Better Housing Coalition President Greta Harris and Richmond Association of Realtors CEO Laura Lafayette gave City Council members a progress report Monday on efforts to develop a regional strategy to meet housing needs.
Harris and Lafayette were tapped to lead Mayor Levar Stoney’s affordable housing task force about two years ago, and together have been working on the first phase of a regional housing framework since October 2018.
In the fall of 2017, the city held a housing summit, followed several months later by news reports ranking Richmond the second-worst city in the country for evictions.
At Monday’s meeting of the Richmond City Council Government Operations Standing Committee, Lafayette said the public could expect a draft of the regional framework in late November or early December of this year, which will mark the conclusion of “Phase One” of the timeline to ultimately implement the housing strategies across the region by June 2022.
“What became clear as we started talking to lots of stakeholders — both for-profit developers, nonprofit developers, a wide variety of different sectors — it became clear that housing opportunities and housing challenges aren't bound by invisible jurisdictional boundary lines,” Harris explained, “and what happens in one locality has direct impact on their neighboring localities.”
After those conversations, Harris said that with Mayor Stoney’s encouragement, she and Lafayette met with top administrators from the surrounding localities, “and today we're really excited to have Hanover County, Henrico County and Chesterfield County sitting at the table with the city of Richmond with support to create a regional framework so we can — as an RVA region — look at housing strategies that will be beneficial for all.”
Guiding the work of developing the framework will be data and priorities identified by stakeholders, including many from the philanthropic community, such as the Robins Foundation, Community Foundation and the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation.
Other partners include national, state and local Realtors associations, the Partnership for Housing Affordability, the Richmond Regional Planning District Commission, Mary Morton Parsons Foundation and the Virginia Nonprofit Housing Coalition.
“Our hope is we will use priorities for each locality, along with data, to be able to develop strategies that will meet the needs of each jurisdiction,” Harris said. “From there, we will create a toolbox of policies, programs and resources that are recommended to each locality, and from there we will work together to implement those strategies after they have been reviewed and fully adopted by each locality.”
Lafayette explained that there is currently a working group consisting of representatives from each of the local governments in addition to herself and Harris, and emphasized the support of the philanthropic community thus far.
“We sat down with the philanthropic community in April of last year — and then it was coming in the wake of articles about evictions,” Lafayette explained, “and they wanted us to begin to react and to have a plan, and we said '... we will work on drafting up a comprehensive regional housing approach, housing framework, but we've gotta do something a little different.'”
That approach, Lafayette says, entails involving the local governments at the “highest level” as well as involving the community in a “very deep way.”
“And then we need a person who gets up every day — day in and day out — who drives the plan forward in partnership with local governments and implementation,” Lafayette says. “So the philanthropic community has funded not only the plan, but a staff person that the partnership for housing and affordability will employ for the next three years to implement the plan.”
As for the timeline, Bob Adams of HD Advisors has been retained as the lead consultant on the project to help draft the framework, and Ebony Walden Consulting has been tasked with the community outreach component. The remainder of “phase one,” which began in October 2018 and will conclude with the draft framework presentation at the end of the year, largely entails collecting and analyzing data, policy recommendations and best practices.
“We're having stakeholder conversations, we're having listening groups, and then each of the jurisdictions will have two meetings [where] everyone is welcome,” Lafayette said, “I think we'll be able to hire a director of communications in the next month.”
The second phase of the project will begin in April and extend through June 2022; according to the document presented to council. The second phase will include hiring a director of implementation, implementing the strategies identified in phase one and measuring outcomes.
The only question at the end of the presentation came from City Council President and 7th District representative Cynthia Newbille, who asked about the data being considered.
Lafayette responded, “We have the market value analysis and then in 2015 the department did a study on housing affordability and housing gap analysis, and Virginia Tech will update those numbers for these four jurisdictions and then all the jurisdictions in the Richmond regional framework.”
Newbille requested periodic updates as the work proceeds — and if the draft vision presented Monday evening is any indication — “Everyone in the Richmond region will have a safe, healthy, and affordable home” — there’s a lot of work ahead.
“That's not something that is true for everyone in our region,” Lafayette said, “Until it is, our work is not done.”