While a study may not be necessary to determine that housing costs in the Charlottesville area are high, staff at the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission are conducting one anyway in order to quantify the problem.
“We have nearly 7,000 renter households below 30 percent of the area median income in our region,” said Laurie Jean Talun, TJPDC’s manager of regional housing and community development grants. “There are a little bit more than 5,000 units that are affordable to that income level.”
That’s one of the preliminary findings in an update of a regional study being developed with assistance from the advocacy group Housing Forward Virginia. During an update at the November 5 planning commission board meeting, Talun said most of those units are subsidized in some fashion, demonstrating a need for more investment in housing.
Thirty percent of AMI is classified as “extremely low income” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency that determines these values geographically to calculate voucher amounts and other payments.
The median family income for the Charlottesville Metropolitan Statistical Area for FY2026 is $139,800, which breaks down to $41,500 for a family of four at 30 percent AMI. Households that pay more than 30 percent of their income for shelter are considered “cost-burdened.”
The last such study was published in 2019. Talun said work on the update is about 75 percent complete. The work is intended to inform policy updates in each of the six TJPDC localities.
“When we look at the data in different parts of our region, different areas may have really different things going on, different needs, and therefore need pretty different strategies,” Talun said.
For instance, Talun said some areas in the planning district have a lack of rental units. One of the recommendations will likely be the creation of a regional revolving loan fund for developers seeking to build units for the lowest affordability levels. The idea is that if more homes are built throughout the region, the likelihood of a family becoming homeless is reduced.
“Anything we do to advance affordable housing keeps us from having to consider things like providing tons and tons of money for rental assistance in the future,” Talun said.
Since 2019, the City of Charlottesville has distributed tens of millions of dollars to both the Piedmont Housing Alliance and the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority to create what is also known as “deeply affordable” housing. He said this will allow many people who work in Charlottesville to also live here.
“Working-class people, especially people who are single parents, can be working steady full-time jobs and still be 40 and 50 percent of AMI,” said City Councilor Michael Payne. “At least in Charlottesville, it’s also like an economic development investment because these are people who are working jobs at UVA hospital system, [as] city school bus drivers, bus drivers.”
Talun said UVA was not directly involved with the study but does have representatives on the Regional Housing Partnership. Albemarle Supervisor Ned Gallaway noted that pressure from local elected officials could help entice them to contribute toward a regional housing fund.
“If we had six jurisdictions providing some effort to a regional mutual fund that could maybe be managed through a group like this, that’s going to have a different weight on UVA because they’ve got employees coming from all of our jurisdictions, even more beyond that,” Gallaway said.
The Albemarle Board of Supervisors recently allocated $6.64 million in affordable housing funds.
