NBC29Housing Cost Crisis

Housing Cost Crisis

Reported by David Douglas
December 15, 2006 

What makes housing truly affordable? Experts believe that if your housing costs are less than 30 percent of your monthly income that qualifies as affordable. But in Charlottesville, that can be tough to find.

A new study suggests a renter would have to make $15 to $23 an hour to spend 30 percent or less of their income on housing. The fair market price for a Charlottesville apartment in 2007 will be $792 a month--a price for a roof over your head that for many comes at much too high a cost.

"What we get all the time now are people calling us who are renters, who are saying, 'I can't afford the rent anymore,'" said Tim Bowring with Habitat for Humanity. 

Such was the case for Larry Scott, who had to struggle to make ends meet. "I wouldn't have been able to do it, if it wasn't for my wife working...I wasn't making but $10 an hour," said Scott. "And my wife was making a little less."

Scott, who now works at the Habitat Store and lives in a Habitat for Humanity home, got priced out of the rental market.

"And I went to work sick plenty of days, couldn't afford to miss time," shared Scott. "Worked overtime a lot of time, just to have a little extra money to do extra things like take your daughter out to dinner once a month."

"It's a crisis, I mean it really is a crisis and the community does really need to come to terms with it...or pretty soon what you're going to have is no one here to be a policeman, no one here to be a teacher, no one here to run the city government," stated Bowring.

Which means that while Charlottesville's beauty and safety have attracted wealth, the rise in land values have sent property taxes into the sky.

"One of the problems we're facing is that the tax rates are going up so fast on these houses because of the land values, the people can get into a house, but the taxes are more than they pay for the house," said Bowring.

The city of Charlottesville is aware of the problem and Habitat is working with them to see if there's any hope of holding taxes down. The city has also outlined quality housing opportunities for all in it's 20-25 vision, but finding a solution might require help from other hands.

"So it's not becoming an employment issue, so employers are saying, 'we need to do something about this problem, or we're not going to have the employment pool we need to run our businesses,'" stated Bowring. 

As for Larry Scott, he won't hesitate to express thanks and considers himself among the lucky ones. "They give you a chance and it's like a dream come true," he said. 

Bowring tells me he feels part of the solution is buying land and maximizing the cost of a property by building densely. He also believes that if a wider range of prices are available in a single neighborhood, more people who need homes will be able to find them and stronger communities will develop.