Like the rest of the region, rents have skyrocketed in Chesapeake over the last five years and many workers can’t afford to live in the city, according to a new report from a business and community group.
“The community of Chesapeake is feeling this affordability crisis on an individual level,” said Thaler McCormick, the CEO of housing nonprofit ForKids and the chair of the Chesapeake Alliance’s Housing Task Team, which worked on the report.
The new task force presented its findings this week to the public at Big Ugly Brewing, with several recommendations for city leaders to consider.
The end goal from the task force: Get 15,000 new housing units of all types built in the city over the next decade.
“(Chesapeake has) high school graduate kids and college graduate kids who can’t come back to Chesapeake because they can’t find a housing unit, or they can’t move out of mom and dad’s house,” McCormick said. “They have older parents who - same problem - don’t want to live in a 4,000 square-foot house and can’t manage it, but can’t find any smaller units here in Chesapeake so they can stay in their community.”
The report notes rents in Chesapeake are up 52% since 2019, outpacing national rent growth of about 30% in the same time period, and more than double the national rate of wage increases.
And the pressures are set to continue growing. The new report says more than 12,300 Chesapeake families are spending more than 30% of their income on rents, making them as ‘rent burdened.’ Population projections estimate there will be more than 8,000 additional households in Chesapeake by 2030.
The whole region’s economy is suffering from the drag of extraordinarily high housing prices, economists from Old Dominion wrote recently.
As a recent housing study in neighboring Virginia Beach found, the Chesapeake report notes that “critical workers” like police officers, teachers, home health workers and warehouse employees can’t afford to live in the city.
A household has to have a total income near $75,000 before average rents in Chesapeake become affordable.
“We want Chesapeake to be average”
One thing that the task force flagged as uniquely Chesapeake is the near total lack of multifamily development.
Like many cities in the region, more than 80% of developable land is reserved for single-family housing in Chesapeake, according to a tool developed by advocacy group Housing Forward Virginia. Just 4% of the city’s land currently allows development of four or more units of housing without the need for city council approval.
The report notes Chesapeake approved zero building permits for new apartments or condos in 2022. In the same year, 81% of new housing units built in Virginia Beach were in multifamily developments.
Those kind of numbers don’t say “Chesapeake is open for business,” said McCormick, the task force chair, told a brewery crowd of around 50 Monday night. “We can’t recruit businesses into this city if we can’t house their workforce.”
The report says clearing roadblocks to multifamily development and luring developers to build it is the surest way to make living in Chesapeake more affordable, in line with findings from other Hampton Roads housing reports.
“One of our more compelling asks is we want Chesapeake to be average,” McCormick said. “Let’s go ahead and produce at the level the rest of the state is and our surrounding cities.”
The task force also says large new multifamily development should have a percentage of units set aside to have rents for lower-income families.
It wants 35% of those 15,000 new units to be in that affordable bracket, and says the city can help that along by subsidizing those developments with a combination of financial support, lesser requirements for parking and other measures.
In particular, the report says Chesapeake should be enabling and courting Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments, which receive federal tax breaks in exchange for lower rents for residents.
“You cannot tell the difference between market rate (and low-income developments). They've got pools and clubhouses and grills. They're great. You drive by, you don't know there's an affordability component here, and Chesapeake's simply not getting them because we don't have the zoning,” McCormick said.
"Drown out some of the NIMBY-ism"
The report lays out plenty of hurdles the city needs to overcome to address affordability.
One that goes unmentioned in the report, but is the elephant in the room of any discussion of municipal housing policy: the ‘not-in-my-backyard,”’ or NIMBY, contingent of community members. These are often neighbors of proposed developments who pack public meetings with objections to development in their neighborhoods.
“There's so many people in agreement on recommendations, but often the only people our city leaders get to hear from are the stridently opposed,” McCormick said.
“I think we've got distance to travel, so part of our job is to help our city leaders have enough supporters that can drown out some of the NIMBY-ism.”
Several members of city council were among the crowd at Big Ugly Brewing, including Mayor Rick West and councilwomen Debbie Ritter and Amanda Newins.
Don Carey, a councilman who’s currently running for mayor, said much of what the Alliance task force relayed are the same kinds of things he’s pushed for and heard elsewhere.
“This is one of the main areas where government should be doing a better job,” Carey said.
But he said making these kinds of changes starts with the political will to prioritize the issue in city budgets.
“From there, you can start identifying the places in the city where you could have more density.”
