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Affordable housing has long been a major issue for Lexington City Council and concerned Lexington citizens.
At its regular meeting on Dec. 1, Council members received a fresh perspective on the issue by two students from James Madison University – Denise Schock and Ramond Curtis.
As a requirement for their Economic and Community Development course, Schock and Curtis dug into the logistics of the housing situation in Lexington with their project, “Community of Change.”
“Lexington has a perceived housing crisis [as it is] finding it hard to meet the housing demand in the area,” Schock said. A contributing factor is that as new generations are entering the housing market, they’re finding that too few homes have been built within the past 20 years, making it particularly difficult to find low-entry housing.
The students had sat down with city officials and city stakeholders to better their understanding of Lexington’s housing market. Some of the items they touched on during their interviews were the cost of housing, Lexington’s memorandum of understanding with the county, the height ordinance, short-term rentals, and nontaxable land in the city, Schock said.
Schools and universities are one of the main economic sectors for the community; in fact the population of students attending Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute accounts for 52 percent of Lexington’s population, they noted.
But school-owned property also takes up a large portion of the land within the city. Schock and Curtis said that 65 percent of land in the city is not taxable because it is owned by the two schools. However, City Manager Jim Halasz later clarified to The News-Gazette that 65 percent of the assessed value of land and structures in Lexington are untaxable, he said.
Rockbridge County, they noted, also has footholds on city property as two county schools are located within the city’s borders.
Schock and Curtis reviewed Lexington’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Rockbridge County. The MOU was reached in 1985, an agreement under which the city gave up its annexation rights in return for yearly payments from the county.
Schock and Curtis believed that the city was only receiving $500,000 from the county, so one of their recommendations was to reevaluate the conditions of the MOU and renegotiate the dollar amount for a larger compensation.
Mayor Frank Friedman informed the students, though, that the city now receives a yearly payment of about $2 million from the county.
The students believe that the city is also restricted by the city’s height ordinance in historic downtown Lexington. Lexington is recognized on the Virginia and national registers of historic places with 417 contributing resources and 65 noncontributing resources included on the register.
“The city and its surroundings are preserved in culture and architecture,” Schock commented. “Owning a home in a historic district can make home ownership difficult and expensive as changing the exterior would require prior approval.”
The historic designation and the city’s height ordinance create issues for expansions that could allow for more housing. The city is restricted from building tall apartment buildings that may deter from Lexington’s historical attributes as the ordinance limits building heights to a maximum of 45 feet for both residential and commercial dwellings. If the city cannot build up, the best option may be to move out, Schock said.
Schock and Curtis made reference to the Spotswood Collaborative and mentioned that it may be beneficial for the city to find developers that will build alternative housing that could compliment Lexington’s historic architectural attributes and create more housing opportunities.
-As a part of their research, Schock and Curtis compared Lexington to neighboring localities. They sought statistics such as the percentage of persons in poverty, median household income, average home value, and industries and public developments.
Comparing the localities’ average home value was “particularly important to us because of the need to understand if Lexington was experiencing some exceptional increase in home value compared to other surrounding localities with similar populations and household incomes,” Curtis said.
In their final executive report, Schock and Curtis concluded that while Lexington is confronting a housing dilemma, the city’s issues are not any more severe than the housing situations in other nearby cities.
For instance, Lexington’s average home value experienced a 43 percent increase from 2015 to 2022, when it was estimated at $307,562. While these statistics may seem discouraging, Lexington’s 43 percentage increase is actually lower than those in Harrisonburg, Staunton, Waynesboro, and Bridgewater, which are experiencing home value increases between 48 percent and 53 percent.
Also, Lexington’s homes are priced lower than Virginia’s overall average home value price of $343,138.
Curtis and Schock studied prominent occupations and industries in Lexington to make recommendations based off of potential areas of opportunity. Educational services had the highest level of employment with 927 people working in schools. Health care and social assistance was the second largest industry. Curtis also noted that some Lexington residents may live in the city but work outside of it and vice versa.
In regard to public development, the team investigated the former Virginia Department of Transportation property near Maury River Middle School. Schock and Curtis indicated that the VDOT property in the city is not currently being used because of the impact it would have on the infrastructure and sewage in the city. They were concerned by this much like the untaxable land because “unused land continues to not bring in tax revenue that it was expected to bring in when it was purchased.”
Again, Halasz later corrected their findings. “The VDOT site is not unavailable for development due to a lack of sewer capacity. Today, the use of the property is limited, but we are making improvements to change that,” he told The News-Gazette.
Regardless, Schock and Curtis recommended developing infrastructure opportunities in water and sewage to attract development in mixed use areas that would expand housing and taxable commercial spaces for the city.
No action was needed to be taken by Council following this presentation, but they will refer back to the students’ findings when evaluating the Lexington’s housing issue in the future.
