RVA’s Housing Woes

RICH: Welcome to RVA’s Got Issues, a podcast about politics and public affairs in and around Richmond, Virginia. Each episode will bring you stories about what’s happening here in RVA. We’ll break down complicated events and ideas so you can understand what’s happening in your community and why it matters.

I’m your host, Rich Meagher. I teach students about Virginia politics at Randolph Macon College just north of the city. You may have seen or heard me on the local news, and now I’m excited to host this new podcast from VPM. We’ll bring you deep dive interviews on the biggest stories in the news, and you’ll hear from people who are coming up with innovative ways to improve their communities.

From Richmond, Chesterfield, Hanover, Henrico, and more, We’ll tell you what’s happening, what’s next, and what you can do about it. On this episode, RVA’s got issues with housing affordability. All up and down the income spectrum, people are having trouble finding a home they can afford.

This is really my last option before I have to either choose commute, or I don’t want to DEF CON me going to college, but Rents and prices are high.

And there’s just not enough homes to go around.

So it’s just finding a place where I can work and not have to make like 10 million more than what I make to get the apartment that I want.

We’ll talk to Jovan Burton from the Partnership for Housing Affordability about this housing crisis and how we can make housing better for everyone in RVA also, RVAs got questions about traffic accidents, A listener asks us.

Why don’t we have more cameras to catch the speeders and red light runners? Last, but by no means least, RVA’s got answers about gardening. We’ll spotlight a community advocate who is teaching skills to adults and kids one garden at a time. All that coming up on RVA’s Got Issues.

 

RICH: On each episode, you’ll hear from a newsmaker from greater Richmond, someone who’s working on the issues shaping the future of our region. Today, RVA’s got issues with housing affordability. Our guest is Javon Burton. Executive Director of the Partnership for Housing Affordability, a nonprofit organization that works with local governments and community partners to shape the future of housing in RVA. Javon, welcome.

JOVAN: Thank you. Happy to be here.

RICH: Yeah, so the idea of what’s affordable just means a certain percentage of your income for some folks, but there’s also some federal definitions of what might be affordable for lower income folks. Like, what does affordable mean in the context of what we’re talking about here?

JOVAN: First and foremost, not spending more than 30 percent of your income on your monthly housing costs. If you are doing that, if you’re spending more than 30%, you’re considered cost burdened. Roughly a third of all the households in the Richmond region are cost burdened. And so, what that means on a human level is, on a monthly basis, you’re making decisions between, do I pay for groceries, do I pay for rent? Right. Do I have enough to pay for child care and health care and all of these other things? What gets sacrificed? And so that’s where you see evictions, right? And you’re less likely to have housing units that are available to you. I think people might get a little confused sometimes about housing because it seems like there’s a new development every five minutes, particularly in some of the growing counties like Chesterfield has grown so much recently. Even Hanover has added quite a few new homes. But there’s a sense that these houses, these new homes aren’t necessarily the right kinds of homes that we need for folks who really need housing in our region. Does that sound right? Yeah, I mean, I think probably the exasperated reply you hear in communities is, don’t we have enough, right? Isn’t this enough development? Uh, one of the, one of the great indicators of is a region. Moving in the right directions. How many cranes do you see up? How many cranes do you see up in the city centers or, or elsewhere? And certainly Richmond is growing. There’s no secret about that. However. That development, again, is not going to be targeted towards the population that we’re talking about. And so, you’re going to see units that come online, new construction and single family, for example, you won’t see anything that’s put in the ground below 300, 000, um, in some cases below 350, 000, depending on where that development is on the multifamily side. You’re going to see rents upwards of 17, 18, 19, even 2, 000. But I would say what’s unique about Richmond is that the rate at which some of these prices are increasing, that is distinct from other areas across the country. So Richmond’s having the fastest growth in terms of rent increases in the entire state of Virginia. What’s driving that? Well, partly. Pandemic. We had a cost of living advantage over a lot of areas. And so in Richmond, where it’s been on the outside, more affordable to live in than, say, D. C. Northern Virginia. Those individuals, those households moving here to still have those salaries from those higher cost areas, but can take advantage of the lower housing prices here has contributed to that. But also just existing demand within our region and again, a backlog of limited supply. So there’s a kind of economic case that goes along with some of these issues, right? That folks who are evicted or folks who are unable to find stable homes in an area are not able to work in that area very well, right? They’re not able to contribute to the economy. Is there like just a pure economic argument that can be made for more investment in housing, funding and changing our rules? So there’s absolutely a financial case to be made, an economic case. If people have affordable housing, they’re going to have more disposable income. That means more money that they can spend in your local economy, which would generate increased tax revenue. So, We won’t continue to grow at the rate that we want to, right? We won’t see businesses continue to, to locate here. We won’t be as competitive because their employees won’t be able to live here comfortably. Um, you’ll see longer commute times, which doesn’t bode well for quality of life. More housing instability also means things like greater use of our public services, our healthcare systems. Greater instances of people who are going to the emergency room, people who are uninsured, all of that has a public cost, right? That’s also a greater impact on first responders. Who carries out evictions? Sheriff’s office. More and more evictions that are being carried out, more strain on first responders, but also more importantly, the strain on those households, many of those households have Children, the impact of moving around throughout a school year on educational outcomes. The data is incredibly clear on the impact negatively that that has on students, particularly those at a young age. So there are so many angles to this issue that when you think about what’s at stake, it’s our competitiveness. It’s the quality of life of residents here. It’s the strain on public resources. You’re going to pay for it regardless, right? So if you’re, if you’re not acting on it, you’re going to pay for it to address it. And if you are acting on it, you’re going to pay for it, but one will be more cost effective than the other. So we talked a little bit about some of these solutions and there’s a lot of them, but again, it makes this, uh, housing problem, this sort of housing issue, a little hard To grasp, I think.

RICH: So for just for our listeners, you know, what’s the sort of elevator pitch about how we address the housing crisis? Are there a couple of clear things you could say to someone? Here’s what we should do and what we’re gonna do to address housing in RVA. Maybe a way that helps make it a little bit less daunting and complicated.

JOVAN: So think about if you were to want to build your own house, right? Maybe one of the first things to think about is where am I going to put it, right? Where is it going to be located? You need land for it. Land costs are incredibly high, and that’s one of the most prohibitive factors to development period, but affordable development. So once you get the land figured out, you know where that’s going to be. Can you zone? Is that land zoned for residential development? If not, you may have to go through a rezoning process. So where you can actually build is the other piece, and that’s addressed through zoning. Then you obviously need money for it, whether that’s for the construction costs, whether that’s for pre development, you may start with some of the pre development work on that land. And you know, we’re in Richmond, right? Civil war took place. Battles here took place. You may realize you’re on a historic site. You can’t do development there. Now you have to find some other place. Or the soil is not conducive to development. It’s on a floodplain, right? There’s all these things that come into play and then you need the political support. So maybe people in the community think that I don’t want trees that have been here for so long to be knocked down for that development. And they’re going to, you know, campaign to their local elected supervisor or council member that I don’t want this development to go up. You’re going to have to make a case and generate support for, uh, Why that housing should be built. So you need political will. You need land. You need zoning and you need funding to do it. And the last thing I would say, just to help people understand, you know, one of the common misconceptions is just let the market play out right. The market will take care of this issue. Housing costs the same to build whether you’re an affordable nonprofit developer or for profit developer. The cost of a brick is a brick. There’s no affordable brick. So construction costs are exactly the same, except you’re going to be with an affordable development offering lower rents. So the return on your investment is going to be lower. You’re going to have debt, but limits on the amount of debt that you can incur in that development. Otherwise, a bank won’t lend to you. And so it costs the same to build. You can make less money on it, and it’s more complicated, thus necessitating some intervention and support from philanthropy, private sector. And the public sector. So I think that’s, you know, kind of what you need to wrap your head around is there are so many moving pieces to this issue, but it’s impossible to have without, you know, financial investment and support, which is usually going to be multiple sources without land, without zoning, without political will.

RICH: So are any of our local governments meeting the crisis? Or are they at least trying to meet the crisis? Are there staff or offices or functions that you’ve seen that are that seem ready to tackle these problems?

JOVAN: Well, yes, and I’ll start big picture. What makes Richmond unique right now is that we’re still in a place where this issue is solvable. And so you may see the headlines or social media, you know, other areas across the country where it’s become so untenable. Whether it’s homelessness or housing costs, that it just feels like it’s just a huge pit. Whereas with Bridgman, while it’s getting worse, certainly, because we’re experiencing a lot of change, it’s still small enough for us to be able to address if we act urgently enough. And I think that we’ve seen much more urgency from our local government partners in recent years, whether that’s increased funding, public funding. And I think the pandemic helped with that quite a bit. But we’ve seen increased public funding. We’ve seen more targeted investment of the federal dollars that they receive to go towards actual housing development. Things like home repairs, preservation and new construction, and then I think we’ve also seen some updates to zoning and more willingness to try to work with the private sector to say, can you give us something right? We’ll be able to help you with a rezoning, for example, if you can include some units of affordability. Another element of the issue that we haven’t talked about is mobile home communities. That’s, uh, another hidden element of housing that a lot of people don’t, don’t see. And there’s a great example in Chesterville County, where, uh, the county worked with a non profit, Project Homes, to purchase a mobile home park, um, that has had a lot of issues around quality and deterioration of the units. And they have done a wonderful job working with the community there to work to try to replace or repair all of the units. So, uh, there’s quite a bit of action going on at housing from both the private sector and public sector. That I think, you know, 10 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have seen that’s good to hear. Um, I also think that there’s, uh, at least a, an effort by some folks in the city to grapple with the past. We’ve got a history in Richmond of redlining, which was the, uh, the banks collaborating with sort of government officials to prevent. Black homeownership, essentially, we had a history of segregation, of course, uh, do you see efforts to kind of trace what’s going on in the housing market today to our past, our particular past of racial segregation? There are, I would say, two or three efforts that are happening right now in the region. That are seeking to redress or ameliorate some of those disparities. One example, and this came from Wells Fargo, is a national initiative to increase BIPOC, or Black Indigenous People of Color home ownership across the country. So they selected eight markets, Richmond being one of them. And the idea is that they have a certain amount of money that they can invest to help create 5, 000 new BIPOC homeowners by 2025. And so LISC, a local organization here, is working to lead that initiative in partnership with local governments and partnerships with all the other nonprofits in the housing space. And so that’s a wonderful program that’s already created over a thousand BIPOC new homeowners here across the region, and that’s one. And then I would say on the preservation side, we’re actually partnering with another nonprofit organization of ours, ones that I mentioned earlier, Project Homes, to look at what impact home repairs have on preserving black wealth. So again, there’s two sides to this issue. There’s new construction, right, creation of units, but there’s also preservation. And so we have this theory that If you’re on a wait list, for example, for a home repair and you have a leaking roof or you need a new furnace for three years, your likelihood of selling where you see all the signs, we all see them driving around, right? We buy ugly homes, we buy ugly homes, all cash. A lot of people get calls weekly asking, are they willing to buy their home? And that could wane on you a little bit. And so our, our theory that we’re going to try to prove through this project is that The quicker that someone can get a home repair, the more likely they are to remain in that home long term and preserve the wealth, uh, within the family.

RICH: So what’s the single most important next step a listener should take if they care about this issue of housing affordability?

JOVAN: I think if you’re a citizen who is maybe interested in, you know, what does this issue look like in my community, I would say, you know, show up to some planning commission meetings when developments are up for discussion and maybe there’s a rezoning. Case that is up before the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors or City Council. You see neighborhood opposition, right? I think understand the roots of this opposition. Reach out to organizations like Partnership for Housing Affordability and others who can help you arm you with data and just also to demystify this. When you talk about who is this housing for? Um, most folks don’t recognize that it’s for either people that you interact with on a daily basis, whether that’s the, you know, Uber driver that you have deliver your dinner or lunch, whether that’s retail workers that you see when you’re shopping on the weekends. I think too often we try to otherize who this issue is serving. And in fact, it’s the majority of our workforce is the bulk of people that you interact with, or you may know someone. You rely on their services on a day to day basis in order to have your quality of life, but their quality of life is impacted by housing.

RICH: Jovan Burton is the executive director of the Partnership for Housing Affordability. Jovan, thanks so much for joining us.

JOVAN: Thank you.

 

RICH: For this episode, RVA has got questions about traffic accidents. To help us, one of our producers, Amber Coles, is here. Hey, Amber. Hey, Rich. Amber, you’ve got our listeners question. What do we got?

AMBER: So this week, our question was submitted by Nancy McConaughey Karnan, and her question is, why aren’t we using the cameras at our traffic intersections to catch people running red lights? They are endangering the lives of people around them. They should be heavily fined and be made to explain how they’re going to keep the community safe before they get their license back.

RICH: Yeah, harsh words from Nancy. Yeah, I kind of agree with her. Yeah, I mean, she’s, she’s right running a red light, super dangerous traffic accidents are on the rise in the city of Richmond over 24 traffic deaths last year, which is more than double the pre pandemic numbers. And it’s similar rates in the, in the counties. You’re a driver, Amber, does it seem like it’s dangerous out there? It does, especially in the city. Um, there is a lot of speeding. Sometimes people get impatient at the lights, so they might go faster. through them, especially when it’s red. So, yeah, yeah. So some people hope that the cameras might help stop that kind of behavior. Uh, evidence for cameras is mixed. Critics argue they’re just used to bring in revenue to local governments. They don’t solve anything. That’s probably not fair. The federal highway administration has some data that suggests cameras can reduce accidents. But most transit experts argue that cameras are not a magic bullet. They need to be combined with other infrastructure improvements like your speed tables, bump outs, roundabouts, protected bike lanes. Do you know how to drive in a roundabout, Amber?

AMBER: I do know how to drive in a roundabout. There’s a lot of them around me.

RICH: That’s good. That’s good. I know some of my neighbors are mad about roundabouts, but they do slow you down. Right? So anything to slow people down. But the city and the surrounding counties don’t seem to be interested very much in cameras. That’s actually in part because state law really severely limits their use. State Delegate Mike Jones, who’s a former Richmond City Council member. He introduced the bill to expand cameras this year, but it didn’t go anywhere. Uh, the city of Richmond piloted a couple of red light cameras a few years ago, but they didn’t follow up after the pilot. In part, it seems like the tickets didn’t bring in enough revenue to pay for the costs of the camera. How high of a ticket do you think you’d have to pay before you’d stop speeding?

AMBER: Oh, I got a ticket once for kind of like parking near a handicap zone. That was like 300. So maybe 300.

RICH: Oh, that would make me stop driving. Uh, Richmond is currently piloting cameras around two elementary schools, Holton and Patrick Henry. And they’re trying to see if that will slow down cars in those important crossing areas. Those are not going to be cameras up on a pole. They’re weird little gray boxes on the side of the road. So if you see a little weird. Gray box near an elementary school. That’s what it is. Uh, so the bottom line here is state law makes it hard to use cameras. The city of Richmond is trying a pilot program, but in the absence of new state laws, it looks like local governments are probably better off trying some other solutions for now.

RICH: Do you think we answered our listeners question there?

AMBER: I think we did a good job and we do want to thank Nancy for submitting her question. And if you have questions, much like Nancy’s, make sure you submit them to us. Yeah.

RICH: Listeners send us a email at rvasgotissuesatvpm. org. Thanks, Amber. Thanks.

 

RICH: Each episode you’ll hear from someone who is making a difference in their community. Jovanni Armstead is a lot of things. A lawyer by training, an Instacart shopper, a mother, a city commission appointee, a community advocate. She also changes communities through gardening. Jovanni, thanks so much for being here.

JOVANNI: Thank you for having me.

RICH: So if we go to one of your gardens, what do we see? What’s the layout? What do you have planted there?

JOVANNI: The first thing you’re going to see is what you would consider dead weeds and plants. In the wintertime, the pollinators need somewhere to go. But you’ll also see typical garden beds. You’ll see trees growing. You’ll see things hanging and you’ll say, what in the world? That’s how we get people to come in because people want to know what is that you have? Why are those things hanging there? And what is hanging? They’re bird feeders. So we have pine cones and we put peanut butter all around them and put bird seeds on them and we hang them, hang them from the trees so that we don’t have to buy more stuff and create more stuff. You just use what we already have.

RICH: So why gardening?

JOVANNI: Well, you go to the grocery store and I got sick of all that shiny stuff on the, on the vegetables and fruit and you buy stuff and it doesn’t last very long. And I said, I want to try to grow my own stuff. And that’s what I did. That’s how I started. Just a little planter in my backyard. And then I said, Oh, I can do this. I can’t grow flowers, but I can grow vegetables.

RICH: Well, then those are good for eating, right? But this is not just what you do, right? You’re not just gardening in your backyard. You have a thing for community gardens, right? So how do you bring people into this? What’s your pitch to them to get people involved in gardening?

JOVANNI: Just trying to show them resiliency and self sufficiency. Why depend on someone else when you can do it for yourself? And it becomes bigger than just fruits and vegetables. You know, it becomes life stories. It becomes, um, Hey, you know that that asthma thing that you have going on? You know that allergy issue that you have going on? It could be related to the food that you eat. Let’s try something different, you know, and we go from there.

RICH: So you’ve done a couple of different gardening projects. Probably the most famous one is the Carmel Empowerment Community Garden in Jackson Ward. What made you think that that neighborhood needed a garden?

JOVANNI: Well, we don’t have, that’s my neighborhood. I’m a Jackson Wardian, I’m born and raised and we are a food desert. We have lots of food insecurities in our community. So I said, well, hey, why not bring that to our community? It may not completely substitute or replace our grocery stores, but it’s a way to get started. And then COVID happened and it became a way for our kids to have a little place to play. And people saw it. And I said, this can be bigger than just us giving out a few fruits and vegetables. And so I invited the community to come in to help us grow. Keyword grow. You know, and it became conversations in the garden. We’ve had school board members come over and talk in our garden. We’ve had literacy programs in our garden. Um, but we were able to use this space as a way to connect the community to their issues. And figure out ways to solve some of that issue.

RICH: I mean, it’s really like you’re, you’re doing a serious metaphorical work, right? You’re growing plants and vegetables, but you’re also growing the community, right? Yeah. How does that work? Like, how has the community responded to that?

JOVANNI: You know, when we first started, people were like, they’re going to steal all your stuff. They’re going to steal everything you have. People are going to tear your place up. And they did not for, I think I was there for about two and a half years before anybody stole anything. And when they stole it, I said, well, if people need it that bad, why not let them take it? That’s kind of the purpose of the community garden. I’d like for you to call me and ask for help. But if you feel the necessity to come in and take, all that inspired me to do is plant more. Because it was just me and they’re like, you know, it was the girl syndrome. There’s a girl over here with a tiller. There’s a girl over here with a hammer. What is this girl doing? And men would come up and say, you know, young lady, you shouldn’t be out here at six in the morning. You know, you shouldn’t be by yourself. Where’s your husband? Where’s your dad? And I explained to them what I’m doing and they’re like, well, let me help you. And that turned into. Oh, I’m not just going to help you. I want to be a part. I want to be a partner. I want to be a part of this stewardship that you have. And they would tell someone else and they would tell someone else. And the next thing you know, I had people coming to cut the grass when I wasn’t there. And I had neighbors ready to fight people who were coming in to pick. And they’re like, no, no, no. Ms. Armstead didn’t say you could be here. And people would call me in the middle of the night. There’s somebody over here sitting here. So it became, you know, Our place, our community place.

RICH: Right. And so you also said you plant things that you like. What are some of the plants that you like? The fruits and vegetables?

JOVANNI: I think my favorite thing to grow are tomatoes because there’s so many varieties and people don’t realize that they come in so many different colors and things like that. My kids favorite thing is garlic because it’s almost a hidden treasure, you know, and they plant this garlic. And you can’t see it for a while. And then when it comes up, you don’t know that it’s garlic. It kind of looks like chives and green onions. And then they have to dig for it. You know, kids like to get their hands dirty. So things that they have to dig for, sweet potatoes and white potatoes and garlic, that’s the stuff that they love the most. Because they got to do a little extra work.

RICH: Let’s talk about the big picture. So you’ve worked with the Office of Sustainability on climate equity efforts. How do you see the gardening work that you’ve done in these spaces connect to the, you know, sort of big picture issues of environmental sustainability, climate change, things like that?

JOVANNI: Hopefully, people will see this as a need for more green space. A place where people can go and breathe. We are so overrun by pavement and, and brick and mortar and just apartments and buildings and just surrounded. Our black and brown communities are suffering the most, um, and have suffered the longest because of where we are concentrated within our city. It’s easy for people to say, well, you know, if you want a backyard, move out to the county. But if you don’t have those resources. If you are working minimum wage jobs, and you don’t have the education, you don’t have the transportation to get to the places to make life better, you should still be able to enjoy fresh air. Your kids should still be able to go to parks and playgrounds without burning up, because a lot of the playgrounds and parks within our city, they aren’t covered. So your kids can’t go. So all of it connects because we need to remain focused on the people who are actually still there. Everyone here is not in air conditioned buildings, are not in these new energized buildings. So we can’t forget about the people who have been here, who will be here and don’t have the same resources.

RICH: Thank you. Jovanni Armstead. Thanks for joining us.

JOVANNI: Thank you so much for having me.

 

RICH: That’s our show. Thanks to our guests, Jovan Burton and Jovanni Armstead. RVA’s Got Issues wants to hear from you. We especially want to hear about the issues you care about. What has always bugged you about your city or county, and what is happening right now in your neighborhood? Do you have a great guest you want to suggest?

Or have you started a project or program in your community that you want to tell us about? Write to us at [email protected]. Join us next time when RVA’s Got Issues with public transit. Even if you don’t ride the bus much, transit brings a bunch of benefits to RVA, as well as challenges.

RVA’s Got Issues is produced by Max Wasserman and Amber Coles. Meg Lindholm is our executive producer. Gavin Wright is VPM’s Managing Producer of Podcasts, and Steve Humble is VPM’s Chief Content Officer. I’m your host, Rich Meagher. Thanks for listening.