Tag: accessory dwelling units

A glimmer of hope for housing

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

The new Staunton Housing Commission, the city’s attempt to address issues of homelessness and an inadequate supply of affordable housing, got off to a rocky start with its first meeting last week. Two of its nine members were not present, and the meeting itself—one of only four scheduled for this year—occurred two months later than initially scheduled. Moreover, much of the meeting was marked by red flags waved by city planner Rebecca Joyce, who asked commission members to trust her efforts over the next year to steer their work.  

“We have to stay in a certain lane,” Joyce cautioned, warning against scattershot thinking on the one hand and thinking there is a magic formula to fix everything on the other. “Guard rails” were mentioned repeatedly.

For all that, the 30 minutes or so of group discussion that took place during the 75-minute session were the liveliest on the subject since the commission’s progenitor, the Staunton Housing Strategy Group, started meeting 18 months ago. This was, in part, due to the addition of new voices and perspectives that were notably absent from the strategy group, including those of Robin Miller, a developer, and Hans B. Kettering, a young man searching for housing he can afford while working for Fisher Auto Parts. So perhaps there’s hope for some innovative thinking.

One hint of a possible clash of ideas and values came, interestingly enough, from city vice mayor Brad Arrowood, who was an early proponent of creating such a commission. Noting that Staunton has more cows than most cities its size because of its more than 2,000 acres (of less than 13,000 total) zoned for agricultural use, Arrowood suggested that this flat and gently rolling land could eventually be developed for housing.  That contrasted with an observation made later in the meeting by Miller, the developer, who noted that building out a road map—that is, building roads, curbs, sidewalks and utilities, including electric, water and sewer lines, plus storm drains—currently costs between $1,700 and $2,000 a linear foot.

Imagine what that means for an entire traditional subdivision. With the exception of Bell’s Lane, a narrow asphalt road, Staunton’s ag-forestal district has none of that infrastructure, so building housing there will be enormously expensive. So expensive, in fact, that there’s only two ways it can happen: either by building very large, very expensive homes, or by building lots and lots of homes within a much smaller footprint. Easier, cheaper and faster, Miller offered, would be to fill in what’s already here, building on vacant lots in the developed parts of Staunton. Indeed, he added, one of the quickest ways Staunton could generate more affordable housing would be to allow greater density overall, and to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in particular.

ADUs have become exactly the kind of quick-fix housing solution that makes Joyce fret, universally offered as a sure-fire way to get more people housed by allowing property owners to build second or even third homes on their existing lots. They invariably come up in these discussions because they’ve become so widespread—elsewhere. Miller mentioned that Richmond just recently adopted an ADU ordinance, despite heavy opposition. A map I published back in November showed the stark contrast locally, with Staunton and Waynesboro as non-ADU islands surrounded by the ADU-receptive sea of Augusta County.

Although the Staunton Housing Strategy Group ostensibly embraced the ADU approach, the formal housing strategy it presented to city council last fall slow-walks the concept—and one possible reason was advanced by Arrowood, who told last week’s commission meeting that it’s fraught with possible unintended consequences. What if, he suggested, homeowners on large lots put up several ADUs, only to position them as short-term rentals, or Airbnbs?  Staunton would be helpless to prevent a transformation of quiet residential neighborhoods into beehives of transient activity, while scarcely increasing the amount of affordable housing for teachers, fire fighters and other essential workers.

The obvious response is not to obstruct ADUs but to regulate Airbnbs, as other Virginia localities already do. Albemarle County, for example, requires short-term rentals to be on a minimum of five acres with a rural zoning.  But a regulatory approach runs into another philosophical roadblock, which Arrowood also articulated and which goes a long way toward explaining why Staunton is in the spot it’s in: houses are private property. They’re not just homes, but financial assets.  Airbnbs are property owners’ entrepreneurial effort to better themselves, comparable to the boarding houses of yore, when widows would let out their spare rooms to working class stiffs who couldn’t afford their own homes. Any attempt to regulate such enterprise would be downright un-American.

Airbnbs, which are rented by the day, week or month to transient guests, are nothing like boarding houses, but the comparison appeals to a certain rosy nostalgia. It also highlights the tension, albeit not one that was further explored at last week’s commission meeting, between two opposing views of how we move from here. On the one hand, an assertive embrace of a higher density and infill strategy that builds on what already exists; on the other, a long-range contemplation of how a blank canvas, otherwise known as the ag-forestal district, might be shaped while avoiding upsetting the status quo.

As with many such tensions, the outcome most probably will lie somewhere between the two. But it will be interesting, in the months ahead, to see how clearly these differences are articulated by commission members and how they’re resolved. That could make for more of the animated conversation that showed briefly last week, before Joyce threw up those guard rails, and just might lead to a more durable and meaningful consensus.

* * *

March 11 postscript/clarification: I’ve misstated Hans Kettering’s interest in local housing issues, as he wrote to let me know that he has decent housing and an amicable relationship with his landlord. As Hans further noted, “I was speaking for friends and people of the community that can’t find anything in Staunton at a reasonable price.” My apologies for my mistake.

Housing pathway full of potholes

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.