Category: Affordable housing

You can’t get everything you want

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoning: new wine in old wineskins

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoned out over affordable housing

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

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How not to read the (housing) room

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

The Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference just wrapped up its 2025 get-together, with 800 or so housing advocates from all parts of Virginia descending on Roanoke to grapple with the key question of the day: how do we make housing more affordable?  The answer, at least according to two plenary speakers, requires revamping zoning codes that are so prohibitively restrictive they result in “legally-mandated scarcity,” as one of them put it.

All that and more is deserving of more detailed analysis, which I’ll get into in a separate post. But whatever the merits of zoning reform, a different answer to the question of how we can get more affordable housing was provided by a breakout panel with the promising title, “Designing for Dignity: Scaling Permanent Supportive Housing in the Suburbs.” Spoiler alert: the answer is “we won’t,” because we’re losing all sense of perspective.

The panel seemed promising. Its two key speakers were Tara Ruszkowski, executive director of the Lamb Center, which among its other good deeds operates a day shelter for the homeless in Fairfax County; and Taylor Stout, senior project manager for Wesley Housing, a long-time non-profit developer of affordable housing in Virginia and Washington, D.C.  Together, they had collaborated on creating a housing project, Beacon Landing, that had its ground-breaking just a couple of weeks ago, and they were at the conference to explain how they overcame various obstacles and assembled 13 different funding sources to reach that point.

As with the panel, Beacon Landing seems like a great idea. Replacing an old motel in a commercial and industrial area with a new five-story building, it will have 54 units of 400 square feet apiece for long-term residents referred by the county’s coordinated entry system, which is to say, people who already are or are at high risk of becoming homeless. In addition to furnished apartments, Beacon Landing will have a large community room, an outside terrace for socializing, a demonstration kitchen for cooking lessons, and case manager offices for staff to provide wrap-around services and oversight.

That something of the sort—and much more—is needed is unquestionable. The county’s Point in Time (PIT) count of the homeless this year was 1,322, a 3% increase from 2024 and up 27% from 2020. Providing supportive housing for 54 of that number may seem like barely scratching the surface, but it’s a start. And as people going into Beacon Landing gain their footing and move on to a bigger and better life, others will come in behind them, making the project’s overall impact far larger than its overall size suggests.

But here’s a wake-up call: the capital expenditure for this project is $33.1 million (no wonder it required 13 funding sources!). That’s just the up-front costs of creating the facility and doesn’t include operating costs, including a payroll of six to seven full-time employees that the Lamb Center says will be needed. The math is insane. The median sales price of a single-family home in Fairfax County is currently around $715,000, or approximately $351 per square foot. Beacon Landing’s per-unit cost comes in at $613,000, or around $1,500 a square foot. True, it can be argued that the cost of the additional common and program areas within the building should be subtracted from the total before making comparisons, but it’s inconceivable that doing so would reduce the per-unit cost to anything approaching $351 a square foot.

There undoubtedly are many arguments the Lamb Center and Wesley Housing can make to justify a seemingly over-the-top acquisition and construction budget, but the bottom line remains that Beacon Landing will be spending enough money to buy 46 single-family homes so it can house 54 people in a fraction of the space. For people already struggling to maintain mortgage payments or to meet their rent, that can seem . . . profligate?

The mystery is that this panel was presented as “scaling” permanent supportive housing, leaving unanswered the question of scaling for what? or where? How many projects of this sort can any locality afford? How many, looking for ways to help their most vulnerable unhoused residents, would look at Beacon Landing and throw up their hands at the sheer impossibility of such a model working for them? What is the message Beacon Landing is sending to anyone concerned about the growing number of homeless people in our communities?

Valley Supportive Housing, which provides supportive housing in Staunton for 68 tenants, does so in a dozen modest structures acquired over the years through conventional loans and grants of various sorts.  I’m betting its director, Lou Siegel, would have choked on his coffee had he attended the housing conference and sat in on the “Designing for Dignity” panel. It’s a good thing for his health that he stayed home.

Homelessness as a kick in the pants

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

The calendar may insist that winter won’t arrive for another six weeks or so, but anyone who ventured outside Tuesday morning knew otherwise—not when the temperature hit a bone-chilling 24 degrees Fahrenheit.  Tuesday was a good day, in other words, to be bundled up in a cozy bed or snuggled with a good book under a comforter in an easy chair. If you were that lucky.

It’s ironic, then, that just 12 hours earlier the city had held the third of three public workshops addressing proposed revisions to its comprehensive plan. Dozens of goals and draft strategies were outlined on multiple easels for Staunton residents to ponder and evaluate, spanning everything from land use, housing and economic development to transportation, public infrastructure and education. A section on health and human services stressed “active living, healthy food access and a clean environment.” Public safety, environmental resources, art and recreation all received due consideration.

But nowhere in all this planning and verbiage was there any mention of Staunton’s homeless population, or its needs and how those needs might be met. True, the section on housing gave a vague nod to promoting “affordable housing options for people of all incomes, needs and abilities,” but it remained silent regarding those unable to take advantage of such promotions. Nor did the draft comprehensive plan set a goal of eliminating homelessness by any particular date, and at no point did it acknowledge, much less prescribe, the kinds of services a homeless population requires. As far as the comprehensive plan is concerned, Staunton residents without permanent shelter simply don’t exist.

Winter’s advent will make that fiction harder to maintain.

Let’s take stock. A long-promised day shelter, offering homeless people refuge from extreme weather, remains as elusive as ever, in part because of a crumbling commitment by First Presbyterian Church to allow the use of its premises, but also because of a lack of financial and leadership backing from city council. Meanwhile, the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry (WARM), which was to operate the day shelter and which already provides emergency overnight shelters from late November through March, just published its schedule of participating churches for the upcoming season. Two of the week-long slots remain unfilled, at an exceptionally late date in the planning cycle, and there are reports that a third also may fall vacant because one of the congregations got cold feet and is backing out. Meanwhile, eight of the 18 overflow slots, for when the primary host churches receive more than 40 people, likewise remain unclaimed.

The Valley Mission, the area’s transitional shelter for homeless people working on reentry into the workforce and established housing, has 89 residents and is at full capacity—as it has been for several years—and is as far as ever from meeting its goal of a six-month turnover. “Yes, the average length of stay has been much longer than a year,” concedes director Sue Richardson. “In fact, we had two different women who were here four years each,” which puts a whole new meaning on “transitional.”

Then there’s Valley Supportive Housing, which provides affordable housing for clients diagnosed with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or addiction—people, in other words, who otherwise would be prime candidates for living on the streets. It also is at capacity, with 68 tenants, and has a waiting list of 43—the biggest it has been in at least a decade. “Two years ago it would have been half of that,” says director Lou Siegel, who says some of those on the waiting list are at Valley Mission, some are in temporary accommodations with family members, and some are living in their cars.

Both Valley Mission and Valley Supportive Housing are in a perpetual scramble for adequate financial backing, which comes in bits and drabs from local sources such as the city’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), the Community Fund and the Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro (CAPSAW). CDBG is all federal money, while CAPSAW receives nearly half of its funding from the federal government—which means both revenue streams are threatened by the current political climate.

Meanwhile, the area’s homeless population, while always difficult to assess accurately, is almost certainly not diminishing. WARM director Alec Gunn estimated this summer that the SAW region has 250 homeless people.  And while this year’s Point in Time (PIT) count—a one-night snapshot—found fewer unsheltered homeless people than last year, bitterly cold weather the night of the census may have driven them deeper underground. Moreover, as a surprised Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection observed, of the 157 sheltered and unsheltered people who were counted by the 2025 PIT census, 71 reported they were homeless for the first time, up from 51 in 2024.

All of which is to say, the Staunton Comprehensive Plan as it’s currently coming together has a gaping hole big enough to push a shopping cart through.

FAILING TO SEE THE CITY’S HOMELESS population means the comprehensive planners also fail to ask why the homeless exist in the first place. If you don’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.

Homelessness, with some rare exceptions, is a signal that the system itself is failing. At its most basic doh! level, homelessness results from an inadequate supply of housing that people can afford. With rental vacancies at or around 2% and housing costs far outstripping the affordability provided by median incomes, the inevitable outcome has been compared to a game of musical chairs, in which the number of available chairs is always less than the number of people circling them. When the music stops, someone always ends up on the floor.

The obvious question: why is that? Why, in a market economy, isn’t more affordable housing being built? The law of supply and demand suggests that when demand exceeds supply, market forces will step up production until the imbalance is corrected. You want to end homelessness? Simple: build more housing at a price that people can afford. So . . . why isn’t that happening in Staunton?

The Staunton Housing Strategy Group spent a year purportedly wrestling with this very issue, ultimately producing this past summer what it optimistically called “Staunton’s Pathway to Affordable Housing and Housing for Working Families.”  Yet it’s notable that of the 19 members of the workgroup, only one, Stu Armstrong, could be categorized as a builder or developer—that is, as someone from the supply side of the supply-demand equation. And Armstrong, as it turned out, didn’t attend a single one of the group’s four meetings.

What that left was an assortment of political leaders, planners and heads of non-profit social agencies holding a one-sided conversation about how best to plug the city’s housing deficits. The result was a set of 11 strategies that, while not entirely without merit, only tangentially address the critical question of how to increase the city’s stock of affordable housing, and do so on a less than urgent timetable. For example, completion of a “strategy” to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in the city is expected to take 18 months, a process that won’t add any new homes but will create the possibility of some down the road.

Foot-dragging over ADUs, which have been given the go-ahead in many municipalities in Virginia and other states, is emblematic of a more fundamental problem that the housing strategy group didn’t address: the city’s zoning code. The main reason Staunton doesn’t have tiny homes or converted garages that can provide additional housing on established home lots is that its rules don’t allow it. Allowing ADUs therefore requires yet another amendment to the zoning code—the default response to every fresh demand for land use, such as creating exceptions to minimum lot size in Uniontown. And just like computer operating systems that over many years become an unwieldy morass of work-arounds, patches and buggy over-writes, zoning codes tend toward increased complexity with every change. What the city’s “pathway to affordable housing” proposes is more tinkering with the underlying code. What the city needs is a new operating system.

It’s not just ADUs that are at issue. Ask developers—as the housing strategy group did not—why they’re not building more affordable homes in Staunton, and the answer you’ll get is a) that the permitting process is too onerous, and b) that they can’t afford to do so. Answer b) to some extent is a consequence of a), because it costs money and time (which is money) to comply with zoning and permitting regulations. But the bigger reason is the zoning itself, which not only limits how a specific piece of land can be used, but which arbitrarily dictates so many other construction variables that the only homes that pencil-out for a builder are expensive ones.

Zoning codes, as the name suggests, create “zones”—a zone for housing, a zone for shopping, a zone for manufacturing, and so on. That made sense when used to keep foundries or slaughterhouses away from residential areas, but it also created artificial divides that segregated functions—stores, homes, offices, apartment buildings, schools, cultural centers—that were all mixed together before zoning codes were created. That mixture, still found and now treasured in downtown Staunton, created a lively, walkable and rich urban environment. The imposition of zones, on the other hand, created land-use monocultures—predominantly large areas of all homes, but also of all mercantile and other activities, as in shopping centers and office parks—that then necessitated a car culture for most people to get to work, do their shopping and go to church or school.

It should be noted that there is nothing intuitively logical about a zoning code’s specific requirements. Staunton’s R-1 residential zoning, for example, is distinguished from R-2 zoning primarily by its minimum lot size, of 15,000 square feet versus 8,750 square feet. But the R-1 lot also must have a minimum lot width of 75 feet at the front and any home built on it must have a minimum 30-foot front set-back, a rear yard at least 35 feet deep and maximum lot coverage of 30%. The same requirements for R-2 homes, meanwhile, are a 70-foot minimum lot width, a 25-foot front setback, a rear yard at least 30 feet deep and maximum lot coverage of, yes, 30%. Why? Why a 25-foot setback for one but a 30-foot setback for the other, or a lot width of at least 70 feet for R-2 but an extra five feet for R-1? What compelling urban mathematics produced these arbitrary requirements?

For builders and developers looking at a lot of 45,000 square feet (just a bit over an acre) zoned R-1, the maximum they can build is three homes. They can’t build cottage courts, fourplexes, townhomes or any number of other configurations increasingly known as “missing middle” housing—housing more dense than single-family homes but smaller than apartment buildings. Instead of 10 or 12 homes they can build just three, so those three are going to be built at a level where they can fetch top dollar, not at a density that would allow at least some affordable homes to be part of the mix.  And in Staunton, the great majority of land is zoned R-1 or R-2, leaving scant room for more modest dwellings.

Zoning’s arbitrary guidelines do preserve a uniformity of appearance that appeals to some people, but which others find stultifying—or as summarized by city planning critic Jane Jacobs, more like taxidermy. Yet their very persistence creates an aura of inevitability, as if the only (unthinkable) alternative is anarchy. And so, even as local feedback to Staunton’s comprehensive plan repeatedly stresses walkability, community, and an integration of work, play and housing, the main obstacle to realizing that vision has gone largely untouched. Despite a proposal to reduce the total number of zoning sub-categories, the comprehensive plan promises to preserve the overall zoning approach. The builders’ dilemma will go unaddressed.

WITHOUT A SERIOUS EVALUATION of how zoning got us into the housing crunch we’re now struggling to overcome, there seems little hope for improvement.

Defenders of the status quo will point to the equivalent of a techie’s work-arounds and system upgrades, including district overlays, special use permits and other ways to game the system while leaving the underlying code untouched. But there’s a reason DOS-based systems have been left behind, not least because they became too expensive to maintain in terms of talent and manpower.

Nor does junking zoning codes mean descending into anarchy. Just as DOS-based systems were replaced by GUI ones—the graphical user interfaces we use without a second thought because they’re so intuitive and user-friendly—so traditional zoning codes are giving way elsewhere to form-based zoning. Traditional zoning codes are a top-down approach that segregates land uses. Form-based zoning is less concerned with regulating land use and instead prioritizes the physical form, scale and character of buildings and public spaces.  Because form-based zoning is a bottom-up approach that regulates how buildings interact with the street and with each other but not what use they’re put to, they tend to encourage infill and the development of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and high-quality public spaces.

That doesn’t mean truly disruptive or dangerous industries or businesses can’t be relegated to specific buffered areas, but the landscape is otherwise opened up to a free market constrained primarily by the same kind of rules that apply to coloring books: use whatever color you want but stay within the lines. Observe the regulations we’ve adopted about building height, scale, massing and relationship to the street, but otherwise put your land to the most productive use you can envision.

That may sound radical at first blush, but it is in fact what occurred in what are now the most treasured parts of Staunton—before the zoning code was adopted. It’s also what a growing number of municipalities around the country are adopting, from Mesa, Arizona to Cincinnati, Ohio to parts of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Form-based zoning deserves, at the very least, a serious examination and consideration by those who are revising a comprehensive plan for Staunton that has a 20-year outlook.

Here’s the bottom line: developers aren’t building affordable housing because our zoning code makes it prohibitively expensive to do so. The real-world consequences of sticking with that creaky form of land-use regulation are, quite predictably, more people without homes. And because as a society we apparently have neither the money nor the political will to minister to those people’s most basic needs, every homeless person we see on the streets, huddled in doorways, or sleeping in uninsulated tents or cars, should be a reminder that we’re not addressing root causes of a social disease.

The Staunton Housing Strategy Group failed to do so. The comprehensive plan’s designers are likewise missing the mark. Who’s left?

Housing advocates: it’s all a dream

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

There was something forlorn about the forum earlier this past week, sponsored by Building Bridges for the Greater Good, which was intended to spotlight teenage homelessness. The microphones offered frequent bursts of loud, jarring static. The stage of the Kate Collin Middle School in Waynesboro, where a similar forum was held a year ago, was more sparsely inhabited this time around—and looked it. The youngest person to take a mic was no longer a teenager, although finding someone of school age to bare his or her soul to several dozen onlookers might have been too much to expect.

Still, without the first-hand testimony of young lives wounded by the uncertainties and instability of homelessness, all that was left were the same old arid statistics that shock but often fail to move: 52 unhoused students in Waynesboro as of Oct. 13, 28 of them living in hotels and motels. Another 26 Waynesboro students living in foster homes, which Ryan Barber, the district’s assistant superintendent, described as “homeless adjacent.” Nearly 200 families across three schools turning to local food pantries each Friday.

No one from Staunton spoke on behalf of that city’s homeless youths. A social worker from Augusta county schools had little to add, seemingly content to let Barber do most of the heavy lifting.

If there was any strong audience reaction to what was said at the forum, it came—twice, with hearty rounds of applause—in response to statements that the long-term solution to such problems is more affordable housing. It’s hard to argue otherwise, since it’s obvious that without affordable housing more people will end up in the streets, but it’s also a term that goes largely undefined and unexplored. The upshot locally has been at least two years of hand-wringing and unfocused discussion that rarely gets at the heart of the issue, which at its core is nothing more than the mismatch between household incomes and housing costs.

“Affordable” housing, including rent or mortgage plus utilities, is typically defined as housing that doesn’t exceed 30% of one’s income. More than that and other basic needs get strained or unmet, including food, clothing, medical expenses, transportation, child care and so on. The sad part is that we haven’t seen anything close to that 30% ratio since March, 2022, when affordability fell of a cliff (see chart below) to levels not seen since the Great Recession of 2008.

This and other illuminating graphs, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, illustrate in several ways how badly we as a society are dealing with our housing issues. For openers, observe that housing today is even more unaffordable than it was in the period leading up to and following a global financial crisis that was triggered by a collapsing U.S. housing market. Although the two crises have differing causes, it’s worth noting that the 2008 collapse resulted in massive government intervention and an all-out effort to stave off another Great Depression. There is nothing comparable today, which means that our housing recession has not only been completely uninterrupted—none of those blue spikes to interrupt a sea of orange—but with no hope that anything’s about to change.

Here’s another way of visualizing the same dynamic, charting the median household income needed to buy a median priced house:

Again, the current lack of affordability exceeds that of the Great Recession. Moreover, the reality is worse than depicted above, since the Atlanta Fed’s statistics include all the components of mortgaged home ownership but do not include utilities. But what is measured is bad enough. The most recent (August, 2025) share of median income going to housing is 39%, the same level reached in July of 2006. By comparison, the lowest share of median income going to housing was in April, 2015, when it dipped to 23%.

With only two statistics going into computing affordability, it’s worth drilling down a bit to see how much each has contributed to our unbalanced ratio. The median household income for our area was $42,819 in mid-2006, $46,661 in April of 2015 and $67,199 a couple of months ago. The median homeownership cost for those same months was $194,033, $164,533 and $308,900. In other words, the cost of homeownership in 2015 was 3.5 times household income, compared to 4.6 times today.

Looked at another way, household income rose 9% over the first near-decade of this comparison, even as homeownership costs dropped 15%. In the decade since? Household income went up 44%, but homeownership costs exploded at twice that rate, by 87.7%. No wonder home ownership has become unaffordable—or that rental rates are likewise skyrocketing, thanks to frustrated homebuyers turning to other shelter options. And just like a rolled-up toothpaste tube, those who can’t keep up get spit out at the other end, ending up couch-surfing or in short-term motel rooms or in their cars or a tent.

Since we’re not about to see a doubling of household income—indeed, given current economic and federal policy trends, we’ll be lucky to see any increase—the only alternative for lowering the affordability threshold is to decrease the cost of homeownership. One way for that to happen is through lower mortgage interest rates, but that’s beyond our meager capabilities, and interest rates are in any case only a secondary factor in housing costs. Even more on the margin are property taxes and home insurance, both of which have climbed over the years but still remain relatively minor components of a monthly mortgage payment. That leaves just one thing we might influence to promote affordable housing: the cost of home building itself. That’s where the conversation should be focused, and it’s also where the conversation has been most lacking.

Home construction is a numbers game that is most profitable when it enjoys economies of scale. As with interest rates, many of the costs that go into that equation—labor, materials, weather—are beyond our control except at the margins. But the one variable over which municipalities have a say is land use. The more housing units that can be built on a particular lot, the lower the per-unit cost of the finished homes. Build a $500,000 house on a half-acre because a lower-cost house won’t pencil out, or build a four-plex with each unit priced at $200,000 and make the same return on investment—and create four times as much housing, each at an affordable price.

That latter option, however, requires a wholesale reexamination of zoning codes and maps, and that’s something Staunton has avoided. The city’s 11-point housing “strategy,” conceived by a working group of housing advocates that not once discussed the role of zoning in driving up housing costs, nibbles around the edges of land-use policies by exploring the possibility of allowing accessory dwelling units. The bulk of the proposed housing strategies, however, merely advocate lots of talking and not so much action: legal services for renters, for instance, or landlord “education.” The nitty-gritty task of grappling with outdated notions of urban planning, meanwhile, apparently proved a step too far.

And so we have moments like Monday’s forum, offered under the hopeful tag line, “I am homeless and still I dream.” Those of us who aren’t homeless are also dreaming—dreaming if we think we’re actually moving the needle on affordable housing, as even a quick look at the charts above should drive home. What’s that phrase, often mis-attributed to Einstein, about the definition of insanity. . . .?

Ambling toward a housing disaster

(Reading time: 9 minutes)

There’s never a good time to be homeless—but there’s bad, and then there’s infernally bad. We’re now well into Dante territory, hurtling past limbo, lust and gluttony to start ricocheting off greed’s boulders.

On a federal level, the gap between supply and demand for housing for the homeless was already skyrocketing before the Trump administration took office (graphed above) but exploded in the past year, thanks to a combination of funding rescissions and deep staffing cuts in departments serving the poor and unhoused. That notably includes the departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and of Health and Human Services, which just in the past couple of days have been whacked with further unprecedented layoffs, shredding what little remains of an already tattered social safety net. If there’s any doubt about the local implications of all this, see the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank and its increasingly alarmed appeals for community support.

But there’s also a deeper, more profound shift in housing policy underway that will have the perverse effect of pouring gasoline on the fire. That shift dates back to a July executive order, issued by Donald Trump under the provocative title “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that ends support for the “Housing First” approach to a growing unsheltered population. While Housing First advocates contend (often with references to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) that people’s basic needs for food, warmth and shelter must be met before they can effectively address addictions, psychological ills or lack of job training, the executive order claims Housing First policies “deprioritize accountability” and fail to “promote treatment, recovery and self-sufficiency.” The better approach, according to the executive order, is to slash funding for such assistance while instituting sobriety requirements for people living in federally funded housing. Can’t stay straight? It’s back on the street with you, where the physical struggle for survival will take all your energy.

Meanwhile, the current trend toward criminalizing homelessness only adds to the problem. A U.S. Supreme Court decision last year empowered municipal officials to fine, ticket, displace or arrest people sleeping in public spaces, and more than 200 localities around the country have since criminalized homelessness. But other jurisdictions—including Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County—already had similar laws on their books. And while our local law enforcement agencies thus far have taken a restrained approach to people camping on public property, acting mostly in response to complaints by directing the offenders to move elsewhere, that could change with any pronounced shift in the political climate.

Homeless people who get jailed for failing to have a sanctioned place to sleep become, ironically, ineligible for certain housing programs. No surprise, then, that once they’ve been incarcerated for not having shelter, many end up in a cycle that perpetuates their homelessness. More than 50,000 people who are released from prison or jail each year go straight into homeless shelters and then into the streets, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which reports that formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to become homeless than the general public due to a lack of financial and social support.

What little support for the homeless that still exists is being chopped away almost on a weekly basis. As reported by Politico a couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration is looking to move as much as two-thirds of HUD’s funds designated for permanent housing projects to transitional housing assistance “with some work or service requirements.” Those who can’t meet the requirements—such as a mother with young children, or someone who’s disabled—may end up on the street again, but as explained by a HUD spokesperson, “HUD is no longer in the business of permanently funding homelessness without measuring program success at promoting recovery and self-sufficiency.” That’s consistent with the administration’s overall “suck-it-up-buttercup” approach to social services but does nothing to address root causes, leaving it up to overwhelmed and unfunded local agencies to deal with the fallout.

Some of these issues may be addressed Monday evening at Kate Collins Middle School in Waynesboro, when Building Bridges for the Greater Good will host a forum on teenage homelessness. That’s because homeless teens are supposed to be served by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which created the Continuum of Care (CoC) program that Politico reports is under attack—indeed, as Politico also noted, Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year proposes cutting all CoC funding. Loss of those funds will mean dozens of students in the SAW region who currently receive emergency housing, transportation and other necessities of life, including food, clothing and personal care supplies, will be at risk of losing their ability to stay in school.

CoC funding also assists 22 households in a program of permanent supportive housing administered by the Valley Community Services Board (VCSB), but their future is equally uncertain. The current funding runs out in December, and while a larger successor grant has been approved, there’s no certainty that money will be released. “If the Politico article is correct, this program would certainly be in jeopardy, but I am not sure what calendar year we will actually feel the impact,” said Lydia Campbell, assistant director of community services at VCSB. “It’s terrible that our community members with the most significant barriers to housing that are finally in their own places could be at risk.”

In the face of this onslaught, local efforts to cope with homelessness and a severe shortage of affordable housing have been lame, at best. That’s partly due to a lack of money, of course, but being cash-poor is insufficient excuse for a city that spends big bucks on a new pool house, golf carts and 50-gallon trash cans for everyone—all welcomed expenditures contributing to Staunton’s quality of life, but at the cost of letting internal sores fester. With only so many tax dollars to go around, expenditures in one area mean belt-tightening in another. In the end, it all comes down to the choices we’re willing to make—or ignore.

Take, for example, the request to city council by Alec Gunn, director of the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministries (WARM), for financial support for a day center for the homeless at First Presbyterian Church. As initially conceived, this would have been a warm day-refuge in the winter and a cool one in summer for an unsheltered population that otherwise resorts to camping out in the library or in fast food restaurants to escape the weather. Talk of the city providing some modest start-up money for such an effort, perhaps $30,000, has been kicking around since the start of the year, with little to show for it and with ambitions for the day center’s scope of services diminishing with each passing month. More recently, rumblings of resistance from the church’s neighbors have been heard, and Gunn did himself no favors with the skimpy “budget” he presented to city council in early September—but neither has anyone on city council stepped up to press for a resolution. And so. . . still no day center.

As much—or little—can be said of the city’s pursuit of affordable housing, a critical component of any serious effort to eliminate homelessness. A key to this somnolent exercise has been creation of a housing commission that could “provide expertise and guidance regarding the amount and quality of affordable and workforce housing in the City,” an initiative first proposed by Councilor Brad Arrowood in March. That’s March of 2023. This past Thursday the city council finally received a resolution to do just that—but it won’t actually vote on the measure until an unspecified “later date.”

Not that there’s anything to be lost in this slow-walk to another grouping of chin strokers. Six of the proposed nine commission members are to be drawn from the ranks of the housing strategy working group that labored for a whole eight hours spread over 12 months to produce the city’s “housing strategy.” That group served mainly as a sounding board for city planners to present their ideas, and for the most part it resonated in tune; this was not a group brimming with ideas. The new commission will likewise meet only four times a year and, under the influence of its carry-over members, presumably will serve a similar role, with similarly minimal results. If there is to be any hope for the housing commission to provide meaningful input, it will have to come from the three non-working group members, ideally including representatives from the building and development sector and at least one person who has been homeless.

But first, of course, there actually has to be a city council vote to ratify the resolution. Assuming it does so in the next few weeks, and that the housing commission holds its first meeting in January, that will mark nearly three years since Arrowood’s initial proposal.

All this foot-dragging might be tolerable in a slower age, but that’s not where we are today. Instead, we’re hurtling toward a precipice with preternatural speed, the economy teetering toward recession, our political machinery seized up and normal middle-class people growing angry, suspicious and resentful under the weight of a disintegrating social order. How else to explain recent events in Waynesboro, where local residents circulated a letter deploring “the homeless problem” and criticizing St. John’s Episcopal Church for allowing a man to sleep in its bushes and a homeless couple to stay on an empty church lot. The letter expressed concern that mental illness, drug addiction and increased crime rates would put the neighborhood at risk, albeit without linking any of those problems to the three specific people prompting the writers’ angst.

Not all local residents shared that view, and in a couple of meetings pushed back vigorously against such stereotyping. But as the homelessness problem deepens and more people are forced to live in their cars and on the streets, similarly charitable responses may become more strained. We’re in a race against time that community leaders have not yet recognized, for money, effort, planning and initiative, and it would be reassuring to get even a whiff of urgency over what needs to be done.

Housing pathway full of potholes

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

Bureaucrats do love their studies and surveys. A cynic might conclude that’s because searching for information is a heckuva lot easier than actually doing something with information that might already be at hand. “We’re looking into it” is at least an answer, if not a particularly satisfying one, to complaints about one thing or another.

Take Staunton’s ongoing fumbling of the housing situation. More than a year ago, the city announced the creation of the grandly named “Staunton Housing Strategy Workgroup,” a meandering exercise that culminated, this past July, in the optimistically titled “Pathway to Affordable Housing and Housing for Working Families.” But that pathway, it turns out, is littered with potholes.

One of the tripping hazards is the action plan’s repeated references to the City Housing Commission as the lead organization for developing nearly a dozen initiatives. Unfortunately, the city doesn’t have a housing commission. It may eventually get around to creating one, as soon as someone figures out what it should look like and what its responsibilities would be, but that hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, the implementation clock for those initiatives, divided into six neat segments of three months each, started running July 1—which means the first quarterly period is now ending and a second is beginning, all without a housing commission to lead the way.

Then there’s the plan’s section titled “Redevelopment Strategies,” which projected that the second quarter—the one that starts Wednesday—would see the results of a “windshield survey” of the city’s housing stock. Such an inventory sounds like a good idea, a necessary baseline to inform housing policy and action. But as with the nonexistent housing commission, there is no windshield survey of the sort envisioned by the plan. Nor is there going to be one before next spring, at the earliest, because the city has yet to prepare its grant application to underwrite such a project.

If all this conveys a certain lassitude and lack of urgency about addressing a problem that is only getting worse with each passing month—well, you might understand why nothing much seems to change. Consider, as another example, that the “action plan matrix” describes an 18-month process just to formulate a “strategy” (that term really should be retired) for amending the zoning code to allow Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) as one approach to increased housing density.

ADUs may be an exotic addition to Staunton’s housing mix, but they’ve been around for quite a few years elsewhere, and researching best practices shouldn’t take a year or more. Nor does anyone have to look far for examples. Lexington, just a few miles down I-81, adopted its ADU ordinance this past winter, and just for good measure added a cottage-court provision in March. Staunton’s city planners, on the other hand, apparently felt they had to secure Planning Commission approval merely to research the cottage-court concept, never mind coming up with a specific zoning proposal. They got the go-ahead last week to start looking around, but are making no predictions of when their exploration will be finished.

“Research” is, however, a superficially defensible way to excuse inaction. After all, how can one make informed decisions about complex matters without having all the relevant facts? And even if other municipalities already have implemented “strategies” that Staunton is only beginning to contemplate, how much of that experience is transferable to our own situation? Lexington may be two or more years ahead of Staunton in adopting innovative approaches to housing, but it also has less than a third of Staunton’s population and a fraction of its surface area. What could such a pipsqueak of a city have to teach us?

I’d argue that while there obviously are differences of scale, our qualitative similarities far outweigh matters of size—that there’s much that Staunton could learn not just from Lexington, but from numerous other Virginia cities that have forged ahead while we dither. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time we want to build a wagon. But it’s not just that Staunton seems incapable of learning from others. It seems that it can’t learn from itself, apparently overlooking or dismissing the information it already has at its municipal fingertips.

Consider again the example of the windshield survey, on whose completion rests the pursuit of “redevelopment strategies for underutilized properties.” That’s high falutin’ language for identifying homes so run-down they should be demolished, in the worst case, or significantly upgraded to prevent further deterioration. How many such homes are there in Staunton? Where are they located? What kind of condition are they in, and how much would it cost for their remediation?

Staunton planners say they don’t have this most basic information, which is why they want a  windshield survey, which is pretty much what the name suggests: a drive-by of every residential property in the city to visually assess its soundness. Or as Lexington’s finished survey explained, dispersed throughout the city “are homes that are in poor condition hidden on many residential streets,” including those that are “vacant or are inhabited by older individuals who no longer have the physical capability or the financial means to perform the maintenance needed for their homes.” We really should know more about that—right?

Lexington therefore applied for, and received, a $50,000 grant from the federal government to assess its housing stock. The findings, released this past spring, consist primarily of a ranking system in which homes rated 1 are sound and those rated 5 are “dilapidated,” suffering from severe damage or decay “with defects requiring clearance.”  “Clearance” is a gentle way of saying “demolition.” The ratings are based on three categories, assessing a home’s foundation, roof and exterior walls. Just 72 of the city’s homes were rated 3, 4 or 5, representing 3.5% of Lexington’s overall housing stock.

That’s essential information to have. The problem is that Staunton already has it—it’s just not in the planning department. It’s in the assessor’s office, which every two years recalculates the taxable value of every property in the city, using several metrics and assessment methods that include its own visual appraisal. As assessor Douglas Flinn explains, his staff will “take a neighborhood at a time and ride up and down the streets to look at each property,” averaging “about 100 to 120 homes per day during a concentrated five-month period”—which is to say, the staff conducts its own windshield survey of all 11,695 parcels in the city.

And as with Lexington’s $50,000 windshield survey, the Staunton assessor’s biannual survey includes “a rating system that incorporates the aggregate condition of the home [that] would include the roof, siding, doors and windows and the general overall condition of the home.”  Which is to say, yet again, pretty much what Lexington’s federally funded survey accomplished.

So how does the assessor’s data differ from the data that Staunton’s planners hope to gain from their own windshield survey? Good question.  Asked what information he expects to gather that isn’t already available, community development director Rodney Rhodes could say only that his department will work closely with the assessor’s office to figure that out before submitting a grant application. “We expect the windshield survey to gather more detailed information than what is currently on hand,” he added, without getting any more specific.

Well, one should hope so. But as seems quite clear, the many months of wheel-spinning by the Staunton Housing Strategy Workgroup might have found some traction had anyone walked from one part of city hall to another to obtain basic housing data that was there all along. Because that didn’t happen, and because the city now will be chasing that same information with yet another study, the pathway to affordable housing just gets longer and longer.

What if ‘urgent care’ was like this?

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

When it comes to the problem of housing affordability—which is to say, to the insufficient supply of such housing—those without a home at all tend to get the shortest shrift. Most of the public fretting is about people being forced to pay 30% or 40% or more of their already meager incomes for shelter. Or about the shelters themselves, which despite their high price tags too often are poorly maintained, inadequately insulated and ringed by sketchy neighbors. Meanwhile, those who sleep in cars, or in tents tucked into patches of vegetation behind shopping centers or supermarkets, simply drop out of sight and out of mind.

Consider, for example, the Staunton Housing Workgroup, which labored mightily over the past year to produce a list of “strategies” to put the city on the “pathway to affordable housing and housing for working families.” We apparently must gird ourselves for a long and arduous trek. As explained by city planner Rebecca Joyce when she presented the group’s strategic vision to city council a few weeks ago, “This is a plan for a start, not a plan for completion”—and oh, by the way, an additional strategy had been added belatedly to the original ten, to provide services for unhoused persons.

Why the late insertion? Because homelessness had not been discussed by the workgroup, despite such a condition being the natural consequence of unaffordable housing.

Just how sluggish and tone-deaf the city can be on the subject can be seen in the workgroup’s proposed timetable for meeting the needs of the homeless, laid out in a six-step approach divided into neat three-month segments. Step one, to run through the end of September: “Compile current list of resources and organizations that serve unhoused community members in the City.”

That should make for a busy morning.

Meanwhile, step six, scheduled for October through December of 2026, proposes to “conduct assessment of current state of needs of unhoused community members in the City and create an action plan of next steps.”

One might think that talking to the people you want to help would be a first step, not the last, but as the rest of this “strategy” makes clear, the city’s focus is on helping organizations, not individuals. As step two explicitly prescribes, for example, “Survey organizations that serve unhoused community members in the City regarding their most pressing needs [emphasis mine].” Steps three, four and five , which are identical, are all about helping organizations apply for funds.

Another example of kicking the can down the road was exhibited at the city council’s last meeting, when city manager Leslie Beauregard reminded everyone that the last budget had appropriated $50,000 for the council to use “at its discretion.” The council had been so discreet that none of the money had been spent. Perhaps the council should revisit the matter and use the funds in a productive manner? Perhaps, as had been previously discussed, some portion—$30,000 had been mentioned—of that unappropriated fund could go toward a WARM day center for the homeless “as part of a broader housing strategy”?

As summarized in the session’s minutes, “Council members agreed on the urgency in supporting the day center but questioned the need to allocate funds immediately,” which suggests the council has a creatively relaxed definition of “urgency.”  The council instead tabled the proposal and “expressed desire to invite a representative from WARM to present a proposal and budget for the day center at a future council meeting.” One can only hope that “desire” will translate into action.

The underlying problem all this illustrates is a lack of urgency or assertive leadership by city officials and staff in addressing a problem that has festered for years. Staunton’s default position is one of passivity rather than initiative, waiting for someone to bring up an issue rather than proactively intervening in something everyone knows is awry. Somnolent staff can propose an 18-month timetable for the city to reach out to “unhoused community members,” and council members uncritically accept that as reasonable.  Meanwhile, WARM will start operating its emergency overnight shelters in less than three months, but the “urgent” need for a day center will have to wait for the thinly staffed and inadequately resourced agency to get an invitation from the council to appear in its chambers.

Would it be too much for the city, having recognized a problem, to reach out to WARM directly? This week? To sit down with WARM staff and find out what’s needed, how much it will cost and who will be running the show?

Staunton’s laissez-faire approach to social needs is just as pronounced on the supply side as it is on the demand end of things. Lydia Campbell, at the Valley Community Services Board (VCSB), has been peppering the internet with emails pleading with local municipalities and social service agencies to apply for a Homeless Reduction Grant. Such grants, which date back to 2013 as part of Virginia’s Housing Trust Fund, are intended to “ensure homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring.”   Eligible projects include “rapid rehousing for literally homeless households, innovative projects for unaccompanied homeless youth or older adults experiencing homelessness, and rental assistance and stabilization services for chronically homeless households residing in permanent supportive housing.”

The response has not been encouraging.

True, as such things go this is not a wealthy program, disbursing just $12.9 million across all of Virginia in 2023, the most recent full accounting available. But that amount underwrote 69 projects that year, serving 3,997 people. Among them was (and is) Hope House, a rapid rehousing project in partnership with the Shenandoah LGBTQ Center that serves unaccompanied homeless youth, ages 18-24. On the other hand, over the past five years only one other program application has been filed (albeit not awarded) in our four-county region, according to Campbell.

In other words, when it comes to free money to address homelessness, local governments, non-profit organizations, housing developers (yes, developers, both profit and non-profit alike) and single purpose organizations—all of whom are eligible to file applications—can’t be bothered.

The current application period has a Sept. 12 deadline, but to date Campbell has not received any requests for a letter of support, which the state requires from VCSB to prevent duplication of services. Given the late date, that seems unlikely to change, although it’s always possible that Staunton staffers have been working feverishly but unobtrusively to . . . nah. Just kidding.

Here’s a final irony. Staunton’s 2023 legislative program, an annual exercise in which the city’s governing body communicates its priorities to the Virginia general assembly, urged an increase in funding for permanent supportive housing. “The Governor’s Housing Trust Fund should become a consistent funding stream for these individuals,” council members contended.

“Just don’t make us ask for it,” they could have added.

Tell ’em the Greeks sent you

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

Throughout all the various discussions of the past year about how best to cope with the SAW region’s shortage of affordable housing, most attention has gone to the “housing” half of that phrase. ADUs, modular construction techniques, pocket neighborhoods, land banks and land trusts, restrictions on short-term rentals—all these and other strategies that have been kicked around have focused, by and large, on how best to increase housing supply. Comparatively little attention has been given to the issue of affordability.

That may simply reflect the intractability of the problem. Housing can be made more affordable either by increasing wages or by lowering the cost of homes—but raising wages is a much bigger socio-economic challenge than even the most dedicated housing advocates can tackle. And efforts to lower the cost of housing sooner or later encounter an inherent paradox: housing in the U.S. is both a consumption and an investment good. Enhancing one almost invariably diminishes the other, which is why efforts to introduce cheaper (i.e. affordable) housing so often encounter fierce resistance from established homeowners, who see their property values under attack.

The result has been an increasingly pricey real estate market, defined by tight supply and constantly rising prices, both nationally and locally. Last year, for example, homebuyers on average were paying more than five times their annual incomes for a home, up sharply from 1965, when their purchase price was less than three times income. The average age of the first-time homebuyer was 35, up from 31 just 10 years earlier. Unable to affect labor market economics and equally ineffectual at promoting cheap housing, affordable housing advocates frequently are left agitating simply for more housing, in the forlorn hope that increased supply may by itself bring down prices. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.

So what’s to be done?

One possible starting point is to look at how new construction is financed. For developers, site acquisition costs may represent just 10% of projected outlays, but that cost comes up-front, before any money comes in, and therefore often is financed through loans. Not only does that make the outlay more expensive when interest rates are high, but land acquisition loans are an overhang that grows with every construction delay, whether caused by permitting issues, bad weather, supply interruptions or labor shortages. Meanwhile, there are only a limited number of financing sources, including government, banks and possibly local lenders, and in our area government funding for housing is not only scarce but increasingly precarious.

But we’re not the first society to face this conundrum. Consider the Greek city of Athens, which just 200 years ago was a “ramshackle village” of perhaps 4,000 residents. It grew steadily over the next century, but an influx of Greek refugees from Turkey upon dissolution of the Ottoman Empire more than doubled the population in just a few months, to 500,000. That was followed by World War II, which devastated the city’s housing stock, after which migration from the countryside again doubled the population. By the late 1940s, Athens was home to more than a million people with insufficient housing and few job prospects, and what housing was available tended to lack basic plumbing or heating.

Against that dismal backdrop, the Greek population—not the government—developed an informal approach to housing called antiparochi, which roughly translates as “mutual exchange,” also sometimes described as “flats for land.” As explained by the BBC in 2019: “Here’s how it worked. A contractor would approach the owner of a house and offer him a deal. He would knock down his house, and build a block of flats in its place. In return, the homeowner would be given a certain number of flats (usually two or three), while the contractor would then make his money by selling the remaining flats to Greeks who were seeking accommodation.”

Such an arrangement, in which no money was exchanged (and, indeed, without the protection of a contract) was largely ignored by the government for more than 20 years, with only minor regulations, such as height limitations and a ban on building over archaeological sites. The result was a win-win-win on multiple levels. The government was able to focus its limited resources on developing infrastructure. The original homeowner realized the equity in his property by having not only a new home—with plumbing!—to live in, but with a second or even third home that he could rent or sell. The builder could start construction with minimal upfront outlays, funding his construction expenses with deposits from prospective buyers only too eager to lock in a home. And as home building took off, the resulting construction boom energized the Athenian economy.

As might be expected, such a free-for-all wasn’t entirely a one-sided success story. As the antiparochi phenomenon became more widespread, architect-free construction became so standardized that the Athenian landscape was transformed into a bleak monotony of drab concrete blocks that still shocks first-time visitors. Developers began cutting corners, not just by eliminating decorative elements but by using insufficient or substandard materials. Yet as the population kept surging, reaching almost two million in the late ’70s, the antiparochi approach kept pace, with housing bank loans comprising just 16% of gross capital formation. And today, the Greeks’ homeownership rate is roughly 65%—almost exactly that of the U.S.

The antiparochi approach eventually was undone by government imposition of an 18% value added tax, applied to the apartments the original homeowners received from the builders. The government also ended a policy that had taxed property transfers but not new construction, which had disincentivized the buying of existing buildings. Behind the changes was at least some civic guilt. “Most people thought that antiparochi was bad for the city and that it destroyed the architecture of the city, but that is not entirely true,” contends Elxis, a contemporary Greek real estate service. “The antiparochi system provided a roof for very low-income families in Greece, who lived in a country without a housing policy.”

Whether the antiparochi approach would work locally is, of course, debatable. The tax policy that led to its near demise in Greece already exists here: while the U.S. tax code allows a swap of one real estate investment property for another while deferring capital gains taxes under Section 1031, there is no such break for homeowners. Nor would the rough-and-tumble approach to building in Athens go down in a society of building codes and inspections. Our shortage of affordable housing doesn’t approach the deprivation faced by post-war Athenians, which pressured government officials into their hands-off attitude.

Yet for all those differences, the Athenian experiment demonstrates that a fresh way of looking at problems can yield unexpectedly creative solutions, and that innovation can be stifled by overly restrictive policies. There are lots of things Virginia’s local governments can’t control, in a state that maintains tight control over most municipal decision-making, but zoning restrictions remain largely within their wheelhouse. So do many tax policies, especially having to do with real estate and personal property. The challenge, therefore, is to look for ways to modify zoning and tax codes in such a way that property owners can unlock their equity productively.

Consider, for example, the large number of Staunton homes built half-a-century or more ago, many occupied by aging empty-nesters who would like to down-size—but who can’t afford to move to a smaller, more manageable home because their own aging property hasn’t sufficiently appreciated in value. How much of the city’s housing stock deteriorates each year as those house-rich but cash-poor couples—and widows and widowers—are unable to upgrade and maintain their property? How much real estate potential is being wasted for lack of anything like the Athenian model?