Affordable and accessible housing is the Achilles heel of the smart growth movement. The latest demonstration of that fact is a report from the Thomas Jefferson Planning District, authored by researchers at Virginia Tech’s Center for Housing Research. As summarized by the Daily Progress: “The Charlottesville area has a ‘severe’ dearth of affordable housing – and the problem is likely to grow worse.”
According to the report, the region has a shortage of at least 4,200 apartments that are affordable for families earning less than 50 percent of the area’s median income, or about $28,500.
The top five jobs in the Charlottesville region – including cashiers, restaurant workers and retail employees – all have an annual average salary of less than $25,000, according to the report.
In a now-familiar pattern, workers find less expensive housing in outlying areas and drive long distances to work, adding to traffic congestion on the arterials serving the region. Charlottesville’s solution is to add another layer of regulation over the layer of regulation that caused the housing shortage in the first place. The city, reports the newspaper, is seeking authority to ask developers to contribute cash proffers for affordable housing funds.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. The solution isn’t forcing developers to subsidize “affordable” housing for a handful of lucky low-wage earners, it’s to allow developers more latitude to build housing of whatever type is in demand. That will require allowing more density, more townhouses, more apartment buildings and more condos to the extent supported by market demand. Ideally, these places would be located where roads, utilities and other infrastructure already exist.
Of course, the conversation will come down to schools. More families mean more school children, and lower-wage earners will mean insufficient tax revenues to cover their costs… as if public schools were a profit center, not a public service.
