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The Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference just wrapped up its 2025 get-together, with 800 or so housing advocates from all parts of Virginia descending on Roanoke to grapple with the key question of the day: how do we make housing more affordable? The answer, at least according to two plenary speakers, requires revamping zoning codes that are so prohibitively restrictive they result in “legally-mandated scarcity,” as one of them put it.
All that and more is deserving of more detailed analysis, which I’ll get into in a separate post. But whatever the merits of zoning reform, a different answer to the question of how we can get more affordable housing was provided by a breakout panel with the promising title, “Designing for Dignity: Scaling Permanent Supportive Housing in the Suburbs.” Spoiler alert: the answer is “we won’t,” because we’re losing all sense of perspective.
The panel seemed promising. Its two key speakers were Tara Ruszkowski, executive director of the Lamb Center, which among its other good deeds operates a day shelter for the homeless in Fairfax County; and Taylor Stout, senior project manager for Wesley Housing, a long-time non-profit developer of affordable housing in Virginia and Washington, D.C. Together, they had collaborated on creating a housing project, Beacon Landing, that had its ground-breaking just a couple of weeks ago, and they were at the conference to explain how they overcame various obstacles and assembled 13 different funding sources to reach that point.
As with the panel, Beacon Landing seems like a great idea. Replacing an old motel in a commercial and industrial area with a new five-story building, it will have 54 units of 400 square feet apiece for long-term residents referred by the county’s coordinated entry system, which is to say, people who already are or are at high risk of becoming homeless. In addition to furnished apartments, Beacon Landing will have a large community room, an outside terrace for socializing, a demonstration kitchen for cooking lessons, and case manager offices for staff to provide wrap-around services and oversight.
That something of the sort—and much more—is needed is unquestionable. The county’s Point in Time (PIT) count of the homeless this year was 1,322, a 3% increase from 2024 and up 27% from 2020. Providing supportive housing for 54 of that number may seem like barely scratching the surface, but it’s a start. And as people going into Beacon Landing gain their footing and move on to a bigger and better life, others will come in behind them, making the project’s overall impact far larger than its overall size suggests.
But here’s a wake-up call: the capital expenditure for this project is $33.1 million (no wonder it required 13 funding sources!). That’s just the up-front costs of creating the facility and doesn’t include operating costs, including a payroll of six to seven full-time employees that the Lamb Center says will be needed. The math is insane. The median sales price of a single-family home in Fairfax County is currently around $715,000, or approximately $351 per square foot. Beacon Landing’s per-unit cost comes in at $613,000, or around $1,500 a square foot. True, it can be argued that the cost of the additional common and program areas within the building should be subtracted from the total before making comparisons, but it’s inconceivable that doing so would reduce the per-unit cost to anything approaching $351 a square foot.
There undoubtedly are many arguments the Lamb Center and Wesley Housing can make to justify a seemingly over-the-top acquisition and construction budget, but the bottom line remains that Beacon Landing will be spending enough money to buy 46 single-family homes so it can house 54 people in a fraction of the space. For people already struggling to maintain mortgage payments or to meet their rent, that can seem . . . profligate?
The mystery is that this panel was presented as “scaling” permanent supportive housing, leaving unanswered the question of scaling for what? or where? How many projects of this sort can any locality afford? How many, looking for ways to help their most vulnerable unhoused residents, would look at Beacon Landing and throw up their hands at the sheer impossibility of such a model working for them? What is the message Beacon Landing is sending to anyone concerned about the growing number of homeless people in our communities?
Valley Supportive Housing, which provides supportive housing in Staunton for 68 tenants, does so in a dozen modest structures acquired over the years through conventional loans and grants of various sorts. I’m betting its director, Lou Siegel, would have choked on his coffee had he attended the housing conference and sat in on the “Designing for Dignity” panel. It’s a good thing for his health that he stayed home.
Looking askance 