Category: Housing

The homeless population is graying

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

As the number of people pushed into homelessness keeps growing, a worrisome subset of that population is expanding at an even faster pace. Locally, we’re not paying nearly enough attention.

Nationwide, there are more than 16 million people 65 or older living by themselves. That represents 28% of our oldest age group, and the older you are, the higher the likelihood you’re living alone: more than half of households with someone 75 and older consist of only one person.

Being old and alone doesn’t necessarily result in homelessness, of course, but it does increase the odds considerably. Living alone is riskiest for the elderly, who tend to have more accidents, are more prone to neglect their health and are frequent targets of financial scams, all of which can result in the loss of a home. And while many Baby Boomers are living in comfortable retirement, 5 million people over 65 live below the poverty line and an additional 2.6 million were classified in 2020 as “near poor,” meaning their incomes were less than 25% above the poverty line—and far below the amount needed to rent an apartment.

Put it all together, and the number of elderly people becoming homeless for the first time is swelling. Add that to the number of chronically homeless people who are “graduating” into the older population, and the ranks of elderly homeless people are growing to levels not seen in decades. The 2024 national Point in Time (PIT) census, the most recently available, found more than 146,000 homeless people who were 55 or over, or 18.9% of the 771,480 total. And here’s the kicker: more than half of those elderly homeless people were unsheltered, compared with just 36% of the overall homeless population.

Locally, the percentages are even more skewed, in keeping with a population that on average is older than at either national or state levels. (In Staunton, we have more people over the age of 65 than we have under 18.) That same 2024 PIT count, conducted by the Valley Homeless Connection, found 47 people ages 55 and older who were homeless, or roughly 26% of the total. Eight were unsheltered, sleeping in cars, a church vestibule and other make-shift accommodations.

Why do elderly homeless people sleep on the street rather than in a shelter? One obvious reason is that there aren’t enough shelters to go around. In recent weeks, for example, the emergency shelter space offered by the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministry (WARM) has been fully subscribed, with 60 or more people filling both primary and overflow churches.  But even when shelters are available, they often aren’t a good match for a population with mobility and other health issues. Getting in and out of bunks, such as those used at Valley Mission; managing medications, like insulin, that might need refrigerating; or making it to a shared bathroom in time for those with incontinence issues, are just some of the major challenges facing older people.

Conversely, older people are more wary of entering shelters because they recognize how vulnerable they are, and because of their generally lower tolerance for conditions that a younger, more resilient population can handle more readily. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, for example, cites the biggest reasons given by people for avoiding homeless shelters as overcrowding (37%) and the related issues of bugs (30%) and germs (22%).

But recognition of the special needs of an elderly homeless cohort has been slow in coming. The national PIT count, for example, only recently started breaking out the age demographics of those it surveys, after years of lumping everyone older than 24 into one giant category. USAging, a national organization that issues periodic assessments of services for the elderly, as recently as 2020 limited its housing focus primarily to home modifications and repairs that help older adults stay in their homes, thereby preventing homelessness. Last year’s report, on the other hand, finally acknowledged a deeper problem, observing that “more older adults are experiencing housing instability or even homelessness,” the insertion of “even” suggesting a previously unimagined condition.

USAging’s findings are based on a national survey of what are known as Area Agencies on Aging, or AAAs, which were established throughout the country by Congress in 1973 to respond to the needs of Americans age 60 and older. Its 2025 Chartbook includes a new “spotlight” on housing issues that charts “the top housing-related challenges facing older adults.” Number one on the list, submitted by 94% of the AAAs, is a lack of affordable housing, while more than a third (35%) cited “increasing homelessness” as among their top dozen concerns.

That concern, however, has yet to filter down to this part of Virginia in any meaningful way. Our local AAA is the Valley Program for Aging Services (VPAS), which serves a five-county area and its cities, including Augusta, Staunton and Waynesboro. Among its better-known programs are Meals on Wheels, but VPAS also helps the elderly with case management services, Medicare counseling, respite and transportation services, and health and wellness programs. When it comes to housing, however, VPAS comes up blank. Its strategic plan for 2025-2027 doesn’t even mention the word.

VPAS executive director Beth Bland said last week that her agency is “certainly aware” of the housing issue, but contended that the problem is “bigger than any one organization can tackle” and added that VPAS doesn’t have the financial or staffing resources to make a difference. Asked why VPAS doesn’t at least provide leadership in bringing community attention to the problem, Bland demurred. “We are not prepared to be, nor would it be appropriate for us, to take the lead on this issue,” she replied, suggesting that the Community Fund is already doing this. The Community Fund, alas, while it has tried to put a spotlight on the overall lack of affordable housing, has had little to do with homelessness.

Putting aside Bland’s unwillingness to have VPAS take the lead on an issue that clearly falls within the AAA mandate, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the local agency is squarely within the national mainstream. As documented in the 2025 Chartbook, only 8% of the nation’s AAAs have a formal partnership with homelessness or emergency shelters, 7% with coordinated entry systems for the homeless and 6% with an affordable housing coalition. The problem of old people living on the streets apparently will have to become much more egregious before we start paying attention.

There is one slim ray of hope locally, although it’s still many, many months from fruition. The Staunton city council last week approved a rezoning request for a property on West Beverley that has been vacant for at least the past 40 years, changing it from an R-4 to a B-5 zoning category. The R-4 category had frustrated multiple development proposals over the years because of its parking requirements—requirements that are much looser in a B-5 zone, so poof! a bureaucratic hurdle was vanquished just like that. Sometimes all it takes is someone with vision to make things happen.

The rezoning clears the way for the former Dunsmore Business College to be redeveloped as 15 one-bedroom apartments for “extremely low-income” senior citizens. The project is being led by Stu Armstrong, a former Staunton resident who owns the brick building and has a history of renovating other residential properties in the Newtown area. Although he estimates the renovation will cost at least $3 million, Armstrong says he can raise sufficient capital through multiple layers of grants, federal housing programs and private equity funding—and a good thing, too, because if he had to cover his costs through rent income, the apartments would have to list for approximately $2,000 a month.

To be sure, were those apartments available today, they would make only the slightest dent in demand. The Staunton Redevelopment Housing Authority, which is lending its support to Armstrong’s efforts, has a waiting list for its subsidized apartments that includes 137 elderly people with annual incomes, on average, of slightly under $14,000. That’s not enough to rent anything in today’s market. But even if Armstrong’s project reduces the housing authority’s waiting list by just 10%, that’s 15 people who otherwise could very well end up on the street.

And maybe, just maybe, Armstrong’s success could point the way for others to follow suit. Let’s wish him well, because the need he’s addressing is only going to keep growing as all of us keep aging.

We’re not moving the needle

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Maybe it’s just the cold that’s slowing everything down, with much of Staunton still sheathed in so much ice it could be the setting for “Dr. Zhivago.” Nearly two weeks after a devastating winter storm hit the region, we’re still digging out and only weakly reestablishing life’s normal routines. A lot of important things have been put on hold.

But attention fatigue and disengagement with issues of affordable housing and homelessness, of such prominent concern in 2023 and 2024, had already set in before the storm.  Where once scores of people attended the two housing summits hosted by the Community Foundation of Central Blue Ridge and the Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro, only a few dozen soldiered on in two working groups that were spun off to address issues of housing stability and housing stock. Monthly workgroup meetings soon bogged down into every-other-month events, attendance dwindled, the focus blurred.

Most recently, when the oncoming storm threatened a housing stock working group meeting scheduled for last week, the meeting was scrubbed altogether. Not postponed for a week or two, which one might expect if weather were the only problem, but canceled outright. That created a four-month gap between meetings, but it’s doubtful anyone views that as a problem—not when there’s so little to show for the past two years.

Then there’s the much-heralded Staunton Housing Commission, which after a similarly lengthy gestation, was scheduled to meet for the first time in early January. Instead, supposedly because just six of its nine members have been appointed to date, the commission’s inaugural meeting will occur later this month. Or maybe in March. With only four meetings per year, there’s really no rush—although it’s fair to ask how this leisurely pace fits in with the city’s “housing strategy,” for which an 18-month clock started ticking last July 1, and for which the housing commission was to be the lead advisory board.

And here’s an ironic twist: the Point in Time (PIT) count, which attempts to enumerate all the homeless people who can be found on one specific night per year, was scheduled for last Wednesday. But because of the extreme cold and generally impassable roads, any homeless people who might have been stuck in their cars, tents or other improvised shelters were given a pass—the only ones who (were) counted were those who reached homeless shelters, like Valley Mission or that week’s WARM emergency facility, which was in Waynesboro. So the “good news” in this year’s PIT count will be that 100% of those who are homeless were sheltered—no unsheltered people were found!

We may hope there will be an asterisk after those numbers.

One good thing that did come out of the storm was a last-minute, hastily assembled temporary emergency shelter thrown together by Staunton Mayor Michele Edwards—although she did so, she struggled to explain, as a private citizen and not as a city official. At least I think that’s the distinction she was trying to draw. Housed in the basement of the Central United Methodist Church, the emergency shelter was full to its limited capacity right up until it closed this past Monday morning, when presumably the emergency was over and the “temporary” aspect of its existence kicked in.

Anyone looking at a landscape torn from Boris Pasternak’s novel might have been puzzled—local schools wouldn’t reopen for another couple of days, after all—where the people who had stayed at the Central United shelter would go that day, or even that night, but that’s how the icicle crumbled. As Edwards emphasized, “temporary means temporary.”

The thing that’s clearly not temporary is Staunton’s ongoing lack of sufficient affordable housing, which persists despite the two years of chin-wagging mentioned above. Also not temporary is the lack of additional resources to cope with the inevitable consequences of that housing shortage. The emergency shelter program operated by WARM has an increasingly shaky roster of local churches willing to have their facilities used for a week at a time. The Mission continues to be backed up, as its supposedly short-term residents are unable to find permanent housing. And despite months of shambolic efforts at creating a day shelter for the homeless, we’re no closer to having one today than we were a year ago.

All that talking and meeting and feel-good assertions of what we’re going to do have made not one bit of progress in either stemming the tide of homelessness or of providing for the most basic needs of the unsheltered. We’ve just been treading water.

The online meeting that came up with an eleventh-hour plan to create an emergency shelter for the homeless took place two weeks ago today. There was much agreement, among the dozen or so participants, that this stop-gap measure should serve as a teaching moment—that the lessons learned from this intervention should result in better planning for the next emergency. Doing so, it was remarked both at the meeting and in subsequent emails, would be best served by sharing insights and observations as soon as possible after the fact, while memories were still fresh.

Two weeks later, and a week after the emergency shelter was closed, that conversation has yet to take place. The temperature tomorrow night is predicted to drop back into single-digits, and the ice and snow won’t melt significantly until mid-week, when the climate rollercoaster we’re riding may push us into the 50s. It is not outside the realm of possibility that when the melt occurs it will uncover someone who did not make it to a shelter, who was not found by a non-existent PIT count, who believed with good reason that there really was no refuge to be had.

That would be depressing, if, we may hope, unlikely. What’s more depressing, precisely because it is more likely, is the thought that a year from now essentially nothing will have changed.

The deadly combination of fire, ice

(Reading time: 2 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we should be learning

(Reading time: 9 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This is what stagnation looks like

(Reading time: 3 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoning: new wine in old wineskins

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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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?