City Council took its annual retreat on September 5 and 6, staying at a hotel in Staunton. The only media there? Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Brian Wheeler, who a few days later reported that Council went through an exercise to re-evaluate its priorities, and councilors agreed that public housing/affordable housing needs the most attention.
How much of a shift is this in Council’s direction? Both Mayor Dave Norris and City Councilor David Brown say that they want to focus more on affordable housing and perhaps less on, say, sustainability initiatives.
 City Council wants to move affordable housing up the priority list, and it discussed its public housing stock at its Staunton retreat. Westhaven (above) is in particular need of attention, but Mayor Dave Norris notes that redevelopment most be done with residents, not to residents. |
“We’re faced with the reality that resources are tightening, and we cannot be as ambitious as we might like to be in terms of tackling some of the challenges that are before us,” says Norris. “But within the limited pool of resources that we do have, how can we make a bigger impact?”
Norris says that environmental sustainability has been going well enough that perhaps that can take a back seat. “We don’t want to get complacent, but we did feel that’s one area where we’ve made good progress—more so than in some of the other areas, like affordable housing.”
It’s not as if the issue of affordable housing is new. For the last three or four years, it has been a rallying cry for those on all sides of the political spectrum, and perhaps the one thing developers and advocates for those in poverty can agree on is that this is a community-wide issue and local government hasn’t done enough.
That’s something Council is recognizing. “Even though we’ve significantly expanded funding in the last two years for affordable housing, a lot of it has gone to preserving rather than building,” says Norris. Council has spent more than $1 million for loans to keep rentals like Dogwood properties, Virnita Court and Monticello Vista affordable. “We’re basically just treading water. I think there’s a real interest on Council’s part in seeing us actually generate new units of affordable housing.”
Once back from Staunton, Council quickly got to work. On its agenda for September 15 was both a report from the city’s public housing authority and a resolution on how to allocate its housing fund. (The Council meeting took place too late for press time.)
Meanwhile, the Free Enterprise Forum’s Neil Williamson took a shot at Council for holding its retreat in Staunton, where only Charlottesville Tomorrow would dare to follow, rather than in the city, where more of the public and local media would attend.
“The Free Enterprise Forum believes it is a deliberate (albeit legal) attempt to hold strategic discussions outside of the normal public view,” wrote Williamson on the Free Enterprise Forum blog. “Understanding that a distant locale has been the tradition for City Council for sometime, the Free Enterprise Forum asks City Council to explain the rationale for such a decision.”
Brown defends the Staunton retreat. “It does make some difference to get away, because then there’s no distractions.” When it’s in town, says Brown, day-to-day duties chip at the edges—not everyone has dinner together—while being away turns it into a “team-building” exercise.
“I don’t think we should spend a night at a five-star hotel or travel for hours,” says Brown. “But I think getting away, spending a night, having dinner together—I think that’s a good thing.”
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