.

None of the exposition above will make any difference this Thursday, when the city council will be formally presented with next year’s budget. But it should prompt our elected officials and their administration to question what the city can do long-term to ensure adequate funding of our infrastructure while also protecting our most economically precarious residents, because without that discussion we’ll just find ourselves in the same bind—but worse—a year from now, and for many years after that. That could mean pursuing one of the ideas above. It could mean something entirely different. Whatever it is, however, the real estate tax should be a leading candidate for reform, even if that requires an assault on the Dillon rule.

There’s thrifty—and there’s cheap

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

It’s crunch time for Staunton’s budget decision-makers, and for anyone looking at the big picture, it doesn’t look good.

Last year’s budget came with a 2-cent increase in the real estate tax rate, but even that small bump prompted some push-back from city council member Jeff Overholtzer, who worried about its impact on lower-income homeowners. So this year, perhaps wanting to avoid stiffer resistance, city manager Leslie Beauregard is holding the line on requesting a tax increase (well, except for a 10-cent-a-pack increase on cigarette sales taxes) and instead is looking to hike water, sewer and refuse fees. The proposed fee increases will raise the average household bill an estimated $7.41 a month.

That doesn’t come close to what’s actually needed, guaranteeing a much more expensive reckoning down the road.

To understand the financial sinkhole lying in front of us, it helps to think of Staunton as a 100-year-old house. It’s got great bones and period architectural details, but a lot of crucial maintenance has been deferred and it’s starting to show. With an actual house, that might mean a roof that’s been leaking long enough to create a mold problem, or plumbing that gets stressed every time the ancient furnace kicks in. With a city like Staunton, it means corroding water and sewer lines. A smart home-buyer who acquires such a vintage Victorian will budget anywhere from 5% to 10% of his purchase price, annually, to address the issues he’s inherited. Staunton, by contrast, puts aside just 1.8% of general fund revenues for its capital improvement plan (CIP).

Much of the CIP, it should be noted, goes not for maintenance of existing infrastructure but for expanding what’s already there, such as the $10 million projected for extension of water and sewer lines to Uniontown. But maintenance is hellishly expensive. Replacement of the existing water mains along Richmond Avenue, from Frontier Drive to Greenville Avenue, is expected to cost more than $13 million. Upgrading existing sewer lines will cost an estimated $7.5 million. And replacing the 16-inch mains that bring water into the city, now a hundred years old, will cost $42 million or so—$42 million that is carried in the budget as an “unfunded” expense. Which is to say, no one has figured out yet where that money will come from.

The $42 million “unfunded” expense aside, it’s not the least bit clear how Staunton will pay for any of the other infrastructure repairs just mentioned, nor additional millions in other needed maintenance. As the city manager forthrightly acknowledges, existing capital fund balances and projected inflows won’t come close to covering projected costs. Indeed, the fund used to pay for Staunton’s share of the regional landfill is “in danger of becoming insolvent,” while three needed positions in the public works department to properly service water and sewer operations have been frozen since 2023. (Although if they were ever thawed, good luck finding decent job applicants for a starting wage of just $17.37 an hour.)

Okay. That’s the expense side of the books. What about the income side? Why doesn’t Staunton have the income it needs to meet its expenses?

Part of the problem is that the city has a history of presenting itself as a low-tax, affordable place to live, unburdened by the socialist pretensions of its bigger brethren, which is why Staunton is so far behind the eight-ball in addressing its housing needs. Almost half of its revenue is from general property taxes, but despite some city residents feeling they’re already over-taxed, Staunton’s property tax rates—91 cents for real estate, $2.90 for personal property—are among the lowest among all of Virginia’s 38 cities. At the end of 2024, for example, Lexington had rates of 92 cents and $4.25, respectively, while Harrisonburg was at $1.10 and $3.45, and Winchester was at 83 cents and $4.80. Waynesboro, meanwhile, raised its real estate tax to 89 cents (from 77 cents!) at the same time Staunton bumped up its rate, but had a personal property tax rate of $3.25. Only five Virginia cities had lower personal property tax rates than Staunton last year, and until last year, only seven of them had lower real estate tax rates.

So purely on a comparative basis, Staunton has room to increase its property taxes, no matter how worrisome that may be for some. But Staunton is further hobbled by another conceit, which is not only that it’s a low-tax haven but that its utilities are self-supporting enterprises like those found in the private sector, such as Dominion Power or Columbia Gas. Indeed, as explained to city council in a presentation March 12, Staunton’s water, sewer and trash collection services are supposedly supported by user fees, not local tax dollars. “Revenues must be sufficient to operate the system and invest in infrastructure without relying on general tax dollars,” according to Staunton’s chief financial officer, Jessie Moyers.

Except, of course, that they’re obviously not.

A small but growing number of Staunton residents are waking up to the crisis that is building up around them, with the recently released 2026 American Community Survey showing a 9% decrease in public perception of “the overall quality of utility infrastructure,” matched by a 9% increase in respondents wanting to see the city give the issue a higher priority. But that concern is scarcely touched by the budget proposal now under consideration. While leaving the general fund and its CIP untouched on this issue, the 2027 budget nibbles around the edges of the infrastructure problem by proposing utility fee increases that will raise just $517,000 a year in additional revenue from water and sewer customers. At that rate, Staunton will accumulate enough money to replace those 16-inch mains by the year . . . 2107.

Not only do the proposed fee increases fall far short of what’s needed to maintain infrastructure without relying on tax dollars, but they’re so timid that if adopted, Staunton would still have the lowest utility rates around. A Staunton household using 9,000 gallons of water over two months, for example, would be billed $48.72, compared to $73.81 for a Waynesboro household and $76.53 in Augusta County. Similarly, the Staunton bill for 9,000 gallons of sewage would run to $67.20, compared with $119.20 in Waynesboro and $121.02 in the county.

Everybody loves a good bargain, but these are illusory savings—the equivalent of eating your seed corn. Whether the city council understands it’s being asked to kick a fiscal can down the road, with even more dire news awaiting future council members, may be evident this Thursday at city hall: the city council work session (open to the public) starts at 5:30 p.m. and will be followed by the regular meeting at 7 p.m. The 2027 budget and the proposed fee increases are on the agenda.

Next up: is there any way for cities to break out of their fiscal strait-jackets?

Housing worries are making us sick

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

Tax season is fully upon us, so it’s only natural for people to grumble about the Internal Revenue Service. But here’s one undeniably good thing for which the taxman can take credit: because of an IRS rule dating back more than a decade, tax-exempt hospitals are required to periodically assess the health needs of the communities they serve. That’s the good news. The bad news, for anyone reading Augusta Health’s report card from last year, is that our health in some key areas has declined steadily since 2016, and a significant reason for that decline is housing affordability issues that weren’t even on the radar a decade ago.

Indeed, the most recent Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) provides a sharp contrast to the first in a series dating back to 2013. That freshman effort took a notably upbeat approach by noting that Augusta was the 31^st most healthy county in the 20^th healthiest state in the country. “Augusta County is living up to its motto ‘Let the ages return to the first golden period,’ referring to a period of simplicity and happiness,” it rhapsodized, in less than scientifically detached fashion. “In general, the Augusta County, Staunton, Waynesboro area outperforms the state averages for health status. Where local results fall at or below those levels, we see an opportunity for combined actions that result in improved community ratings.”

But then, in a prescient turn of phrase, it added: “There are several lifestyle gaps that need to be closed to move Augusta County toward greater overall health.”

Fast forward a dozen years, and last year’s CHNA indicates that those gaps not only were not closed, but that some grew into chasms. While the 2012-13 assessment ranked chronic disease management, as well as health behaviors (“particularly related to obesity and physical activity”) as its top two health priorities, the 2025 ranking vaults mental health to the top spot. And although physical activity and weight retain their number two ranking, right on their heels as number three is housing, which scarcely registered in the earlier assessment.* Meanwhile, chronic diseases, led by diabetes, trail behind in importance.

To be sure, the 2013 assessment was significantly more superficial than the reports that started coming out in 2016, when the grunt work was handed over to Professional Research Consultants and a 28-page report metastasized into a document nearly nine times as long. Moreover, the greater detail was complemented by a consistency of format, enabling comparisons across the three-year intervals that followed. The problem is that this consistency also highlights just how much backsliding has occurred.

AMONG THE ASSESSMENT’S housing-related findings for Staunton (anyone wanting to focus more on Waynesboro or Augusta County can peruse the complete assessment here), nearly a third (32.1%) of residents worried or stressed over their rent or mortgage payments in the previous year—apparently with good reason, as 12.3% reported they had been displaced from their housing within the past two years, and 9.9% said they’d been homeless in that same time period. Another 11.2 % said they were living in unhealthy or unsafe conditions.

For the SAW region as a whole, the incidence of unhealthy or unsafe living conditions jumped significantly from 2019 to 2025, from 9.9% to 14%—but even more sharply for renters, to 19.5%, compared to 10.5% of homeowners. An even wider disparity between renters and homeowners was found in response to the question of housing instability, with 17.8% of renters in the SAW region saying they had to find emergency housing in the previous two years, compared to 4.8% of homeowners. Meanwhile, the overall incidence of housing instability in the SAW region doubled, from 5% in 2016 to 10.2% in 2025.

Homelessness in the SAW region—defined as adults reporting “a time in the past two years when they lived on the street, in a car, or in a temporary shelter”—was zero in 2016, then climbed steadily through each reporting period, to 6.8% in 2025.

The health consequences of being homeless or of living in unsafe housing can be intuited by most people, but less immediately obvious is the toll on mental health taken by persistent anxiety over losing the home one already has. And while there are numerous reasons for depression or suicidal ideation, the parallel growth of deteriorating mental health and of insufficient affordable housing strongly suggests a link. Indeed, as housing stress has grown significantly over the past decade, the area’s mental health has taken a dive:

Asked to rate their overall mental health, 21.9% of SAW adults believe it is only “fair” or “poor,” a 150% increase since 2016. Staunton leads the way on that metric, with 27.8% reporting fair or poor mental health.
A total of 41.7% of SAW adults (and 50.4% of Stauntonians) say they have had two or more years in their lives when they felt depressed or sad most days. The open-ended nature of that measurement would dilute its significance, were it not for the fact that it is nearly double the 21.8% reading in 2016.
More than a third (35.5%) of SAW adults say they have been professionally diagnosed as having a depressive disorder, a 138% increase from the 14.9% reported in 2016. Moreover, that incidence jumps to a whopping 47.1% of Staunton’s adults, which is more than twice the 20.4% incidence for Virginia overall.
Local residents aren’t just depressed; 17.2% of SAW adults say they feel that most days are “very” or “extremely” stressful—a percentage also up significantly from the 10.5% recorded in 2016. Staunton leads the pack on this metric as well, with 22.1% reporting they feel stressed out.

Such ailments, alas, afflict some demographic groups far more severely than others, with low income and LGBTQ+ respondents greatly over-represented in all negative ratings—demographic groups that also have less visibility within the larger community, and less political clout with which to address the issues that are making them sick. Nor, once they do get sick, are there adequate mental health and related services to provide the care that’s needed.

The CHNA includes literally scores of comments from local doctors, social services providers, community leaders and others, detailing what they believe are the reasons for this intractable morass. To be blunt, there isn’t much that’s revelatory, although some of the anecdotes—a 35-year-old father, working two jobs to house his family in a motel room, dying from a stress-induced heart attack—get at the human cost of the illness permeating our body politic. And then there’s the occasional assessment item that further drives the point home, such as the finding that 19.3% of local adults acknowledge they have been “hit, slapped, pushed, kicked or otherwise hurt by an intimate partner.” That rate, too, has doubled since the 9.7% reported in 2016.

The problem with health exams, as all too many physicians know, is that patients will yes them to death—exercise, stop smoking, eat more nutritionally, cut down on the booze, yadda-yadda—and then go blithely on as though no red flags had been raised. So it seems with the 2025 CHNA’s section marked “evaluation of past activities.” Number two on its list of previous strategies was meeting the health care needs of the homeless through a four-pronged approach, all of which were implemented in 2023—and all but one, and then only minimally, going unaddressed in 2024, due to a vacant RN Health Educator position.

Vacant since November 2023, that is, or almost two years prior to the 2025 CHNA’s release.

It’s a near certainty that Augusta Health’s unfilled position is a result of budget constraints, but as with all such cuts, choices reflect priorities. Short-term rewards have a way of biting us in the ass down the road, and a high-salt, high-cholesterol diet almost invariably morphs into diabetes and obesity. But what are you going to do when it’s your doc who’s ignoring sound medical advice?

Meanwhile, it’s clear we have to move beyond discussing the lack of sufficient affordable housing simply in economic terms, or of viewing housing issues through a policy-making lens that bogs down in abstract philosophical differences. The lack of sufficient housing for city residents earning what passes for a living wage locally is a serious health issue every bit as insidious as lead poisoning, seeping into the populace largely unseen and unremarked until it explodes in seemingly inexplicable violence, depression and apathy. The 2025 CHNA waved several red flags. How many more such studies will we need to awaken us to the epidemic that’s underway?

* “Scarcely registered,” indeed. The single mention of housing in the 2013 CHNA was in a graph showing the SAW region’s top three health and community issues, in which “affordable housing” came in at no.21 of 22 issues overall.