The Shortline 5-3-24
Escaping the Housing Trap in Harrisonburg • Homelessness in the Valley on the rise along with housing costs • Power-hungry data centers in Virginia • Climate change upends home insurance market
Charles Marohn, Strong Towns founder and author of new bestseller book Escaping the Housing Trap stopped in Harrisonburg Tuesday afternoon. Addressing a standing room-only crowd at at Pale Fire, he spoke about the history of the US housing market, and the trap Americans find ourselves in: housing is shelter, but it’s also an investment and a cornerstone of the US economy. He promoted the need for locally-financed missing-middle development in cities and towns across the country to address the national housing crisis.
Marohn’s co-author Daniel Herriges explains:
If we want a true housing supply glut — enough to fundamentally alter the contours of a housing shortage totals at least six or seven million homes, by most estimates — who is going to build it?
A key part of our answer at Strong Towns is small-scale, incremental developers … incremental development adds an incredibly important pressure-release valve to the mix. And I suspect it will prove far more resilient than the boom-and-bust nature of big-time housing development.
Mahron said that, to make housing more available, localities need to reform regulations like zoning ordinances and housing codes, empower incremental developers, and localize financing. One key part of this, he said, was eliminating parking requirements for new construction. (Daily News-Record)
You can watch a video of the presentation here.
The Valley
The number of people experiencing homelessness in the upper Shenandoah Valley increased 16% between 2023 and 2024, according to newly released data. In the Valley, the housing affordability picture is particularly bleak. A shift towards building housing for wealthier people has left everyone else in a lurch, a 2024 Chmura Analytics report commissioned by Virginia Housing found. (WMRA)
Bridgewater is the second town and third municipality in Rockingham County to become a Tree City USA. The other is Broadway, which recently celebrated its 12th year in the program. Harrisonburg is also a Tree City, but none of the other outlying towns have joined the program. (Daily News-Record)
Timberville Town Council voted to give municipal employees a 5% raise. Timberville residents will face a 5 percent increase in fees and sin taxes, but will not face an increase in real estate taxes. (Daily News-Record)
Waynesboro is getting a traffic garden — a small-scale network of real-world streets free of cars where children can practice riding bikes while learning to follow the rules of the road. To my knowledge, this is the first traffic garden in the Valley. (Facebook)
Virginia
The way many American localities zone has also contributed to making transportation our second greatest expense. Transit-oriented development (TOD) has arisen as an important strategy to fight high transportation and housing costs by co-locating more compact forms of housing and commercial uses with stations on a fixed-route transit line. (HousingForward Virginia)
Data centers will soon overtake residential customers to become Dominion Energy’s largest category of customer. Dominion is moving forward with plans to build new methane gas generating units. Legislative action is needed, and with the climate clock ticking, we have no more time to lose. (Virginia Mercury)
Google recently announced a $1 billion investment to expand its Virginia data centers, including two Loudoun County sites and a newly opened Prince William County campus. Google said the company’s investments in its Virginia data centers play an essential role in supporting the company's AI tech and cloud business. (Inside NOVA)
In Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, a legislative study is underway to learn more about how those operations are affecting electric reliability and affordability. (Virginia Mercury)
The Bensley Agrihood in Chesterfield County aims to co-locate affordable housing and food production. The project requires rezoning and a conditional use permit from Chesterfield County. Three hearings on the project have been delayed since January. (VPM)
The Democratic legislature passed a bill Republican Gov. Glenn Younkgin signed that bans the sale of pavement sealant containing a set of chemicals environmental groups say seep into the waterways, causing health issues for wildlife and humans. The ban begins July 1. (Virginia Mercury)
Norfolk’s plan to build a flood wall downtown to block damage from catastrophic storms could fall short by $48.8 million in state funds in the next fiscal year, according to changes to the proposed city budget. (The Virginian-Pilot)
Elsewhere
Worsening climate disasters like more intense hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms are making multi-billion-dollar home insurance payouts an annual occurrence. Home insurance protections are shrinking and becoming increasingly unaffordable, while private insurers are raising rates or pulling out of some markets entirely. (Climate + Community Project)
The negative externalities of supersized cars — in emissions, crash deaths, and the erosion of tires and pavement — are a market failure, since their costs are borne by society writ large, not the people who buy big pickups and SUVs. Left unaddressed, those societal costs will grow as more people replace their modest-sized cars with big SUVs or trucks. (Vox)
E-bike incentives are more cost-effective in reducing carbon emissions compared to electric car incentives, and that's without including a range of cycling-related benefits such as increased physical activity, reduced local air pollutants and decreased travel costs (Science Direct)
Though small in number, the elected interests of most local cities give disproportionate attention to business interests and their pro-driving beliefs. Because localities refuse to reform their automobile policies, car insurance has skyrocketed as traffic violence has increased. (The Discourse Lounge)
Nearly half of U.S. renter households in large metro areas are rent-burdened — that is, they spend more than 30% of their income on monthly rent. BIPOC renter households are more likely than other households to be rent-burdened. (Zillow)
Two in five US homeowners don’t believe they could afford to buy their own home if they were purchasing it today because home prices have doubled over the last decade. 59% of homeowners who answered this question have lived in their home for at least 10 years, and another 21% have lived in their home for at least five years. (Redfin)
A coalition of housing business organizations has sent a letter to Congress and President Biden demanding urgent action to address America's worsening housing affordability crisis, promoting several bills that have been introduced in Congress to address the shortage. (letter)
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled that a landmark law ending single-family-home-only zoning in California is unconstitutional, a decision that could lead to the law being invalidated in the state’s largest cities. (Los Angeles Times)
In the past two years, at least four delegations of housing experts and political leaders from California have visited Vienna to explore whether the Austrian approach to social housing could work in the US. The city of Vienna builds about 6,000-7,000 new units of subsidised housing every year as it tries to keep up with rising demand. (The Guardian)
The solar industry is pushing into the U.S. Midwest, drawn by cheaper land rents, access to electric transmission, and a wealth of federal and state incentives. Common solar farm construction practices, including clearing and grading large sections of land, also can lead to significant erosion and major runoff of sediment into waterways without proper remediation. (Reuters)
Catalonia has outlined new requirements to authorize agrivoltaic power generation on agricultural land. The new provisions state that it is mandatory to maintain agricultural activity while generating power. (PV Magazine)