Invisible or heavy hand?
So what’s a city to do?
What you can’t do, according to a focus group of developers who weighed in on the Consolidated Plan last November, is force fairness into the equation with new laws.
“A lot of times the reflex of policymakers is to further regulate or require affordable housing,” said Charlie Armstrong of Southern Development. But rewrite policy to require developers to build a certain ratio of affordable housing, he said, “and that has an equal and opposite effect on the average price of the remaining real estate. You’re probably making it worse globally by fixing it one or two times.”
Armstrong said he doesn’t blame high housing costs entirely on overregulation. But he believes government has to tread carefully to avoid making things worse, and instead try to incentivize affordable projects by waiving permitting fees and speeding up review timelines, encourage innovative builds, and find ways to rehab existing housing rather than count on new construction to fill all the gaps.
Corbin Hargraves thinks that’s not enough. Hargraves is a local financial advisor and mortgage loan officer who started his own financial company, The Providence Group of Virginia, in part because he saw the need for more financial literacy in minority communities. He said the annual payout from the CHF isn’t enough, and Charlottesville needs bigger, more ambitious policy shifts when it comes to affordable housing. Local government should be leading the charge, he thinks, even if it means putting a hand on the scale.
“The people in power have to say, ‘Some of this housing needs to be specifically designed for those on a lower income bracket,’” he said. No more blaming the market.
But the city’s efforts to even the playing field have been more akin to Armstrong’s recommendations, and the section of the Consolidated Plan that lays out goals and measurable objectives—the actual “plan” part —calls for more of the same. Last year, the City Council and Planning Commission agreed to sell a former dump site off Elliott Avenue to Southern Development and Habitat for Humanity for $1 after the corporate-nonprofit partnership proposed a high-density, mixed-income neighborhood on the site. And then there’s the Charlottesville Housing Fund (CHF).
The 2007 brainchild of then-mayor Dave Norris, the fund does require some support from builders, but not much. Only development projects that require a special use permit come with an obligation to construct some affordable units or pay into the CHF, and in a city where much of the new residential development is by-right, that’s relatively rare. Taxpayers supply the rest of the approximately $1.4 million funneled from the fund into federal matching grants and the coffers of half a dozen local housing assistance nonprofits with the aim of helping poor residents buy homes or fix up and afford to stay in the ones they already own—and upping the percentage of supported affordable housing in pursuit of the city’s 15 percent goal.
In a way, Dana Martin is a Housing Fund success story. The 39-year-old mother of four was born in Charlottesville, and the first home she remembers was in Westhaven, the city’s oldest public housing project. Her own first apartment was in the federally subsidized Section 8 development Downtown now called Friendship Court. Ultimately, she decided she’d do whatever it took to buy her own home.
“I wanted more,” she said. “I wanted my kids to see more, see the dreams I had.”
But the $10 an hour she was making working the front desk at the Red Roof Inn meant there was literally nothing on the market she could afford. Even making public housing rent was hard. So she signed up with Habitat for Humanity, which has received CHF money to support its mission of offering low-income families no-interest mortgages with flexible payments on homes they helped build. With a promotion under her belt and training in home ownership from Habitat, she could afford her own condo in the organization’s Sunrise community, a former trailer park in Belmont.
“It was hard transitioning,” she said—going from very low rent payments and food stamps to a mortgage. Without the leg up from Habitat that allows her to pay a set 30 percent of her income on housing, she would have remained where she was, an unwilling long-term resident of an overburdened public housing system whose tenants are often incentivized to stay rather than risk the giant financial step of moving into the regular housing market. “But I’m making it,” she said.
But Martin is also part of a small minority; Habitat has helped provide homes for just shy of 150 families in Charlottesville. And it’s not always easy to predict the long-term effects of efforts to balance the housing market. When more than a dozen funders, including the city and Piedmont Housing Alliance, poured $6 million into rebuilding about 10 percent of the housing stock in the 10th and Page neighborhood in 2006, the project was heralded as a way to stabilize and revitalize the neighborhood, but many of the brightly painted homes are now assessed at $200,000-$300,000—in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their neighbors.
At first glance, it looks like gentrification to Hargraves. On a recent muggy afternoon, he stood on the corner of Page Street and 10th, arms akimbo. “You have a $280,000 house right here,” he said, pointing to one of the 2006 rebuilds. “And right across the street you have Westhaven, where people are in subsidized housing.” In the near distance behind him is the towering Tyvek-covered shell of a nearly finished addition to 1115 Wertland, a brand new student housing condominium. It’s one of three planned or in-progress developments in the city geared toward the University crowd—more housing, but not the kind of stock that’s going to bring up the ratio of affordable units in the city. Not the kind of housing that could become homes for the 46.7 percent paying a third, half, or more of their income to keep the roofs over their heads.
“Why shouldn’t residents from low-income neighborhoods have the same opportunities?” Hargraves asked.