One of the perennial problems of America in the 21st century is the rising cost of housing and the many factors that go into an equation many struggle to understand.
One of the functions of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission is the Regional Housing Partnership, a local clearinghouse where all manner of stakeholders have the opportunity to learn from each other both at regular meetings and the occasional housing summit.
“I went back and evaluated the attendance at the last summit,” said Laurie Jean Talun, Regional Housing and Community Development Grants Manager at the TJPDC. “It was over 200 people, and it was almost perfectly, evenly split amongst those three groups of for profit, nonprofit, and public.”
The next summit is scheduled for March 12 and March 13 of next year and carries the tagline “From Crisis to Solution.”
The keynote speaker is Erica Sims, the president of a firm called HDAdvisors.
“She’s been central to affordable housing work across the state for many years,” Talun said. “HDAdvisors is involved with Virginia Housing, Housing Forward Virginia, Maggie Walker [Community Land Trust], the statewide land trust, as well as a million different housing programs.”
There will be many breakout sessions all of which are intended to increase awareness of different tools to bring down the cost of housing.
“We’ll be thinking about what are the tools available to planners and elective officials in the state of Virginia as a general state,” Talun said. “Different ways of preserving communities. Thinking about both displacement and preserving the feel of the community that has been really established while allowing for more affordable housing to be available.”
Talun said the TJPDC is still looking for additional sponsors for the summit which has a budget of just under $95,000.
While preparations continue for the summit, TJPDC staff are also seeking funds for a new regional housing needs assessment to inform future policy. The last such work was published in 2019 and Talun said new work is needed to identify where gaps exist.
“We want to understand our housing ecosystem a little better and really have data to back it up,” Talun said. “We want to, of course, understand the cost burden that people are living with, everything from commuting patterns to the impact of housing on economic development, and just in general have accurate data for planning and funding purposes across the region.”
This time around, the TJPDC will work with the Virginia Center for Housing at Virginia Tech. One goal will be to train local government and nonprofit staff to be able to update the numbers without hiring consultants in the future. Localities can opt in to different levels of funding for more pieces of information.
“This is a regional study but as far as the strategies portion, localities that provide funding for that are going to get a lot more attention and going to be able to participate more in that part,” Talun said. “But everybody’s going to benefit from just obtaining data that sometimes is really hard to come by.”
Talun said she has attended some of the similar work being done currently in the Staunton, Augusta County, and Waynesboro area.
The work on the housing needs assessment will get underway in January and a draft report is expected by the end of 2025. For a sense of it all, take a look at the 2019 needs assessment here.
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