Lack of administrative capacity slowing Charlottesville’s affordable housing progress

The phrase “Cville Plans Together” is likely not a household name in Charlottesville unless your household has someone in the development industry or the planning sector. Yet, the initiative overseen by the firm Rhodeside & Harwell has had a profound impact on the lives of anyone who lives in and around the city by resulting in a zoning code that allows for a lot more residential development.

Long-time readers of this newsletter may be familiar given that it was created in part to cover the process of creating a new set of rules for how things get built. The archive is fairly extensive and this link goes back to the beginning.

One of the key-takeaways of the Cville Plans Together initiative was a moral commitment for Charlottesville City Council to spend $100 million over ten years on affordable housing projects, a goal that is overall way ahead of target. The City Council had a briefing on September 8.

“The city has invested approximately $65.8 million which is about 66 percent of the full 10-year goal,” said Madeline Metzler, Senior Housing Planner with the Department of Neighborhood Development Services.

“Overall, we’re ahead on direct housing investments and on tax relief and stability programs, and we’re behind on spending for administrative capacity, which affects our ability to implement new programs, carry out policy changes, and expand our transparency tools,” Metzler continued.

By their own numbers, the city has met 75 percent of its ten-year goal on direct housing investments, 61 percent toward the housing stability goals, but only 15 percent of the administrative capacity goal.

For details on the first two, take a look at my story in today’s C-Ville Weekly. For this story I want to explore what might be missing if there’s not enough staff to do some of the administrative work to implement some of the interventions. Before we do that, some more background.

Resources:

• Staff report for September 8, 2026 update to Council
• Presentation to Charlottesville City Council, September 8, 2026
• Request for Proposals for a firm to oversee housing strategy, Comprehensive Plan, and new zoning
• Cville Plans Together initiative documents and records

Wanted: Dynamics and structures dismantler

In early 2019, the update of Charlottesville’s Comprehensive Plan had stalled as the Planning Commission became divided on some important elements. On February 4, 2019, City Council agreed to spend $600,000 toward hiring a consultant to step in and get things moving.

“With the exception of the community engagement, housing and land use elements, the other chapters of the comprehensive plan are largely completed,” reads the staff report for that item.

Some members of the Planning Commission wanted to take the opportunity to increase residential density across the entire city by getting the plan’s Future Land Use Map and zoning code in sync.

“By bundling the efforts of Comprehensive Plan completion, Housing Strategy, and Zoning Ordinance Rewrite in one RFP the City can better ensure efficient and effective gathering of community feedback,” the report continued.

The Housing Advisory Commission and the Planning Commission put together an extensive background statement intended to guide the effort in a clear direction. I’ve quoted from it in previous stories but it’s worth reading the next four paragraphs to understand the direction Cville Plans Together would take.

In Charlottesville’s history, the failure of institutions and city government to be accountable to low-wealth communities, particularly communities of color, has taken many forms: violent suppression, structural oppression, neglect, half-hearted or insincere attempts that serve to manufacture consent, and well-meaning attempts that end up failing due to their assumptions, framework, and processes favoring those in power and resulting in lopsided and inaccurate information, community inaction, or community harm.

Housing is at the root of historical structural inequity and oppression in the United States, and it came to be this way deliberately. As we build a strategy to achieve a local housing landscape that is healthy, ample, high quality, and affordable, we must be equally deliberate in dismantling the dynamics and the structures that perpetuate continued inequity—structures that often go unnoticed by those of us who benefit from them or don’t directly experience their harm.

To that end, rather than relying on the existing power structure to set the narrative and define the discussion, the community engagement strategy must leverage community relationships and expertise to genuinely engage our community. This methodology is vital to the project’s success and to the quality and legitimacy of the final Comprehensive Plan Update/Housing Strategy/Zoning Ordinance Rewrite.

In the same vein, the Comprehensive Plan Update/Housing Strategy/Zoning Ordinance Rewrite must be consistent and supportive of these aims, reflecting the values of the community and commitment to equity and inclusion, recognizing the troubling history of segregation, racial covenants, urban renewal and exclusionary zoning, but also celebrating the diversity, history, culture, and visual beauty of our community.

In October 2019, the city hired Rhodeside & Harwell to do the work. The firm was familiar with the city due to its work overseeing the West Main Streetscape, a multi-year, multi-million planning project that never materialized in any physical changes.

When the steering committee met for the first time on January 29, 2020, one of the items on the agenda was to get feedback on what the initiative would be known as. This meeting was held in person in the NDS conference room, but community engagement efforts would be challenged with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The steering committee got right to work with the second meeting as the world transitioned to video conferencing. Consultants with the firm HR&A presented their initial set of questions.

The Cville Plans Together initiative still has all of the materials and should serve as a repository for anyone seeking to understand the context for future land use decisions. City Council adopted the Affordable Housing Plan eleven months later which contains not only the $100 million goal for affordable housing spending, but also called for the elimination of single-family zoning.

“Single-family zoning, which is prevalent in Charlottesville, has historically been a tool to create and reinforce racial segregation in Charlottesville and nationwide and has restricted the development of housing, contributing to rising housing costs,” reads page 9 of the plan.

Another top-level recommendation was to “revise regulations and development approval processes to increase the supply of housing and slow the increase in housing cost, while protecting lower income and other marginalized communities.”

The Affordable Housing Plan specifically called for more multifamily housing across the city and to expand development rights. The plan called for “soft density” across all of Charlottesville, and to require mandatory production of affordable units.

Another was to “focus and align subsidy programs with community-defined priorities and make changes to increase impacts.”

This called for more funding to go to the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority and to increase the amount of money to developers of affordable housing to fill in gaps.

More details on how to do these things continue as one reads through the 158-page document. One of the guiding principles is racial equity and page 25 lists critical strategies.

“Key to the successful implementation of the plan will be ensuring that affordable housing programs are designed and implemented to be accessible and utilized by all residents including [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color],” reads page 25. “ To ensure that programs operated by the City and its partners support racial equity, City Staff should track metrics related to program participants, residents, and impacts, and disaggregate impact data by race.”

Several pages of the plan are geared toward staff capacity to capture those metrics and notes that Charlottesville doesn’t have enough people to keep track. In March 2021, there were three personnel including a housing program coordinator, a grants coordinator, and Redevelopment Manager.

Five and a half years later

Council’s update on September 8, 2026 provided an opportunity to discuss staffing. When the plan was adopted in March 2021, the City Manager was Chip Boyles who moved the housing portfolio to the new Office of Community Solutions.

Last June, City Manager Sam Sanders dissolved that office and brought housing back under the umbrella of Neighborhood Development Services where Madeline Metzler is based. Toward the end of her presentation, she laid out her division’s goals.

“We’ll continue building administrative capacity, and we’ve already made some progress there in filling one of our vacant positions,” Metzler said. “We also need to look closely at how to best align [Capital Improvement Program] investments with our affordability and equity goals, support the implementation of a tax abatement program, and expand our transparency tools, including public dashboards and improved public reporting.”

Metzler said increasing capacity is not just about increasing the number of people in the office. A capacity study was done to analyze how to handle the workload which she said called for specific skill sets to help the city meet its goals.

“One of the positions in that recommendation included a position that would have more skills in looking at the funding agreements that we have, more experience with housing financing, and maybe also able to try to find other funding opportunities and like broaden the pool of funding that some of our developers are looking at and trying to partner with them to find other grant opportunities or whatever else might be out there,” Metzler said.

The Affordable Housing Plan also called for greater support for tenants rights and anti-displacement programs. Metzler said a lack of staff has meant an inability to explore those programs fully.

“Certainly that’s what we hear from the community is the real risk of displacement, and thinking about what we can do to mitigate that is something we have on our minds,” Metzler said.

Time to revisit the plan?

City Manager Sam Sanders delivered one of the first audits of the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund back in April 2022 when he was still in a deputy role to Interim City Manager Michael C. Rogers. He said Charlottesville has put a lot of resources to tackling housing affordability but the problem does not have easy solutions.

“We are finding ourselves in such a deep hole when it comes to affordability that it is very difficult to climb out,” Sanders said. “At times it feels impossible. I think what we have to be reminded of is that we came up with a plan, we are attempting to work that plan, and when we identify that there are gaps in the plan, we are supposed to focus on those gaps because the plan was created with all of that in mind.”

However, Sanders said the City Council will face tradeoffs as it considers the next budget. He said filling all of the additional positions called for in the housing capacity recommendation would cost at least half a million a year.

One housing position will be filled in the short term and the city is talking to its financial advisors about how to finance more, but Council itself will have to continuously revisit the Affordable Housing Plan.

“The difficulty that comes with all of that is how do we balance all of those other issues along with this very, very expensive investment activity that we have been facing every year,” Sanders said.

Sanders said another potential change could be a transition to loaning money to developers rather than make grants.

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