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.

What we need is a matchmaker

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

The growing mismatch between people’s needs and the resources available to them keeps growing, and with Congressional Republicans hell-bent on adopting a “big, beautiful bill” that will slash Medicaid and other social spending, the gap is certain to keep widening. Care to guess who’s getting hurt the most?

Actually, there’s no need for guesses. Dr. Ryan Barber, whose increasingly sad job it is to ensure that homeless school children have their educations disrupted as little as possible, has been speaking out a lot about an increasingly fraught situation. Barber works for the Waynesboro School District, where at this time last year there were 100 children sleeping in cars or hotels or on a relative’s couch. A few weeks ago that number was 107, continuing a steady upward trend. Staunton, meanwhile, has seen a 50% increase in student homelessness over the past three years.

Traumatized children are not likely to be good students, so public servants like Barber do their best to keep disrupted young lives on an even keel. Local public schools have laundry machines for washing limited wardrobes, give out new clothing to replace what’s worn out or embarrassingly unfashionable, provide food for after-school consumption. If a student’s family is forced to shelter outside the district, Barber and his counterparts will pay for transportation so a child can keep attending the same school, with its familiar teachers, friends and routine.

Yet all that costs money—a surprising amount of it. In one case Barber recounted at a recent SAW housing luncheon, a Waynesboro student whose family moved in with relatives in Swoope continued to attend her same school—at a cost to the district of $250 a day for transportation. Funding for such expenses comes partly from Project Hope, a state program that last year disbursed a total of approximately $45,000 to Staunton, Augusta County and Waynesboro schools—a drop in the bucket when $5,000 of that can get eaten up by driving a single student.

Paltry though it is, however, Project Hope is among the funding sources getting cut. So is Title 1 money, which is federal assistance for schools with children from low-income families, of which there is no lack locally. Ditto for Title 6b, which provided funding for educating students with disabilities, which as Barber noted, is a people-intensive business. So too with a slew of other federal programs that have provided Waynesboro schools with $2.9 million a year, the loss of which would mean losing as many as 30 staff positions.

It’s not just public schools that are getting whacked, although their casualties will be the most poignant. Speaking at a Building Bridges for the Greater Good event three weeks ago—at which Barber also appeared—Staunton city manager Leslie Beauregard summarized the current budget cycle as “the most difficult ever.” There won’t be any FEMA funding to repair severe flood damage under the Wharf parking lot, money for digitizing the city library’s archives has evaporated, and Covid-related funding that paid for approximately 10% of local health staffing has been cut as well.

Meanwhile, Beauregard added, the city received $140,000 in additional requests for new funding from non-profits that were casting about for whatever financial help they could get. A grant for extending water and sewer lines to Uniontown is in jeopardy. And while the city’s annual Community Development Block Grant seems stable at the moment, “if that goes away, it will affect our housing programs greatly.”

These are, in other words, bleak and troubled times. So what’s to be done?

MONEY IS ALWAYS NICE, of course, and many times it’s indispensable. But the other great resource available to almost every community is . . . the community. The people who sometimes open their wallets to others, but who also can contribute their time and energy to help each other. Some  people can afford to write a check but don’t have the time to do volunteer work, and some people are just scraping by financially but have time on their hands that they can contribute to their neighbors.

It’s this latter group we need to do a better job of recruiting. And enabling.

When Dr. Barber disclosed that it costs $250 a day to transport a student from Swoope to Waynesboro, the obvious question from an audience member was why that service couldn’t be provided by community volunteers. Oh, that simply wouldn’t be practical, came the flustered response (not from Barber, it should be emphasized), what with liability and insurance issues and the problem of ensuring reliable pick-up and drop-off times and, well . . .  on to another topic. And just like that, a potential gift horse was smacked on its butt and sent on its way.

In plush times, which these are not, that might be an understandable if still unfortunate response. Volunteers can be a real pain in the ass. They don’t always donate their time for the best reasons, they sometimes acquire an off-putting sense of entitlement, they can be fickle and unreliable. Scheduling them can be a nightmare, you can’t always know how they’re representing your organization to the public, and the turnover rate can be nightmarishly high. How much more convenient just to pay someone to do a job!

Yet for all those headaches, fiscally strapped communities have long depended on volunteers to provide some of their most essential services. Even today, a substantial number of volunteers staff ambulances and fire apparatus in the SAW region, working alongside career staff whose ranks are kept lean because of budgetary constraints. Volunteers pick up, sort and distribute groceries at food pantries, swing hammers and saw lumber for home-repair non-profits, deliver blood and plasma for the Red Cross, cook and serve meals at shelters, and perform a hundred other tasks that quite often remain invisible to the general public.

Asserting that volunteers are an impractical resource is a lazy dismissal, and especially so in miserly times like these, when the only alternative may be nothing at all.

Consider, for example, the need for some kind of daytime refuge for the area’s unsheltered homeless population. Some homeless people have jobs to go to during the day, but many don’t and are left to roam the streets, regardless of extreme summer heat or winter cold. Where do they end up going? To the public library or the YMCA, to a Hardees or McDonalds, or riding a Brite bus interminably—to wherever they can keep cool or warm and dry, even if they discomfit those around them. 

How much more humane would it be to provide a day shelter, complementing the emergency night shelters that the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry operates from November through March each year?

Several initiatives are underway locally to create just such a facility, including one spearheaded by Staunton Mayor Michele Edwards. A local church has offered use of its space, Edwards and a WARM representative are discussing whether that agency can staff the operation, and the mayor has said city council might be able to provide some start-up funding. There’s also talk of Augusta Health providing visits by a mobile clinic, and of Mary Baldwin social work students playing some role.

It all sounds promising, but look more closely and you’ll see some cracks. The church in question has scheduling conflicts. WARM is in a financial hole following this past winter’s severe weather and seems unlikely to afford additional personnel costs. And Edwards has emphasized that the city won’t be able to cover operating costs, which means that once this boat is pushed into the river, it’s on its own and with no readily identifiable captain to steer it.

Perhaps for these reasons, there are a couple of other preliminary efforts underway to achieve the same goal. Yet woven through all of these initiatives is the same hurdle: who’s going to man the ship? Who’s going to unlock the doors, fill the coffee pot, ensure that the bathrooms are clean, maintain order, provide counsel to those who look for it, sweep the floors and put out the trash? There’s really only one answer: it will have to be community volunteers, and more than just a couple of Mary Baldwin students.   But where will they come from?

WHICH BRINGS ME, at long last, to the underlying thesis of this essay: in Staunton, we do a poor to nonexistent job of matching people willing to work on behalf of others with people who need that help. And we do a similarly poor job of matching people who need help to resources—including volunteers—that could give them what they need.

Consider for a moment that you’re a first-time visitor to Staunton, a tourist, and you want to know what’s worth seeing or doing in the neighborhood. What’s a good place to eat? How can I get to the Frontier Culture Museum? Are there any antique outlets locally? Hey—you’re in luck! The city elders have thoughtfully funded and staffed a centrally located store-front where you can get answers to all these and any other questions you might have, plus brochures, maps, web sites and QR codes that put the entire area at your fingertips.

But if you’re a local without money but with a problem? Good luck finding an equally accessible and helpful resource center.

Got a leaky roof that you can’t afford to repair but don’t know how to tap into possible help? How about needing free food but not knowing where local food pantries are located or their hours of operation?   Or what if you don’t have a car but need to get to Augusta Health for medical attention, and you know there’s a Brite bus that might take you there but not where to catch it or what kind of schedule it follows—and if you go to the new, much ballyhooed “Lewis Street Transit Hub,” there’s neither a route map nor an operating schedule for you to look at? (Huh? How dumb is that?)

Tourists bring money, so perhaps it’s not surprising that we make information so much more accessible to them than to our own residents —unsurprising, but sad, nonetheless. But equally frustrating is that the reverse information flow is also stymied.

Live in Staunton, have some time and want to give back to the community? Maybe you’re a retired accountant or bookkeeper willing to tutor someone in basic financial literacy. Or perhaps you’ve got basic handyman skills and could spend four hours a day for three days a week helping someone with home repairs. Or you’ve got a clean driving record and are willing to spend a day or two a week or month delivering food to the homebound, shuttling supplies for a non-profit, or transporting elderly patients for medical appointments. Maybe you’re even willing to staff a day shelter for the homeless?

Terrific—but you’re on your own figuring out which local agency would benefit most from what you’re willing to offer, much less whom to contact and how to present yourself.

What these examples illustrate is a hole in Staunton’s social fabric whose existence has gone unnoticed. What the city lacks is an information broker to match people who have something to offer with people or organizations who need that something. We do that for visitors via the Staunton Visitor Center, offering a place for strangers to ask questions and get expert help in getting what they want while also providing local businesses and attractions with a way to advertise what they have available. What we don’t have is a Staunton Resource Center that can perform the same services for our neighbors.

Such a resource center could, for example, maintain an inventory of potential volunteers, together with descriptions of what they’re willing to do and their general availability.  The center’s data banks would include such basic personal information as age, sex, educational level and any physical limitations, a description of the kind of volunteer work desired, and preferred work environments, such as indoors or outdoors, or working alone or with a group. Each entry would also describe a volunteer’s special skills or abilities, past volunteer work, language fluency, driving record and other relevant details. With that information in hand, a broker could let a church, school, social agency or other organization know of the best possible candidates for volunteer positions they may be trying to fill, or let a potential volunteer know what openings matching their interests are available.

Conversely, Staunton residents who are thinking of finding a volunteer position could review requests filed with the resource center by local agencies seeking help.

In addition, the staff at such a resource center could respond to local residents’ needs by providing basic information, be it as simple as a bus schedule or as complex as a list of contacts most helpful to someone who’s about to get evicted: legal assistance, emergency shelter, transportation, school personnel, and so on.  By engaging one-on-one with people walking in off the street, resource center staff could identify needs that someone caught up in the emotional turmoil of a crisis hasn’t yet recognized, offering proactive rather than merely reactive assistance.

Yes, a resource center of this sort would cost money—just as the visitor center costs money, currently budgeted at a bit more than $62,000 a year. (That’s in addition to the city’s $665,000 budget for tourism in general.) But just as the money spent on tourism is viewed as seed corn, returning many times more than is expended through visitor spending on local restaurants, lodging, entertainment and so on, so a resource center to mobilize volunteer time and efforts should be recognized as enriching the community.

Unfortunately, the reflexive response to such suggestions is the pretense that online resources and cell phone apps can substitute for face-to-face assistance—which, yes, is cheaper, but hardly effective, as the city itself underscores with its spending on the visitor center. Not everyone has a cell phone, or a charged cell phone. Not everyone is skillful at using digital devices to obtain needed information. Most critically, people who need help often don’t know what they need to know—they don’t know what questions to ask. That’s where human intervention can be critical.

Meanwhile, the brokerage aspect of such a resource center presumably could have an online presence—as the real estate market has, with Zillow and Realtor.com—but ultimately, it’s human beings who create the most productive connections. We’ve got to find a better way to make that human link.

We’re only beginning to see the deprivation that lies ahead, as federal money dries up, the economy stumbles toward possible stagflation and critical community needs go unfunded. This is the time to figure out how we’re going to compensate for the loss of money that typically lubricates our social machinery, and really, the only alternative is the time, effort and concern we have for each other. The days when we can spend $250 a day to transport a homeless student to school are coming to an end, and yet it takes hardly any imagination at all to think of an alternative—it just needs organization.

Developers finally get a seat

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

The past year has not been kind to people concerned about Staunton’s shortage of affordable and working-class housing. Despite an initial outpouring of interest about the issue, with a couple of hundred people turning out for two housing “summits” focused on the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro (SAW) region, attendance at working groups spun off by the summits has dwindled month by month. A much-awaited regional housing study, expected last summer, was finally released a couple of months ago and promptly sank from sight due to its leaden content. Staunton’s housing strategy group managed to stretch four 90-minute meetings across seven months without anything more to show for its efforts than a dozen “strategies” that could have been cooked up over a weekend, most of them built on on verbs like “explore” and “develop”—strategies, in other words, that are still in the early conceptual stage.

And then, of course, there’s this year’s federal torching of an already inadequate social safety net of grants, vouchers and other resources that much of the local planning didn’t anticipate. Expect much back-pedaling and wheel-spinning in the months ahead.

It therefore may come as a surprise, amid all the doom and gloom, to learn that this past Thursday’s meeting of the SAW housing stock working group had a breakthrough, of sorts, with the invited presence of two local developers. Although it might seem obvious that any serious exploration of housing issues would require participation from the supply side of the demand-supply equation, virtually all local discussions on the subject have been dominated by everyone except those who actually plan, build and sell the housing that everyone else laments is in short supply. So—genius. And good news, too.

The bad news is that this belated course correction was attended by only half-a-dozen working group members, with three more patching in via Zoom. The further good news is that the entire session was taped, and is accessible here: SAW Housing Stock Work Group Meeting-20250508_100405-Meeting Recording.mp4.

The developers who broke out of their comfort zone were Scott Williams, of the Crescent Development Group in Charlottesville, and Tommy Shields of Ivy Ridge Developers, in Waynesboro. That their attendance was unusual was evidenced by group member Rick Kane’s earlier efforts to recruit three other developers to address the group, none of whom could be bothered to respond to his first and second emails, Kane’s long history as a local real estate broker and former builder notwithstanding. Developers, as Williams readily acknowledged, tend to keep a low profile. Virtually anything they say, no matter how responsive to community concerns, tends to be quickly discounted as self-serving, and no one wants to be a punching bag.

Yet that’s been our loss. Who else, after all, is better positioned to tell us what it would take to get more affordable housing built?

THE EASIEST ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION, according to both Williams and Shields, is simply this: encourage greater housing density.

While not dismissing other development hurdles, such as a shortage of skilled workers or high fees and interest rates, the two developers agreed that the quickest way to get more housing is to increase the allowable “number of units per linear foot of road.” That’s why so much recent construction in the SAW region is of townhouses, which require lots that are only 20 feet wide, versus the 80 or 90 feet that a single-family home needs. Smaller frontage requirements mean more housing units per acre. And more housing units mean a broader base over which to spread costs, resulting in a lower cost per unit. Fifteen or 20 homes on one acre can be sold at a significantly lower price than just two or three single-family homes built on the same lot.

But off-setting the construction math is an equally straight-forward political calculus that occurs when high-density development is proposed for an area of low- or even medium-density zoning—and in Staunton, that covers a lot of ground. (The city’s most recent comprehensive plan indicates that 63% of Staunton’s vacant/undeveloped land is zoned for residential use, with two-thirds of it designated R-1 or R-2, both low-density classifications that allow only detached single-family homes on large lots with extensive setbacks.) Any developer seeking a waiver to exceed density limits can expect an angry crowd of nearby homeowners, gripped by visions of plummeting property values, to descend en masse at public hearings to oppose any change. And public officials, no less than developers, don’t want to be punching bags. 

The upshot? Despite a successful downtown core of relatively dense, mixed-use development that exists only because it predates current zoning restrictions, much of Staunton resembles a suburb more than an urban district. Absent, by and large, is what developers refer to as “the missing middle” of housing options, a diverse palette of housing options along the affordability spectrum that includes duplexes, fourplexes, bungalows, cluster homes, cottage courts, courtyard apartments and living/working combinations, such as apartments above street-level stores and businesses. Nor, despite all the recent attention to the issue, is that likely to change, given widespread fears of public backlash—yet as Williams observed, “If you create policy based on never having the phone ring, we’ll never get to where we need to be.”

Indeed, Staunton’s housing market has been shaped by decades of these and other policy decisions baked into its zoning code that send a clear, if not always intended, signal to developers. Many municipalities, for example, have ordinances enabling the creation of planned unit developments, which can include a wide variety of housing styles as well as commercial and office space. Staunton does not. And while city officials say they are open to such designs, developers must file for special-use permits each time they want to build a mixed-use development, sending a very clear message that this is not a normal course of business. Small wonder that little changes.

City housing planner Rebecca Joyce attempted to put a positive spin on this approach by explaining that requiring special-use permits enables city planners to “help the developers tailor their projects” to Staunton’s often quirky lots and challenging topography. But this presupposes that developers aren’t up to the task on their own, or that they won’t ask for help if they need it. Moreover, as Williams pointed out, every special-use permit application amounts to a bespoke mini-ordinance, eating up city staff time and causing costly delays for developers, whose financing costs don’t get suspended while the bureaucracy grinds on.

What became clear Thursday, as Williams and Shields shared their frustrations, is that Staunton is caught between a relatively inflexible approach to zoning that is more suitable for suburbia, on the one hand, and an exploding need for the kind of housing that suburban zoning can’t accommodate, on the other. The city can have one or the other, but it’s hard to see how it can have both.

DESPITE THIS BASIC BUT LARGELY UNNOTICED TENSION, Staunton has in fact made some strides recently towards grappling with its growing housing needs. Perhaps most notably: whereas just a few years ago the city maintained it had no role in assuring an adequate housing supply, there now is at least a recognition that city policies and regulations can enhance or hinder how the private sector plays its role.

So, for example, the city council recently reduced its parking space requirements for new construction, thereby allowing more developable land to be used for housing rather than asphalt. It has started exploring the possibility of creating a land bank and a land trust, which would enable the city to condemn abandoned properties and rehabilitate them. It is discussing adoption of an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) ordinance, which would allow homeowners to build or to convert part of their property into a second, smaller dwelling. It is contemplating establishment of a city housing commission.

But if the housing strategy workgroup it created last year is any indication, progress on these and other initiatives will be slow and fitful. Aside from its leisurely meeting schedule, the workgroup—like the SAW working groups—was further hampered by the conspicuous absence of builders and developers at the table. Its agenda was set entirely by the city planning department, with no noticeable initiative by group members, no examination of competing values or perspectives and little if any dissent from agenda assumptions.  No wonder, then, that the city’s own role in creating the current, unacceptable housing crisis was never questioned, much less addressed.

While creation of the housing strategy workgroup can be viewed in theory as a progressive step forward, its undifferentiated makeup and spoon-fed content ensured a conservation of the bureaucratic status quo. In the absence of anyone like Scott Williams or Tommy Shields, city planners had no one holding up a mirror for them to contemplate their own role in perpetuating the problems they purportedly were addressing.

Get serious about the stats we use

(Reading time: 9 minutes)

The housing stock working group has been tasked with two assignments in advance of its May meeting. The first is to collect ideas on misconceptions about—well, that’s not entirely clear, but it has to do with housing. The second is to review a supposedly detailed study that analyzes the costs of home building regulations. This is the “study,” formulated by the National Association of Home Builders, which concluded that regulatory costs and fees add $94,000 to the price of a new home.

It seems, therefore, that our second assignment fortuitously satisfies the first. The idea that the NAHB study is either detailed or has any relevance to the SAW region is a glaring misconception that the working group should be wary of promoting in any way.

As I wrote earlier, the NAHB study is deeply flawed because its respondents were woefully few in number and were self-selecting; because it is completely opaque about where the respondents were located or what kinds of housing they had built; and because it is, in any case, using data that predates the pandemic and the subsequent run-ups in housing costs, wages and interest rates. Its only apparent virtue is that it provides an easy if meaningless talking point, which endows it with a zombie-like persistence.

 The question of whether regulatory costs and fees are excessive and therefore contributing to the unaffordability of new housing is a legitimate one, deserving of serious consideration. Unfortunately, doing anything in a serious way usually takes work, and it’s really tempting to avoid that kind of exertion when a supposed authority or expert offers an answer already gift-wrapped and tied up in a bow. So let me counter with another study, one that will take some effort to peruse and which superficially, at least, has even less relevance to the SAW region than the NAHB effort. For all that, however, I promise it can teach us all something useful.

“The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California,” which can be downloaded at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3743-1.html, was published earlier this month by the RAND Corporation’s Center on Housing and Homelessness. Its mathematically dense goal is “to identify policy reforms than can lower production costs and increase housing affordability in California,” which as the authors note, had seven of the ten most expensive metro regions in the U.S. in 2021. It does this by looking at data from more than 100 multifamily housing projects in California, Colorado and Texas and—hold on, here comes the wonky stuff—uses a regression-based statistical model to account for differences in development costs according to building type, size, whether financing was private or public and other variables.

In other words, the RAND study takes great pains to describe its sample base and methodology in a way that the NAHB doesn’t even acknowledge, much less detail. And while its greatest relevance is to California policy makers, its conceptual framework and analysis are applicable to all housing markets. At the very least, therefore, the RAND study provides a model for how to interrogate our own housing needs.

WHAT DISTINGUISHES THE RAND effort from its anemic NAHB cousin is its understanding—and willingness to explain—the complex interplay of cost-drivers that result in a final price tag for a housing unit. How much does it cost to build a multifamily housing project? Well, there are construction costs, which include labor and materials. There is the cost of the land itself. And there are “soft” costs, which include architectural, engineering and legal fees, the costs incurred by filing required environmental reports, inspection fees and regulatory compliance costs, financing costs and, in many jurisdictions, development or impact fees. The RAND study finds that, on average, 70% of the cost of a multifamily housing project is tied up in construction, 10% in the land and 20% in soft costs.

It is this last category that many people think about when they refer to burdensome regulatory costs, and there is some basis for that. Inspection fees, regulatory compliance costs and impact fees are all obviously the result of policy decisions that can be increased, modified or erased, depending on community standards. Likewise, architectural and engineering fees are sensitive to a community’s design and permitting requirements.

But land and construction costs are also sensitive to community policies. Restrictive zoning can easily drive up the cost of land. Hard costs can be driven higher by building codes that require certain construction materials or installation of life safety systems, like alarms or sprinklers, as well as landscaping or parking requirements. And labor costs can vary considerably, depending on minimum wage laws and whether subsidized housing projects are required to meet prevailing wage rates.

The point of detailing all these factors is to underscore the difficulty of teasing out how much a project’s costs are the result of regulatory and other policy decisions, which are almost always unique to that project in that location at that point in time. That’s why the NAHB “study” is so pointless, and why there is nothing comparable on a state or county level. There are too many variables, and it’s a moving target to boot.

So does that mean we’ve hit a brick wall? Not exactly. Not if we collect a significant amount of data in a targeted area and sort it according to certain specific categories. That’s what RAND did, categorizing multifamily units into four groups by dwelling size across the three states it targeted, further divided between those built with private funding and those participating in the low-income housing tax credit program. The results were starkly disparate:

  • Total development costs (TDC) per net rentable square foot (NRSF) for market-rate developments in Texas were $167, compared with $531 in San Francisco (2019 dollars). TDC for low-income tax subsidized units was $236 in Texas, versus $731 in San Francisco.
  • Total development costs per apartment in Texas averaged $133,000 for the market-rate units, $96,000 for the subsidized ones, indicating that the latter were considerably smaller in size. The comparable figures for San Francisco were $485,000 and $487,000, again indicating a sharp reduction in size of the subsidized units.
  • Average predevelopment time in Texas was 13.1 months, average construction time was 13.9 months, for a total time to completion of 27 months. The California (not just San Francisco) equivalents were 27.9 months in predevelopment and 21 months in construction, for a total time of more than four years before a project is completed.

Keeping in mind the earlier discussion about unique variables affecting every project, it should be noted that these comparisons are hardly apples to apples. Construction costs in San Francisco, to pick just one of the most obvious differences, are affected by seismic standards that you won’t find in Dallas. Real estate costs more in California, wages are higher, etc. etc.

Yet for all that, the disparities are too great to be explained away by such factors alone, as RAND’s regression analysis found, and their consequences are that average rental prices in California are nearly twice those in Texas. Why? Lower construction costs leave room for lower rents.  And according to RAND, “Discretionary local impact fees are dramatically lower in the state [of Texas], at least in part because of strict oversight of these fees. But substantially lower levels of regulation overall and state policies that tightly constrain approval times likely play the most important role.”

WE CAN LEARN AT LEAST TWO things from all this.

First, the Texas and California statistics provide us with two extreme data points for total development costs, as well as extremes of production time. If local builders report development costs or production times closer to those found in Texas, there’s probably not a whole lot to be gained by second-guessing existing regulatory policies and procedures. Any gains from doing so would be marginal.

If, on the other hand, local production times and development costs are more comparable to California’s, clearly that opens up some ideas for addressing our affordable housing deficit. The RAND report’s recommendations, although explicitly intended to lower multifamily housing production costs in California, could have relevance to us, depending on which excessive regulatory cost-drivers are identified locally. Among the more intriguing:

  • Adoption of a policy, similar to state law in Texas, requiring local jurisdictions to approve or deny a proposal for a housing development within 30 days of submission. Failure to meet the 30-day deadline would result in automatic approval.
  • Promotion of policies to speed construction timelines, such as having synchronized rather than sequential inspections.
  • The returns on municipal impact and development fees, if any, should be weighed against potential gains from increased property tax revenue and other revenue and welfare gains from more new housing.
  • Adoption of large-scale upzoning to lower per-unit land prices and increase overall production. Even modest reforms, such as allowing duplexes or fourplexes where only single-family homes are allowed, can make a significant difference.

There doubtless are other conclusions that can be drawn from this study—it runs to 58 pages, and there’s a separate 48-page annex for anyone who really wants to get in the weeds—and there is abundant talent within our group to make that happen. But that will take work.

That work also would benefit from the input of developers and builders who looked to build in our area but have concluded they just couldn’t make their ideas pencil out—assuming, of course, that this has happened. If our group has had one continuing weak spot, it has been the lack of an industry voice to identify what could be done at the policy-setting level to encourage more affordable housing construction. That’s not entirely our fault—one of our members invited three different developers/builders “to join in the discussion about cost of regulations/what we can do for them/holdups in construction processes/etc.” but none responded—but it does create an information vacuum.

As a result, we don’t really know if a “regulatory burden” is an important reason why we don’t have developers breaking down our doors to build multifamily homes. The RAND study should at least help us formulate the right questions to ask, and also could help us decide that this is an area of inquiry that isn’t worth our efforts.

Don’t expect much from United Way

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

The past week’s announcement that United Way of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County (UWHR) is expanding into the SAW region doubtless was greeted with relief by many local social service agencies. The demise last fall of the SAW United Way eliminated a relatively small but not insignificant source of funding for some non-profits in the region, at a time when demand for food, housing, mental services and other basic needs is rapidly growing. And with political turmoil in Washington squeezing or eliminating much critical federal funding, any fresh source of financial support is to be welcomed.

But the news isn’t all that rosy. The fact is, only a small fraction of the money collected by United Way ever makes it to the people and programs on whose behalf it’s raised. Most of what’s collected stays with United Way, for salaries and other payroll expenses, office overhead and rainy-day savings accounts. And while the SAW United Way closed its doors amid allegations of fiscal improprieties, that was only one layer of a nearly impermeable filter that already exists between United Way donors and its recipients.

Consider, for example, that the SAW United Way raised $589,152 in contributions for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023, the last time it filed its 990 federal tax form. Of that amount, only a third—$196,405—was disbursed to area social service providers, while payroll expenses consumed $258,617, including a $83,250 salary for chapter president Kristi Williams; the balance went to office expenses and travel. Among the recipients of the chapter’s largesse that year was Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta, awarded a whopping $7,167, and Valley Supportive Housing, which got $15,000.

UWHR is not beset by similar hints of financial hanky-panky, but the imbalance between contributions to the agency and contributions made by the agency is even more pronounced than it was in the SAW region. According to UWHR’s most recent Form 990, for the fiscal year ending April 30, 2024, the Harrisonburg-Rockbridge chapter received $691,655 in cash contributions, in addition to reaping $24,538 in investment income, for a total of $716,193. Cash awards made that same fiscal year? Just $92,139, spread among six daycare and early learning centers.

UWHR payroll expenses, meanwhile, despite CEO Amanda Leech’s more moderate salary of $65,919, amounted to $335,864. Office and other expenses claimed another $223,317, which means that the agency kept 80% of all the money it took in for itself.  At that rate, the working poor are destined to be with us for a long, long time.

These stark contrasts may explain, to the extent that the public knows such things, why UWHR’s fund-raising has plummeted over at least the past five years, albeit with a minor bump up in 2023. Contributions received in 2019 amounted to $1.3 million—then steadily ticked down with each passing year, to $905,000 in 2020, $767,000 in 2021 and $653,000 in 2022, or a plunge of roughly 50% over four years. In 2023-24 the inflow rebounded a bit, to $691,655.

Given those numbers, it may come as a surprise to learn that UWHR is sitting on a pile of cash, with $201,301 in savings and $987,436 in securities, or substantially more than it receives in annual contributions.  Aside from generating some investment income, the purpose for this nest egg is unclear. It isn’t mentioned in any of the agency’s public-facing documents, and Leech did not respond to my inquiries about her plans for those reserves, or why she thinks it’s appropriate for a charitable organization serving the working poor to have squirreled away more than a year’s worth of revenues.

Assuming that UWHR operates in the SAW region much as it has in its own backyard, it’s clear that local social service providers should rein in any expectations about what they’ll get. Moreover, note should be taken of one other aspect of UWHR’s decision-making, a so-called “focused” approach to dispensing funds. As already noted above, for example, all six of its current major recipients are devoted to young children: First Step, Generations Crossing, Harrisonburg-Rockingham Child Day Care, Plains Area Day Care Center, Second Home and Connections Early Learning Center.  All those recipients undoubtedly need those funds, but that focus also means any non-child oriented social service agency can only hope that its focus aligns with UWHR’s the next go-round.

Of the dozen or so recipients of the now-defunct SAW United Way’s last funding cycle, only three would have been eligible for UWHR grants this year. Leech has said that the United Way will hold listening sessions over the next few months to figure out how to best serve its expanded region, so it’s possible UWHR will take a different approach in the SAW region—if local agencies make themselves heard. Even 20% of a donated dollar is better than nothing. On the other hand, potential donors are best advised to just cut out the middleman and make their contributions directly to the social service agency of their choice. Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta and Valley Supportive housing are good places to start. So is WARM, the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministry, which is SAW’s only provider of emergency shelters for the homeless during winter months and which was hit especially hard financially by this past season’s bitter cold.

We have to know what we don’t know

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

One of the underlying issues pervading all aspects of the affordable housing discussion we’ve been having locally is the lack of reliable, timely data. There’s a lot we don’t know, and much of what we think we know is flawed.

There is, for example, the recently released regional housing study, which not only lacks a lot of needed information but is burdened by a significant load of outdated and incomplete statistics.  The problem this poses is a false sense of authority. Statistics just look so damn definitive. They’re precise and official looking, and they do such a nice job of reducing complexity into the numeric equivalent of a soundbite that it’s hard to put them aside. They brook no argument—even when they send you off on a wild goose chase.

But the regional housing study is far from unique. A couple of more recent pronouncements about the housing situation illustrate how apparently authoritative sources can paint a picture that on closer examination is at least questionable. Yet because such statements fit so well into a broader understanding of our circumstances, they get adopted and repeated and eventually blend into the background narrative without a challenge. They become accepted wisdom, shutting down further discussion.

Consider, for instance, the question of how much government regulations add to the price of a newly built home.  Developers may have to pay for environmental impact or traffic studies, as well as zoning, impact, utility hook-up and other fees, and have the additional costs of complying with OSHA regs and specific design standards. Builders must comply with building codes and architectural design standards, as well as foot the bill for permit or inspection fees. Could relaxing or amending some of this regulatory burden allow for cheaper housing to be built?

To ask the question is to answer it: of course it would. What that doesn’t tell us is how much of a cost-saving is possible, and whether that reduction would be significant enough to prompt the construction of more affordable housing. Are regulatory costs so high that they are a major disincentive for more housing development? Or are they relatively minor, in the overall scheme of things, and therefore unlikely to produce more than marginal gains if cut back, possibly at the price of lower quality?

We don’t actually know. All the meetings and conversations locally about “solving” the housing shortage have been remarkably unbalanced, in the sense that the people sitting around the table overwhelmingly are from the demand side of the housing equation. The supply side—developers, builders, lenders, underwriters, property managers—has been  remarkably rare.  

So when attendees at a recent SAW housing group meeting heard that $92,000 of a new home’s price tag is attributable to regulatory costs, it might have seemed that a significant information void had been filled. Moreover, given that this statistic was generated by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), it certainly sounded authoritative. And the implications are seemingly huge: with a new home in the SAW region going on the market for upwards of $326,000, as much as 28% of a new home’s selling price might be trimmed solely by government fiddling with the various requirements it imposes on builders and developers.

A closer look at that NAHB calculation, however, suggests otherwise. The actual regulatory cost calculated by the association was $93,870, of which it attributed $41,330 to developer’s regulatory costs and $52,540 to regulation during construction. The study was conducted four years ago. The developers’ costs were based on a survey sent nationwide to 2,071 NAHB members—with a scant 57 providing “complete and useable responses.” The association provides no information about which markets were represented in the responses, nor how widely they were distributed. The $41,330 number, in other words, is a wild-ass guess that has little to no relevance to the SAW region in 2025, despite its apparent precision.

Meanwhile, the survey based its conclusions about builders’ costs on 280 “complete and useable responses,” which sounds better than the developers’  stats but with no indication of whether this was a higher rate of return, since the NAHB doesn’t say how many builders were polled. And, again, the study provides no information about which markets were represented or what kinds of homes the builders were erecting. Nearly half of the increased costs those builders attributed to regulations were due to “changes to building codes over the past 10 years,” so there’s no applicability to localities with few or no changes to their building codes over that period. In addition, a substantial chunk of increased regulatory costs was attributed to “architectural design standards motivated by aesthetics, or possibly even, in some cases, a desire to price less affluent residents out of particular neighborhoods.” Is that relevant to the SAW region?

In short, the applicability of this extremely limited “study” to any particular housing market is less than zero— “less than” because using a misleading statistic can create a false sense of comprehension.  But with the NAHB distilling a complex issue into a seemingly authoritative data point, there’s the temptation to think there’s no need to research the issue any further. The regulatory cost burden on new housing construction? Asked and answered.

A different kind of false certainty based on an apparently authoritative source was seen at the Staunton city council’s March 13 work session, at which the planning staff was asked what role developers play in terms of the city’s housing strategy. As just indicated, an accurate answer would have been “little to none.” The staff response, however, was to assert that “most of the land for larger developments has already been purchased, so they are looking at more of the low hanging fruit of the single lots and other smaller cottage-type developments.”

That answer not only was unresponsive, but highly questionable. Even a cursory look at a map of Staunton will disclose an abundance of undeveloped and open land, especially in the city’s northern reaches. The city’s 2018 comprehensive plan, currently being updated, noted that of Staunton’s 12,800 acres, nearly 3,000 acres was vacant land zoned for residential use. Some of that land undoubtedly has been developed in the past seven years, and a significant chunk of it is undevelopable because of steep terrain or flooding hazards, but even with that there’s clearly a lot of room within city limits for more housing.

But land availability isn’t subject merely to physical constraints. Land use ultimately is subject to political choices, notably over zoning. Those 3,000 vacant acres are apportioned among four zoning classifications, with the lowest-density classification claiming nearly a third of the total. Medium-density zoning, meanwhile, had 415 vacant acres, while high-density zoning weighed in with 325.8 vacant acres—all more than enough, one would presume, for at least some significant housing developments. But if that’s not enough, how much more housing could be built through upzoning? Is that something that should be at least examined, without a prior dismissal of the possibility?

Other political choices are reflected in the city’s decision to set aside considerable acreage for an ag-forestal district, “intended to support the growth of active farm, forestal, nursey and related enterprise.” Given Staunton’s location within a heavily agricultural county, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether preserving still more farmland within the city’s boundaries is the most appropriate use of such property, especially if doing so penalizes development of sufficient affordable housing. How many hundreds of acres of the ag-forestal district could be carved out for other uses while still preserving its most attractive natural features, such as the Bells Lane corridor?

Then there are the decisions that went into designing Staunton Crossing, the city’s premier economic development effort. Early on, planners for the project contemplated housing as part of its development mix, presumably in recognition of the need for new businesses to have adequate housing for their employees.  But then, for reasons never made explicit, the housing idea got dropped, even as plans for an AI data center shrugged aside criticism that such centers provide only modest employment gains—the ostensible rationale for building Staunton Crossing in the first place.  Meanwhile, in the seven or so years since those choices were made, new data centers have grown exponentially in size and become omnivorous consumers of water and electricity, raising the question of how well suited such an industrial application is for a region that has had frequent drought scares. Should that part of the project be reexamined to assess its suitability for housing?

None of this is to say that the city should be upzoning any particular area, that the ag-forestal district should be trimmed or rezoned entirely, or that Staunton Crossing should stop trying to recruit data center providers. But it does point to the fact that these and other land-use decisions are inherently political, made at a specific time for reasons that may change or become obsolete, and that new priorities—such as the growing need for affordable housing—may take on greater importance. To dismiss a question about new housing developments by saying, in effect, that there’s no room for big projects is therefore untrue. It also is needlessly self-limiting, forestalling fresh thinking that could open new possibilities.

Winter is coming

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

In another sign that the universe has a dark sense of humor, the Valley Homeless Connection announced last week the results of its annual Point in Time (PIT) survey of the local homeless population. That was on Tuesday. Three days later, the Trumpian chainsaw approach to government slashed funding to an additional half-a-dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The council, Trump said, was “unnecessary.”

As government agency budgets go, this won’t save more than pocket change: $3.6 million a year. But as far as meeting a social need, the cut eliminates the only federal agency charged with implementing “the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.” And yes, there actually is such a plan, adopted Dec. 19, 2022, one that sought to reduce homelessness by 25% by this year. That it has failed to do so is as much a statement about the size of the problem as it is about the government’s effectiveness in addressing systemic issues without adequate funding or political buy-in.

The local PIT count underscores the point. The annual snapshot of how many people are sleeping in homeless shelters and on the streets, in one capacity or another—tents, cars, cardboard boxes—found little change from a year ago, when the 2024 PIT found 157 homeless people in the SAW region of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. This year’s survey, conducted on one of the coldest nights in many years—the temperature in Waynesboro dropped from a high of 22 to just 4 degrees—counted 146 homeless adults in the SAW region (another 10 were counted in Lexington and Rockbridge County). Nine of the adults also had custody of 16 children younger than 18, adding to the total.

The good news is that a greater percentage of the PIT-counted people this year were in emergency shelters, with 82 staying at the Valley Mission, 40 in the overnight shelter operated by WARM, and five staying at the New Directions Center, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. All the children were sheltered, as well, and two people in the SAW region were put up in motel rooms paid by social agencies. That left just 17 people in the SAW region toughing it out in the cold, compared with last year’s 30 or more. Then again, as observed by Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection, the severe weather may have forced any number of homeless people into other alternatives, such as couch-surfing with family or friends. And as always, there’s the question of how many unsheltered people were simply missed in the count, with the extreme cold forcing people to burrow in more tightly wherever they were.

Among the PIT findings that Campbell highlighted was an increase from 51 in 2024 to 71 in 2025 of people who reported they were homeless for the first time. “That is a wild thing,” Campbell said, reflected in such vignettes as the woman who sleeps in a car parked outside her husband’s Verona workplace while he works inside. Indeed, the PIT found “lots” of people sleeping in their cars in the Sheetz and Walmart parking lots, as well as at Cracker Barrel, Martin’s and Lowe’s. Meanwhile, as the number of newly homeless people suggests, the pipeline is filling up faster than it can empty out: the national plan to end homelessness reports that on average, 908,530 people became homeless each year between 2017 and 2020, while 900,895 exited homelessness each of those years.  That’s a remarkable turnaround from the period of 2010-2017, when national homelessness declined 14%.

Meanwhile, meeting the national plan’s goal of a 25% reduction in homelessness would require that this year’s PIT count not exceed 437,000, down from the 582,462 counted in the 2022 PIT census. The trend, alas, has been precisely in the opposite direction, topping out at 770,000 in 2024—and if the local numbers are any indication, the national 2025 PIT results are unlikely to have improved.  But because it takes many months to compile all the national data, just how much worse things have become nationally won’t be known until late this year.

Locally, the outlook is grim. The advent of spring inevitably pushes away concerns about people freezing to death, and the leafing out of the landscape tends to obscure homeless encampments: out of sight, out of mind.  The slash-and-burn practices that are hollowing out—if not completely eliminating—social service budgets and agencies are still to be fully felt locally, but Campbell says Housing and Urban Development funding for permanent housing is already drying up, and an array of services to help people cope with joblessness, substance abuse and poor health is evaporating. Even those who don’t lose sight of the problem can feel hamstrung and helpless to respond in any meaningful way.

Yet as often intoned in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” Even now, on the verge of the spring equinox. What then?

Long-awaited housing study a bust

(Reading time: 12 minutes)

The much-awaited regional housing study was finally released at the end of this past January. It is, to say the least, underwhelming.

Divided into two segments, a “consumer” version marked by larger fonts and a liberal use of photos, plus a so-called “technical” version, the study was marketed as providing “a deep understanding of the housing market dynamics in the Central Shenandoah Planning District,” which encompasses five counties and five cities. The study was originally promised for a June 2024, release, and was eagerly awaited by various local housing groups hoping to use its data as a springboard for further planning. Instead, those expectations were repeatedly put on hold, as first one delay was announced and then another, until in some cases the study became an afterthought.

So why the eight-month delay? It wasn’t because new data was being assimilated, or existing data was being reanalyzed. Indeed, it’s a fair guess that the study itself was barely tweaked at all during this long dry period, as it contains several references to future events that had already occurred by the time it was made public. Instead, the recurring delays were vaguely attributed to foot-dragging by unnamed localities in the planning district that hadn’t “signed off” on the study in a timely fashion.

Which right there should have been a big red flag that the “regional housing study” was actually a political football. In fact, it’s now clear that this is not a “study” as much as it is a “plan”—and plans need buy-in from those charged with implementing them.  Indeed, while a study suggests an effort to gather basic information from which plans can be developed, this study explicitly states that its findings were predetermined. As explained on p.9, study planners “met with staff from each county and city” who “described each jurisdiction’s housing stock, housing challenges and potential opportunities.” The study’s parameters, in other words, were established from the outset. Instead of conclusions flowing from the data, the data followed the conclusions.

Moreover, the “housing” aspects of the plan are only a minor part of its data base, which includes far more information about the region’s demographics than about its housing stock. A more accurate description would be to call this a “householder” study, its glaring gaps in actual housing information acknowledged by the study’s own repeated recommendations for still more study, such as its call for Staunton to “conduct a detailed housing demand analysis,” or that it “conduct a detailed survey and inventory of vacant/underutilized properties in the city.”

“Plans” are recommended courses of action, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But plans need legs, which is to say, they need to be built on a solid, factual base if they’re to have merit. Anyone reading their recommendations should be able to see how those proposals were derived from the available evidence. Yet in this case the cart precedes the horse, with the technical report dedicating just 79 pages to facts and numbers, compared to the 218 pages of proposals for how that information should be applied. Nor are those 79 pages weighed down with dense data dumps and spreadsheets: much of what’s there consists of generalized observations and broad conclusions, unburdened by the kind of detail that would allow readers to develop alternative understandings.

Take, for example, a section in the technical report headlined “Age and Condition of Housing Stock” that opens as follows: “Stakeholders across the Central Shenandoah footprint mentioned concerns about housing conditions. Focus group participants discussed dilapidated single-family homes that need to be demolished; for-sale inventory that needs updates and in some cases, substantial repair; housing that need [sic] rehabilitation and modifications for current residents; multi-family rental housing that has been neglected by landlords; and mobile homes that need replacement, among other conditions-related challenges.”

That reads like a précis for the section that should follow, a quick summary of compelling issues that can then be explored in more satisfying detail. But it’s all a tease. How many dilapidated homes are ripe for demolition? Where are they located? How extensive are the repairs needed by the for-sale inventory, and how quickly should they be undertaken before these homes fall into the “ripe for demolition” category? What would be the estimated cost of such intervention? Which multi-family housing units need remedial attention, and how many families are affected? Good and reasonable questions all, and all of which go unanswered here or anywhere else in the study.

But even on its own meager terms, the study’s scant data is only part of the problem. This is not just an issue of quantity, but of quality: what’s offered is so far past its “sell by” date that it might as well be tossed into the trash.

While many of the study’s conclusions are based on unidentified focus groups and interviews with anonymous “experts”—their identities cloaked, for inexplicably dark reasons, to “protect the anonymity” of participants—its main statistical underpinnings are drawn from U.S. Census Bureau and HUD surveys that largely or completely predate the Covid epidemic. This choice presumably was one of convenience, since such federal data are widely available and require far less effort—or expense—to obtain than more region-specific information. But because these are federal sources, which encompass the whole country and therefore have to distill enormous data quantities, what’s available is neither granular enough or timely enough to be especially useful at a local level.

 As a result, most of the regional housing study’s findings are based on American Community Survey estimates, which are five-year averages spanning the years 2017-2021 (and in some instances 2018-2022). Others are drawn from more dated 2019 Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy data, another five-year averaging of surveys spanning the even earlier 2015-2019 period. In other words, the study’s assertions about current housing cost burdens, as just one example, describe a world in which there has been no pandemic, no dislocation of job markets and spike in unemployment, no subsequent inflation and jump in mortgage rates, no moratorium on evictions and no billions of dollars of government assistance pumped into the economy to avert economic collapse. All, it goes without saying, producing massive distortions in housing markets.

Even when the study does (rarely) cite alternative data sources, what it provides lags current information by at least a couple of years. For example, it references the 2022 Point in Time survey to discuss the extent of local homelessness, even though 2024 data—collected in January of that year—was available long before the report was issued. Similarly, although the study turns to sales data from Virginia Realtors to explore time-on-market and related issues, it uses information that is drawn from 2015-2022. By contrast, a realtor who participates in one of the SAW housing groups does a comprehensive sales analysis of local markets every month and has years of more timely information and analysis at his fingertips, some as recent as a month ago.

Just how much difference a couple of years can make is evidenced by the study’s assertion, based on 2022 Realtor sales data, that the median home sales price in Staunton is $250,000. That claim should fail the straight-face test, following the 43.85% run-up in the city’s real estate property tax assessments for the period 2021-2025. Indeed, the local realtor mentioned in the previous paragraph observed that the average home sales price in the SAW region was $324,403 at the start of 2024, following an approximately 9% per year average appreciation over 17 years.

Relying on data that is many years old to describe the present in such a dynamic context means losing nuance, at best, and completely mischaracterizing current developments at worst. Yet at no point does the housing study acknowledge this limitation, or attempt to assess which of its conclusions are therefore least reliable. Like an AI hallucination, it confidently asserts a reality that doesn’t exist, mapping out future action based on staring fixedly into a rearview mirror. It does so by withholding basic data needed for a critical examination of the study’s assessments and conclusions. Indeed, it goes out of its way to obfuscate outside analysis, as when it acknowledges that it “has not documented the source of each estimate discussed” for “readability” reasons—a claim made in the “technical” report, which presumably should be loaded up with “technical” information but isn’t.

So, for example, all discussion about household income is restricted to comparing wages for different job categories, which can encompass widely ranging job titles and pay levels, rather than examining the more useful baseline of the minimum wage. In Virginia that would be an especially helpful metric because of the state’s significant boosts to the minimum, from $7.25 an hour in 2020—where it had been stuck for many years—to $12 in 2024, a time period squarely within the study’s information black hole. The pitfalls this poses was recently illustrated by Staunton’s Consolidated Plan, which overlooked the increase and thereby completely misstated the affordability of the city’s housing stock.

In its unwillingness to cite specific data, the housing study falls back on generalities that are too sweeping or obvious to be useful. Housing “that is for sale or for rent (aka ‘on the market’) is scarce.”  Staunton “continues to grapple with providing adequate housing infrastructure for its most vulnerable residents.” When it comes to housing, “there is not enough supply to serve renters with extremely low incomes.” And in a surprisingly cautious assessment, “the rental market is approaching a too-tight scenario.” All true—notwithstanding the hedge about “approaching”—and all well-known for quite some time. This study does little to go beyond the obvious.

EVEN ON ITS OWN (limited) terms, the housing study makes some questionable assertions while also raising legitimate issues that it then ignores.

On p.64, the study notes that focus groups “explained that a substantial amount of the region’s housing stock needs critical home repair.” Although “critical” implies a matter of urgency, this observation does not lead to a further analysis or remedial recommendations beyond a suggestion for “enhancements to rental inspection programs in Staunton and Waynesboro.” Both cities have opted to enforce the state’s property maintenance code, giving tenants in substandard housing some recourse, but Augusta County has not. The housing study doesn’t feel a need to point that out.

On p.66, the study acknowledges that the area “continues to grapple with providing adequate housing infrastructure for its most vulnerable residents, including those experiencing chronic housing insecurity [i.e. homelessness], mental health conditions and substance use disorder.” The study then quotes a 2023 report from the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services calling for the Valley Community Service Board to more than double its existing 120 units of supportive housing—but goes no further in developing the recommendation. The consumer version of the study, meanwhile, does call for development of “a strategic plan” to help “those experiencing homelessness.”

The study elsewhere finds that roughly 3% of SAW housing stock—more than 1,800 housing units—consists of long-term vacancies, which is to say, empty housing that is not being held for seasonal, recreational or occasional use. Some of these vacancies “may represent an opportunity to increase the available housing stock by encouraging owners to rent or sell their units,” the study suggests, without further elaboration. The consumer version of the report, meanwhile, concedes that Staunton has “vacant and abandoned properties that contribute to blight and hinder community growth”—but since the housing study doesn’t know how many such properties exist, or where they’re located, the best it can do is urge the city to find out.

There’s much more of this kind of thing. The point here is not to nit-pick, but to point out that the housing study raises many more questions than it answers—questions not of the “how shall we cope with this” variety, but of what’s actually happening. Questions, in other words, that a regional housing study may reasonably have been expected to answer. Instead, the study’s center of gravity is defined by extensive menus of remedial actions that undoubtedly will keep city planners busy for years to come, calling for additional studies, for development of new taxes, bonds, grants  and other financing vehicles, and for seeking out public and private partnerships—all of which is well and good and even essential, but all of which could have been initiated without this document.

Meanwhile, it’s too easy to lose sight of why the regional housing study—at least as it was widely understood—was so anticipated. One clue is on page 17, which observes that “there are approximately 5,000 households at risk of homelessness in the Central Shenandoah footprint.” Already preceding them are “an estimated 265 people comprising 186 households who are unhoused.” Given the current political onslaught in Washington D.C. on anything that even remotely looks like compassion for one’s neighbors, it’s not fanciful to think that the 5,000 households already at risk may have their ranks diminished—by sliding into the unhoused category.

The regional housing study, in either its consumer or “technical” versions, makes us no better prepared to deal with that.

PIT count: more inconvenient truths

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Key takeaways:

  • Based on last year’s PIT census, the local homeless population grew almost 29% in one year, outstripping the national increase.
  • The SAW area rate of homelessness as measured by the last PIT was roughly 12.8 for every 10,000 people, exceeding the 11 per 10,000 in Harrisonburg and Rockingham.
  • The SAW region has only one year-round homeless shelter, but because of a severe shortage of affordable housing, its average length of stay has more than doubled over  the past few years and demand for beds greatly exceeds supply.
  • Without adequate support services, most homeless people will cycle in and out of homelessness over many years. Each time they do, their mental and physical health deteriorates more.

LESS THAN A MONTH after the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development released its 2024 Homelessness Assessment Report, based on information gathered last January, the annual census is about to be repeated for 2025. The Point in Time survey, familiarly and perhaps ironically referred to as the PIT count, is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 22—a day forecast to be one of the coldest we’ve had in this area in several years. Can there be a more painful juxtaposition?

Described by HUD as “a snapshot of the number of individuals in shelters, temporary housing and unsheltered settings,” the PIT census is frequently criticized for producing significant undercounts of the homeless population, both because of its methodology and because of the transitory nature of homelessness. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, for example, cites estimates that the annual number of homeless individuals is 2.5 times to more than 10 times the number counted on any single night, as people cycle in and out of homelessness. Advocates for the homeless also take issue with HUD’s exclusion of otherwise homeless people “residing” in jails, hospital beds or detox centers on the night of the count, of people who are couch surfing with friends or family, and of other coping mechanisms that homeless people use. Still, the PIT is one of the few ongoing measurements we have of an extraordinarily vulnerable population, and so deserves our attention.

But there are other caveats. The fact that it took HUD nearly a year to release the results of a one-night count dilutes the PIT’s usefulness as a planning tool, even as it acts as a smokescreen for public officials reluctant to deal with problems of homelessness. Staunton, for example, defaults to the PIT count whenever it’s called on to provide estimates of homelessness in the city, asserting that separate data for the city itself is not available—a statement absurd on its face, since the data for each PIT count is obtained on a local level. Instead, the city observes in HUD filings that Staunton is a member of the Virginia Balance of State Continuum of Care, which is responsible for overseeing the PIT, and that the Balance of State CofC’s findings are as good an estimate as it can provide of local homelessness.

The Balance of State CofC, it should be noted, consists of 71 counties and cities from one end of Virginia to the other, so not exactly “local.”

Just how bad is the homeless situation? Here are some numbers to mull over. Nationally, the Jan. 20, 2024 PIT count found a 7% increase in unsheltered homelessness compared to the previous year, amid an 18% increase in overall homelessness. That’s grim, but much of the jump was attributed by HUD to a rising number of asylum seekers—with waves of border crossers being dumped in Denver, New York and other northern cities—and of several natural disasters, notably the Maui fire in Hawaii. Since neither of those causes had a significant effect on Virginia, it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that the Balance of State CofC clocked an even higher gain in homelessness, of 22% year-over-year.

If there’s one bright note in the 2024 Balance of State CofC PIT, it’s that the increase in unsheltered homelessness was a bit lower than the national increase, at 5.3%. This suggests that even though a greater percentage of Virginians became homeless last year than was true nationally, at least the counties and municipalities in the Balance of State CofC were able to shelter more of their increased homeless populations. But there’s another possibility: that the Balance of State CofC was simply less efficient at locating unsheltered homeless people, who can pitch a tent or park a car in many more nooks and crannies than a handful of volunteers can find. And with national and state land within the bounds of Augusta County, not to mention a largely rural and agricultural landscape, finding a homeless person here can be far more difficult than poking around the alleys of a big city.

HOW DO THOSE percentages translate into actual numbers, and what do we know about the extent of homelessness locally, Staunton’s obfuscation notwithstanding??

The Balance of State CofC that’s already been mentioned is actually divided into 12 planning groups, including our local Valley Homeless Connection, which consists of four counties and four cities: Augusta, Rockbridge, Highland and Bath counties, and the cities of Staunton, Waynesboro, Lexington and Buena Vista.  This week’s PIT count, as was true in the past, ostensibly will cover this entire region, but in practice—either because of limited manpower, or because homeless people gravitate toward urban centers for the support services they provide—past PITs reported only a handful of homeless people in Rockbridge and Lexington, and none at all in Bath, Highland or Buena Vista.

The great preponderance of homeless people, therefore, is in the SAW region—and those numbers jumped even more sharply from 2023 to 2024 than in either the Balance of State CofC or nationally. Specifically, the area of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro saw a 28.7% jump in the homeless population, from 122 in 2023 to 157 in 2024. The unsheltered population, meanwhile, registered a 46.6% increase, from 30 to 44. To put that into some kind of perspective, the SAW homeless rate went from approximately 10 per 10,000 population in 2023 (based on a SAW population of 122,770) to roughly 12.8 per 10,000 in 2024; by comparison, the Rockbridge/Harrisonburg area, which recently opened a $5 million dollar emergency shelter for the homeless, has a rate of 11 per 10,000.

That the unsheltered numbers in SAW weren’t even higher is due almost entirely to WARM, a consortium of local churches that offers emergency overnight shelter on a rotating basis, and which on the PIT night last year had 48 clients, compared with just 26 the previous year. How many it will accommodate this Wednesday is anybody’s guess, but in any case WARM has a maximum capacity of 50. Meanwhile, the only other homeless shelter in the region, Valley Mission, had 62 people in its beds during the PIT count in 2023, and increased that only slightly to 65 last year. Although it has a theoretical capacity of 90 single adults, that number is divided between 60 men and 30 women, so if there are fewer than 30 women needing shelter, some beds will go unused. In addition, since half of the beds are top bunks, homeless people with mobility issues—which is not unusual—may be unable to access empty bunks that require climbing a ladder.

Homeless people unable to find shelter with WARM or the Valley Mission, or with a friend or family member, in past years have ended up sleeping in a tent or car or, in at least one case, an RV camper. The dozen or so PIT census-takers last year reported people seeking shelter behind Martin’s Supermarket and Roses Discount Store in Waynesboro, behind the Walmarts in Waynesboro and Staunton, at a laundromat and the county library and along Coal Road in Stuarts Draft. But the survey made no mention, for example, of the homeless people camping behind the Food Lion on West Beverley, and there’s no telling how many other tent camps get missed.

(Also worth noting: because WARM operates only December through March, a PIT survey at other times of the year would result in even higher numbers of unsheltered homeless people.)

The Valley Mission was for many years regarded as the area’s safety valve for this sort of problem, providing short-term shelter and supportive services for homeless people while they transitioned to permanent housing—and, by providing an alternative to the streets, removing a civic discomfort. But the Mission’s capacity has long been outstripped by demand. Executive director Sue Richardson says that when she took her position, in 2012, the publicized expectation for Mission residents was a stay of three months—but as she quickly learned, the reality was closer to five. A lack of affordable housing, even then, made short stays difficult. And three months of support services, helping clients deal with substance abuse issues, psychological problems, unemployment and undeveloped life skills, was in many cases simply insufficient.

But the real hammer blow, Richardson adds, came with the pandemic and a sudden flood of tax dollars, designed to get homeless people out of congregant shelters—because of their heightened risk of COVID contagion—and into motel rooms and other single accommodations. Although such isolation may have made epidemiological sense, it also took the legs out from under the support services most homeless people need to become truly self-sufficient. The result was that a substantial number of Mission clients with various disorders got worse. Counseling and teaching that once may have resulted in sufficient improvement over five or six months was now, in the years after pandemic relief dried up, taking 10 months or a year—or longer. And meanwhile, housing availability only grew tighter.

Today, according to Richardson, the average length of stay at the Mission stretches from 12 to 18 months; in one extreme example, a woman sheltered at the Mission for more than four years. What was once a relatively smooth-flowing pipeline for the homeless, emptying out almost as quickly as it filled up, has now become an overflowing funnel. A growing number of homeless people are piling up at the intake, while only a trickle empty out the other end. And in the SAW area, that overflow increasingly is spilling into the streets because of not having anywhere else to go.

The severity of the problems faced by this population is reflected in the PIT results, which include a questionnaire that provides some crucial insights into who is homeless, why, and how often.  Of the 168 people surveyed across the four-county Valley Homeless Connection area last year, for example, 101 said this was not the first time they’d been homeless. Nor is homelessness a short-term speed bump in the road of life, as 82 had been homeless for more than seven months at the time of the PIT count, the great majority for more than a year.  

How did they end up on the street? Asked for the biggest reason they believed they were homeless, 24 said it was because they didn’t have a job and 18 said they had a disability that presumably kept them from working.  Fifteen had been evicted, six cited high rents and eight said they were underemployed, suggesting they weren’t paid enough to afford rent. An additional 18 were fleeing domestic violence or sexual assault, 17 said they suffered from serious mental illness or had substance use issues, and four cited general health problems. Ten had been released from prison or jail, while family issues, a robbery, and divorce pretty much rounded out the list.

In short, the homeless population spans a wide range of needs and disorders, requiring an equally wide range of support services for meaningful rehabilitation. It also is a population that is expanding at a faster rate locally than it is nationally, while the resources to meet its needs have increased far more slowly, if at all. This Wednesday’s PIT count may add some details, and it most likely will document a continued worsening of overall homelessness. But it almost certainly won’t tell us anything we don’t know already.

We all live on a knife’s edge

(Reading time: 14 minutes)

Most of us, whether we realize it or not, live on a knife’s edge of possibilities. On one side, a comfortable if not extravagant life of warm shelter, nourishing food, the fellowship of loved ones, an adequate supply of pleasurable distractions; on the other, bleak ruination. It doesn’t take much to tip us into disaster. The sudden loss of a job, an illness, the death of a spouse, a car accident or house fire . . . and just like that, a predictably familiar existence can be upended and life becomes a struggle for survival.

Many of us are lucky enough to have a personal safety net of family or close friends who can help when disaster strikes. But for those who don’t, a public safety net is essential—and increasingly more so in recent years, as pandemic-catalyzed stresses sapped an economy already weakened by years of growing income disparity and a shortage of affordable housing. Unfortunately, the same economic forces that create such problems also undermine an effective social response.

There are, after all, only two ways to fund a public answer to extreme privation: public tax dollars, or private charity. As this paper suggests, however, neither has been up to the task. Charitable giving, after a temporary boost resulting from pandemic-induced compassion, has resumed a years-long decline. Taxpayer dollars, swollen by federal programs intended to stimulate the economy, likewise have dwindled as the pandemic recedes into the past. Worse yet, there still is only the most tentative political acceptance locally of the role government should play in such circumstances.

Now, as the holidays are celebrated by those on the fortunate side of the knife edge, an increasing number of people find themselves on the opposite side, homeless or nearly so during the darkest days of the year. How will we ensure that they, our neighbors, are adequately sheltered from winter’s onslaught of ice, sub-freezing temperatures and cutting winds?

FOR AN UNDERSTANDING of how much of a political vacuum exists on this issue, consider that in Staunton there is no public spending on emergency shelters for the homeless, and only a minuscule amount funneled to a handful of non-profit agencies that provide temporary or affordable housing. This is as much a failure of political will as it is a lack of funds.  For example, of the nearly $13 million that Staunton received from the American Rescue Plan Act, none at all went to housing of any kind, or for the needs of the city’s homeless or the agencies trying to help them.

This oversight was entirely in keeping with how the city has expended other federal funds, even those specifically meant to provide decent housing for low- and very low-income people. In its recent accounting of how it wrapped up spending a $1.7 million federal Community Development Block Grant, Staunton conceded it had failed to meet “its goal for housing development”—failed so spectacularly, in fact, that more than $700,000 remained unspent after five years. The city’s biggest outlay over that five-year span? $334,894 for “general administration and planning,” otherwise known as overhead.

Despite this spending shortfall, Staunton nevertheless minimizes its housing problems by asserting in the same document that homelessness in the city “is not widespread, likely because services and shelters are located in neighboring Augusta County.” This claim is both unsupported and speculative, since the city has made no effort to comply with a funding requirement for “reaching out to homeless persons (especially unsheltered persons) and assessing their individual needs.” Indeed, the city has only a vague idea of how many homeless persons live within its boundaries, much less what their needs are.

Moreover, the assertion that services and shelters for the homeless are in Augusta County is risible, given that the same document—in response to a question about the help Staunton has given to individuals and families on the verge of homelessness—cites the city’s contributions to Valley Mission, which provides short-term housing for people who otherwise would be living on the streets. It is also located in Staunton, not Augusta County, and is only a short walk from the Salvation Army, which likewise provides at least some services to the homeless. But despite the fact that it is oversubscribed and has a waiting list, the Mission received no more than $5,000 to $8,000 a year from the city’s federal block grant.

While tax dollars are in short supply, public charity is subject to the same economic constraints that put a significant segment of the population at risk. People can’t give what they don’t have. Extremely wealthy people garner headlines with massive donations to their favored causes, but as a recent New York Times article on “effective altruism” observed, some 20 million households stopped making charitable donations between 2010 and 2016.  The organizations that suffered the most from this drought are community-based groups whose existence depends on small-dollar donors, rather than on mega-philanthropists.

Similarly, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported earlier this year that fewer than half of U.S. households now make charitable contributions, and overall charitable giving dipped 3% in 2023. Yet even as small-dollar donors have been dropping away, the Forbes top 100 charities saw a 4% increase in their donations last year, leaving smaller local non-profits in a struggle “to raise money from a fatigued, overstretched base of support.”

These aren’t abstract numbers. Although tax filings for local non-profits aren’t always as current as we might wish, those that are available reinforce the notion that things are getting tight right here in our backyards. Valley Mission, already mentioned, peaked in gifts, grants and contributions received in 2020—the first year of the pandemic—at $1.8 million, which then fell off just a bit in 2021, to $1.7 million, and has since seen donations decline sharply, to $1 million in 2022 and $1.1 million last year. Valley Supportive Housing, which provides affordable housing and supportive services for those with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or substance use issues, saw its grants and contributions jump from $139,240 in 2020 to $598,165 the following year—before declining to $432,990 in 2022. How it did in 2023 or this past year remains to be reported.

Then there’s the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministry, or WARM, the only agency within the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro area that provides emergency overnight shelter from December through March for people who otherwise are sleeping in tents or cars.  This effort, cobbled together by a score of churches who volunteer their facilities for a week at a time on a rotating basis, is like the Mission in that it is oversubscribed, with more people seeking refuge than can be accommodated. And like the Mission, WARM also has seen a decline in contributions over the past couple of years, from a high of $652,186 in 2022 to a mere $382,352 last year. Just $28,130 of last year’s revenue was from government grants—none from Staunton—with the balance chipped in by churches, foundations and individuals.

There are—or were—a couple of intermediaries in the charitable contributions arena that historically helped plug some of the holes. The local United Way, for example—which pulled in $1.2 million in 2020, or more than double its 2019 haul—contributed $15,000 to Valley Supportive Housing a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it also burned up twice as much money for overhead expenses as it provided in overall charitable assistance, saw its receipts plunge to just $406,845 in 2021, and closed its doors a few months ago amid charges of fiscal impropriety and possible embezzlement.

That leaves the field to the Community Action Partnership for Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro (CAPSAW) and to the Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge (CFCBR), with the former distributing state and federal funds and the latter dispersing mostly private contributions.  CAPSAW in particular targets low-income individuals and families, “distributing public funds and providing guidance to programs that effectively address the challenges of poverty.”  Last year it awarded grants totaling $431,456, marking at least four years of steady increases—although one of its grant recipients, ironically, was the United Way of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. Meanwhile, only three of its 17 other grant recipients directly address housing issues, including Renewing Homes Greater Augusta, Valley Mission and Valley Supportive Housing.

Among CAPSAW’s signal achievements has been helping renters avoid eviction, starting with 110 renters assisted in fiscal year 2022, 291 in 2023 and 322 in 2024, attesting to the rising demand for such intervention. But in most other respects, CAPSAW’s attempts to assist those most in need of housing assistance have fallen short of its own goals. For example, the partnership had hoped to provide 400 homeless individuals with safe temporary shelter in 2022, but managed to reach only 165. It did much better in 2023, when it reached 296—but the need had grown so much that CAPSAW’s target also had been increased, to 520. And this past year, despite lowering its target to 480, the partnership actually saw a decline in the number helped, to 271.

Similar shortfalls were recorded by CAPSAW in its efforts to help people obtain safe and affordable housing, as differentiated from temporary shelter. Moreover, the number of deficient homes that got needed structural repairs through its funding declined sharply, from 70 in 2022 to 55 in 2023 to 14 last year. The non-profit addressing those needs, Renewing Homes, blamed the slump on a lack of volunteers and the increased cost of building supplies, among other factors.

Meanwhile, the Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge is in some ways the 800-pound gorilla in the local charitable funding scene, but it also has a more diffused focus. In 2022 it donated nearly $2 million to a wide-ranging assortment of 91 different organizations that each received $5,000 or more—often much more. Yet because of CFCBR’s broad mandate to “strengthen civil society by enhancing local assets,” in addition to some donors restricting how their money can be spent, a good deal of the money it distributed ended up at tax-supported or user-funded institutions, such as the $265,052 that went to Augusta County Public Schools, or the $32,270 awarded to the Staunton YMCA. Even the City of Staunton came in for a share, at $25,144, for two beautification projects.

That’s not to say that CFCBR hasn’t provided critical funding to some of the housing-assistance agencies already mentioned above: that same year, $51,000 went to Valley Supportive Housing, $11,000 to Valley Mission and $15,025 to Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta. But with its largesse broadcast widely among arts programs, animal shelters, community centers, volunteer fire departments, crisis intervention programs, athletic teams, food assistance programs and so on, CFCBR clearly is spread thin; the amount of assistance it can provide to the most at-risk segment of our population is much less than its overall size might suggest, and much, much less than is actually needed.

BLEAK THOUGH this recitation is, the outlook for the next several years doesn’t allow much room for optimism.

There are bright spots, to be sure. Over the past year or two, Staunton’s political leadership has appeared increasingly receptive to the notion that it has to play a more active role in responding to the city’s housing crisis. November’s municipal election seated several councilors who have shown a willingness to engage with housing issues, and the city is lurching toward eventual creation of a housing commission that could champion housing initiatives at budget time (a process that is just now starting for the 2025 fiscal year). And Virginia Housing last month unveiled a five-year, $75 million investment program to build workforce housing throughout the state, potentially creating as many as 5,000 new affordable housing units—although whether Staunton will qualify for some of that funding, and whether it will move quickly enough to claim a piece of it, remains to be seen.

But the larger picture is more foreboding. Much depends on how completely the new Trump administration descends into chaos, with its announced tariffs, disembowelment of regulatory agencies and overall kleptocratic approach to governance threatening massive economic convulsions. In such circumstances, those with the least to lose inevitably get hurt the most. Consider, for example, that during his first term Donald Trump repeatedly sought deep budget cuts at HUD, source not only of Community Development Block Grants but of countless other programs that altogether provide housing for more than 4.3 million people. Those efforts were stymied by a politically divided Congress, but that balance will shift in Trump’s favor in 2025, and with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy salivating at the thought of amputating huge chunks of the federal budget, HUD’s future is tenuous, at best.

If all of Trump’s budget proposals are enacted—a big if, to be sure— “you should expect large increases both in the scope of poverty and in the depth of poverty,” Bob Greenstein, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, told National Public Radio in a November report on what lies ahead. Among the possible casualties, based on past defeated efforts, is a new federal fund designed to boost the supply of affordable housing, which proponents argue distorts “the market” by raising demand. Also on the conservative wish list is an end to the homelessness policy known as “housing first,” which contends that people need safe and affordable shelter before they can begin to deal with drug addictions or mental health issues.

The bottom line, if all the promised cuts are delivered, will be a meaner, more Dickensian society that will hit communities that lack social services in depth—like Staunton—especially hard. The future already has been foreshadowed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last June that empowered cities to criminalize homelessness, permitting evictions from homeless encampments and confiscation of the last shreds of private property that their inhabitants still possess, including sleeping bags and personal papers. At least 120 cities have passed “anti-camping” laws in the decision’s wake, with another 50 considering as much, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. Alas, that won’t be necessary here: Staunton, Augusta County and Waynesboro already have such laws on their books. It’s only goodwill that has kept them from being fully enforced.

But goodwill is a slender reed. How quickly it can snap is on display in Georgia, where the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit a few days before Christmas against the City of Brunswick over its efforts to close The Well. Operated since 2014 as an offshoot of the United Methodist Church, The Well offers showers, laundry facilities, meals and other services, including an emergency overnight shelter in cold weather, to the city’s homeless population. Why would the city want to end such a program? Apparently because it attracts the “wrong element”—which is to say, people who have fallen on the wrong side of that knife’s edge.

To avoid going down that path, Staunton and its neighbors can no longer ignore the harsh, cascading reality about to roll over us. Our civic leaders can no longer pretend they don’t have to wade into the housing crisis because churches, foundations and non-profits are taking care of the problem—not when the reality is that such responses are increasingly strained. That will require tax dollars, to be sure. But it also will require political leadership, with both elected officials and social service organizational leaders speaking out publicly and loudly on behalf of those who are largely voiceless. It will require energetic attempts to rally community support, through public forums, neighborhood meetings, media outreach and pulpit oratory. It will mean directly engaging those same voiceless people, whether in shelters, food pantries or on the street, to learn more about how they ended up in such circumstances and what they need to get back on their feet.

It will require putting a human face on destitution, so that people who are homeless, voiceless and powerless can’t simply be dismissed as the “wrong element.” With a little bit of misfortune, any of us could be similarly cast out. Let’s try to keep that from happening.

On winter and a city spending spree

(Reading time: 9 minutes)

This past week’s snowfall, slight and unexpected though it was, signaled not just the start of winter but of the resumption of an annual human pinball game.

This is the season in which our area’s homeless population bounces around from one sleeping facility after another, only to be turned out at 7 a.m. each day to cope with whatever the weather throws at them. There are 19 churches participating in the WARM shelter program this year, scattered across Waynesboro, Staunton and Augusta County, each providing at least a week of nightly refuge starting this Monday and running though the end of March.  Heartwarming, isn’t it?

But there are two ways to frame this helpfulness. One is to commend the generosity of spirit that moves so many disparate congregations to share their facilities with those less fortunate; the other is to sigh over such a Rube Goldberg approach to a community-wide problem that has yet to get the kind of concerted attention it deserves. From the point of view of most of those being helped, sleeping on a cot in a church basement is better than huddling in a nylon tent while the outside temperature dips below freezing; on the other hand, there’s something cold—in every sense of the word—about having to haul off your scant belongings each day before sunrise and not knowing, from one week to another, where you’ll sleep next. Or how or where you’ll spend the intervening 11 hours in an ongoing effort to stay warm and dry.

At least two observations seem pertinent. First, there’s the logistical problem of collecting and delivering several dozen people each day from wherever they’ve spent the day to that night’s designated shelter, as well as the related problem of then dispersing the overnight population the following morning. WARM’s program is a low-barrier approach to sheltering, which means it doesn’t screen for sex offenders or people with criminal histories or other issues that churches might find problematic when they open their facilities to day care centers or worship services or other activities. So: 7 a.m., and everyone must be gone.

The WARM solution is a shuttle bus that can move up to 15 people at a time (at this writing, 28 have already signed on), depending on how many personal possessions—which can include walkers—they’re carrying; what it doesn’t have is sufficient drivers. Two prospective hires have backed out even before the season begins, presumably because they decided that $13 an hour for split shifts spanning a 12-hour day just wasn’t worth it. That leaves one unpaid volunteer and the program’s coordinator to cover 14 driving shifts a week, which seems unsustainable over a four-month period. Raising pay might attract more drivers, but of course that takes money, and WARM simply is not getting enough: its income last year, from gifts, grants and contributions, was just 58% of what it received in 2022 and was the lowest it’s been in four years, according to its tax filings. Its annual fundraising effort this year, as seen on the WARM website, has reached just $30,000, or less than half of its $70,000 goal.

Second, there’s the free ride that Staunton gets out of this. WARM, after all, is an acronym for Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry, and while the “area” in that acronym is broadly construed to include Augusta County and Staunton, neither of those governing bodies shows up on the program’s list of community partners. Seven of the WARM participating churches are in Staunton, and a considerable number of its homeless clientele also are from Staunton, but the city itself is AWOL from the effort even as it provides no shelter alternatives of its own.

How shameful is that?

WHAT BRINGS ALL this to mind is a story in the Augusta Press on Nov. 20 that detailed how local governments have been spending their American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. The local governments in this accounting include Harrisonburg, Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County, which received nearly $60.5 million in the aggregate. Harrisonburg got the largest share, but Staunton didn’t do too badly, at just under $13 million. But just what has Staunton done with this windfall?

Pretty much what you might expect from a kid turned loose in a toy store with a bunch of money and apparently few if any constraints. Although a chunk of the approved expenditures is going to significant capital improvements, including $3.8 million for the new courthouse and $2 million each for a regional radio system and two new fire trucks, much of the itemization reads like a bucket list of unrelated and scattered purchases, from new fire house doors to the recycling center, from a Staunton Crossing marketing plan to wifi hardware. And then there’s the mysterious “Thermal Application Control system upgrade,” priced at $350,000 with nary a word of explanation of what it means or does.

Nowhere on that list is there an allocation for housing of any kind, or of responding to the needs of the city’s homeless or of the private sector agencies trying to help them. Harrisonburg—which, to be fair, received significantly larger ARPA funding of $23.8 million—nevertheless set aside nearly a third of its windfall to “expand accessible, affordable housing,” including $5 million for a Homeless Services Center and $2 million for a housing development fund. Staunton, on the other hand, apparently forgot the many, many times it has lamented its lack of affordable housing and how this has become a priority issue for the city

Indeed, as I wrote in September, the city has a long-standing history of ignoring housing needs. I pointed out at the time that one recurring reason for this is that housing needs in general, and the problems of our homeless population in particular, don’t have a seat at the table when budgeting requests are made and funding priorities are established. No doubt there are strong arguments to be marshalled for most, if not all, of the projects for which ARPA funds will be dispensed, but there is no sense from that list of how—or if—those projects were prioritized, or even how they were selected other than someone thinking they’d be nice to have.

Meanwhile, as I wrote when I critiqued the West End revitalization plan, there is a certain smug attitude among at least some city staff, when pressed for a program to help homeowners “improve their properties’ sustainability, health and affordability,” that “several programs already exist” and therefore additional city help is unwarranted. Similarly, when the Staunton housing strategy group was recently presented with a list of 60 possible programs to improve housing, not one addressed the issue of “housing and supportive services for persons without housing or temporary housing,” despite that being among the six housing strategies the group supposedly is addressing. Then again, that same blind spot could be found in the West End revitalization plan, which likewise never acknowledged the area’s homeless encampment.

The airy belief that non-profit agencies are filling the gap left by Staunton’s repeated absence from critical housing issues can prevail only as long as the city doesn’t take a close look at what’s actually happening. The WARM shelter program’s struggles are just one example of the tenuous reality many non-profit agencies already face, even before a harsh new governing “philosophy” sweeps Washington, D.C. and gives new meaning to trickle-down economics by closing off any number of funding streams. United Way’s decision to close up shop in the SAW area speaks to a similar drying up of funds, this time from the private sector. Staunton really can’t afford to fiddle while Rome burns.

THE GOOD NEWS, such as it is, is that it’s not too late to change course—at least somewhat.

The City Council, at its November 14 meeting, had a preliminary discussion about reapportioning ARPA funds; moreover, it should be noted that more than half of its ARPA funding has not been spent yet, since the second tranche of $6,477,913 was received less than two months ago, and therefore presumably more of that money could be reapportioned as well. Meanwhile, the money that already has been cleared for reapportionment, amounting to more than $600,000, is to be discussed at a public hearing December 12, with a possible council vote January 9.

In other words, it’s not too late to question how ARPA funding has been allocated, nor is it too late to change those decisions. It’s not too late, or unreasonable, to ask the city council to explain how it solicited spending proposals or how it prioritized the requests it received. Nor is it unreasonable to ask the council to put its money where its mouth is by addressing issues of homelessness and inadequate affordable housing, the possibilities of which are demonstrated by Harrisonburg, if not quite on the same scale.

Yes, WARM can use financial help and should get some, but that’s not the only option.  As described earlier, the whole emergency shelter response in the SAW area is a rickety construct that could use shoring up—but there also is absolutely no program of any kind to provide daytime shelter for the homeless, pushing them into fast-food restaurants, public libraries or interminable rides on a Brite bus in search of warmth.  When will Staunton have a serious discussion about building a drop-in warming shelter for those with nowhere else to go? If not now, when?

However the ARPA funds are allocated, they must be spent by the end of 2026. That’s a two-year window in which the city has an unmatched opportunity to address a problem it thus far has repeatedly ignored—and yes, winter is coming, as if to drive the point home.