The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur, and so much has transpired in the news that some important and interesting developments in the life of our City have not gotten the attention they surely deserved.
For example, on Nov. 2 Charlottesville announced the largest expansion of City parkland since 1987 (thanks to the largest private donation of land to the people of Charlottesville since 1974), expanding Forest Hills Park by 20% in one fell swoop. Thank you to Charlie Armstrong and his colleagues at Southern Development for making that happen; stay tuned for news on more parkland acquisition opportunities in the very near future.
That same night, Cville City Council unanimously approved Winneba, Ghana, as our fourth Sister City. A very special unannounced guest joined us all the way from Ghana for the public hearing -- our friend Joe Baami, the chair of Winneba's own Sister City Commission. What a wonderful surprise!
Also on Nov. 2, City Council approved the formal agreement establishing the new Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP), which aims to produce 20-40% energy savings in 30-50% of Charlottesville-Albemarle homes and businesses in the coming decade (and will create many new "green jobs" in the process). Huge potential there.
The next day was Election Day. A big night for our City Democratic candidates, and a big night for Republican candidates almost everywhere else. (Interesting piece of vainglorious trivia: now that City Council elections are held concurrently with state/federal elections, more voters are participating in the selection of City Councilors than ever before; as a result, my 6,300 votes on Nov. 3 were the most ever received by a candidate for Charlottesville City Council. It's a record that's likely to be broken in the not-too-distant future, but for now it at least gives me marginally more standing when I try to pull rank with my children. My cat, on the other hand, seems entirely unimpressed.)
Last Tuesday, Nov. 10, the Charlottesville Planning Commission gave a welcome and gratifying "thumbs up" to two separate projects that I have helped to shepherd for several years now. One vote granted approval of a site plan for the new YMCA next to Charlottesville High School, and the other vote granted approval of a special use permit for the new SRO (Single Room Occupancy) supportive housing apartments for the homeless, on 4th St. NW. Once their doors are opened to the public, both of these facilities will positively affect the lives of many, many local residents in the years and decades to come.
Last Wednesday, Nov. 11, the CRHA (Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority) Redevelopment Committee met to get a status report on the Master Planning process for revitalization of our public housing neighborhoods in Charlottesville. We're about 3/4 of the way through the Master Planning process, and hundreds of public housing residents have been involved in it some form or fashion (by attending community workshops/charettes, participating in site visits to other redeveloped communities, completing resident surveys, taking an urban design class for students at CHS, etc.). We are committed to this NOT becoming another example of top-down urban renewal like Vinegar Hill, and our friends at PHAR are doing an excellent job of keeping everyone accountable to the Residents Bill of Rights that CRHA, PHAR, and City Council all approved before we started work on Master Planning.
Last week, the City announced that we had ended FY'09 with a surplus, despite the woeful economic climate and despite Council's decision not to increase the property tax rate last year. Chalk it up to City departments tightening their belts and our Commissioner of Revenue and Treasurer's offices doing an excellent job in collecting taxes owed to the City. One more reason we continue to be one of the only cities in the country to enjoy the highest possible bond rating from the leading bond agencies.
Tomorrow, Nov. 16, City Council will be asked to give the green light to a major environmental improvement initiative that too has been years in the making -- the $3.2 million Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project. It's one of the largest ecological restoration projects in our City's history and I'm excited to see it moving forward.
That's just a sampling of things that have been going on here in Charlottesville, Virginia the last couple of weeks. Heck of a fortnight indeed.
***I would be remiss if I did not put in one more plug for this important effort, which has largely overshadowed much of everything else in Cville the last two weeks. Let's hope it ends with a positive resolution.
Last week I had the honor of participating in the opening symposium for this year's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVa. This year's class of Batten students are taking on a semester-long project to educate themselves on the issue of affordable housing in Charlottesville and explore ways that we as a community can better meet this urgent need. I was quite impressed with the students I met and very much look forward to seeing what ideas they come up with. Media-Newswire.com has an article about my presentation, which gives a good overview of this multi-faceted problem and touches on some potential solutions -- click here to read it.
Back in the fall of 2007, the City of Charlottesville, County of Albemarle and University of Virginia agreed (at the urging of IMPACT) to create a joint Task Force to explore ways to meet the growing demand for affordable housing throughout our region. (Full disclosure: I was briefly the City Council representative on the Task Force before becoming Mayor, at which point Satyendra Huja took my place.)
This past Thursday, the members of the Task Force released their final report, which can be found here. After much research, discussion and debate, the Task Force offered up the following recommendations to the City and County:
* Commit to a permanent, dedicated, annual funding investment in affordable housing
* Support the creation of a Regional Housing Fund to accept investments in affordable housing from both public and private sources
* Adopt or amend proffer policies to produce more affordable housing units available to families at extremely low-, very low-, and low-income levels
* Support the building of Single Room Occupancy housing
* Support and encourage the creation of security measures and supportive services in new and existing neighborhoods to ensure that affordable housing is safe and pleasant
* Promote the use of tax credits for developers by offering technical assistance
* Consider issuing general obligation bonds to fund affordable housing initiatives
* Provide funding for loans to developers of affordable housing
* Provide support for the Thomas Jefferson Community Land Trust
* Establish a Housing Ombudsman Office to serve both area residents and developers of affordable housing
* To the extent allowed by law, pay all employees, and strongly encourage their contractors to pay, a Living Wage
* Support regional transit networks and options
* Continue to support regional non-profits such as Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), Habitat for Humanity, and the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program (AHIP) whose missions are to address affordable housing
* Review and remove unnecessary regulatory barriers that impact affordability including consideration of a streamlined approval process for developments that propose affordable housing units
The Task Force added the following recommendations specifically for consideration by the University of Virginia:
* Consider developing housing sites to provide higher density mixed income housing for graduate students and UVa employees including faculty and staff
* Continue to provide housing for all first-year students and housing options for other students
* To the extent allowed by law, pay all employees, and strongly encourage their contractors to pay, a Living Wage
* Support regional transit networks and options
Excellent ideas all. Now comes the hard part -- generating the political will to actually implement these recommendations so the report doesn't end up sitting on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust.
Today I received an advance copy of an impressive new publication by the National Association of Realtors and the U.S. Conference of Mayors called Ambassadors for Cities, which highlights the work that local Realtors Associations around the country are doing to promote "affordable city living." There were 8 associations profiled nationwide, and I was pleased to see that our very own Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR) was one of them. The publication cites CAAR's Work Force Housing Fund as a model approach for moving working families into their own homes. Congratulations to the good folks at CAAR for the well-deserved recognition.
The publication's introductory essay, "Many Roads Lead to an Affordable Community," includes some comments about the importance of affordable housing that I thought merited repeating. To wit:
One thing all of these associations have in common is a determination to alleviate the suffering of residents who cannot afford a decent place to live. A surprising number of people fit that description.
"Affordable housing," according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is housing that costs no more than 30 percent of a family's annual earnings. A family paying more than 30 percent is considered "cost burdened." It may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care.
The State of the Nation's Housing 2008, published by Harvard University's Joint Center on Housing Studies, reports that 18 million families spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent or mortgages. Millions more spend between 30 and 50 percent. The number is increasing the fastest among homeowners. In an April 2008 survey conducted by the National League of Cities, 62 percent of city officials said that in the past year it had become difficult for low-income families to become homeowners in their communities.
The effects of the housing crunch ripple across society.
Public servants -- firefighters, police officers, teachers, nurses -- can no longer live in the communities they serve. When housing is unaffordable, employees can't find decent, affordable housing options near their jobs, so employers lose the ability to attract and retain workers. As business revenues fall, so do municipal tax revenues: one-third of city officials expect to end 2008 worse off than 2007. Local economies suffer.
For most Americans, home ownership is the single most critical step in wealth creation. Typically, when a home remains out of reach, so does a college education. Retirement security evaporates.
Conversely, when housing costs are within the reach of the workforce, neighborhoods grow stronger and more marketable. When public service employees are close to their jobs, government performance improves.
Amen to all that.
Generating more affordable housing (and we need a lot more of it around here) is not just a matter of dedicating more funds (public and private) for the preservation and production of affordable housing, though that's critically important. It's also a matter of more effectively engaging with the private sector to provide stronger incentives for developers and homebuilders to be part of the affordable housing solution. At our City Council meeting last week, we took a big step in this direction by agreeing to initiate a streamlined review process for developments that include a certain percentage of affordable housing units, or that contribute to our City's affordable housing fund (as part of a broader strategy of improving the process by which all development projects are reviewed). The Free Enterprise Forum blog explains why this step was so important.
In today's Daily Progress, there is an article implying that the City of Charlottesville does not know how many affordable housing units were produced or preserved or rehabbed with $2.15 million in City affordable housing funds this past year. If I were a taxpayer reading this article, I'd be outraged. How can the City not gauge the return on such a substantial outlay of public funds? What's the City doing with my money? Are all these tax dollars going to waste? Who's minding the store over there in City Hall?
The problem is, the implication is simply not accurate. We know exactly how many units of affordable housing were (or are being) produced, preserved and/or rehabbed with those funds. Unfortunately, the information presented at our City Council work session on this topic last night was not clear or detailed enough, and the discussion was so wide-ranging in parts as to confuse the issue. In other words, I don't necessarily blame the reporter, who is one of the best I've worked with in my time on Council. But I do think it's important to correct the record. The public deserves to know what they're getting from their tax dollars and in this case, the information is readily available. I've asked staff to provide the exact numbers to the Progress so as to clear up the record.
UPDATE: Here's the tally -- for FY08, our $2.15 million in affordable housing funds assisted in the preservation, production or rehabilitation of 152 affordable housing units (75 units at Dogwood Housing, 50 units at Monticello Vista Apartments, 6 home renovations through Albemarle Housing Improvement Program, 10 homes through Habitat for Humanity, 1 home through Piedmont Housing Alliance, 10 rental units through Region Ten Community Services Board). Dollars from this fund were also allocated to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging (JABA) to conduct a homesharing/accessory apartment study, to the Shelter for Help in Emergency (SHE) to provide transitional housing to victims of domestic violence, and to the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority to advance its effort to revitalize our public housing communities.
When you're in the line of business I'm in (elected office), you occasionally wonder (1) why the hell you're doing what you're doing, and (2) are you really focusing on what needs to be focused on.
Then you read an article like this and you say, "Ah, yes."
In a nutshell: We live in a wonderful community, but high housing costs, poverty and sprawl are threatening our quality of life. So say two economists with much bigger brains than mine.
A good reminder as to (1) why I'm doing what I'm doing, and (2) where it is I/we need to keep focusing my/our energies.
My thanks to Messrs. Shobe and Rephann for not letting us lose sight of that which is staring us in the face.
In case you missed it, Seth Rosen has an excellent piece in today's Progress about the merits and costs of providing supportive housing for the chronically homeless. Charlottesville has about 2-3 dozen residents who have been living on our streets for years and who are struggling with some sort of severe mental disorder. Over the past four winters, we at PACEM have gotten to know them all. In the bad old days, many if not most of them would be warehoused in state institutions by now, typically against their will. Starting in the 1960s, however, this country launched a broad "deinstitutionalization" campaign and pledged to invest in community-based care for the mentally ill. Well, no surprise: we never fulfilled that pledge. As a result, many people fell through the cracks and ended up right out on the streets. Many others continue to do so today. A critical component -- nay, THE critical component -- of a successful strategy of community-based care is supportive housing. It's heartening to see that Charlottesville is finally coming to understand that supportive housing for the chronically homeless not only improves their quality of life (and ours), it also saves us money. Ironically enough, you see, in many cases it costs more to keep people out on the streets than it does to provide them with stable housing and support services. For more info., read Seth's article here.
Vote was 3-2 against creating a dedicated affordable housing fund via ordinance, despite overwhelming public support for the idea at tonight's public hearing -- largest turnout of citizens for a public hearing in recent memory, which was gratifying and affirming (even if I can't shake the feeling that I let them all down). Was interesting/eye-opening to see how hard certain people (including a number of former Democratic City Councilors) lobbied, mostly behind the scenes, to help derail the proposal. All is not lost, however; thanks to a resolution drafted by David Brown and adopted unanimously at tonight's meeting, there's a chance we may yet be able to secure some additional funds for housing in the months and years ahead, even if we're unlikely to see the level of investment (or the sustained commitment of funds) that many of us had hoped. Such is the nature of politics -- compromise is the name of the game. And to Council's credit, what we have now in the funding pipeline for housing is at least a lot more than what we had 2 years ago....
My thanks to Holly Edwards for supporting the ordinance, and to my fellow Councilors for giving it a fair hearing. And special thanks to all who came and spoke at tonight's public hearing, especially those who shared their personal stories about struggling to get by in this "World-Class City" of ours. Your testimonies will not be forgotten.
Oh, and I've just got to pass on a word of appreciation for former Vice Mayor Meredith Richards, who stood up to say, this ordinance is a good start, but the problem is, it actually doesn't go far enough. That is a woman of vision!
We've been trying to take something of a thematic approach to City Council meetings so far this year. Our first meeting (Jan. 7) focused on a range of environmental topics. Our second meeting (Jan. 21) was heavy on alternative transportation (pedestrian safety, transit improvements, etc.). Tomorrow's session (Feb. 4) features a subject that citizen survey after citizen survey and community needs assessment after community needs assessment consistently points out as one the biggest frustrations that people have with the City of Charlottesville: the lack of affordable housing for our residents.
You know the litany of challenges: People paying 50% or 60% of their income on their housing costs. People working 2 or 3 jobs to keep up with their mortgage or their rent. People doubling up with family members or friends. People going homeless. People moving 30 or 40 miles away to find housing they can afford. Employers struggling to attract or retain workers because of the high cost of living (i.e., the high cost of housing) here. There is hardly a household in Charlottesville that hasn't been affected by this situation. The people at the top may have it good and may not recognize there's a problem, but most of us see it, experience it and hear about it every day. Yes, housing costs aren't skyrocketing like they were in the years following 2003, but wages still have a long, long way to go to catch up. We remain the region in Virginia with the largest gap between housing costs and wages. Not an enviable position to be in.
Tomorrow night, we will be considering an ordinance that would create a dedicated stream of revenue for affordable housing in the City budget. (Seth Rosen had the story in yesterday's Progress.) Unfortunately, for this coming year at least, it would actually represent a decrease in affordable housing funding from FY08 (when we used one-time surplus funds to significantly increase funding from the year before). But the idea is that as revenues increase in future years, a small percentage of them (the equivalent of 2 cents on the property tax dollar and 25% of lodging taxes) would be automatically set aside each year in a fund for the promotion and preservation of affordable housing.
In total, the ordinance would result in a little over 1% of the City's overall budget being dedicated to the affordable housing fund each year, which is a pittance really when you consider the true scope of the problem and the high priority that our citizens have assigned to it. (It's important to note, though, that these limited City funds will be able to leverage substantial sums of additional monies from state, federal, and private sector sources; of the 300+ localities across the country that have established dedicated housing funds, many of them routinely see their local dollars multiplied six or seven times over [or more] by other sources of funding. It's also important to note, as we're entering a period of economic slowdown, that housing development is one of the best economic generators we know of, in terms of promoting local job creation & business activity and recycling dollars in our community.) The ordinance also encourages the creation of stronger incentives for developers to be part of the solution through inclusion of affordable units in new developments and/or the contribution of monies to the City's affordable housing fund. I am pleased to say that our local developers have been very cooperative in working with the City on the creation of such incentives. Some real win-win potential there.
In addition to considering the dedicated housing fund ordinance, we'll also be making a final round of housing-related allocations from our FY08 budget and hearing a status report from Noah Schwartz, Executive Director of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority (CRHA), about CRHA's plans for redevelopment of public housing in Charlottesville. The Council meeting starts at 7:00pm tomorrow and the public hearing on the ordinance will begin around 7:40pm. Please feel free to come and share your thoughts on any or all of these subjects.
UPDATE: Christina Mora of NBC 29 does a great job of breaking down the issue with this report.
Today's print edition of the Daily Progress includes an article entitled "Housing Costs, Low Wages Lead to Rise in Homeless," which links to this AP story. Apparently, when housing costs increase a lot faster than wages, some people can't keep up and end up homeless. "Until we have some investment in affordable housing," says Massachusetts state official Julia Kehoe, "we're not going to see a leveling off of these numbers." I've tried (see here and here, for example), but I couldn't have said it better myself.
This past year, the dozens of area congregations and thousands of area residents involved in IMPACT spent a lot of time studying local needs, and eventually chose their top two priorities for community action: expanding affordable housing and improving public transportation.
At tomorrow night's City Council meeting, we will be receiving a major new report from the Charlottesville/Albemarle Commission on Children and Families. The product of an extensive, year-long study of local needs, this report (which is Part Two of CCF's Human Services Strategic Plan for our region) concludes that the top two priorities for community action are: expanding affordable housing and improving public transportation.
I think these groups are trying to tell us something, but I just...can't...figure...out...what...it...is. :-)
When I ran for Council last year, I pledged to push for constructive change in four key areas: affordable housing, education & youth, poverty & race, and the environment. (I've even kept my campaign website on-line so people could hold me accountable to the commitments I made along these lines.) Now that it's been a full year since I was elected, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on some of the progress that we've made in these four areas. (Make no mistake -- we still have a long way to go...) I neither seek nor deserve sole credit for every one of these accomplishments, but I am proud to have been involved in advancing each of them in some small or large way.
Today, I'll focus on the first two topics: Affordable Housing and Education & Youth.
Affordable Housing
* Last Fall, Council appointed a standing Housing Advisory Committee (comprised of realtors, developers, housing advocates, neighborhood leaders and others) to help the City develop new initiatives to expand and improve our affordable housing stock.
* In November 2006, the Housing Advisory Committee unanimously endorsed the creation of a new Charlottesville Affordable Housing Investment Program (CAHIP) to consolidate, dedicate and expand financial support for affordable housing. CAHIP focuses on four key areas: permanent supportive housing for the elderly and disabled, low-income homeownership, workforce housing, and revitalization of public housing.
* During our FY2008 City Budget deliberations, hundreds of City residents (click here and here, for example) pushed Council to adopt the CAHIP proposal and otherwise increase City support for affordable housing development (preferably in partnership with the County and UVa). The final FY08 Budget passed by Council includes $1.75 million in new funds to capitalize the CAHIP initiative and leverage additional financing from federal, state, regional and private sources. This represents a five-fold increase in City support for affordable housing from FY2007.
* Also in our FY08 Budget, Council expanded our Affordable Housing Tax Grant Program to provide deeper tax relief to homeowners who've been particularly hard hit by rising assessments. With the average property tax bill increasing by approx. $230 in Charlottesville next year, the expanded Tax Grants ($250-$500 for qualifying households) mean that a significant number of middle- and lower-income homeowners will pay less in net property taxes in 2008 than they did in 2007. I would like to have expanded this program even further in FY08 and will try again next year.
* Council has also asked staff to develop a property tax deferral program whereby homeowners can opt to postpone payment of a portion of their property taxes until they sell their homes. This will be especially helpful for homeowners who are trying to get by on fixed incomes.
* The City's Planning Commission is working to develop stronger incentives for builders to include Affordable Dwelling Units in new housing projects, and Delegate David Toscano agreed to sponsor legislation in the recent General Assembly session (HB 2451) to help move this idea forward.
Education & Youth
* Council has provided strong support to the new School Superintendent, Ms. Rosa Atkins, and to our School Board in their efforts to bring positive change to our City school system. The FY08 School Budget, which Council fully funded, includes a number of innovative initiatives designed to improve academic achievement for all children. I am especially pleased at the creation of a new 3-year-old preschool program in the City's schools and the implementation of a proactive dropout-prevention initiative to keep more kids in school until graduation. Higher-quality after-school programming and teacher-training initiatives are also getting more attention.
* In response to concerns raised by parents and students, Council agreed to expedite Americans with Disability Act (ADA) improvements to our schools to remove barriers to students with physical disabilities.
* Council agreed to nearly double the size of our City summer youth employment program for 2007, and my hope is that we can double it again in 2008, and again the year after (being sure not to sacrifice quality for quantity along the way). Anything we can do to reenforce the value & importance of work and to help our teenagers to secure marketable job skills and positive mentoring relationships is a good thing.
* We have expanded our support for community organizations that offer positive opportunities to kids -- youth sports, tutoring and mentoring, environmental education, community service, the arts, etc. -- and we are supporting efforts by our City Police to reduce negative opportunities for kids (gang prevention, etc.).
Next time, I'll discuss some of the steps we've taken on Poverty & Race and the Environment. After that, I'll talk about some of our other accomplishments from this past year, and lastly (but not leastly) I'll focus on some of the areas where I feel we've fallen short and/or still have much work to do. Thanks for indulging me in this. More importantly, thanks for your continued support. It's not easy being an elected official but I can't imagine a better place to be one, and a better community to serve, than Charlottesville, VA.
My friend Holly Edwards has more good sense in one finger than the rest of us do in our entire bodies. As if we needed more evidence of that, she comes out with this letter to the editor from yesterday's Daily Progress, written in response to this article from Jan. 21 about the Bush Administration's plan to enact severe cuts in operating funds for public housing. As usual, Holly frames the issue much better than I ever could...
I was a guest on Coy Barefoot's "Charlottesville-Right Now" WINA radio show yesterday, talking about affordable housing and transportation issues, and Sean Tubbs of the Charlottesville Podcasting Network was kind enough to post the podcast on his site. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Julian Taliaferro has a great radio voice; mine hovers around cringe-worthy. Nevertheless, many thanks to Coy and Sean for making this happen.
Local developer Oliver Kuttner dropped a mini-bombshell in last week's C-ville Weekly that really deserves more notice. Tucked away in this article about his architectural vision for the old Boxer Learning building on the Downtown Mall (formerly home to Central Fidelity Bank) was this passage:
What will be in the building? Kuttner wants several floors of retail by opening up the basement as a courtyard along the side street and creating a second floor of retail fronting the Mall. He plans four apartments above the retail in a first phase of redevelopment. The second phase will be a larger structure closer to Water Street that nears the nine-storey limit, which will contain either a 72-room hotel—or affordable apartments at around $500 a month. “In Charlottesville, you can’t rent anything cheap any more,” says Kuttner. “I think that with clever design I can do it.”
Let's hope he does figure out how to do it. Think of all the retail clerks, office workers, baristas, artists and musicians who are being increasingly priced out of housing anywhere near downtown. Many of them contribute mightily to the downtown business and cultural "scene" and many of them are currently paying an arm & a leg for parking everyday because they have to commute in from elsewhere. Wouldn't it be great if they had access to affordable rental housing within a short walk of where they work and play? Must downtown housing all be upscale and high-priced? Can't we have at least one oasis of residential bohemia amidst the Caspari Condos that are popping up all over downtown these days?
If you see Oliver, please sing his praises for thinking of the working stiffs and the starving artists. It's their town too.
Tuesday, January 2 is the day that City Council makes a decision on our affordable housing investment proposals. For the full scoop, go visit my friend Tatyanna Patten. (Thanks for the plug, Tat!)
Every year around this time, the National Low Income Housing Coalition releases a report called Out of Reach, which analyzes housing costs vs. wage levels in communities all across the U.S. The report focuses on a statistic they call the "Housing Wage," which is the amount of money that a worker has to earn in order to afford an average two-bedroom rental unit in his/her community.
Well, Out of Reach 2006 was released today. And the 2006 Housing Wage for the Charlottesville area has been calculated at...(drum roll please)...$15.23. Know many retail or service jobs around here that are paying that much?
From the report:
"In Charlottesville, VA MSA, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) for a two-bedroom apartment is $792 . In order to afford this level of rent and utilities, without paying more than 30% of income on housing, a household must earn $2,640 monthly or $31,680 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of $15.23.
In Charlottesville, VA MSA, a minimum wage worker earns an hourly wage of $5.15. In order to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom apartment, a minimum wage earner must work 118 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Or, a household must include 3.0 minimum wage earner(s) working 40 hours per week year-round in order to make the two bedroom FMR affordable."
At our City Council meeting last night, the UVa Center for Survey Research reported the results of a major survey of Cville residents on quality of life issues in the city. (1,111 telephone surveys were conducted in February and March of 2006.) The Center conducted the same survey in 2000, so we can get a sense of how citizens feel things have improved (or worsened) in the intervening years.
Overall, citizens seem to be satisfied with the quality of life in Charlottesville. On a 10-point scale, 64% gave the city an "8" or better in their general estimation of Charlottesville as a place to live. (14% gave the city a "10.") The mean rating for 2006 was 7.72, down slightly from 7.89 in 2000.
The survey results revealed that not all is well and good in our fair city, however. One issue in particular jumps out as needing more attention. In asking citizens to assign priority to various local issues, no subject rose higher in priority between 2000 and 2006 than affordable housing. Citizens now put affordable housing as second on the list of most important goals for the City to pursue, just behind quality education. In determining citizen satisfaction with City services, no service rose higher in citizen dissatisfaction between 2000 and 2006 than the City's efforts to provide for affordable housing.
When you compare those findings to the meager dollars that the City actually allocates to affordable housing development (i.e., less than .32% of our FY07 budget--we spend more than 3 times that on upkeep of our City golf courses!), you quickly realize how far out of line our budget is with the needs and demands of our citizens, at least in this particular area. Hopefully that will soon change.
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