The vacancy rate for houses in Virginia Beach is running about one percent, while the vacancy rate for apartments is 2.5 percent, compared to a five percent rate deemed necessary to provide a range of consumer choice. Virginia Beach is experiencing an intense housing shortage that threatens to price out the teachers, policemen, shopworkers, carpenters and others earning less than $50K a year who are so indispensable to a functioning society. So notes an editorial in today’s Virginian-Pilot.
It’s nice to know that there’s something that the Pilot‘s editorial writers and I agree on. Accessibility to affordable housing is a real problem — not just in Virginia Beach, but throughout much of Virginia. We just disagree about the prescriptions.
“Developers blame regulation for the shortage,” says the Pilot. “They say that they are so burdened with expensive governmental oversight — about what they can build, where, and when — that affordable housing is impossible to do profitably. Their answer is to allow the market to govern such things, and affordable housing will come.” Relaxing regulations to encourage more economical solutions — more housing units in less space, for example, mixed in with stores and offices — might not be a bad idea, the Pilot concedes, but “unfettered development” — especially opening up agricultural zones — is what caused Virginia Beach’s problems in the first place.
What really gets the Pilot’s juices flowing is the prospect of more regulation, favorably citing a proposal by Empower Hampton Roads: If the city has to give zoning approval for a project of more than 50 units, require developers to throw in some “affordable” housing.
I like the Pilot‘s first notion better: Peel away the rules and regulations that make it impossible for developers to build affordable housing units. In particular, strip away regs that make it difficult for developers to re-develop old subdivisions at higher densities. Then stand back, overrule the NIMBYs who invariable object to the development of any housing less valuable than their own, and see what happens. If the market fails to respond to the demand for affordable housing, then try something different. But don’t start out with the presumption that the market doesn’t work.