GRCII: Gilpin, Winchester Greens, and the amazing SRO
by Ross Catrow
As mentioned previously my randomly assigned topic at the Greater Richmond Challenge II was “Workforce Housing.” Real quick: workforce housing is housing for people that form the backbone of society (think teachers, police, fire, clergy). Workforce housing is different than affordable housing. Affordable housing is for the guy who sells you beer at 7-11.
Our day was filled with meetings all over the region with interesting people: the publisher of the RTD (aside: I was really hoping that Tom was going to be lame. But he is awesome, intelligent, and funny. I don’t know how good he is going to be at running the ol’ paper but as a dude: he rocks.), the head of planning for Hanover County, an employee of St. Joseph’s Villa, the head of the Department of Revitalization for Henrico. That was all before lunch.
We had lunch at the FRIENDS center in Gilpin Court. While there we spoke with the property manager of Gilpin, some representatives from the RRHA, the director of the Department of Community Development, as well as a resident. I’ll share some demographic stats from Gilpin in another post. They are eye opening.
After lunch we went to a successful affordable housing neighborhood on Jeff Davis called Winchester Greens. The Better Housing Coalition renovated a depilated apartment complex to some pretty awesome Fan-esque apartments — that rent for 700$. It is probably the most “successful” workforce housing option in the region.
The final place we toured was the South Richmond SRO. A SRO, “single room occupancy,” is a renovated hotel where each resident lives in one room. These facilities cater to the homeless and provide social services as well as extremely cheap rent. An astounding 96% of people leaving the South Richmond SRO are self sufficient after one year. !!! . That is amazing to me. The other great thing is the whole renovation cost 1.9M$ This isn’t a convention center, or a performing arts center sized project. We could plop these down across the city for basically nothing and move a lot of people off of the streets.
Glad to see the shout-out for South Richmond SRO in your post – I’m on the board of VA Supportive Housing, mainly due to a history of doing a “homeless story” every sweeps in every year from 1980 to 2000 in NYC. When I got to Richmond (and away from working-for-a-major-news-outlet “unbiased journalist” rules), when I was offered the opportunity to work with a ground-breaking supportive housing non-profit, I jumped at the chance.
VSH is embarking on a new, ambitious initiative, called A Place To Start (APTS) – working with the chronically homeless (who are also typically chemically dependent and/or mentally ill) to get them established in their own stable shelter and working with “flying squads” of mental health, medical, and social work specialists.
Affordable housing is disappearing, as the minimum wage stays laughably low and “affordable” housing rises above $700/month. Education is the answer, but without national standards, local school systems can turn out the well-chronicled high school diplomates who can’t read. Public schools can become warehouses, and “No Child Left Behind” isn’t the answer. Rigorous national reading, math and science standards are.
So, what about workforce housing? All of what you are talking about seems to be affordable housing, right? Was there discussion or was this more of a field trip for something that follows?
Also, Gilpin Court is pretty crazy. It’s basically a slum. Again, I don’t follow how it has much to do with workforce housing?
Last year the Workforce Housing group was called Affordable Housing. This year they’ve narrowed it down for some reason. I was going to save some of this for another blog post but I’ll just put it here:
I’m not really convinced there is a “Workforce Housing” issue. Single police officers, teachers, nurses, etc, definitely do not make enough money (on a starting salary) to afford to buy a house. But do they really need to own a house? On a salary of 28k (which is around what these people make starting off) a person should be able to afford to spend 700$ on rent/mortgage. Plenty of places exist to live in for that kind of price.
What may not exist are places in that range in areas that are optimal to live. A married police officer who’s wife doesn’t work can’t afford to live anywhere in the city with decent schools. But again, I don’t know if this is a *problem.* People have to make concessions sometimes. PS. maybe it is an education problem and not a housing problem.
As we talked with officials about the workforce housing problem none of them had any excellent/hard data. Everything was average house price — which is worthless in my mind (give me the median!). No one had a good definition of who these “work force housing” folks were, and no one knew how many of them exist. What I really took away was that this is a nebulous problem that may be a bigger issue in the future.
Affordable housing on the other hand *is* a pressing issue now. There are people who are poor and can’t afford to live anywhere, let alone somewhere for 700$. Maybe in the counties things are different, but I think “affordable” housing is a bigger issue in the City than “workforce” housing.
Those are some starting thoughts.
Gotcha. thanks for expounding. so this year’s “WorkForce Housing” was good to show them that next year they should change it back to “affordable housing?” but seriously, it sounds like you got to do a lot and see a lot, which is cool.
i think another thing to consider (maybe) is that we have all new standards now than people did even 20 years ago. back in the day you saved a bunch of money and you bought when you could afford it. now, everyone wants everything now (you weren’t supposed to buy a house as newly-weds right out of school back in the day, now people expect that). which actually gives a little validity to Midas’ crazy “abolish mortgages” statement. this doesn’t help people who will make no money forever though.
Yeah one of the big things we suggested in our “presentation” (read: lame skit) was that people need education. Education on saving up for a down payment for a bunch of years, and how mortgages work.
I do hope that they change it back to “affordable housing” too.
i feel like maybe it is an american dream thing. like being able to own a house is a benchmark that a lot of people use to measure Life Success. so when people who are necessary to society (which sounds like what the ‘workforce’ here is) can’t afford to reach that benchmark, i think it makes people see that as a Problem.
but yeah, renting. owning a house now for most people means owning a mortgage. which means that you address your rent checks to a bank instead of a landlord, with the added bonuses that you can knock holes in the wall if you want and that you get to speculate on the real estate market. plus the emotional value. none of those things (imho) are necessary conditions for living a comfortable, honest life, which seems to me to be a better benchmark for Life Success.
so i agree, i mean if someone can rent a nice place affordably, then i don’t think we should wring our hands too much about what they ‘own.’ until we ABOLISH MORTGAGES, i think it is more worthwhile to focus on the people who can’t even afford that much.
(ps: abolish mortgages)
there must be some good way to make money off of affordable housing. maybe that’s sad, but i’d rather somebody find a way to make it work and turn a profit, then do it with taxes and have the government handle it (but that’s just me!) like housing welfare.
maybe an SRO-style thing could be profitable if you maximize density and cut out wasteful aspects of apartments (1 kitchen per 3 or 4 people and 2 bathrooms for 3 or 4 people is not necessary). what if you built a dorm for poor people. like a million rooms with a community kitchen and community bathrooms. could you make a profit? could you convince a developer to build that as an investment?
or maybe taking care of poor people is always going to be the job of the government?
i dunno, i mean do colleges make a profit off of on-campus housing? or do they just break even? i don’t even know how much it costs.
there are dorms at VT that are $2,500 for the year. that’s a little over $200/month. maybe more if that’s a school year. but, even if they are just breaking even, $200/month is pretty darn cheap. you could work about 1 day a week at minimum wage and pay that. i don’t know if VT makes any money on that, though.
Wolf:
We actually brought up the question a couple times that if there was money to be made (ie. a big need, “demand”) for affordable “workforce housing” someone would be in there making a buck off of it. We thought that it’s got to be made profitable to get developers involved. You can only provide so much incentive from the government, like you said. Plus nobody likes taxes. (Aside: there are some no-expense incentives you can provide like speeding up zoning permits, but they only go so far.)
Midas:
The thing dorms don’t provide is social services. Available, on premise social services are why things like the South Richmond SRO is so successful. Someone has got to pay for that stuff. Actually the SR SRO has three budgets: 1) a construction budget, which was paid for with grants, bonds, government money, 2) an operating budget which is covered by rent, and 3) the social service budget which is paid for from grants and the like.