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Threshold, Lexington’s housing commission, is seeking a grant to conduct the first citywide survey of housing needs, in hopes of starting a more in-depth conversation about how to address those needs going forward.
Threshold held a public hearing last week regarding a Community Development Block Grant to perform a windshield survey of the residential spaces in Lexington to determine the condition of housing in the city and identify which areas are in most need of assistance.
Olivia Raines, housing program manager with the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission (CSPDC), gave a presentation to Threshold and members of the public about the grant and how they hope to use it. The survey is part of a housing study that the CSPDC is conducting throughout the region, which covers the counties of Augusta, Bath, Highland, Rockbridge and Rockingham, to better understand the housing issues in the region and to develop strategies to address the issues.
A windshield survey is a survey of housing that is taken by trained surveyors looking at the exterior of houses either from their car or from the sidewalk or street. The survey, Raines explained, “allows for a complete inventory of all the housing units and the associated infrastructure in Lexington” and assesses the condition of the home “based on observable external features.” The survey would also involve looking at existing housing data within the city to help add context to the findings.
“This helps the city make more informed and evidencedriven decisions about future investment, looking comprehensively at housing and infrastructure,” she said. “Rather than making anecdotal decisions about housing repair needs, this is a way to better inform that process in the future … The point of this is to get a better sense of the needs rather than make a decision in the immediate about future investment. It’s just to help guide investment in the future.”
One of the things that makes housing in Lexington a bit unique in the region, Raines noted, is that just over a third of the housing stock in the city was built in or before 1939, making it some of the oldest housing in the region.
“Obviously, older homes [and] historic homes are a key part of Lexington’s identity,” she said. “Your historic culture is a lot what makes you unique, but with homes also comes the need for maintenance and repair and that’s where we can encounter some maintenance issues.”
She also noted that a significant number of homeowners and renters in the city are living in cost-burdened households, meaning that more than 30 percent of the household income is being put toward housing related expenses. In Lexington, nearly one-third of homeowners and almost 40 percent of renters are considered cost-burdened.
“When someone is costburdened, they’re going to be struggling to make difficult choices between their housing expenses and other expenses like childcare, transportation, [or] education, so when you add home maintenance to that, income-constrained households may choose to just defer that maintenance rather than make those required repairs,” she said.
The Community Development Block Grant that Raines is assisting the city in applying for is for up to $50,000 and will be used to hire a consultant to conduct a windshield survey in Lexington and create a needs assessment based on the results of the survey. These block grants require that programs applying for them meet one of three goals: benefiting low- to moderateincome persons (individuals earning 80 percent of the area median income or less), eliminating neighborhood deterioration and blight, or meeting an urgent community need. Raines said that, for the purposes of the city’s application, the second goal was the one that was being met.
“The goal is to get a better analysis of housing conditions and infrastructure conditions in the city with the eventual goal of eliminating signs of neighborhood deterioration,” she said.
Following her presentation, Raines took questions from the Threshold board and from members of the public. City Council member Chuck Smith asked what metrics would be used for the survey and wondered “how much data can you get from looking at a house from 50 feet away and only looking from the front?”
Raines noted that the specific metrics that would be used for the survey would be determined once a consultant had been selected to conduct it, but that it could include looking at the windows, roofing, foundations or for other things that could indicate maintenance on the home. She also said that she’d been assured by consultants that “with a trained eye, there is a lot you can tell from the street.”
“It’s not going to get everything perfect,” she said, “but it’s a way to say these houses are clearly in great shape, these houses are in severe need of rehabilitation and then somewhere in between, so it’s going to be a way to scale the severity of those needs.”
Smith also wondered if potentially rehabilitating rental properties within the city could result in the rents for those properties increasing. Raines noted that that was a concern, but “we also don’t want to lose that stock because it becomes uninhabitable.”
“In our region, we’ve heard that localities that have a significantly older rental stock are getting to the point where a significant number of their units are just straight-up substandard, and we don’t want that either,” she said. “You’re not going to get a perfect answer, but you do want to make sure that those units are maintained to some quality, and most housing rehab programs are just ensuring that housing meets housing quality standards. Not that they are a luxury unit, but that they’re meeting basic housing quality standards.”
Several members of the Threshold board expressed support for the survey.
“We’ve done studies for housing in areas around the city for the past 34 years,” said Threshold Vice Chair Fred Kirchner. “This is the first time that it’s citywide to serve all the citizens. I think that’s what we really need to find the other pockets around that we haven’t really been looking at. We’ve always been looking at the same neighborhoods. I think it should be a citywide reassessment that gives us a good, broad view.”
“This is actually getting to specifics about what we actually need in this community,” added Threshold Chair Shandrey Sands. “Maybe we find out that weatherization is the best way to go, maybe we find out that there are some neighborhoods that completely need to be kind of redone, but this is the start of the conversation.”
