Talking Affordable Housing and "Smart Growth" at Stafford Board of Supervisors Meeting
More housing is needed in Stafford to meet demand, and putting it in the right place will help affordability and reduce traffic congestion, presenters say.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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In order to house the 55,000 new residents that the Weldon Cooper Center projects will be moving to Stafford in the next 20 years, the county needs 18,000 new homes to be constructed.
And that should include homes at “a lot of different price levels,” said Chip Boyles, executive director of the George Washington Regional Commission.
Boyles gave a presentation on the demand for housing in Stafford and across Planning District 16 at Tuesday’s meeting of the Stafford Board of Supervisors.
The Weldon Cooper Center projects that the population of PD 16—which includes Stafford, Spotsylvania, Caroline, and King George counties and Fredericksburg city—will grow by 111,000 by 2040. Assuming three people per household—the average household size in Stafford—that means 45,000 new homes are needed across the region, Boyles said.
GWRC in 2020 initiated an affordable housing study, which resulted in an action plan that identified 42 strategies for increasing the housing supply. Boyles said commission staff recently pared those down to four “that we’re taking a look at and trying to move forward.”
The top priority is to create an awareness campaign for local government and the public that includes an accurate description of what “affordable housing” means.
“Affordable housing does not equal low income housing,” Boyles said. “Anyone who is spending more than 30% of their income on housing needs [mortgage or rent, insurance, and utilities] is living unaffordably in terms of housing.”
An affordable housing payment for a household making $83,750 per year would be not more than $1,750 per month.
“There are not a lot of units in our region you can get for that, especially when the [Fredericksburg Area Association of Realtors] most recent data showed that the median household sales price in Stafford is $579,000,” Boyles said. “$1,750 won’t pay much towards mortgage at that rate.”
Boyles also emphasized that spending on transportation or childcare is not generally considered to be part of housing-related spending, but “in a region like ours, those two can push you way over 30%.”
Boyles said GWRC’s goal is not to tell jurisdictions what they should do regarding housing, but to provide data to help them see how housing demand affects the entire region.
“Housing is just like transportation,” he said. “It’s not as if you have a brick wall around the boundaries of your county. You have to look at it from other jurisdictions’ point of view.”
The housing crisis affects transportation directly, Boyles said. “If people are moving to Caroline or Orange or further out, they’re then traveling more often through our jurisdictions, creating more traffic,” he said. “So if we can come up with strategies to move closer to where we work and live affordably in higher-quality housing, then we’ll feel we’ve achieved at least one of our priorities.”
GWRC’s three other housing-related priorities are to develop a “one-stop shop” where the public can get information and assistance; to find a way to help the community pay for maintenance and repair; and to help local governments update their comprehensive plans to include address affordable housing.
“Not very many people are aware that state code now requires local governments’ comprehensive plans to have an affordable housing element,” Boyles said.
Boyles’ presentation was followed by one from Stewart Schwartz with the Coalition for Smarter Growth.
Schwartz said the region’s traffic headaches are related to land use and the way communities have been developed around the automobile.
Transportation costs families almost as much per month as housing, Schwartz said. According to AAA, the annual cost to own and operate a new car is $12,297, or just over $1,000 per month—a cost that can be reduced by creating walkable communities where housing, shopping, work, and recreation are in close proximity.
As an example, Schwartz said Stafford could look at ways to incentivize redevelopment of vacant land and underused parking lots in its designated Urban Development Area, which generally runs along Interstate 95.
“You could retrofit this to provide needed housing and walkable neighborhoods,” he said.
Schwartz noted that “compact development”—such as housing over retail or public buildings, or “missing middle” housing such as garden apartments, duplexes, and triplexes—has a higher tax yield per acre than development that is more spread out.
Supervisors on Tuesday complimented Boyles and Schwartz for their presentations, and Aquia representative Monica Gary asked that the Board schedule a work session on the subject of affordable housing.
“We need to deal with it and very soon,” she said. “If we don’t make this priority people will continue to suffer.”
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It's interesting that 19 of the 42 solutions mentioned involve the preservation of existing housing stock - stock we are losing every day as we do nothing to preserve it. Kudos to the Stafford BOS for coincidentally adjusting its code re housing solution #3.1 in 2021. Now how about the rest?