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The Housing Divide

The cost of living has steadily risen in Charlottesville, as has the average income.  But what happens when the city’s lowest wage earners can no longer afford to live there?  WMRA’s Jordy Yager has this report on the state of affordable housing in Charlottesville.

Sound of construction zone

A giant excavator shovels hundreds of crumbled cinderblocks along West Main Street, clearing the remnants of an old office building. A new six-story apartment building called The Standard is set to take its place, adding nearly 650 bedrooms to Charlottesville’s rental market. But not one of these will be priced as affordable for lower-income residents in the city. Instead, they’re aimed at University of Virginia students.

SHARONDA POINDEXTER-ROSE: That’s all you hear about Charlottesville is students, students, students, students, students. You don’t really hear too much about single mothers trying to do the right thing by working, trying to make a living for their family. You hear about students.

Sharonda Poindexter-Rose is a single mother. She’s 24 years old and works as a server at a local restaurant. Over the last several months, she’s sought to upgrade her 1-bedroom home to a 2-bedroom. But along the way, she’s discovered a hard truth about Charlottesville’s housing market.

POINDEXTER-ROSE: It’s so expensive. Like, really, it is. It’s expensive out here.

Most 2-bedrooms in Charlottesville range between $1,000 to $1,800 a month, according to a recent study commissioned by the city. That’s on par with Virginia Beach, according to U.S. Census data, and exceeds average rents in cities such as Richmond, Roanoke, and Harrisonburg.

Six years ago, Charlottesville set a goal that by the year 2025 it wants 15 percent of all housing to be affordable for 2-person families making less than $52,000 a year. Since setting that goal, more than 1,500 new housing units have been built in the city. But only 73 of them have been priced as affordable. As a result, the percentage of affordable housing in the city has actually decreased slightly from 10.1 percent to 10.06 percent.

Stacy Pethia was hired in August to be the city’s Housing Program Coordinator. From a business standpoint, she says, she gets it; developers make less profit with affordable housing. And legally, they don’t have to build it. A local ordinance allows them to pay a lump sum into the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund instead.

STACY PETHIA: I think, historically, the developers generally pay into the Fund as opposed to providing units. I would like that to change.

Pethia oversees the fund, which was started in 2007 to try and increase the city’s affordable housing. That apartment building under construction on West Main Street? It’ll join two others, of equal size, recently built and also aimed at student tenants. All together, their developers paid nearly $1.5 million into the fund, rather than making a few of their 560 units affordable to lower-income residents.  None of these three developers returned requests for comment.  Pethia worries that trend toward more expensive housing will continue.

PETHIA: What I think we don’t want to happen is that all of the new housing that comes in is high-end, and people who are of moderate or lower-income need to move farther and farther away from the city. That would hurt the future of the city itself.

Anecdotally, people are moving away, to places within driving distance, such as Waynesboro or Scottsville, but where 2-bedrooms go for less than half as much.

According to a recent report, it costs about $35,000 a year to be self-sufficient in Charlottesville. And perhaps more startling, one out of every four families here make less than that. Sure, Charlottesville’s area median income is $84,000 a year. But that’s a bit misleading, says Brandon Collins. He’s an organizer with the Public Housing Association of Residents.

BRANDON COLLINS: You have a lot of incomes that are on the very high scale that have skewed things so that our median income is actually pretty high. But we still have a very big divide between the very low, or extremely low-income people and the very wealthy in Charlottesville.

Collins says the affordable housing fund needs more taxpayer dollars. Currently, the city gives it about $1.3 million a year. That money is then given mostly to area non-profits to rehab existing homes and build new homes for low-income residents. But for those who rent, the market is sparse. And the message is clear, says Poindexter-Rose.

POINDEXTER-ROSE: It comes across as if they don’t care. You know what I’m saying. That’s what the message comes across, it comes across as, to me, African-Americans we just do not care about. You know what I’m saying. We don’t care about you all.

Last November, Pethia and the Housing Advisory Committee offered City Council a series of 35 recommendations on ways to increase affordable housing. One was to offer developers what are called ‘density bonuses’ — permission to build larger buildings in exchange for a guaranteed number of affordable units. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

PETHIA: It’s not always well liked in cities though, because it’s changing the entire look of the city. And Charlottesville, it’s not New York. I mean, it still has its little neighborhoods that are quaint and reasonably scaled. And to build affordable housing, we’re going to have to change that.

The Great Eastern Management Company is part of that change. It’s trying to be the first to incorporate affordable units into its housing plan instead of paying into the fund. But some say the four-story building the company’s proposed is just too large for their upper-class neighborhood near Downtown. And they’ve actively campaigned against the 126 units, at least four of which would be priced as affordable, says David Mitchell, who handles the company’s construction and development.

DAVID MITCHELL: It’s tough. Change is hard. But this city is changing and it’s going to become a city, it’s not a town, and we need to plan for it or the consequences are going to be pretty bad I think and the people that are going to get hit the most are the ones who can’t afford it.

One thing’s for certain: Cities change.  The question is, for whom?

Jordy Yager was a freelance reporter for WMRA from 2015 - 2019.