Albemarle Supervisors get a briefing on the county’s Human Services need assessments

As the community continues to wrestle with a growing number of people with mental health, substance abuse, and behavioral issues, a snapshot of the underlying conditions will be of use to anyone seeking solutions.

On July 15, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors were briefed on a recent human needs assessment that pulls from multiple data sources to paint a picture.

“No one data point is by itself instructive, but to view together this data allows us to draw more general conclusions,” said Kaki Dimock, the county’s Chief of Human Services.

Dimock said the 2026 assessment builds off of the first one in 2023 which was conducted to identify the most vulnerable households in Albemarle County. Both draw from multiple sources in an effort to determine the overall community well-being.

“There’s a significant number of families who are struggling to make ends meet through a variety of different definitions,” Dimock said. “In our community, many people struggle with mental health concerns like depression or anxiety, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, sometimes major, sometimes minor, but universal.”

According to the most recent Orange Dot Report from 2024, a family of four needs an income of at least $63,321.53 to make ends meet and 18 percent of Albemarle families do not meet that threshold.

The 2025 ALICE Report from the United Way established a survival budget for a family of four at $88,848 without childcare costs and $108,528 when you factor that need in.

“Another method for identifying whether folks have access to enough to make ends meet is the use of food banks and food insecurity in general,” Dimock said. “According to Feeding America, in 2025, 10.5 percent of the people in our community were experiencing food insecurity. That’s 11,860 people.”

Dimock said that the food bank Loaves and Fishes has reported a doubling of visits from 2022 and 2025. The need has increased while access to federal food benefits has declined.

Another data set comes from the Community Well-Being Profiles produced by the UVA Center for Community Partnerships last year. One statistic is that seven percent of Albemarle residents under the age of 65 are without health insurance.

“These people are at risk of catastrophic financial impact should they experience a health emergency,” Dimock said.

The number of people enrolled in Medicaid increased during the pandemic from 16,605 in 2021 to a peak of 21,761 in 2024. That number declined to 19,311 in 2025 due to changes to federal policy post COVID.

The cost of housing is a stressor for many with 16 percent of homeowners paying more than 30 percent in their monthly income on housing. Nearly half of the number of renters also pay more than 30 percent.

Costs continue to rise.

“The median list price in our community was $630,000 for a home and our median sales price was $554,000 and our median rent is holding pretty stable at $2,200,” Dimock said.

Recommendations from the needs assessment include prioritizing services for the most vulnerable by funding nonprofit groups to provide direct services.

Supervisor MIke Pruitt said he has received a lot of emails about the encampments at Rivanna River and Free Bridge.

“I don’t see the county as having a role in the short term solutions there, but I think we have a role in the medium and long term solutions,” Pruitt said.

Supervisor Ned Gallaway agreed but also said there are likely more people camping throughout the county’s urban ring in places not as visible as Free Bridge.

“Since it’s not 40 or 50 or 75 folks and it’s not in the floodplain and they’re out of sight, out of mind, they’re not calling attention to themselves,” Gallaway said. “We have to play a role in the solution of helping them find a place to be and the solution for those folks is going to be the same as the solution for the folks that are in the income encampment because they’re all unhoused and they’re all trying to find a place that’s safe for the evening.”

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