Housing in Charlottesville may be one of the most written-about subjects in not only this student paper but in other local ones as well. This is for good reason — housing in Charlottesville is expensive for all, unaffordable for some. Students are not the only people who need housing in Charlottesville, yet a barrier of academia seems to grow from Preston Avenue down to Jefferson Park Avenue and from Alderman Drive to the Amtrak station. Students, removed from the Charlottesville community, often do not deeply engage with the impact they have on the lives of permanent Charlottesville citizens, nor the complicated nature of homes within the city limits.
However, the effect of the relationship between students and Charlottesville is felt all over in the form of changing land values, rewritten zoning laws and altered communities. This opinion piece serves as a bridge between what students experience in their lives as temporary Charlottesville residents and the past decades of disastrous city policy, gleaning lessons from that past to inform policy today. Specifically, this piece will argue that permitting the growth of affordable housing by existing organizations via legal changes could be a step towards remedying historically damaging policy.
Where Bodo’s, McDonalds and Wendy’s now sit near Preston Avenue used to be a thriving Black community, a casualty of a movement that still affects the housing market today. Urban renewal was a portfolio of policies across the country aimed at making cities a more attractive place for rich white suburbanites to live. It consisted mainly of politicians declaring historically Black neighborhoods slums and razing the land for new, more expensive development.
Charlottesville was swept into this scheme — urban renewal projects displaced more than 1,000 predominately Black residents in the neighborhoods of Garrett Street in 1973, Cox’s Row in 1961 and Vinegar Hill in 1960. This destruction was accomplished through a poll tax that removed these Black residents from the democratic process — the decision to destroy passed by a margin of 36 votes due to proponents convincing white voters that disease from said “slums” could pass into their neighborhoods and impact property value.
The organization responsible for this demolition of Charlottesville’s Black community was the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority. It was given permission by the federal Housing Act of 1949 to not only claim land through eminent domain and use it for public housing projects for the displaced persons, but also to simply sell demolished land to private businesses. The first public housing project, Westhaven, was used to house Black residents that were forced from their homes in neighborhoods condemned by the CRHA. In the same fashion until the present, the CRHA was not an active force for good in the community, leading us to the modern day with only marginal tweaks to housing policy in Charlottesville. Public housing today rings of welfare and good intentions, but in its origin, it was merely a tool of segregation and a means to the end of urban renewal.
A trend arises when examining this context — Charlottesville has grown used to ignoring the interests of poor people and minorities in the interest of its wealthy white residents. This idea is crucial to explaining where Charlottesville stands today with housing. The average house in Charlottesville cost $643,000 in 2024, a 43 percent growth from just years prior. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,845 a month, $300 more than the national average. The affordability problem here is not hard to see.
The economics are simple as well — a city with a large population of mainly affluent, temporary young people who are happy, or rather forced, to pay high rent pushes up the opportunity costs of an affordable housing owner. In other words, why keep providing housing to low-income, permanent residents when you could up the rent and house a flowing student population?
This affordability crisis can also be understood in terms of homelessness. There are about 220 people perpetually living on the streets, a sharp increase from years prior. For a small city like Charlottesville, this is a sizable population. City Council has acknowledged the issue of homelessness, yet it remains difficult to pass measures supporting the unhoused. Altruism often fails to gain traction in politics, leaving significant action out of reach. As former-homelessness outreach coordinator Charlie Parr wrote in “Stray,” “Can anyone speak on his behalf, or has someone rigged the game?”
It certainly seems rigged. While perhaps not using race as a primary form of discrimination, current debates over housing unfortunately and predictably devolve into camps of rich versus poor. The crux of the issue is the same — past and present residents wrestle over how to deal with rising property value and increasing population. Today, many of these same arguments rest in zoning laws.
Zoning laws are a set of rules that dictate how a given plot of land can be used. In an economic sense, they are a form of control to regulate population influx to desirable locations. With regard to affordable housing, they are used to determine where a large apartment building can go, where the CRHA can build new housing units and where to place a new homeless shelter. One can easily see how conflicts can be fought through these laws — wealthy residents often do not want to live near affordable housing, making progressive zoning rare.
In Charlottesville, these sorts of zoning battles are all too common. For example, in July, a new zoning ordinance that emphasized affordable housing was scrapped by a judge for missing a court filing date, leaving the city for a brief period with no zoning laws whatsoever — it is still in court. Or take the progressive 2023 zoning ordinance that was dragged on in court by plaintiffs whose single family lots were rezoned to be available for denser housing. Both are efforts by the City Council to move past antiquated zoning laws that favor wealthy property owners, and unsurprisingly, both were significantly controversial.
Homelessness is another element of zoning that embodies this historical conflict. When it was suggested that the Salvation Army convert its property on Cherry Avenue into a shelter, the project was pushed back by residents of the neighboring communities worried about drugs and safety. And to ensure that this project did not “endanger” any of the surrounding residents, Gov. Glenn Youngkin cut the project’s funding, handicapping the city’s ability to help its residents. The debate over where poor people are allowed to live has evolved beyond overt derogatory race questions, yet it has taken shape in aggressively anti-affordable zoning ordinances.
Struggles with zoning changes show Charlottesville to be a historically stubborn city when it comes to changing its housing structures, and often views issues through the traditional “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” view — do not offend wealthy taxpayers. Perhaps this seems fair to pessimists, but every life should be worth the same to the government regardless of who pays the most taxes. Housing should be a right — not a source of stress for low-income residents. We do not need to change the market structure, but we do need to play a deliberate hand in its composition in order to ensure equity for all residents. Charlottesville needs to move closer to being affordable for everyone, and there are a few options to move forward.
Moving past its problematic history, the CRHA has shown itself not only to be a rhetorical solution to unaffordability, but a practical one too. After years of property neglect and decline, in 2019, the CRHA turned a new leaf, securing millions of dollars to renovate and build new affordable housing sites across the city. In 2024, the CEO of CRHA, John Sales, said that “for the first time ever, these public housing units will have AC and won't have to use window units.” Just recently, the CRHA filed plans to renovate Westhaven into a modern mixed-use community. The CRHA is a large organization that receives funding from the Office of Housing and Urban Development, the City of Charlottesville and private donors, so it has the capacity to produce change if given lease to do so. There is much to be hopeful for in the CRHA.
That said, there are significant legal roadblocks in front of the CRHA. Zoning issues in Charlottesville prevent a lot of public funds from moving into buying and developing affordable housing. Those lawsuits mentioned above are hindrances to the actions of the CRHA. Similarly, there is lots of uncertainty in funding going around public authorities right now. For example, the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority has almost $41 million cut by HUD this year, forcing them to refuse potential residents. This federal funding is significant, but if the city, and perhaps even the state, steps up, the CRHA will have options.
Additionally, there are legal remedies to expanding the number of affordable housing units to ease rent costs. The Faircloth Amendment was passed in the Clinton presidential administration in 1998 and restricts the number of housing units public authorities can build more than the amount they already retained in 1999. In most large cities, the amendment is only a paper limit that public authorities do not actually reach. Charlottesville is, however, restricted by the amendment to 376 units when it would rather build more. In other words, there is no reason that the housing economy of Charlottesville should practically suffer through the Faircloth Amendment so that Chicago and New York City can have theoretical barriers on public housing. Units have to be moved around and renovated because they cannot grow to the unrestricted amount, clearly a hindrance to the amount of affordable housing in Charlottesville.
The Faircloth Amendment is a huge obstacle to affordability and needs to be repealed nationally before any real work can be done to fix the housing market in Charlottesville. Those who argue against repealment do not argue that the amendment is good, but rather, that the repealment is not the solution. Some claim that zoning is the real issue, and fixing affordability comes with reducing space currently restricted to single-family households. It is true that this restriction is a problem, but again, this is contrary to market economics. View the CRHA as just another market buyer of housing. If the government places a cap on the amount of units the CRHA can buy and build, then there is no incentive to buy new land. Thus, there is no reason for zoning laws to ever change. The Faircloth Amendment influences zoning laws just as much as zoning laws influence affordability.
Frankly, this issue does seem a bit hopeless given that several more outspoken Democrats have already made the Faircloth Amendment a hot-button issue and thus eliminated any chance of compromise from across the aisle. However, it does seem like the City Council is already moving in the right direction given the passage, albeit caveated by lawsuits, of progressive zoning law. If the CRHA cannot explicitly provide new housing, the city can provide more money for housing vouchers, create new rent assistance programs and adjust zoning laws so that single-family households are not allowed to dominate housing prices.
As a player in the community, the University has some things it can do to ensure it fits well into a more affordable Charlottesville housing market. The University exists in a relatively small area, and programs that use more of this area in more efficient ways are key to the reduction of housing prices. Much work has been done analyzing student housing, concluding that the University can significantly reduce students from the housing market via upperclassmen housing requirements, thereby easing price pressure on permanent residents. Of course, there are challenges to this approach, such as getting students to agree to on-Grounds housing, but the University seems to be warm to this option.
While it is difficult to fix a housing market so damaged by historical and modern transgressions, all of these solutions pose steps in the right direction. It is easy to say that the city needs to do better, yet it is hard to step past the present roadblocks. Whatever direction it takes, past policy should shape their vision beyond a system of market supply and demand. Charlottesville needs to support every member of its community, even if their tax bill is smaller. All residents will benefit from a more equitable housing market, and being a better place to live is certainly in the interest of the city. Do not let inertia define the coming years.
Paul Kurtzweil is a senior opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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