Category: Housing

Houses of God, homes for people

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

New York City is undergoing a “transformational” change in its commercial building sector, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, with a projected 40 million square feet of offices scheduled for conversion into apartments and other uses over the next five to 10 years. That’s a huge amount of residential space in the offing, but while New York is an extreme example, it’s hardly alone: the pace of office conversions is picking up across the country, “thanks to the rapidly falling prices of obsolete office buildings, changes to zoning rules that allow for more residential construction, and government incentives that help bring down costs.”

All well and good for white-collar metropolitan areas, you might think, but of what relevance is that to a small, tourist-oriented city like Staunton (or to blue-collar Waynesboro)? It’s not like our diminutive urban cores are bursting with empty space abandoned by accountants, financial managers, software developers, research analysts or other practitioners of the “knowledge economy.”  True enough—but here’s what Staunton has that New York doesn’t: a bumper crop of churches, many of which are similarly hollowed-out.

There are 76 of them in Staunton, by one local clergyman’s count. Big churches, little churches, old churches, storefront churches—one church for every 334 Stauntonians, or roughly three times the national average. That’s not because we’re more sinful (although we might be) but simply a result of having been around longer. The result is predictable: while some churches have robust congregations and full calendars, many are lucky to get more than 50 people in their pews on Sunday mornings. We have churches so diminished that they have to share a minister, and churches that have been deconsecrated by congregations that finally couldn’t deny the handwriting on the wall. The rot, all too often, is sinking in.

It’s not just deteriorating church buildings that are going to waste; so is the land they sit on. While some churches have a footprint scarcely smaller than the plot they’re sited on, others own sprawling empty parking lots and overgrown greenery that at their worst contribute to a sense of urban blight. Consider the Marquis Memorial United Methodist Church, which except for one small corner parcel owns an entire city block fronting West Beverley, as well as half-a-dozen vacant house lots across Stoneburner. Much of its two-plus acres sits empty—as does a small, strip-mall type of building that also sits on church land but is used solely for storage—contributing to the overall run-down appearance of the West End.    

Although there does not appear to be a comprehensive survey of church properties in Staunton, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy last November released a study looking at land in Virginia owned by faith-based organizations. Among its findings: that of more than 4 million parcels in the state, 22,543 are owned by such organizations, totaling more than 74,000 acres. “To put this in context,” it noted, “the City of Richmond is roughly 40,000 acres, meaning the identified parcels amount to nearly twice the size of Richmond.” (Staunton, by comparison, comprises roughly 12,500 acres.)

Some of those parcels, as noted, barely exceed a church’s footprint. But 51% exceed half an acre and 38% are larger than one acre, which the report contends is big enough to suggest “meaningful development potential” for housing. And while the study isn’t granular enough for our portion of the state to tease out Staunton-specific statistics, it does report that the Central Shenandoah Planning District, which encompasses the SAW region, has 970 parcels owned by faith-based organizations, totaling 2,741 acres. The median size of these parcels is 0.69 acres, or less than one-third of the Marquis Memorial UMC property—or one-seventh the size of the five-acre parcel occupied by the Christ United Methodist Church, which has more than a thousand feet of frontage on Churchville Avenue.

There apparently is no comparable inventory of church buildings themselves, although national statistics are suggestive. A denomination in one unnamed state, cited by consultant Richard Reinhard (about whom more to come), rated 20% of its 530 churches in “critical condition” (not paying their bills) and an additional 40% in “serious condition.”  Or consider the city of Gary, Indiana, which has only 67,000 residents—after decades of decline from a peak of 178,000—but more than 250 empty churches, according to its planning director. Staunton has a more stable population, but that hasn’t insulated it from an overall decline in church membership, and even more sharply so among younger generations. That means that not only are congregations getting smaller, they’re also greyer.

The consequences of these trends vary, and are complicated by other factors. The 75-member Allen Chapel AME congregation, for example, decided to move out of its West Beverley church in 1997, ostensibly because of limited parking and poor accessibility for the handicapped—conditions that were hardly new in 1997 but which became less tolerable as churchgoers aged; that building now houses two Airbnb rental units. But the Bibleway Community Church, directly across the street, appears to have been sitting vacant at least since 2020, when it was purchased by a woman who currently has a West Virginia address. How many other Staunton churches are in similarly precarious circumstances?

Rick Reinhard, quoted above, is former chief administrative officer of a social justice agency of the global United Methodist Church, where he first started grappling with many of these issues. These days he is chief consultant for a Rockville, MD-based group that among other things advocates for a fledgling YIGBY (Yes in God’s Backyard) movement to use church real estate—whether the land or the building itself—for affordable housing.

“Religious faiths face a great mismatch between small, aging congregations and large, deteriorating properties,” he wrote last year. “Developing intelligent reuses and redevelopment of these properties will make the difference between a community flourishing and struggling. Housing advocates view underused faith properties as natural sites to develop projects that help close the great national gap on affordable housing.”

Yet as Reinhard concedes, convincing congregants to convert their houses of worship into houses of a more conventional nature is a huge task: “All too often houses of worship are stricken immobile by their declining congregations. Convincing an elderly congregation to close or even alter the sacred places where they were married, their parents were memorialized, and their children were baptized can be a heavy lift. Faith leaders are schooled in neither real estate nor finance in divinity schools, and sometimes find it anathema to their beliefs.”

For all that, a growing number of churches find themselves in the same financial position as someone working for less than a livable wage, just one leaky roof or burst boiler away from closing. Reinhard estimates it costs upwards of $7 a square foot annually to operate a church (which doesn’t pay real estate taxes), which means a modestly sized 10,000-square-foot building will eat up approximately $70,000 a year just to adequately maintain the structure. Small wonder that older, declining congregations are worshiping in crumbling buildings, or—ironically—that “Small burghs are discovering that the churches found front and center on their towns’ postcards [sound familiar?] are falling into disrepair with uncertain futures.”

A few congregations locally, although none in Staunton, are showing what else is possible. In Roanoke, the former Belmont Baptist Church was converted into affordable apartment units that hit the market late last year. And Trinity United Methodist Church, also in Roanoke, started converting its Sunday school building into 15 affordable rental units this past February. Seven of the units will be reserved for seniors coming out of homelessness, while the balance will be rented to older couples on limited incomes. Prompting the move was a recognition that the dwindling congregation could no longer afford routine maintenance and insurance costs, much less pay for repairs to the sanctuary’s leaky plaster roof.

“Our building was no longer serving us, it was the master of us,” the church’s pastor told a reporter.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the former Wayne Hills United Methodist Church in Waynesboro is now owned by Embrace, a church-affiliated non-profit that has repositioned the property as a community center and food garden. Last year it hosted “Blitz Build 2024,” during which nine tiny homes were built in nine days to house otherwise homeless people in the region. This year its director, Jenelle Watson, is developing a more ambitious plan for approximately two dozen homes to be sited on a third of the 3.3-acre parcel, also for people transitioning out of homelessness.

The conversion of New York’s temples of commerce into affordable housing may seem of remote interest in Staunton, but we would do well to pay heed. “The acceleration of office conversions won’t sharply reduce the overall supply of office buildings any time soon,” the Wall Street Journal acknowledged. “But conversions are already starting to benefit neighborhoods where they take place. By bringing in new residents, these projects are restoring street life, shopping and entertainment venues where obsolete office buildings used to stand.”

As much could be said of Staunton’s less secular temples—with, of course, the added benefit of creating much needed housing.

West End: nothing to BRAG about

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

For anyone looking to understand why civic improvements in Staunton move at a snail’s pace, a good place to start one’s education is with the West End.

Long recognized as the city’s neglected quarter, its vitality sapped by construction of the Woodrow Wilson Parkway decades ago, the West End was targeted by the city council in 2020 as a “high priority zone” for revitalization. That same year, the city applied to the EPA for a three-year, $300,000 Brownfields Assessment Grant.  The purpose of the grant, as explained by city staff, was “to return vacant or underutilized properties to productive reuse” by assessing for possible environmental hazards, often from industrial waste but also from asbestos, underground gas tanks, lead paint or other contamination.  Site remediation would then “incentivize investment and jumpstart redevelopment and area-wide revitalization.”

Initial progress was promising. The EPA signed off on the grant the following spring, with the study scheduled for completion by September 30, 2024. Draper Aden Associates, a Virginia-based consulting engineer, was retained for the heavy lifting. And in keeping with an announced emphasis on “community engagement,” the city and its consultants planned a series of public meetings over a six-month period “to position the impacted community at the forefront as champions for these revitalization initiatives.”

Study oversight and community engagement was to be provided by the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group (BRAG), a consortium of nine “partners” that would “take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.” Several BRAG members—including the Valley Mission, the Salvation Army and the Staunton Redevelopment/Housing Authority—dealt with housing issues, holding out the promise that this would not be a neglected focus in a process that could easily favor commercial interests. The West End Business Association and Staunton’s West End Alliance, meanwhile, were singled out as being “strongly committed to the preservation and revitalization of West End and will take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.”

Indeed, BRAG was to play a crucial role in ensuring that the West End wouldn’t simply become a colonial outpost for a bunch of remote planners parachuting in. It would “meet quarterly to assist City staff in site selection and cleanup/reuse planning,” according to the grant application, which added that BRAG and the city would involve representatives “of neighborhoods most directly impacted by proposed redevelopment projects.” Moreover, “partner organizations like the Salvation Army and Valley Mission will represent disadvantaged communities to communicate their needs and disseminate information, which will be beneficial for constituents with limited internet and/or phone access.”

But of course, man plans and God laughs.

Four years on, the brownfields study is still incomplete. Draper Aden Associates has been gobbled up by a larger firm which, if city staff are to be believed, is extremely slow in responding to information requests about its activities. The planned series of public hearings was severely whittled down over Covid concerns. And BRAG? Never happened. The West End Alliance apparently no longer exists as a separate entity. The other BRAG “partners” never met as a group, had nothing to do with selecting brownfield sites for study, and indeed seem largely ignorant of their supposed role.

The disadvantaged communities presumably remain just that.

THERE IS ONE SILVER LINING to this $300,000 brown cloud, and that’s the redevelopment of the former Chestnut Hill Shopping Center. As it happens, this was one of three “priority” sites identified by the grant application because of “their potential to catalyze additional investment and revitalization of West End, as well as to extend redevelopment opportunities.”  That the vacant shopping center happened to meet the city’s need for some place to build a new courthouse was a fortuitous accident, not the result of careful planning, but you take your wins where you can. Will a courthouse turn out to be the best use of that property in the interests of West End revitalization?  Maybe, maybe not, but in any case a moot point now.

But what of the other two “priority” sites that were identified by the grant application, carefully picked from among more than 25 candidates chosen for their “potential to change the blighted landscape and revitalize the stagnant economy in the target area”?  The first is a one-acre site of a salvage yard that closed in 2011, apparently targeted because of its high potential for contaminating Lewis Creek with heavy metals, PCBs and volatile organic compounds. In other words, not much redevelopment potential but a possible environmental disaster if not attended.

The third of the three sites, however, amounts to an enormous blank slate that could accommodate the most ambitious of developments. Bounded by Morris Mill Road on the north and east, the former Unifi Manufacturing site spans approximately 50 acres and has been vacant since 2008. Immediately to its south is a vacant, wooded tract of an additional 27 acres, which backs onto a Food Lion supermarket, while a connecting vacant lot on the east side of the Food Lion could give direct access to West Beverley Street. Ware Elementary and Shelburne Middle schools are within easy walking distance.

All of which is to say, the West End has a void that screams for development. City maps of the West End core study area and of a proposed enterprise zone look like an upside-down saucepan, with the handle running from downtown along West Beverley, then flaring out along Morris Mill Road to the city boundary. The West End Revitalization Plan has a map on page 28 that includes a large green area, matching exactly the description provided in the preceding paragraph, labeled “redevelopable parcels.”  As the grant application summarized, “the site’s proximity to schools and residences make it a high priority for investigation and redevelopment.”

Indeed—but no. The UniFi site is history. Just don’t try to figure out why.

Consider the grant application’s effusive embrace of community engagement: “To maintain progress throughout the grant period, the QEP [Qualified Environmental Professional] will prepare monthly reports to the City and BRAG in compliance with the approved EPA Cooperative Agreement Work Plan, which will summarize activities, e.g. milestones achieved, issues encountered, and budget/schedule updates. These will be used to gauge progress, communicate with constituents and prepare quarterly performance reports.”

Those quarterly reports, however, are too sketchy to be of use to anyone. For example, the decision to extend the initial three-year grant by an additional year is described thus: “An Extension Amendment Request was submitted to EPA as well as updated contact sheet siting a new Grant Recipient Representative.” No reason given why more time was needed—but at least the change was noted. Not so for the UniFi site, which after more than a year of investigation, abruptly dropped off the radar at the end of 2023. The quarterly reports don’t even acknowledge the deep-sixing of its largest “high priority” site, much less a reason for the radical change. On the other hand, the quarterly reports do make sporadic mention of other possible brownfields sites, such as Don’s Auto Repair and Gypsy Hill Park, but again without any explanation.

Does anyone living or working in the West End have the slightest idea that the brownfield study is still chugging along? Highly unlikely. But just as much in the dark are city leaders and planners, all of whom—from council members to the city manager to the head of the planning department—are new to their positions since the grant application was submitted and unable to answer even basic questions, such as why Gypsy Hill Park belatedly became part of a West End brownfield study. This is a ship that has been set adrift, and one can only hope it will eventually touch shore undamaged.

The good news, if one can call it that, is that as of the end of March the study had eaten up only 54% of the original grant money. Of course, that does raise the question of how the city will reasonably spend the remaining $138,000 before Sept. 30—or whether it will seek yet another extension. Maybe it should turn to the West End’s residents for answers. Just don’t look to BRAG for help.

Seeking your thoughts—kinda

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

It’s a fair guess that most Stauntonians have never heard of the city’s comprehensive plan, much less seen it, and that’s not really surprising. The 450-page document states quite explicitly on its cover page that it was prepared for the Staunton Planning Commission, which makes it sound more arcane than it is. The current version is five years old, so a whole lot of water has gone under the bridge—quite literally, in the case of downtown—since it was drafted. And all the people who you might expect would be most involved in its implementation are no longer there: every city council member, the city manager and the city’s director of community development have moved on since the plan was completed.

Then again, much of Staunton’s Comprehensive Plan actually doesn’t, well . . . plan anything, so it’s easy to ignore. While the Commonwealth of Virginia requires every municipality to prepare such plans “with the purpose of guiding and accomplishing a coordinated, adjusted and harmonious development of the territory,” the Commonwealth Code also states that that the plan should be a survey of that municipality’s assets and challenges—and that’s the basket in which Staunton placed most of its eggs. The result is more descriptive than prescriptive, an inventory of the Staunton that existed in 2018 but with few attempts at guidance for the near future, never mind to the plan’s supposed end date of 2040.

But now we have a chance for a do-over. Starting last year, city staff, consultants and a small group of Staunton residents have been revising the plan to make it more up-to-date and, we can hope, make it more of a planning tool than it has been. That process has included seeking input from Stauntonians as to what they think should be in the plan, through online surveys and a series of public meetings, and the next such meeting—an open house at Staunton High School—is less than a month off. Anyone concerned about the city’s future should make an effort to be there: Wednesday, June 25, between 5:30 and 7 p.m.

That said, I wouldn’t be my usual curmudgeonly self if I didn’t add a cautionary note. Despite the city’s apparently diligent attempts to solicit public opinion about various plans, these efforts often have an unfortunately performative aspect to them. The ritual involves lots of easels covered with large white sheets of paper, lots of small stick-on dots in various colors, and an abundance of post-its of obviously limited size on which to scribble fresh ideas. Those in attendance are asked to respond to various questions about whatever the city thinks should be of greatest concern to them, and the answers are subsequently collated, summarized, mentioned in final plan documents—and, generally, thereafter ignored.

Does that sound harsh? Consider, then, the West End Revitalization Plan, completed last summer and subsequently adopted by the city council. That plan also went through a pro forma attempt to get input from West End residents, including public meetings and an online survey. The meetings made it abundantly clear that public “concerns about property upkeep and affordable housing” were among the area’s most notable “challenges.” The online survey disclosed that of eight possible concerns, West End respondents thought that “improved upkeep of existing housing” was the second most “important” or “very important,” just four votes behind the 194 cast for “adding new shops, stores and services.”

How seriously were those views taken? The final, adopted plan is big on retail improvements but scarcely gives a nod to housing concerns. Indeed, only one of 17 proposed actions in the plan directly addresses housing rehabilitation, and does so in the most dismissive way possible by suggesting simply that the city “connect residents to existing resources.” Which is to say, the West End doesn’t have a problem with property upkeep and affordable housing, it has a communication problem.

It therefore will be interesting to see to what extent public input registers in this far broader, city-wide planning document. One possible marker was provided by the Jan. 22 open house, the first of three, when 106 local residents registered their attendance (although city officials believe the actual number attending was higher) and repeatedly voiced support for mixed-use development. Attendees emphasized “the need for mixed-use areas that integrate homes, shops, and parks to create vibrant neighborhoods,” according to a summary of comments under “land use.”  Similarly, in a summary under “economic resources & development,” attendees “highlighted the need for increased mixed-use development and support for small businesses in less densely populated areas.”

The summarized comments about housing, meanwhile, illustrate an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what it takes to create a truly dynamic community. Attendees “highlighted the need for affordable housing for their workforce, concerns about rising prices, the lack of options for low-income and middle-income households, and . . . a pressing need for better connectivity between residential areas [and] increased density of housing.”

The emphasis on mixed-use developments and increased housing density, in a city largely mired in a century-old land-use philosophy known as Euclidean zoning, is in some ways revolutionary. Euclidean zoning (the name comes from a village in Ohio, not the Greek mathematician) separates land uses by type—residential, commercial, retail, industrial, etc.—each into their own zones or areas. That may be desirable in preventing a factory or a slaughterhouse from being plopped down next to a church or apartment complex, but it also creates the largely fragmented land-use pattern we have today, with the notable exception of downtown. Add to that a residential zoning preference for detached single-family homes, with broad swaths of the city’s 20 square miles zoned R-1 (maximum of three homes per acre) and R-2 (maximum of five), and the result is a pleasantly bland, dispersed suburban landscape on which builders can’t afford to build homes for low- and middle-income families.

One possible work-around for developers is to seek special use permits so they can build the mixed-use and denser housing that city residents attending these sessions say we need—but for several presumably obvious reasons, that’s not an attractive option. Nor is it happening in any meaningful way. The alternative, therefore, is for those working on the comprehensive plan update to rework the city’s zoning code—to revise the rules and maps that keep things the way they are—so that standards for higher density and mixed-use developments are written into the code, creating “by right” options for developers. No more having to say “Mother, may I please?”

Whether that in fact will happen is . . . let’s just say not likely. One problem with these sounding-board sessions with the public is that they come at a time when the plan revisions are already well underway, so there’s a natural resistance to taking on big new projects—and rewriting zoning ordinances is just about as big as they come. Then there’s the problem of public backlash. Although the Stauntonians attending these open houses may be largely in favor of such changes, they also tend to be more actively engaged in civic affairs than the majority of the population—and a lot of those folks would be aghast at the idea that there could be a wholesale reordering of the land-use landscape ( just one of the problems facing developers seeking special use permits). Winning them over, or at least muting their resistance, would take time, public education and reassurance.

So I’m not optimistic that these open houses and other attempts to solicit public input will make any meaningful difference. The ship’s course is fairly well set, and any comments that might adjust its bearings are no more likely to change the outcome than occurred with the West End Revitalization Plan. But still. The arguments are worth making, if only to lay one more brick against the day when they finally will make a difference.

What we need is a matchmaker

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developers finally get a seat

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get serious about the stats we use

(Reading time: 9 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE CAN LEARN AT LEAST TWO things from all this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t expect much from United Way

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have to know what we don’t know

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter is coming

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-awaited housing study a bust

(Reading time: 12 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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