Virginia Community Grapples With Affordable Housing Issues

Every year, Denise Hunt tackles a job that confounds most Culpeper, Va., residents.

Hunt works in the human resources office of the Culpeper school system, hiring nearly 100 employees. And Hunt must find out where they’ll live.

And she must act fast. Culpeper’s lack of affordable housing options has cost her a teacher more than once.

“Most new teachers want to live on their own. They’ve gone through college, and done the dorm life. Now they have a real job and want to have their own place,” Hunt said.

Landlords and renters know her, and teachers make good tenants. She finds out fast about new openings. But it’s tough finding affordable apartments in Culpeper when few even exist.

“I think it’s serious. I think it’s one we have to constantly be aware of, constantly in search of ideas,” she said.

Hundreds of homes stand ready for completion. Hundreds more languish in the development stage. But few of the houses on the way have anything to excite Culpeper poor and working poor. Many local experts agree that Culpeper needs both kinds of housing:

• “Low income housing,” for people who fall below the poverty line and require federal assistance to make ends meet.
• “Workforce housing,” aimed at government employees like police officers and teachers who make too much for assistance, but too little for the minimum payments.

Both present challenges. But with no incentive to build affordable houses, a real estate developer often just won’t do it.

“Whatever is already in place through zoning is probably not going to be affordable,” local attorney Butch Davies said. “It’s going to take new zoning because you’re going to need new proffers to get the affordable housing component included. It’s just taken us a while to get there. It’s still not a part of our proffer structure.”

As Virginia mortgage costs remain too high for many lower- and middle-income residents to pay the bills, the challenges of solving the problem remain as daunting as ever. More and more, local experts call for an unprecedented amount of involvement to build affordable homes.

Sam Aitken learned the hard way.

In 2002, the head of the non-profit Culpeper Community Development Corp set about renovating the old Ann Wingfield school to apartments for low-income families in Culpeper. It took four years from purchase of the property to moving residents in. Filling the tax credit application took two years, and the county secured a loan from Virginia Housing Development Authority (VHDA).

The VHDA in particular scored applicants on a points system. Two-bedroom apartments, for example, received ten points more for two bathrooms rather than one. Scoring points cost well over $1 million, but competition for the money was fierce, and a mere 20 points eliminated applicants.

“It isn’t easy, and you have to do some things to get the money that you normally wouldn’t do in order to score points,” Aitken said.

Methods that work in building housing for people on government assistance don’t necessarily cut it for those with greater means seeking workforce housing and still unable to find anything suitable.

The VHDA awards their highest scoring to applicants if a certain percentage of the houses service low income. Workforce housing, therefore, brings the lowest scoring. Building workforce units remains possible, but developers must blend them with low income houses.

Time will tell if mortgage rates remain at optimal levels for borrowers and Virginia home prices come back down to earth. If things remain as they are, we are probably going to see a lot more of these issues.