Valley Mission – Looking askance

Homelessness as a kick in the pants

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

The calendar may insist that winter won’t arrive for another six weeks or so, but anyone who ventured outside Tuesday morning knew otherwise—not when the temperature hit a bone-chilling 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Tuesday was a good day, in other words, to be bundled up in a cozy bed or snuggled with a good book under a comforter in an easy chair. If you were that lucky.

It’s ironic, then, that just 12 hours earlier the city had held the third of three public workshops addressing proposed revisions to its comprehensive plan. Dozens of goals and draft strategies were outlined on multiple easels for Staunton residents to ponder and evaluate, spanning everything from land use, housing and economic development to transportation, public infrastructure and education. A section on health and human services stressed “active living, healthy food access and a clean environment.” Public safety, environmental resources, art and recreation all received due consideration.

But nowhere in all this planning and verbiage was there any mention of Staunton’s homeless population, or its needs and how those needs might be met. True, the section on housing gave a vague nod to promoting “affordable housing options for people of all incomes, needs and abilities,” but it remained silent regarding those unable to take advantage of such promotions. Nor did the draft comprehensive plan set a goal of eliminating homelessness by any particular date, and at no point did it acknowledge, much less prescribe, the kinds of services a homeless population requires. As far as the comprehensive plan is concerned, Staunton residents without permanent shelter simply don’t exist.

Winter’s advent will make that fiction harder to maintain.

Let’s take stock. A long-promised day shelter, offering homeless people refuge from extreme weather, remains as elusive as ever, in part because of a crumbling commitment by First Presbyterian Church to allow the use of its premises, but also because of a lack of financial and leadership backing from city council. Meanwhile, the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry (WARM), which was to operate the day shelter and which already provides emergency overnight shelters from late November through March, just published its schedule of participating churches for the upcoming season. Two of the week-long slots remain unfilled, at an exceptionally late date in the planning cycle, and there are reports that a third also may fall vacant because one of the congregations got cold feet and is backing out. Meanwhile, eight of the 18 overflow slots, for when the primary host churches receive more than 40 people, likewise remain unclaimed.

The Valley Mission, the area’s transitional shelter for homeless people working on reentry into the workforce and established housing, has 89 residents and is at full capacity—as it has been for several years—and is as far as ever from meeting its goal of a six-month turnover. “Yes, the average length of stay has been much longer than a year,” concedes director Sue Richardson. “In fact, we had two different women who were here four years each,” which puts a whole new meaning on “transitional.”

Then there’s Valley Supportive Housing, which provides affordable housing for clients diagnosed with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or addiction—people, in other words, who otherwise would be prime candidates for living on the streets. It also is at capacity, with 68 tenants, and has a waiting list of 43—the biggest it has been in at least a decade. “Two years ago it would have been half of that,” says director Lou Siegel, who says some of those on the waiting list are at Valley Mission, some are in temporary accommodations with family members, and some are living in their cars.

Both Valley Mission and Valley Supportive Housing are in a perpetual scramble for adequate financial backing, which comes in bits and drabs from local sources such as the city’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), the Community Fund and the Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro (CAPSAW). CDBG is all federal money, while CAPSAW receives nearly half of its funding from the federal government—which means both revenue streams are threatened by the current political climate.

Meanwhile, the area’s homeless population, while always difficult to assess accurately, is almost certainly not diminishing. WARM director Alec Gunn estimated this summer that the SAW region has 250 homeless people. And while this year’s Point in Time (PIT) count—a one-night snapshot—found fewer unsheltered homeless people than last year, bitterly cold weather the night of the census may have driven them deeper underground. Moreover, as a surprised Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection observed, of the 157 sheltered and unsheltered people who were counted by the 2025 PIT census, 71 reported they were homeless for the first time, up from 51 in 2024.

All of which is to say, the Staunton Comprehensive Plan as it’s currently coming together has a gaping hole big enough to push a shopping cart through.

FAILING TO SEE THE CITY’S HOMELESS population means the comprehensive planners also fail to ask why the homeless exist in the first place. If you don’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.

Homelessness, with some rare exceptions, is a signal that the system itself is failing. At its most basic doh! level, homelessness results from an inadequate supply of housing that people can afford. With rental vacancies at or around 2% and housing costs far outstripping the affordability provided by median incomes, the inevitable outcome has been compared to a game of musical chairs, in which the number of available chairs is always less than the number of people circling them. When the music stops, someone always ends up on the floor.

The obvious question: why is that? Why, in a market economy, isn’t more affordable housing being built? The law of supply and demand suggests that when demand exceeds supply, market forces will step up production until the imbalance is corrected. You want to end homelessness? Simple: build more housing at a price that people can afford. So . . . why isn’t that happening in Staunton?

The Staunton Housing Strategy Group spent a year purportedly wrestling with this very issue, ultimately producing this past summer what it optimistically called “Staunton’s Pathway to Affordable Housing and Housing for Working Families.” Yet it’s notable that of the 19 members of the workgroup, only one, Stu Armstrong, could be categorized as a builder or developer—that is, as someone from the supply side of the supply-demand equation. And Armstrong, as it turned out, didn’t attend a single one of the group’s four meetings.

What that left was an assortment of political leaders, planners and heads of non-profit social agencies holding a one-sided conversation about how best to plug the city’s housing deficits. The result was a set of 11 strategies that, while not entirely without merit, only tangentially address the critical question of how to increase the city’s stock of affordable housing, and do so on a less than urgent timetable. For example, completion of a “strategy” to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in the city is expected to take 18 months, a process that won’t add any new homes but will create the possibility of some down the road.

Foot-dragging over ADUs, which have been given the go-ahead in many municipalities in Virginia and other states, is emblematic of a more fundamental problem that the housing strategy group didn’t address: the city’s zoning code. The main reason Staunton doesn’t have tiny homes or converted garages that can provide additional housing on established home lots is that its rules don’t allow it. Allowing ADUs therefore requires yet another amendment to the zoning code—the default response to every fresh demand for land use, such as creating exceptions to minimum lot size in Uniontown. And just like computer operating systems that over many years become an unwieldy morass of work-arounds, patches and buggy over-writes, zoning codes tend toward increased complexity with every change. What the city’s “pathway to affordable housing” proposes is more tinkering with the underlying code. What the city needs is a new operating system.

It’s not just ADUs that are at issue. Ask developers—as the housing strategy group did not—why they’re not building more affordable homes in Staunton, and the answer you’ll get is a) that the permitting process is too onerous, and b) that they can’t afford to do so. Answer b) to some extent is a consequence of a), because it costs money and time (which is money) to comply with zoning and permitting regulations. But the bigger reason is the zoning itself, which not only limits how a specific piece of land can be used, but which arbitrarily dictates so many other construction variables that the only homes that pencil-out for a builder are expensive ones.

Zoning codes, as the name suggests, create “zones”—a zone for housing, a zone for shopping, a zone for manufacturing, and so on. That made sense when used to keep foundries or slaughterhouses away from residential areas, but it also created artificial divides that segregated functions—stores, homes, offices, apartment buildings, schools, cultural centers—that were all mixed together before zoning codes were created. That mixture, still found and now treasured in downtown Staunton, created a lively, walkable and rich urban environment. The imposition of zones, on the other hand, created land-use monocultures—predominantly large areas of all homes, but also of all mercantile and other activities, as in shopping centers and office parks—that then necessitated a car culture for most people to get to work, do their shopping and go to church or school.

It should be noted that there is nothing intuitively logical about a zoning code’s specific requirements. Staunton’s R-1 residential zoning, for example, is distinguished from R-2 zoning primarily by its minimum lot size, of 15,000 square feet versus 8,750 square feet. But the R-1 lot also must have a minimum lot width of 75 feet at the front and any home built on it must have a minimum 30-foot front set-back, a rear yard at least 35 feet deep and maximum lot coverage of 30%. The same requirements for R-2 homes, meanwhile, are a 70-foot minimum lot width, a 25-foot front setback, a rear yard at least 30 feet deep and maximum lot coverage of, yes, 30%. Why? Why a 25-foot setback for one but a 30-foot setback for the other, or a lot width of at least 70 feet for R-2 but an extra five feet for R-1? What compelling urban mathematics produced these arbitrary requirements?

For builders and developers looking at a lot of 45,000 square feet (just a bit over an acre) zoned R-1, the maximum they can build is three homes. They can’t build cottage courts, fourplexes, townhomes or any number of other configurations increasingly known as “missing middle” housing—housing more dense than single-family homes but smaller than apartment buildings. Instead of 10 or 12 homes they can build just three, so those three are going to be built at a level where they can fetch top dollar, not at a density that would allow at least some affordable homes to be part of the mix. And in Staunton, the great majority of land is zoned R-1 or R-2, leaving scant room for more modest dwellings.

Zoning’s arbitrary guidelines do preserve a uniformity of appearance that appeals to some people, but which others find stultifying—or as summarized by city planning critic Jane Jacobs, more like taxidermy. Yet their very persistence creates an aura of inevitability, as if the only (unthinkable) alternative is anarchy. And so, even as local feedback to Staunton’s comprehensive plan repeatedly stresses walkability, community, and an integration of work, play and housing, the main obstacle to realizing that vision has gone largely untouched. Despite a proposal to reduce the total number of zoning sub-categories, the comprehensive plan promises to preserve the overall zoning approach. The builders’ dilemma will go unaddressed.

WITHOUT A SERIOUS EVALUATION of how zoning got us into the housing crunch we’re now struggling to overcome, there seems little hope for improvement.

Defenders of the status quo will point to the equivalent of a techie’s work-arounds and system upgrades, including district overlays, special use permits and other ways to game the system while leaving the underlying code untouched. But there’s a reason DOS-based systems have been left behind, not least because they became too expensive to maintain in terms of talent and manpower.

Nor does junking zoning codes mean descending into anarchy. Just as DOS-based systems were replaced by GUI ones—the graphical user interfaces we use without a second thought because they’re so intuitive and user-friendly—so traditional zoning codes are giving way elsewhere to form-based zoning. Traditional zoning codes are a top-down approach that segregates land uses. Form-based zoning is less concerned with regulating land use and instead prioritizes the physical form, scale and character of buildings and public spaces. Because form-based zoning is a bottom-up approach that regulates how buildings interact with the street and with each other but not what use they’re put to, they tend to encourage infill and the development of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and high-quality public spaces.

That doesn’t mean truly disruptive or dangerous industries or businesses can’t be relegated to specific buffered areas, but the landscape is otherwise opened up to a free market constrained primarily by the same kind of rules that apply to coloring books: use whatever color you want but stay within the lines. Observe the regulations we’ve adopted about building height, scale, massing and relationship to the street, but otherwise put your land to the most productive use you can envision.

That may sound radical at first blush, but it is in fact what occurred in what are now the most treasured parts of Staunton—before the zoning code was adopted. It’s also what a growing number of municipalities around the country are adopting, from Mesa, Arizona to Cincinnati, Ohio to parts of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Form-based zoning deserves, at the very least, a serious examination and consideration by those who are revising a comprehensive plan for Staunton that has a 20-year outlook.

Here’s the bottom line: developers aren’t building affordable housing because our zoning code makes it prohibitively expensive to do so. The real-world consequences of sticking with that creaky form of land-use regulation are, quite predictably, more people without homes. And because as a society we apparently have neither the money nor the political will to minister to those people’s most basic needs, every homeless person we see on the streets, huddled in doorways, or sleeping in uninsulated tents or cars, should be a reminder that we’re not addressing root causes of a social disease.

The Staunton Housing Strategy Group failed to do so. The comprehensive plan’s designers are likewise missing the mark. Who’s left?

West End: nothing to BRAG about

(Reading time: 7 minutes)

For anyone looking to understand why civic improvements in Staunton move at a snail’s pace, a good place to start one’s education is with the West End.

Long recognized as the city’s neglected quarter, its vitality sapped by construction of the Woodrow Wilson Parkway decades ago, the West End was targeted by the city council in 2020 as a “high priority zone” for revitalization. That same year, the city applied to the EPA for a three-year, $300,000 Brownfields Assessment Grant. The purpose of the grant, as explained by city staff, was “to return vacant or underutilized properties to productive reuse” by assessing for possible environmental hazards, often from industrial waste but also from asbestos, underground gas tanks, lead paint or other contamination. Site remediation would then “incentivize investment and jumpstart redevelopment and area-wide revitalization.”

Initial progress was promising. The EPA signed off on the grant the following spring, with the study scheduled for completion by September 30, 2024. Draper Aden Associates, a Virginia-based consulting engineer, was retained for the heavy lifting. And in keeping with an announced emphasis on “community engagement,” the city and its consultants planned a series of public meetings over a six-month period “to position the impacted community at the forefront as champions for these revitalization initiatives.”

Study oversight and community engagement was to be provided by the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group (BRAG), a consortium of nine “partners” that would “take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.” Several BRAG members—including the Valley Mission, the Salvation Army and the Staunton Redevelopment/Housing Authority—dealt with housing issues, holding out the promise that this would not be a neglected focus in a process that could easily favor commercial interests. The West End Business Association and Staunton’s West End Alliance, meanwhile, were singled out as being “strongly committed to the preservation and revitalization of West End and will take an active role in leading the City’s Brownfields Program.”

Indeed, BRAG was to play a crucial role in ensuring that the West End wouldn’t simply become a colonial outpost for a bunch of remote planners parachuting in. It would “meet quarterly to assist City staff in site selection and cleanup/reuse planning,” according to the grant application, which added that BRAG and the city would involve representatives “of neighborhoods most directly impacted by proposed redevelopment projects.” Moreover, “partner organizations like the Salvation Army and Valley Mission will represent disadvantaged communities to communicate their needs and disseminate information, which will be beneficial for constituents with limited internet and/or phone access.”

But of course, man plans and God laughs.

Four years on, the brownfields study is still incomplete. Draper Aden Associates has been gobbled up by a larger firm which, if city staff are to be believed, is extremely slow in responding to information requests about its activities. The planned series of public hearings was severely whittled down over Covid concerns. And BRAG? Never happened. The West End Alliance apparently no longer exists as a separate entity. The other BRAG “partners” never met as a group, had nothing to do with selecting brownfield sites for study, and indeed seem largely ignorant of their supposed role.

The disadvantaged communities presumably remain just that.

THERE IS ONE SILVER LINING to this $300,000 brown cloud, and that’s the redevelopment of the former Chestnut Hill Shopping Center. As it happens, this was one of three “priority” sites identified by the grant application because of “their potential to catalyze additional investment and revitalization of West End, as well as to extend redevelopment opportunities.” That the vacant shopping center happened to meet the city’s need for some place to build a new courthouse was a fortuitous accident, not the result of careful planning, but you take your wins where you can. Will a courthouse turn out to be the best use of that property in the interests of West End revitalization? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case a moot point now.

But what of the other two “priority” sites that were identified by the grant application, carefully picked from among more than 25 candidates chosen for their “potential to change the blighted landscape and revitalize the stagnant economy in the target area”? The first is a one-acre site of a salvage yard that closed in 2011, apparently targeted because of its high potential for contaminating Lewis Creek with heavy metals, PCBs and volatile organic compounds. In other words, not much redevelopment potential but a possible environmental disaster if not attended.

The third of the three sites, however, amounts to an enormous blank slate that could accommodate the most ambitious of developments. Bounded by Morris Mill Road on the north and east, the former Unifi Manufacturing site spans approximately 50 acres and has been vacant since 2008. Immediately to its south is a vacant, wooded tract of an additional 27 acres, which backs onto a Food Lion supermarket, while a connecting vacant lot on the east side of the Food Lion could give direct access to West Beverley Street. Ware Elementary and Shelburne Middle schools are within easy walking distance.

All of which is to say, the West End has a void that screams for development. City maps of the West End core study area and of a proposed enterprise zone look like an upside-down saucepan, with the handle running from downtown along West Beverley, then flaring out along Morris Mill Road to the city boundary. The West End Revitalization Plan has a map on page 28 that includes a large green area, matching exactly the description provided in the preceding paragraph, labeled “redevelopable parcels.” As the grant application summarized, “the site’s proximity to schools and residences make it a high priority for investigation and redevelopment.”

Indeed—but no. The UniFi site is history. Just don’t try to figure out why.

Consider the grant application’s effusive embrace of community engagement: “To maintain progress throughout the grant period, the QEP [Qualified Environmental Professional] will prepare monthly reports to the City and BRAG in compliance with the approved EPA Cooperative Agreement Work Plan, which will summarize activities, e.g. milestones achieved, issues encountered, and budget/schedule updates. These will be used to gauge progress, communicate with constituents and prepare quarterly performance reports.”

Those quarterly reports, however, are too sketchy to be of use to anyone. For example, the decision to extend the initial three-year grant by an additional year is described thus: “An Extension Amendment Request was submitted to EPA as well as updated contact sheet siting a new Grant Recipient Representative.” No reason given why more time was needed—but at least the change was noted. Not so for the UniFi site, which after more than a year of investigation, abruptly dropped off the radar at the end of 2023. The quarterly reports don’t even acknowledge the deep-sixing of its largest “high priority” site, much less a reason for the radical change. On the other hand, the quarterly reports do make sporadic mention of other possible brownfields sites, such as Don’s Auto Repair and Gypsy Hill Park, but again without any explanation.

Does anyone living or working in the West End have the slightest idea that the brownfield study is still chugging along? Highly unlikely. But just as much in the dark are city leaders and planners, all of whom—from council members to the city manager to the head of the planning department—are new to their positions since the grant application was submitted and unable to answer even basic questions, such as why Gypsy Hill Park belatedly became part of a West End brownfield study. This is a ship that has been set adrift, and one can only hope it will eventually touch shore undamaged.

The good news, if one can call it that, is that as of the end of March the study had eaten up only 54% of the original grant money. Of course, that does raise the question of how the city will reasonably spend the remaining $138,000 before Sept. 30—or whether it will seek yet another extension. Maybe it should turn to the West End’s residents for answers. Just don’t look to BRAG for help.

Winter is coming

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

In another sign that the universe has a dark sense of humor, the Valley Homeless Connection announced last week the results of its annual Point in Time (PIT) survey of the local homeless population. That was on Tuesday. Three days later, the Trumpian chainsaw approach to government slashed funding to an additional half-a-dozen federal agencies, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The council, Trump said, was “unnecessary.”

As government agency budgets go, this won’t save more than pocket change: $3.6 million a year. But as far as meeting a social need, the cut eliminates the only federal agency charged with implementing “the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.” And yes, there actually is such a plan, adopted Dec. 19, 2022, one that sought to reduce homelessness by 25% by this year. That it has failed to do so is as much a statement about the size of the problem as it is about the government’s effectiveness in addressing systemic issues without adequate funding or political buy-in.

The local PIT count underscores the point. The annual snapshot of how many people are sleeping in homeless shelters and on the streets, in one capacity or another—tents, cars, cardboard boxes—found little change from a year ago, when the 2024 PIT found 157 homeless people in the SAW region of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. This year’s survey, conducted on one of the coldest nights in many years—the temperature in Waynesboro dropped from a high of 22 to just 4 degrees—counted 146 homeless adults in the SAW region (another 10 were counted in Lexington and Rockbridge County). Nine of the adults also had custody of 16 children younger than 18, adding to the total.

The good news is that a greater percentage of the PIT-counted people this year were in emergency shelters, with 82 staying at the Valley Mission, 40 in the overnight shelter operated by WARM, and five staying at the New Directions Center, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. All the children were sheltered, as well, and two people in the SAW region were put up in motel rooms paid by social agencies. That left just 17 people in the SAW region toughing it out in the cold, compared with last year’s 30 or more. Then again, as observed by Lydia Campbell of the Valley Homeless Connection, the severe weather may have forced any number of homeless people into other alternatives, such as couch-surfing with family or friends. And as always, there’s the question of how many unsheltered people were simply missed in the count, with the extreme cold forcing people to burrow in more tightly wherever they were.

Among the PIT findings that Campbell highlighted was an increase from 51 in 2024 to 71 in 2025 of people who reported they were homeless for the first time. “That is a wild thing,” Campbell said, reflected in such vignettes as the woman who sleeps in a car parked outside her husband’s Verona workplace while he works inside. Indeed, the PIT found “lots” of people sleeping in their cars in the Sheetz and Walmart parking lots, as well as at Cracker Barrel, Martin’s and Lowe’s. Meanwhile, as the number of newly homeless people suggests, the pipeline is filling up faster than it can empty out: the national plan to end homelessness reports that on average, 908,530 people became homeless each year between 2017 and 2020, while 900,895 exited homelessness each of those years. That’s a remarkable turnaround from the period of 2010-2017, when national homelessness declined 14%.

Meanwhile, meeting the national plan’s goal of a 25% reduction in homelessness would require that this year’s PIT count not exceed 437,000, down from the 582,462 counted in the 2022 PIT census. The trend, alas, has been precisely in the opposite direction, topping out at 770,000 in 2024—and if the local numbers are any indication, the national 2025 PIT results are unlikely to have improved. But because it takes many months to compile all the national data, just how much worse things have become nationally won’t be known until late this year.

Locally, the outlook is grim. The advent of spring inevitably pushes away concerns about people freezing to death, and the leafing out of the landscape tends to obscure homeless encampments: out of sight, out of mind. The slash-and-burn practices that are hollowing out—if not completely eliminating—social service budgets and agencies are still to be fully felt locally, but Campbell says Housing and Urban Development funding for permanent housing is already drying up, and an array of services to help people cope with joblessness, substance abuse and poor health is evaporating. Even those who don’t lose sight of the problem can feel hamstrung and helpless to respond in any meaningful way.

Yet as often intoned in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” Even now, on the verge of the spring equinox. What then?

PIT count: more inconvenient truths

(Reading time: 11 minutes)

Key takeaways:

Based on last year’s PIT census, the local homeless population grew almost 29% in one year, outstripping the national increase.
The SAW area rate of homelessness as measured by the last PIT was roughly 12.8 for every 10,000 people, exceeding the 11 per 10,000 in Harrisonburg and Rockingham.
The SAW region has only one year-round homeless shelter, but because of a severe shortage of affordable housing, its average length of stay has more than doubled over the past few years and demand for beds greatly exceeds supply.
Without adequate support services, most homeless people will cycle in and out of homelessness over many years. Each time they do, their mental and physical health deteriorates more.

LESS THAN A MONTH after the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development released its 2024 Homelessness Assessment Report, based on information gathered last January, the annual census is about to be repeated for 2025. The Point in Time survey, familiarly and perhaps ironically referred to as the PIT count, is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 22—a day forecast to be one of the coldest we’ve had in this area in several years. Can there be a more painful juxtaposition?

Described by HUD as “a snapshot of the number of individuals in shelters, temporary housing and unsheltered settings,” the PIT census is frequently criticized for producing significant undercounts of the homeless population, both because of its methodology and because of the transitory nature of homelessness. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, for example, cites estimates that the annual number of homeless individuals is 2.5 times to more than 10 times the number counted on any single night, as people cycle in and out of homelessness. Advocates for the homeless also take issue with HUD’s exclusion of otherwise homeless people “residing” in jails, hospital beds or detox centers on the night of the count, of people who are couch surfing with friends or family, and of other coping mechanisms that homeless people use. Still, the PIT is one of the few ongoing measurements we have of an extraordinarily vulnerable population, and so deserves our attention.

But there are other caveats. The fact that it took HUD nearly a year to release the results of a one-night count dilutes the PIT’s usefulness as a planning tool, even as it acts as a smokescreen for public officials reluctant to deal with problems of homelessness. Staunton, for example, defaults to the PIT count whenever it’s called on to provide estimates of homelessness in the city, asserting that separate data for the city itself is not available—a statement absurd on its face, since the data for each PIT count is obtained on a local level. Instead, the city observes in HUD filings that Staunton is a member of the Virginia Balance of State Continuum of Care, which is responsible for overseeing the PIT, and that the Balance of State CofC’s findings are as good an estimate as it can provide of local homelessness.

The Balance of State CofC, it should be noted, consists of 71 counties and cities from one end of Virginia to the other, so not exactly “local.”

Just how bad is the homeless situation? Here are some numbers to mull over. Nationally, the Jan. 20, 2024 PIT count found a 7% increase in unsheltered homelessness compared to the previous year, amid an 18% increase in overall homelessness. That’s grim, but much of the jump was attributed by HUD to a rising number of asylum seekers—with waves of border crossers being dumped in Denver, New York and other northern cities—and of several natural disasters, notably the Maui fire in Hawaii. Since neither of those causes had a significant effect on Virginia, it therefore may come as a surprise to learn that the Balance of State CofC clocked an even higher gain in homelessness, of 22% year-over-year.

If there’s one bright note in the 2024 Balance of State CofC PIT, it’s that the increase in unsheltered homelessness was a bit lower than the national increase, at 5.3%. This suggests that even though a greater percentage of Virginians became homeless last year than was true nationally, at least the counties and municipalities in the Balance of State CofC were able to shelter more of their increased homeless populations. But there’s another possibility: that the Balance of State CofC was simply less efficient at locating unsheltered homeless people, who can pitch a tent or park a car in many more nooks and crannies than a handful of volunteers can find. And with national and state land within the bounds of Augusta County, not to mention a largely rural and agricultural landscape, finding a homeless person here can be far more difficult than poking around the alleys of a big city.

HOW DO THOSE percentages translate into actual numbers, and what do we know about the extent of homelessness locally, Staunton’s obfuscation notwithstanding??

The Balance of State CofC that’s already been mentioned is actually divided into 12 planning groups, including our local Valley Homeless Connection, which consists of four counties and four cities: Augusta, Rockbridge, Highland and Bath counties, and the cities of Staunton, Waynesboro, Lexington and Buena Vista. This week’s PIT count, as was true in the past, ostensibly will cover this entire region, but in practice—either because of limited manpower, or because homeless people gravitate toward urban centers for the support services they provide—past PITs reported only a handful of homeless people in Rockbridge and Lexington, and none at all in Bath, Highland or Buena Vista.

The great preponderance of homeless people, therefore, is in the SAW region—and those numbers jumped even more sharply from 2023 to 2024 than in either the Balance of State CofC or nationally. Specifically, the area of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro saw a 28.7% jump in the homeless population, from 122 in 2023 to 157 in 2024. The unsheltered population, meanwhile, registered a 46.6% increase, from 30 to 44. To put that into some kind of perspective, the SAW homeless rate went from approximately 10 per 10,000 population in 2023 (based on a SAW population of 122,770) to roughly 12.8 per 10,000 in 2024; by comparison, the Rockbridge/Harrisonburg area, which recently opened a $5 million dollar emergency shelter for the homeless, has a rate of 11 per 10,000.

That the unsheltered numbers in SAW weren’t even higher is due almost entirely to WARM, a consortium of local churches that offers emergency overnight shelter on a rotating basis, and which on the PIT night last year had 48 clients, compared with just 26 the previous year. How many it will accommodate this Wednesday is anybody’s guess, but in any case WARM has a maximum capacity of 50. Meanwhile, the only other homeless shelter in the region, Valley Mission, had 62 people in its beds during the PIT count in 2023, and increased that only slightly to 65 last year. Although it has a theoretical capacity of 90 single adults, that number is divided between 60 men and 30 women, so if there are fewer than 30 women needing shelter, some beds will go unused. In addition, since half of the beds are top bunks, homeless people with mobility issues—which is not unusual—may be unable to access empty bunks that require climbing a ladder.

Homeless people unable to find shelter with WARM or the Valley Mission, or with a friend or family member, in past years have ended up sleeping in a tent or car or, in at least one case, an RV camper. The dozen or so PIT census-takers last year reported people seeking shelter behind Martin’s Supermarket and Roses Discount Store in Waynesboro, behind the Walmarts in Waynesboro and Staunton, at a laundromat and the county library and along Coal Road in Stuarts Draft. But the survey made no mention, for example, of the homeless people camping behind the Food Lion on West Beverley, and there’s no telling how many other tent camps get missed.

(Also worth noting: because WARM operates only December through March, a PIT survey at other times of the year would result in even higher numbers of unsheltered homeless people.)

The Valley Mission was for many years regarded as the area’s safety valve for this sort of problem, providing short-term shelter and supportive services for homeless people while they transitioned to permanent housing—and, by providing an alternative to the streets, removing a civic discomfort. But the Mission’s capacity has long been outstripped by demand. Executive director Sue Richardson says that when she took her position, in 2012, the publicized expectation for Mission residents was a stay of three months—but as she quickly learned, the reality was closer to five. A lack of affordable housing, even then, made short stays difficult. And three months of support services, helping clients deal with substance abuse issues, psychological problems, unemployment and undeveloped life skills, was in many cases simply insufficient.

But the real hammer blow, Richardson adds, came with the pandemic and a sudden flood of tax dollars, designed to get homeless people out of congregant shelters—because of their heightened risk of COVID contagion—and into motel rooms and other single accommodations. Although such isolation may have made epidemiological sense, it also took the legs out from under the support services most homeless people need to become truly self-sufficient. The result was that a substantial number of Mission clients with various disorders got worse. Counseling and teaching that once may have resulted in sufficient improvement over five or six months was now, in the years after pandemic relief dried up, taking 10 months or a year—or longer. And meanwhile, housing availability only grew tighter.

Today, according to Richardson, the average length of stay at the Mission stretches from 12 to 18 months; in one extreme example, a woman sheltered at the Mission for more than four years. What was once a relatively smooth-flowing pipeline for the homeless, emptying out almost as quickly as it filled up, has now become an overflowing funnel. A growing number of homeless people are piling up at the intake, while only a trickle empty out the other end. And in the SAW area, that overflow increasingly is spilling into the streets because of not having anywhere else to go.

The severity of the problems faced by this population is reflected in the PIT results, which include a questionnaire that provides some crucial insights into who is homeless, why, and how often. Of the 168 people surveyed across the four-county Valley Homeless Connection area last year, for example, 101 said this was not the first time they’d been homeless. Nor is homelessness a short-term speed bump in the road of life, as 82 had been homeless for more than seven months at the time of the PIT count, the great majority for more than a year.

How did they end up on the street? Asked for the biggest reason they believed they were homeless, 24 said it was because they didn’t have a job and 18 said they had a disability that presumably kept them from working. Fifteen had been evicted, six cited high rents and eight said they were underemployed, suggesting they weren’t paid enough to afford rent. An additional 18 were fleeing domestic violence or sexual assault, 17 said they suffered from serious mental illness or had substance use issues, and four cited general health problems. Ten had been released from prison or jail, while family issues, a robbery, and divorce pretty much rounded out the list.

In short, the homeless population spans a wide range of needs and disorders, requiring an equally wide range of support services for meaningful rehabilitation. It also is a population that is expanding at a faster rate locally than it is nationally, while the resources to meet its needs have increased far more slowly, if at all. This Wednesday’s PIT count may add some details, and it most likely will document a continued worsening of overall homelessness. But it almost certainly won’t tell us anything we don’t know already.

We all live on a knife’s edge

(Reading time: 14 minutes)

Most of us, whether we realize it or not, live on a knife’s edge of possibilities. On one side, a comfortable if not extravagant life of warm shelter, nourishing food, the fellowship of loved ones, an adequate supply of pleasurable distractions; on the other, bleak ruination. It doesn’t take much to tip us into disaster. The sudden loss of a job, an illness, the death of a spouse, a car accident or house fire . . . and just like that, a predictably familiar existence can be upended and life becomes a struggle for survival.

Many of us are lucky enough to have a personal safety net of family or close friends who can help when disaster strikes. But for those who don’t, a public safety net is essential—and increasingly more so in recent years, as pandemic-catalyzed stresses sapped an economy already weakened by years of growing income disparity and a shortage of affordable housing. Unfortunately, the same economic forces that create such problems also undermine an effective social response.

There are, after all, only two ways to fund a public answer to extreme privation: public tax dollars, or private charity. As this paper suggests, however, neither has been up to the task. Charitable giving, after a temporary boost resulting from pandemic-induced compassion, has resumed a years-long decline. Taxpayer dollars, swollen by federal programs intended to stimulate the economy, likewise have dwindled as the pandemic recedes into the past. Worse yet, there still is only the most tentative political acceptance locally of the role government should play in such circumstances.

Now, as the holidays are celebrated by those on the fortunate side of the knife edge, an increasing number of people find themselves on the opposite side, homeless or nearly so during the darkest days of the year. How will we ensure that they, our neighbors, are adequately sheltered from winter’s onslaught of ice, sub-freezing temperatures and cutting winds?

FOR AN UNDERSTANDING of how much of a political vacuum exists on this issue, consider that in Staunton there is no public spending on emergency shelters for the homeless, and only a minuscule amount funneled to a handful of non-profit agencies that provide temporary or affordable housing. This is as much a failure of political will as it is a lack of funds. For example, of the nearly $13 million that Staunton received from the American Rescue Plan Act, none at all went to housing of any kind, or for the needs of the city’s homeless or the agencies trying to help them.

This oversight was entirely in keeping with how the city has expended other federal funds, even those specifically meant to provide decent housing for low- and very low-income people. In its recent accounting of how it wrapped up spending a $1.7 million federal Community Development Block Grant, Staunton conceded it had failed to meet “its goal for housing development”—failed so spectacularly, in fact, that more than $700,000 remained unspent after five years. The city’s biggest outlay over that five-year span? $334,894 for “general administration and planning,” otherwise known as overhead.

Despite this spending shortfall, Staunton nevertheless minimizes its housing problems by asserting in the same document that homelessness in the city “is not widespread, likely because services and shelters are located in neighboring Augusta County.” This claim is both unsupported and speculative, since the city has made no effort to comply with a funding requirement for “reaching out to homeless persons (especially unsheltered persons) and assessing their individual needs.” Indeed, the city has only a vague idea of how many homeless persons live within its boundaries, much less what their needs are.

Moreover, the assertion that services and shelters for the homeless are in Augusta County is risible, given that the same document—in response to a question about the help Staunton has given to individuals and families on the verge of homelessness—cites the city’s contributions to Valley Mission, which provides short-term housing for people who otherwise would be living on the streets. It is also located in Staunton, not Augusta County, and is only a short walk from the Salvation Army, which likewise provides at least some services to the homeless. But despite the fact that it is oversubscribed and has a waiting list, the Mission received no more than $5,000 to $8,000 a year from the city’s federal block grant.

While tax dollars are in short supply, public charity is subject to the same economic constraints that put a significant segment of the population at risk. People can’t give what they don’t have. Extremely wealthy people garner headlines with massive donations to their favored causes, but as a recent New York Times article on “effective altruism” observed, some 20 million households stopped making charitable donations between 2010 and 2016. The organizations that suffered the most from this drought are community-based groups whose existence depends on small-dollar donors, rather than on mega-philanthropists.

Similarly, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported earlier this year that fewer than half of U.S. households now make charitable contributions, and overall charitable giving dipped 3% in 2023. Yet even as small-dollar donors have been dropping away, the Forbes top 100 charities saw a 4% increase in their donations last year, leaving smaller local non-profits in a struggle “to raise money from a fatigued, overstretched base of support.”

These aren’t abstract numbers. Although tax filings for local non-profits aren’t always as current as we might wish, those that are available reinforce the notion that things are getting tight right here in our backyards. Valley Mission, already mentioned, peaked in gifts, grants and contributions received in 2020—the first year of the pandemic—at $1.8 million, which then fell off just a bit in 2021, to $1.7 million, and has since seen donations decline sharply, to $1 million in 2022 and $1.1 million last year. Valley Supportive Housing, which provides affordable housing and supportive services for those with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or substance use issues, saw its grants and contributions jump from $139,240 in 2020 to $598,165 the following year—before declining to $432,990 in 2022. How it did in 2023 or this past year remains to be reported.

Then there’s the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministry, or WARM, the only agency within the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro area that provides emergency overnight shelter from December through March for people who otherwise are sleeping in tents or cars. This effort, cobbled together by a score of churches who volunteer their facilities for a week at a time on a rotating basis, is like the Mission in that it is oversubscribed, with more people seeking refuge than can be accommodated. And like the Mission, WARM also has seen a decline in contributions over the past couple of years, from a high of $652,186 in 2022 to a mere $382,352 last year. Just $28,130 of last year’s revenue was from government grants—none from Staunton—with the balance chipped in by churches, foundations and individuals.

There are—or were—a couple of intermediaries in the charitable contributions arena that historically helped plug some of the holes. The local United Way, for example—which pulled in $1.2 million in 2020, or more than double its 2019 haul—contributed $15,000 to Valley Supportive Housing a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it also burned up twice as much money for overhead expenses as it provided in overall charitable assistance, saw its receipts plunge to just $406,845 in 2021, and closed its doors a few months ago amid charges of fiscal impropriety and possible embezzlement.

That leaves the field to the Community Action Partnership for Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro (CAPSAW) and to the Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge (CFCBR), with the former distributing state and federal funds and the latter dispersing mostly private contributions. CAPSAW in particular targets low-income individuals and families, “distributing public funds and providing guidance to programs that effectively address the challenges of poverty.” Last year it awarded grants totaling $431,456, marking at least four years of steady increases—although one of its grant recipients, ironically, was the United Way of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro. Meanwhile, only three of its 17 other grant recipients directly address housing issues, including Renewing Homes Greater Augusta, Valley Mission and Valley Supportive Housing.

Among CAPSAW’s signal achievements has been helping renters avoid eviction, starting with 110 renters assisted in fiscal year 2022, 291 in 2023 and 322 in 2024, attesting to the rising demand for such intervention. But in most other respects, CAPSAW’s attempts to assist those most in need of housing assistance have fallen short of its own goals. For example, the partnership had hoped to provide 400 homeless individuals with safe temporary shelter in 2022, but managed to reach only 165. It did much better in 2023, when it reached 296—but the need had grown so much that CAPSAW’s target also had been increased, to 520. And this past year, despite lowering its target to 480, the partnership actually saw a decline in the number helped, to 271.

Similar shortfalls were recorded by CAPSAW in its efforts to help people obtain safe and affordable housing, as differentiated from temporary shelter. Moreover, the number of deficient homes that got needed structural repairs through its funding declined sharply, from 70 in 2022 to 55 in 2023 to 14 last year. The non-profit addressing those needs, Renewing Homes, blamed the slump on a lack of volunteers and the increased cost of building supplies, among other factors.

Meanwhile, the Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge is in some ways the 800-pound gorilla in the local charitable funding scene, but it also has a more diffused focus. In 2022 it donated nearly $2 million to a wide-ranging assortment of 91 different organizations that each received $5,000 or more—often much more. Yet because of CFCBR’s broad mandate to “strengthen civil society by enhancing local assets,” in addition to some donors restricting how their money can be spent, a good deal of the money it distributed ended up at tax-supported or user-funded institutions, such as the $265,052 that went to Augusta County Public Schools, or the $32,270 awarded to the Staunton YMCA. Even the City of Staunton came in for a share, at $25,144, for two beautification projects.

That’s not to say that CFCBR hasn’t provided critical funding to some of the housing-assistance agencies already mentioned above: that same year, $51,000 went to Valley Supportive Housing, $11,000 to Valley Mission and $15,025 to Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta. But with its largesse broadcast widely among arts programs, animal shelters, community centers, volunteer fire departments, crisis intervention programs, athletic teams, food assistance programs and so on, CFCBR clearly is spread thin; the amount of assistance it can provide to the most at-risk segment of our population is much less than its overall size might suggest, and much, much less than is actually needed.

BLEAK THOUGH this recitation is, the outlook for the next several years doesn’t allow much room for optimism.

There are bright spots, to be sure. Over the past year or two, Staunton’s political leadership has appeared increasingly receptive to the notion that it has to play a more active role in responding to the city’s housing crisis. November’s municipal election seated several councilors who have shown a willingness to engage with housing issues, and the city is lurching toward eventual creation of a housing commission that could champion housing initiatives at budget time (a process that is just now starting for the 2025 fiscal year). And Virginia Housing last month unveiled a five-year, $75 million investment program to build workforce housing throughout the state, potentially creating as many as 5,000 new affordable housing units—although whether Staunton will qualify for some of that funding, and whether it will move quickly enough to claim a piece of it, remains to be seen.

But the larger picture is more foreboding. Much depends on how completely the new Trump administration descends into chaos, with its announced tariffs, disembowelment of regulatory agencies and overall kleptocratic approach to governance threatening massive economic convulsions. In such circumstances, those with the least to lose inevitably get hurt the most. Consider, for example, that during his first term Donald Trump repeatedly sought deep budget cuts at HUD, source not only of Community Development Block Grants but of countless other programs that altogether provide housing for more than 4.3 million people. Those efforts were stymied by a politically divided Congress, but that balance will shift in Trump’s favor in 2025, and with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy salivating at the thought of amputating huge chunks of the federal budget, HUD’s future is tenuous, at best.

If all of Trump’s budget proposals are enacted—a big if, to be sure— “you should expect large increases both in the scope of poverty and in the depth of poverty,” Bob Greenstein, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, told National Public Radio in a November report on what lies ahead. Among the possible casualties, based on past defeated efforts, is a new federal fund designed to boost the supply of affordable housing, which proponents argue distorts “the market” by raising demand. Also on the conservative wish list is an end to the homelessness policy known as “housing first,” which contends that people need safe and affordable shelter before they can begin to deal with drug addictions or mental health issues.

The bottom line, if all the promised cuts are delivered, will be a meaner, more Dickensian society that will hit communities that lack social services in depth—like Staunton—especially hard. The future already has been foreshadowed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last June that empowered cities to criminalize homelessness, permitting evictions from homeless encampments and confiscation of the last shreds of private property that their inhabitants still possess, including sleeping bags and personal papers. At least 120 cities have passed “anti-camping” laws in the decision’s wake, with another 50 considering as much, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. Alas, that won’t be necessary here: Staunton, Augusta County and Waynesboro already have such laws on their books. It’s only goodwill that has kept them from being fully enforced.

But goodwill is a slender reed. How quickly it can snap is on display in Georgia, where the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit a few days before Christmas against the City of Brunswick over its efforts to close The Well. Operated since 2014 as an offshoot of the United Methodist Church, The Well offers showers, laundry facilities, meals and other services, including an emergency overnight shelter in cold weather, to the city’s homeless population. Why would the city want to end such a program? Apparently because it attracts the “wrong element”—which is to say, people who have fallen on the wrong side of that knife’s edge.

To avoid going down that path, Staunton and its neighbors can no longer ignore the harsh, cascading reality about to roll over us. Our civic leaders can no longer pretend they don’t have to wade into the housing crisis because churches, foundations and non-profits are taking care of the problem—not when the reality is that such responses are increasingly strained. That will require tax dollars, to be sure. But it also will require political leadership, with both elected officials and social service organizational leaders speaking out publicly and loudly on behalf of those who are largely voiceless. It will require energetic attempts to rally community support, through public forums, neighborhood meetings, media outreach and pulpit oratory. It will mean directly engaging those same voiceless people, whether in shelters, food pantries or on the street, to learn more about how they ended up in such circumstances and what they need to get back on their feet.

It will require putting a human face on destitution, so that people who are homeless, voiceless and powerless can’t simply be dismissed as the “wrong element.” With a little bit of misfortune, any of us could be similarly cast out. Let’s try to keep that from happening.

West End plan a half-baked dish

(Reading time: 17 minutes)

It’s been four years since Staunton residents first met to discuss a revitalization plan for the West End. Many such meetings, an online survey and input from approximately 300 residents and stakeholders later, a 115-page document that describes itself as “the first holistic plan for Staunton’s western neighborhoods” was presented to the city council this past August, which voted in September to accept it provisionally. Final acceptance is scheduled for a Dec. 12 council meeting, following one final public hearing.

And then?

Quite possibly, not nearly enough. This critique argues that the West End Revitalization Plan is a half-baked dish that isn’t what the customer ordered, notwithstanding its claims to be a community product, and should be sent back to the kitchen. Suffused with a hearty stew of information and suggestions for economic revitalization, improvements to streets and sidewalks and more development of green spaces, it nevertheless serves up only a thin gruel of recommendations for upgrading the area’s residential stock. Housing issues, cited repeatedly by area residents as a major concern, are all but ignored in a document that fundamentally “assumes” reinvestment in the commercial corridor “will lead to reinvestment throughout the rest of the West End,” including private properties and residences.

Not that this is a new attitude. As I wrote earlier, in a white paper released in early September, Staunton has long given lip service to issues of sustainable and affordable housing, as exemplified by its 2018 Comprehensive Plan. There, it contends that “[h]ousing is primarily a private system that is influenced by factors beyond those controlled by local government,” in effect washing its hands of any problems. That sentiment was echoed in the city council’s contemporaneous “Vision for 2030,” wherein the only mention of housing is the claim that Staunton “has housing affordable to a full range of households”—a statement presumably absolving the city of any need to take a closer look at what housing is available, what condition it’s in and whether there’s enough of it to go around.

This myopic perspective has been a recurring theme in several city studies, with the West End Revitalization Plan only the latest link in a chain of housing denial. Planning for the city’s marquee economic development project, for example, started with a consideration of housing as a possible component of Staunton Crossing, only for the idea to be dropped midway through the conceptualization process. There appears to be no written record of the thinking that went into the decision to pivot away.

So when it came to formulating the West End Revitalization Plan, the city’s consultants weren’t starting with a blank slate: they were building on a foundation of other, prior studies with an unacknowledged blind spot. The Cole Avenue stream restoration plan, the intersection improvement study, the long-range transportation plan, the brownfields assessment, the greenway plan, the Gypsy Hill stream restoration plan, the bicycle and pedestrian plan, a city flood analysis—all are cited in the plan as resources that shaped its outcome. None deals with housing. The one marginal exception is the Comprehensive Plan, which despite its repudiation of housing as a city concern, at least provides a city-wide inventory of housing stock, sorted by age and market value.

Nor were the planners concerned about enlisting expert housing assistance. While the plan relates how “transportation planners explored ways to improve the multimodal transportation network” and “economic experts studied the types of business that can be successful in the West End,” there is no mention of input from urban planning and renewal professionals—planners with expertise in addressing urban blight and deteriorating residential neighborhoods.

No wonder, then, that the Revitalization Plan’s attention to housing is fleeting and superficial. Past is indeed prologue.

BUT AS ALREADY MENTIONED, four years of research included several efforts to solicit comments and suggestions from the people closest to the issues. Surely the West End’s residents had something to say about paying attention to housing as part of any meaningful revitalization plan?

Indeed they did, and the Revitalization Plan occasionally acknowledges such concerns, even as it sidelines virtually all such input to its appendices—which, inexplicably, are not attached to the plan itself. The main narrative instead summarizes the many comments planners received in bloodless statements such as, “Throughout the engagement process, community members expressed concern about vacant or unmaintained properties and believed they were reducing the West End’s appeal”—a marked contrast to the more vivid language the plan uses for its own vision, which it describes as “a vibrant, diverse and multimodal community, where residents can safely and conveniently access their thriving commercial corridor.” Would that its description of the housing situation were as compelling.

Yet as those seeking out the plan’s appendices will learn, the lack of adequate housing in the West End was a dominant theme throughout the planning process. An early stakeholder meeting, for example, concluded that “the West End neighborhoods are aging. Coupled with limited incomes, concerns about property upkeep and affordable housing” were among the area’s most notable “challenges.” Asked to list those challenges, respondents used adjectives like “dreary” and “lackluster,” and roughly a quarter of their comments were housing-related, including complaints about absentee owners and landlords, homeless tent camps, deteriorating Section 8 housing and roadside parking in residential areas. Asked what they would like to see more of in the West End, participants listed “affordable housing, multifamily housing, incentives to rehabilitate vacant or unlivable homes, initiatives to help those who cannot financially maintain their homes, and a renter’s Bill of Rights.”

An online survey late last year provided a graphic ordering of local priorities, with respondents asked to rank, on a scale of 1-5, eight possible elements of a revitalization plan. Leading the list was “adding new shops, stores and services,” with 194 respondents feeling that this was either “important” or “very important”—but running a close second was “improving upkeep of existing housing,” which got 190 votes as “important” or “very important.” The third biggest response to that question, meanwhile, was “adding new jobs and employment opportunities”—a choice one might have expected to get significantly more than the 179 “important” or “very important” votes it actually received, given a median household income in the West End that’s 28% lower than in the city overall.

The big emphasis on “improved upkeep of existing housing” is rooted in a bleak reality that the plan scarcely acknowledges and never researches in any detail. Yes, the plan gives a brief nod to the area’s demographics: older, poorer, and with a higher proportion of non-white residents than is true of the rest of Staunton. And there’s an equally succinct summary of the homes the West End’s residents inhabit—homes that the plan claims are on average valued at $139,850, or less than two-thirds of the city’s overall median. But within those broad strokes are even more extreme variations, not mentioned by the plan, such as the three census blocks (of seven West End blocks altogether) in which the median house value was just $115,000 in one, $111,600 in another, and $111,100 in a third.

(Those figures, found in the Comprehensive Plan, must be kept in perspective, as they—and virtually all housing statistics currently floating around—are seriously outdated. The Comprehensive Plan’s numbers are from the 2010 U.S. census, which means they’re not only quite old but predate the significant explosion in real estate valuations of the past three years. The Revitalization Plan, on the other hand, doesn’t cite specific sources but almost certainly uses statistics derived from pre-pandemic data. Despite this ambiguity, however, it’s clear that seven years ago, approximately 1,300 homes in the West End had a median valuation less than half the city average, and it’s highly unlikely that the ratio has narrowed since—indeed, just the opposite may be expected, due to the ongoing deterioration of the West End’s older housing stock because of its older population and lower income levels.)

Given all of the above, it’s reasonable to think the completed revitalization plan would have a substantial and detailed set of recommendations addressing the West End’s housing stock. It does not. Not even close.

AFTER YEARS of casting their fact-finding net across the West End, the city’s consultants settled on a four-pronged set of goals for the area’s revitalization. The first three entail creating more opportunities for West Enders to go shopping, to more safely navigate local streets and sidewalks, and to enjoy enhanced green spaces. The fourth, meanwhile, labeled “reinvestment and affordability,” describes a need to “foster reinvestment in the West End’s neighborhoods and homes while maintaining affordable living and homeownership opportunities.”

One might question why a concern repeatedly cited by local residents as one of their top two issues got bumped to fourth place on a list of goals, but at least it didn’t get completely ignored—although the devil, as they say, is in the details.

For each of the four goals, the revitalization plan lists strategies, actions, and a secondary set of “other actions.” Combined, the four goals prescribe10 strategies, 17 proposed actions and a dozen “other actions.” Only one of those strategies, “support home renovations,” specifically targets housing. And only one of the 17 proposed actions is listed under that housing strategy: “connect residents to existing resources.” In other words, the plan sees no need to come up with any housing initiatives, and certainly no need to spend money other than on staff time—unlike its other goals and their strategies, which call for such investments and incentives as possible tax increment financing, repairing sidewalks and building bus shelters, planting trees, creating a public square, and so on. When it comes to housing, revitalization is in the bargain bin.

To be fair, the home renovations strategy also proposes one “other action” item, recommending that the city develop a home conditions program to help “homeowners and landowners improve their properties’ sustainability, health and affordability.” Such a program, the plan notes, would be best served by a non-profit organization taking a lead role, leaving it up to the city to promote dialogue and coordinate targeted efforts. The suggestion is not nothing. It also requires almost nothing from the city.

That lack of city skin in the game also is reflected in the plan’s other two strategies for the reinvestment goal, to wit, “reinvest in community centers and resources,” and “support neighborhood advocacy”—strategies that call for “reimagining” the former Booker T. Washington high school as a community center (which it already is), and for providing renter education programming. Again, not nothing. And, again, requiring little more from the city than staff time, which is an impoverished definition of “reinvestment.”

In letting the city off the hook for doing anything meaningful about West End housing, the revitalization plan’s authors are simply taking their cue from their paymasters, as reflected in one particular comment. In response to community requests for “additional housing rehabilitation resources,” the plan reports, “City staff noted several programs already exist.” Which is to say, “We’ve already got everything we need, no need to reinvent the wheel, let’s move on.” Are those programs up to the task? Unknown, since the revitalization plan makes no effort to establish the extent of the problem they are being expected to address. Do those programs have adequate finances, manpower and management skills to meet the need, whatever it might be? No way to answer that, either, since the programs themselves were never examined—all that the plan provides is a recitation of program names.

Paradoxically, the plan does assert elsewhere that “[t]he city currently does not have a program that helps homeowners and landowners improve their properties’ sustainability, health and affordability.” And the city’s assertion that “several programs already exist” is at best a passive-aggressive assertion that puts the onus of unmet needs on those who need help, rather than on those who have the resources they need. The city’s website, for example, lists a score of local, state, federal and non-profit programs and services that are housing related and possibly useful resources for city residents—if they have wi-fi and computer access, if they know where to look, and if they can figure out which of that smorgasbord of entries is relevant to their needs.

Meanwhile, you would never know from the revitalization study that one reason why the West End feels “run-down” is the small but readily visible number of homeless people on its streets. You would never know, from the study, that there is a homeless encampment behind the Food Lion. You would never know that the area has several social agencies targeting the homeless and the near-homeless, including the Valley Mission and the Salvation Army. You wouldn’t know that the West End is where much of the city’s subsidized and public housing is located.

The homeless and those who need subsidized housing also have needs, but those needs won’t be met without acknowledging their existence. Yet despite repeated community input about unsheltered people living in the West End, the plan simply doesn’t see them. They don’t exist. The revitalization plan proposes a neighborhood arts program as “a cost-effective way to beautify public spaces and local neighborhoods,” even as it completely ignores how those public spaces and neighborhoods are made less beautiful by people wandering the streets in obvious need of showers, warm food and a safe place to lay their heads each night.

IN GLOSSING OVER the many housing concerns raised by West End residents, the revitalization plan must be seen as an incomplete and flawed document. The planners behind this effort created a four-legged table, but one leg is so much shorter than the other three that the whole structure is too wobbly to be more than marginally useful.

Worse yet, by seeking community input and then ignoring much of what it received, the city and its planners have provided yet another reason for public skepticism about government responsiveness. It’s insulting to be asked for one’s thoughts, only to have them disregarded without an explanation, and it’s disrespectful to expect people to contribute their time and energy to an exercise that treats their contributions in such cavalier fashion. This is how civic responsibility and involvement are eroded, replaced by cynicism and resignation.

A comprehensive—or “holistic,” to use its own terminology—revitalization plan would provide as much granular detail about housing stock as it does in its description of sidewalks, or of the potential for business development in the West End. It would explore possible funding sources for underwriting housing repairs, as it does when recommending tax increment financing for economic development, or public-private partnerships, such as land banks and land trusts, to deal with abandoned or blighted dwellings. It would examine current zoning requirements to see if they are impeding private sector investments, and it would analyze the city’s fee structure for new housing for the same reason. It would consider whether the city has a role to play in regulating absentee owners who buy housing for investment purposes, rather than as personal dwellings. It would explore a possible renter’s bill of rights, as urged by several area residents.

None of this is beyond Staunton’s scope. City leaders sometimes deflect such proposals by claiming their hands are tied by the Dillon Rule, a principle of American municipal law that limits the powers of local governments to those explicitly granted by the state, and to a certain extent they’re correct. But that doesn’t mean the city is entirely without options. Virginia Housing, a self-supporting organization created by the state specifically to help Virginians attain quality affordable housing, released a detailed study last November, titled “Housing as an Economic Development Strategy for Virginia,” that lays out these and other strategies that Virginia cities can use to address housing needs—strategies, in other words, that are available to Staunton right now, and without running afoul of Dillon Rule limitations.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that the very title of the Virginia Housing study gets at a basic economic truth that the revitalization plan fails to recognize. As the study also summarizes, “Changing economic and market conditions have exposed the necessity of aligning housing and economic development efforts strategically,” which in plain English means that housing and economic development are two sides of the same coin. Meaningful improvement of one requires improving the other. By failing to acknowledge that symbiotic relationship, the West End Revitalization Plan undermines the salutary work it has otherwise done.

Then there’s the elephant in the room, which never enters the revitalization plan’s field of vision. By ignoring the problem of area homelessness, the plan unnecessarily weakens its proposals for economic revitalization and green space enhancements. It also ensures that the plight of the city’s unsheltered residents will only get worse, as occurs with any untended building or garden that’s allowed to deteriorate.

For example, there’s an obvious need in the West End for more short-term shelter space, as the Mission not only can’t accommodate everyone who needs its facilities but is being pressed to shelter people longer because of a lack of longer-term housing—there’s just nowhere for people to go. There’s also a need for overnight warm shelters and for “cold shelters,” where homeless people can go during winter days. Without that, they end up congregating anywhere they can find some warmth—riding Brite buses, hanging out in fast-food restaurants, the library, the YMCA or the community center in Verona—undoubtedly discomfiting the “regular” patrons of those establishments or services. Moreover, as summers get hotter, there will be a growing need for cooling shelters, not just for the homeless but for the many poverty-level residents of the West End without air conditioning.

Finally, by failing to adequately inventory the West End’s physical infrastructure, the revitalization study overlooks possible resources that could be tapped to meet some of these needs. For example, how many older churches in the West End are occupied by dwindling congregations that can barely keep up with maintenance and utility costs? The former Allen Chapel AME church on West Beverley provides one example of how such demographic trends can play out: it’s been converted to housing—for transient guests, occupying its two Airbnb accommodations. Are there other large churches whose congregations could be approached with purchase offers, sufficient to allow them to downsize to more appropriately sized buildings while enabling their existing quarters to be repurposed for a different kind of service?

These and numerous other questions can be asked, and various innovative remedies can be explored, only if the West End’s underlying needs are comprehensively identified. There’s no question that the area needs an injection of economic vitality, that it would benefit enormously from repairing and building an adequate bicycle, pedestrian and jitney bus infrastructure, and that enhanced green and public spaces could generate more community interaction and a sense of civic pride. The West End Revitalization Plan addresses all those needs and provides a detailed schematic on how they may be addressed.

On the issue of adequate and affordable housing, however, it falls disastrously short, and thereby places the whole revitalization effort at risk.