Gimme shelter

Zoning: new wine in old wineskins

Nov. 28: Our zoning code, designed for a different age with different demographics and housing needs, has become a planning strait jacket that almost invisibly shapes our built environment. If we want to be truly serious about addressing our shortage of affordable and workforce housing, we first must get a better understanding of the rules that have brought us to this point—and understand that the rules we’ve made are rules we can change.

Zoned out over affordable housing

Nov. 22: If there was one dominant theme at the Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference this past week, it was zoning—zoning and how it gets in the way of creating sufficient affordable housing. Or as one prominent speaker asserted, when it comes to affordable housing, zoning results in “legally mandated scarcity.” The question that needs to be asked is why we’re guiding today’s land-use decisions with 60-year-old sensibilities.

How not to read the (housing) room

Nov. 21: The Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference the past few days opened on the theme of “Housing Reimagined,” but a panel spotlighting a supportive housing project in Fairfax County beggared the imagination: $33.1 million to house 54 people in apartments of 400 square feet each. That works out to $612,963 per capita, in a county where the median sales price of a single-family home of 2,000 square feet is $715,000. You do the math.

Homelessness as a kick in the pants

Nov. 12: Every homeless person you pass in the street is a red flag that our system isn’t working—that a market economy that works to increase supply to meet demand has failed. But despite various plans and studies that have attempted to understand why that is, none have looked at the most prominent obstacle to sufficient affordable housing: a zoning code that makes affordable housing too costly to build.

RV myth denies housing realities

Nov. 8: It’s become a commonplace that ratty trailers and motorcoaches lining city streets have become the housing of last resort for a nation without enough homes to go around. But there’s an upscale version of this phenomenon, known as PMRVs, that has the RV industry tying itself in knots explaining why these houses on wheels are just like your car —and therefore shouldn’t have to meet housing standards.

Housing advocates: it’s all a dream

October 17: A forum that was supposed to spotlight teen homelessness instead underscored how little we have grappled with root causes of the problem. We’re now well into the fourth year of housing unaffordability that exceeds levels set in the “Great Recession,” which resulted in massive government intervention that is completely missing this time around.

Ambling toward a housing disaster

October 11: Federal funding spigots are being turned off, entire programs designed to get people off the streets and into housing so they can deal with their underlying issues are being wiped out, and winter’s approach will exacerbate the problems faced by people without sanctioned shelters. The local response? Taking three years to create a housing commission and stalling on funding for a day center, while local residents agitate about drug addiction and mental illness that they haven’t actually witnessed.

Tell ’em the Greeks sent you

July 11: When two world wars, the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the Great Depression devastated Greece’s housing stock, the people of Athens came up with a novel approach to real estate finance: antiparochi, otherwise called “flats for land.” Could something similar be implemented in Staunton to finally fill the affordable housing shortage?

Houses of God, homes for people

June 18: There are, by one count, 76 churches in Staunton—one for every 334 city residents, or roughly three times the national average. With congregations everywhere getting older and smaller, many can no longer afford to maintain their properties; some, seeing the handwriting on the wall, have decided to repurpose their buildings to meet more secular needs.

West End: nothing to BRAG about

June 9: Staunton’s brownfields study, financed by an EPA grant, was to be overseen by a consortium of nine “partners” dubbed the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group, or BRAG. Four years later, with the study still incomplete, the partners have never met—and, indeed, apparently don’t even know they had a role to play in representing the communities the study is supposed to benefit.

Seeking your thoughts—kinda, sorta

May 27: Staunton’s existing Comprehensive Plan is five years old and in the process of being updated. That’s good news, given that the existing “plan” does little of the sort, especially when it comes to housing. The bad news—if this planning effort follows precedent—is that the community input the city is so diligently seeking will be largely ignored to the extent it colors outside the lines of conventional thinking.

What we need is a matchmaker

May 23: The main resources to get anything done are money and people—and with money at all levels drying up, the only way we’re going to meet our housing and other needs is by tapping our human resources. What we need is a “people broker,” someone who can match potential volunteers with projects and services that need their help.

Developers finally get a seat

May 11: For all the meetings, studies, committees and discussions about affordable housing of the last 12 to 18 months, one group you might think would be central to solving the problem has been conspicuously absent from the table—until now. Unfortunately, what housing developers and builders had to say this week isn’t what city planners want to hear, so don’t count on this sort of break-through being repeated.

Get serious about the stats we use

April 21: Bad statistics make for bad comprehension of complex subjects, but they’re like fast food: readily available and easily consumed, giving a false sense of meeting one’s nutritional/informational needs. When it comes to understanding housing costs, that means avoiding a superficial “study” from the National Association of Home Builders in favor of, yes, denser but more meaningful alternatives.

Don’t expect much from the United Way

April 13: SAW United Way met an appropriate demise—but its Harrisonburg-based replacement doesn’t hold out much promise of providing meaningful assistance to local social service organizations. Not when it keeps 80% of its fund-raising for itself, with salaries eating up nearly half of all donations and more than a year’s worth of revenues squirreled away in securities and savings.

We have to know what we don’t know

March 31: Let’s face it: when it comes to local housing, we just don’t know much. Exhibit A is the recently released regional housing study, which is replete with outdated and incomplete data, but it’s far from unique. The problem is not only that we don’t have the information we need, but that the information we do have creates a false sense of authority. Statistics—even bad statistics—just look so damn definitive.

Winter is coming

March 17: The local Point in Time survey of the homeless—an annual one-night snapshot of how many people in the SAW region are sleeping in homeless shelters or on the streets—found 146 people, although the extreme cold suggests that some may have been missed. Three days later, the Trump chainsaw slashed funding to half-a-dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, decreed as “unnecessary.”

Long-awaited housing study a bust

March 7: Eight months overdue and diminished by insufficient, outmoded and at times just plainly inaccurate data, the greatly hyped regional housing study has finally been released. Its extensive menu of projects will keep local planners busy for years to come—mostly by scrambling to fill its information voids. But as far as helping remedy a severe shortage of affordable housing? Not so much.

PIT count: more inconvenient truths

Jan. 19: The annual snapshot of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters and on the streets will be taken in three days—less than a month after the national results for last year were released. That delay mutes its usefulness as a planning tool, but on the other hand, the outcome can be predicted even before the stats are in: the homeless population keeps growing from one year to the next, locally up nearly 29% from 2023 to 2024.

We all live on a knife’s edge

Dec. 26: Most of us, whether we admit it or not, live on a knife’s edge of possibilities, one misfortune away from ending up in a struggle to survive. Yet the help we might need is ever more limited and inaccessible: charitable giving is declining, volunteers are harder to recruit, everything is more expensive and, of course, federal funding of all kinds is being slashed. The human tendency in such circumstances is to blame the unfortunate for their situation, in a vain effort to convince ourselves that we are, somehow, different. We’re not.

On winter and a city spending spree

Nov. 23: Winter’s here, and with it the annual human pinball machine that bounces our local homeless population from one sleeping facility to another. We can—and should—commend the generosity of the 19 churches that provide such shelter for a week at a time. But we also should understand that such a Rube Goldberg approach to a community-wide problem is inherently fragile, unnecessarily complicated and a political cop-out, allowing municipal officials to avoid dealing with their most vulnerable constituents.

West End plan a half-baked dish

Oct. 23: The West End Revitalization Plan, released a couple of months ago after four years in the making, does an excellent job—of ignoring virtually all community input about upgrading the area’s housing stock. Then again, such myopia is par for the course for a city that historically viewed its housing supply (don’t even mention those without housing at all) as outside of its proper concerns, best left to the private sector and charitable organizations.

More Airbnbs mean less housing for all

Oct. 16: The practice of converting homes into mini-hotels, otherwise known as short-term rentals and successfully monetized by Airbnb and Homestay, is attractive to people with too much money who want to flesh out their portfolios with passive income streams. It also, alas, depletes the housing supply in an area with too little of it, and does so with virtually no oversight or regulation by the city.

Throw a party but ignore the guests?

Sept. 11: In this open letter to the Staunton city council, I argue that the West End Revitalization Strategies Plan—while more comprehensive and detailed than most city planning efforts—falls woefully short in addressing the needs of those who made the plan necessary in the first place: the people who live in the West End. As it turned out, the city council paid as little heed to my comments as it did to those of the West End’s residents.

The white paper that kicked things off

Sept. 3: (Fair warning: this is a long read) A flurry of studies and public meetings suggests that Staunton finally may be coming to grips with a housing crisis that has been years in the making. Just don’t hold your breath. Although fully a third of all city residents are but one misstep away from homelessness, the Queen City historically has been downright churlish on the subject of affordable housing, and its resistance to change is baked into its municipal character.