Tag: cottage courts

Kicking the ADU can down the road

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

To better understand why Staunton can’t get a handle on its lack of sufficient affordable housing, consider the June 18 meeting of its Planning Commission. Dominating the 90-minute session was a meandering and inconclusive conversation about a subject the commission has largely ignored, over which it has little control, but about which it is willing to entertain dystopian fantasies. In doing so, it made an inadvertent argument for renaming itself, perhaps as the Reaction Commission. Or the Let’s-First-See-What-Everyone-Else-Is-Doing Commission.

Among Staunton’s most pressing problems is its largely acknowledged if imprecisely documented shortage of housing that local residents making local wages can actually afford. There just isn’t enough of it to go around in the first place, so what’s available is priced out of reach. The obvious solution is to build more housing that is smaller and less expensive, leading to the equally obvious question: why isn’t that happening? And the obvious candidate to answer that question is the provocatively named Planning Commission (there’s also the newly formed Housing Commission, but that bunch is still trying to figure out what it’s doing), which one might think is currently consumed with trying to cut the Gordian knot of failed housing policy. One would be mistaken.

True, there are numerous reasons why Staunton has an insufficient housing supply, reasons that are at work all across the country and most of which are quite out of reach of a mere five Stauntonians meeting once a month, mostly to review rezoning requests. The cost of construction materials has sky-rocketed since the pandemic, the ranks of skilled construction workers have been depleted by Trump’s xenophobic deportation policies, interest rates are high and apparently poised to go higher. Those aren’t things a local planning commission can affect. But there’s also the matter of housing design and density, and that fits squarely within the planning commission’s wheelhouse. It’s also something the commission avoids looking at too closely.

Strange though it might seem, there’s not enough land available for building small homes in Staunton. With an average population density of just over two people per acre, it might appear that Staunton has lots of room for additional housing. But parks and agricultural districts and heavy industry whittle down the amount of land suitable for development. So too with land devoted to roads and parking lots, as well as land that’s too steep or too rocky or subject to flooding. There is land available for sizeable developments, as evidenced by the recently announced 267-home  McIntosh Village, but that’s big money chasing market-rate housing that will be too big and too expensive for empty nesters or service worker paychecks.

But then there’s our fondness for zoning that deliberately spaces homes far apart, allowing few homes per acre and dictating setbacks and minimum lot sizes and maximum lot coverage—our self-imposed limitations on what’s possible, in other words. Not geography or geology, but the very sort of thing that a planning commission concerned about an adequate housing supply for its existing population should be examining.

Just how inadequately it is doing so was on display June 18, when the commission was presented with a proposed amendment of the city zoning code that would clear the way for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built pretty much anywhere Staunton allows housing.  The proposed revision was not something the Planning Commission had solicited. Nor was it sought by the Housing Commission, which has been slow-walking the ADU idea to some future chin-stroking evaluation. It was instead mandated by the Virginia General Assembly, which to its credit got fed up with all the wheel-spinning in the provinces and adopted this past session a bill that overrides local zoning authority.

Most succinctly, the state is mandating that as of July 1, 2027, ADUs are to be permitted by right—that is, without requiring “May I?” special-use review—in all zoning districts throughout the Commonwealth that allow single family use. ADUs are defined as “an attached or detached dwelling” that provides “complete independent living facilities for one or more individuals.” There are restrictions on size and placement, as well as parking and building code requirements, but basically the new law opens the door for homeowners to double their capacity. It could be with a backyard cottage, a basement apartment, a garage with a second-floor apartment. The additional space could be rented out, or it could house an aging parent or adult child. Best of all, the increase in the city’s housing stock will come without requiring any of the new roads, storm water management, water and sewer lines and other infrastructure that come with a new subdivision.

Planning commission reaction? Mixed but generally aghast. Commission member Dale Hansen, fantasizing about slap-dash cabins with hot plates and composting toilets popping up in backyards, said he wants to see some kind of allowance for ADUs “but not getting too crazy, and I don’t know how to regulate crazy,” eliciting sympathetic chuckles from other commissioners. The way the law is written, Hansen complained, “It’s sort of the Wild West—anyone who wants one can get one.” Well, yeah. That’s the idea.

Commission chair Jessica Robinson summarized the commission’s approach to the idea of getting ahead of an issue by asserting, “I don’t want to be a trailblazer.” No fear there—the state has already taken on that mantle—but because Staunton doesn’t have to amend its zoning code before next July, Robinson clearly is hoping to kick the can down the road. “I don’t think it’s impossible that people will start pushing back on this and that at the next General Assembly session it gets put off further?” she suggested, albeit on a questioning note. “And I think we should wait and see and make sure it survives all that.”

There was talk among the commissioners about seeing what zoning amendments other cities are writing—“Let them fail first, before we fail,” Hansen offered helpfully—and a suggestion that perhaps the Housing Commission could provide helpful insights. There was musing about feeling like “deer in the headlights.” None of it grappled with the fact that Virginia now has an explicit law to which Staunton must conform, without a lot of room for creative embellishments or escape clauses, which means there are only so many ways the city’s zoning code can be amended to be in compliance. The rest is wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that the planning commission comprehends just how much the regulatory landscape is shifting beneath its feet. For the state to wade into a zoning issue—one of the few areas of responsibility reserved for localities—is huge. (See also the new state law that gives churches the by-right power to build affordable housing on their property.) At the same time, the commission’s tone-deaf approach to ADUs suggests its members haven’t been paying attention either to the ADU concept or to the housing needs of their neighbors.  ADUs as a relief valve for housing pressures have been around for years—long enough to be a significant part of the conversation at last year’s Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference, as I wrote last fall, and long enough to be discussed by the city’s Housing Strategy Group and in Comprehensive Plan ruminations. The problem locally is that it’s been just that—talk—and little more, as if a bunch of old folks were sitting around discussing the desirability of going to heaven.

The green and (to a lesser extent) the black area in the graph above are prime sources of potential tenants for ADUs and now comprise substantially more than 50% of all households.

Nor will ADUs be the end of it. In addition to having a high percentage of relatively low-wage workers, Staunton has a higher percentage of elderly residents than the national average. It’s sobering, therefore, to learn that the fastest growing group of people entering homelessness are those 55 and older—people increasingly on fixed incomes, often in poor health, who can no longer afford to live in the city in which they were raised or worked or raised their own families. ADUs are not only more appropriately sized for these populations, which don’t need multiple bedrooms or a backyard, but can be built more cheaply and therefore rented for less than single-family homes. But they’re only one possible approach.

Other housing variations that are excluded from permitted uses within current zoning regulations, such as cottage courts, may be next. Expect pressure to grow for allowing single-family home conversions into duplexes or triplexes by right, or for eliminating lot size minimums in established neighborhoods, or for eliminating all parking mandates for housing, thereby freeing up more land for infill development. None of these are novel concepts in the wider world, although they are locally. All should enter into the planning (and housing) commission’s awareness if it wants to avoid future “deer in the headlights” moments, and if it intends to take seriously the “planning” part of its mandate.    

Instead, the commission won’t be meeting again until August, when it’s not clear whether the proposed ADU revisions to the city code it receives will be substantively different from what it’s already seen. The city’s community development planners have been given next to no guidance on what changes to make, beyond a vaguely worded request to “keep refining it.” At some point the commission will have to hold a public hearing on the proposed changes; next April was suggested as a good choice.

No sense in rushing things. Or starting them, for that matter.

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.