Staunton Planning Commission

Virginia goes where Staunton falters

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Why are local land-use decisions, as defined by building codes and zoning ordinances, left up to cities and counties? Why do federal and state governments generally relinquish their claim over this aspect of our lives?

The answer is seemingly obvious. The residents of Staunton (and Waynesboro and Augusta County) are far more aware of their local land-use needs than a bunch of politicians in Richmond or Washington, D.C. City councils and county boards of supervisors are closer to their constituents, and thus more responsive to their concerns at the grassroots level—and what is more grassroots than the homes we live in and the businesses we support? Local control is democracy in its purest form.

And yet. . . .

In just a couple of weeks we’ll reach the three-year anniversary of the first SAW Housing Summit, followed six months later by a second such assembly, the two events attracting scores of participants seemingly united by their concern over the area’s homeless population and its lack of sufficient affordable housing. Working groups were created, ideas were brainstormed, regular public luncheons on housing topics were scheduled. The city of Staunton assembled a housing strategy group that met for more than a year, culminating in the creation of . . . a housing commission that meets four times a year, apparently to continue talking.

That’s hardly gangbusters. All those consultant-driven meetings and community energy and self-satisfied hype produced not one additional affordable home, failed to remove even one homeless person from the streets. If local control is rooted in the idea that the lowest levels of government are most sensitive to the needs of their constituents, what Staunton’s political leadership has demonstrated is an understanding that its constituents need to talk about problems but not necessarily do something about them.

It’s sobering, therefore, to realize that the Virginia Assembly seemingly is more attuned to our local housing needs than we are. While we dithered locally, our state’s political leadership stepped into the breach this past year by adopting three bills that revoke local authority over certain housing issues and pass the initiative to the private sector. By doing so, the state essentially has concluded that local authorities are more of an obstacle than a constructive force in meeting their local constituents’ housing needs. The irony is that local officials are still waking up to the implications of what that means and of what lies ahead.

Here’s the rundown:

a) Manufactured Housing

An amendment to the Code of Virginia, effective as of this past March 31, explicitly prohibits localities from regulating manufactured homes more strictly than traditional “sticks-and-bricks” site-built homes. That means manufactured homes now may be placed on any lot that already permits single-family use; prior to this amendment, manufactured homes were restricted primarily to agricultural zoning districts, which is why you see them in the county but not in the city.

That could now change, and to the extent that “manufactured homes” are synonymous with “travel trailers,” the results may not be to everyone’s liking. Although the city’s planners are recommending a code amendment to require such homes be affixed to a continuous perimeter foundation, eliminating the unsightly skirting that conceals the space beneath them, the state’s amendment otherwise opens the door to single-, double- and even triple-wide trailers to be moved into residential neighborhoods. And while the state change limits issuance of certificates of occupancy to five years following the date of manufacture—meaning you couldn’t bring in a 10-year old trailer and try to have it approved as a permanent residence—the fact remains that many house trailers are constructed according to the CATNAP principle: Cheapest Available Technology Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution.

On the other hand, the state change also opens the door to innovative construction methods that can be faster, cheaper and more efficient than traditional on-site construction. “Manufactured home,” as defined by state law, simply means a structure that is transportable in one or more sections, each eight or more feet wide and 40 feet or longer, that is designed to be used as a single-family dwelling. That definition includes not just conventional house trailers, but prefab housing that is built in panels or modules in a controlled environment before being transported and assembled at their final destination.

That sort of thing is still a novelty in the U.S., thanks in part to the kind of zoning restrictions that are now struck down, but is far more common overseas. About 15% of Japan’s new housing is built this way, as are nearly 80% of the homes in Sweden, a country that has refined its approach out of climatic necessity. A factory setting offers numerous possibilities for automation, standardization and quality control, and there are some fledgling efforts in the U.S. to adopt this model for obvious reasons of lower cost and product consistency. Whether prefab housing will get a local foothold is an altogether different question—although as an aside, it sure seems worth investigating, by someone with just a bit of vision, as a possible manufacturing tenant for Staunton Crossing.

b) YIGBY housing

Officially known as the Faith in Housing Act, the “yes in God’s backyard” legislation requires that localities permit qualifying affordable housing developments “by right”—meaning no special permits or review are required—on properties owned by tax-exempt religious organizations and 501(c)3 nonprofits. The new law will become effective Jan. 1, when it will supersede any local restrictions on building density, height or setbacks, in an effort to help declining church congregations make better use of their underutilized property. (It should be noted that the law sunsets after four years.)

The problem of once-robust congregations struggling to maintain buildings and property they can no longer afford is particularly acute in Staunton, which has 76 churches by one local count, or roughly three times the national per capita ratio. Some, like the Marquis Memorial United Methodist Church, have multiple vacant buildings and sit on a couple of acres of lawn and parking lots devoid of more than a handful of cars. But Marquis Memorial is hardly singular, and the Central Shenandoah Planning District, which encompasses the SAW area, has 970 parcels owned by faith-based organizations, totaling more than 2,700 acres.

The new state law smooths the way for congregations wanting to build housing on their property, providing that at least 60% of the homes are reserved for affordable housing, defined as no more than 80% of the median income for rental units and 120% of the median for homes that are sold. With Staunton’s median household income at approximately $66,000 and “affordable housing” defined as no more than 25% to 30% of household income, that would result in monthly rents of no more than $1,100 to $1,320.

Those are still relatively high housing costs for individuals at the low end of the wage scale, but manageable for working couples. But as with the manufactured housing initiative, there are aspects of this code change that may irk some Staunton residents. For example, the city will have to allow a minimum of 20 housing units per acre, as well as building heights of 45 feet (with exceptions in historic districts), regardless of surrounding land use. The developments also may use up to 30% of their floor area for publicly accessible non-residential uses that are “ancillary” to the organization’s mission, including child-care centers, health clinics, coffee shops, fund-raising thrift shops, and so on.

The Staunton planning commission, presented with these changes in state law, authorized city staff at its Sept. 17 meeting to draft the necessary zoning code amendments, so watch for more developments here.

c) Accessory Dwelling Units

If there was one housing initiative that the city’s nascent housing commission seemed to take seriously, albeit in the same ponderous manner with which the city has approached all housing issues, it was the idea of breathing life into accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Incredibly, the state proved itself more nimble in getting there first.

Virginia’s authorization of ADUs basically doubles the carrying capacity of almost all residential land by allowing a second single-family dwelling on the same property, regardless of other zoning limitations. An ADU can be an attached or detached dwelling, must provide facilities for sleeping, eating, cooking and sanitation, and must be allowed under the same site plan and other approval procedures already required for traditional single-family homes. The state law permits localities to exercise only a few discretionary options, including the possibility of requiring that ADU leases must be for 30 days or more—in other words, seeking to ensure that ADUs can’t be built simply as income-generating short-term rentals.

The law also quite clearly states that localities may not “require compliance with any other requirements except as provided in this section,” a prohibition that the Staunton planning commission apparently decided to ignore.

Having wrestled with the ADU provisions for the past three months, the commission this past Thursday decided to ban short-term rentals in a primary dwelling “if the property contains an ADU.” That restriction, planning commission members contended, is a necessary “clarification” of the state law that closes the “loophole” created by the commission’s decision to ban ADUs from being used for short-term rentals. After all, what would prevent a homeowner from building an ADU—then moving into it as his own residence and turning his primary residence into a short-term rental? If the logic works in one direction, why not the other?

There are at least a couple of problems with that reasoning, starting with its disregard of the express prohibition on adding restrictions the state hasn’t already enumerated. But the bigger problem is that Staunton doesn’t have a permitting process for short-term rentals—nor, for that matter, does it have much of anything at all to say about the practice, in keeping with the city’s general aversion toward addressing housing issues. The only thing you need to operate an Airbnb in Staunton is to fill out a quaintly named, one-page “Homestay Registration” form with the city’s revenue commissioner and pay a $50 annual registration fee. Even that low hurdle may be getting ignored.

While the planning commission’s possibly impermissible amendment was offered on the pretext of honoring the intent of allowing ADUs—to create more permanent housing, a problem about which the planning commission has previously had little to say—both the commission and the city have avoided paying any attention to the root problem. It’s been nearly a decade since Staunton reluctantly addressed the issue of short-term rentals, and the number of Airbnbs in the city has proliferated ever since. Revisiting the phenomenon is certainly worthwhile, since short-term rentals indeed are whittling down the city’s available housing stock, but shoe-horning a limited backdoor limitation on them in this manner is just asking for a legal challenge.

Meanwhile, as planning commission members obsess over details over which they have no control, it appears they’ve been completely oblivious to the honking big problem in the language they’ve approved regarding ADU size. The state’s legislation does not cap the size of an ADU but does allow localities to do so, provided they allow a minimum of either 350 or 500 square feet, depending on lot size. That’s enough for a comfy cottage. Staunton’s ADU language, however, states simply that the ADU’s size “shall be less than” that of the primary dwelling—which is to say, there’s nothing to prevent the owner of a single-family home of 2,000 square feet from building a second home (lot size permitting) of, say, 1,990 square feet.

Interesting.

The ADU law won’t go into effect until July 1 of next year, so the planning commission has time to continue poking at the thing and doubtless will, regardless of how futile that might be. Then again, no one else seems to be paying much attention. No one spoke at Thursday’s public hearing on the matter, suggesting that the default mode on housing issues at the local level is indeed inaction—but just wait. Wait until the first single-wide pops up on one of those nice half-acre lots in Baldwin Acres. . . .

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.