February 18, 2026
I’m republishing the following with the permission of Michael Monaco. He published it originally here. I think his stuff is worth subscribing to as well.
There was a reasonable conversation on facebook, Three of my favorite comments there:
1 – Unfortunately, the market will set the value of whatever housing gets put up. Where we make it affordable is by making it walkable reducing the need for other expenses. Mixed use properties with incentives for people who have businesses there and will live there. I think Crozet is perfectly set up for this to have corridors on either side of the railroad tracks that are connected by pedestrian bridges. With commuter trains that go to Waynesboro, Stanton and Charlottesville. But having these sprawling neighborhoods full of homes that cost a half $1 million or more isn’t going to cut it. The focus of development should go between 250 and three notch starting from one train crossing to the next. From the river over to Crozet Avenue.
2 – Underlying this analysis is the assumption that Affordable Housing must be NEW. I have never rented or purchased a new home. It is NOT true that 75% of approved but unbuilt units must be affordable. The process of naturally occurring affordable housing has not ceased. Also ignored: the difficulty in finding homeowners who both qualify for affordable units, and for a mortgage; the short window for advertising affordable units before they can be sold at market price; and the fact that Charlottesville and Albemarle are one market from a practical perspective. When UVA adds student housing, that puts some affordable housing back into the community bucket. Also ignored is that the County is advocating for maximum density at a time when the remaining properties are the most challenging. Buildout analysis doesn’t fully account for topography, water issues, road and pedestrian access, etc.
3 – In NYC the affordable housing was the OLD housing, the new stuff got premium prices. There’s just not a lot of ramshackle falling-down houses out here for unwealthy folks to buy or rent. Maybe in 40 years when Old Trail isn’t so new that neighborhood will be affordable.
My thoughts, before his story:
I would argue that we are running out of room to build housing the way we have built housing for 50 years.
We need to build generationally — mixed use, meaning housing on top of coffee shops and shopping centers, integrating appropriate infrastructure, and jobs. We need places where people can live and work close-by.
Doing this stuff piecemeal does not work. Building neighborhoods without connectivity, or sidewalks that stop at the development’s boundary, do not work for community building, maintenance or connectivity.
We need to think generationally, beyond our respective backyards, beyond next week, next month, next year. Even next decade. Plan and execute as if our grandkids’ lives depend on the decisions made today and tomorrow. What you and I want now matters less than working to build a community and future for those who come after us.
As with so many data stories, it started with a chart.
The May 2025 Annual Affordable Housing report for Albemarle County includes a chart showing the estimated number of Affordable Housing Units needed by 2040 by income level.
Overall, the total number of affordable housing units needed by 2040 is 10,070. Call it ten thousand.
Will it happen?
No. Here’s why.
Level-Setting
First things first: what’s our current inventory? According to that same report, we have 2,230 affordable homes in the county. That number is made up of subsidized rental units, proffered for-sale and for-rent units, preserved units, and bonus density units. Subsidized rental units are what most of us think of when we think affordable housing: an apartment or rental home, somehow subsidized by public dollars. That might be Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, that might be some other state or local dollars, but subsidized somehow. Proffered units are those offered up by a developer when a new development is built in the County. Up until recently, Albemarle County required a proffer of 15% of the total homes in a new development as affordable; that changed with new housing policy in recent years, which now requires 20%.
Bonus density units are similar to proffered units in that they are part of a new development; certain types of zoning allow for more density – more units per acre – if those homes are designated affordable. Preserved units are in the list too; this typically means homes that would have fallen into the market, but have been somehow kept affordable (usually by a nonprofit partner).
This might not represent all of the “affordable” housing in Albemarle. That is, there may be some housing that’s just old, or small, or worn-down, or all three; any combination of factors that brings down the rent. This also doesn’t include houses that may be completely paid off, or other situations where monthly housing costs are “affordable” for the owner/renter.
So: 2,230 homes counted in the current inventory of affordable housing.
There are also 3,051 affordable homes in the development pipeline. Of those, the vast majority are proffered units – 2,113, or about 70% of pipeline affordable homes. The rest are subsidized rental homes.
This knocks our big ten thousand down by a few pegs – counting the existing affordable housing and pipeline affordable housing against the total needed, we reach 4,789additional affordable homes needed by 2040. (This is a high-level total; the current & pipeline numbers aren’t broken down by income bracket affordability, so we can only really compare at the top level).
About five thousand more affordable homes. In order to know if we’re going to even approach those numbers, we need to know how many homes we’re expected to build in the next fifteen years.
How Many Homes Will We Build By 2040?
Huzzah for the Land Use Buildout Analysis! It’s a useful tool (and they promise to actually have a tool to use in the future, as opposed to snapshot analyses).
We’re looking at the 2025 column in this little picture:
In case it’s not self-evident:
- Maximum remaining approved units (unbuilt) refers to homes that have been approved through Board of Supervisors action – rezonings, special use permits, etc. – but have not yet actually been built. There are 11,230 of those homes.
- Maximum units under review refers to pending applications before the County at time of report (April 2025 – almost a year ago!) There’s just under four thousand of those – 3,986 total.
- Theoretical Maximum Buildout Estimate refers to how many homes could be built on the developable acres in the development areas. There’s probably a lot of math and assumptions under the hood driving this number; the analysts come up with 6,428 homes.
Annoyingly, the County doesn’t have a public-facing comprehensive tracking tool for how many of those approved/pending units – the “Development Pipeline” – are proffered affordable (or bonus density, or subsidized, etc etc). We can kind of squint at the affordable housing numbers from earlier – 3,051 affordable homes in the pipeline – but those numbers aren’t synced up with the land use buildout analysis, and I don’t know if the affordable housing “pipeline” uses the same definition as the land use buildout “pipeline” – units approved plus units pending approval.
For now, we’ll squint. 3,051 affordable homes in the pipeline. Let’s assume the word pipeline means the same thing in two different places and combine the 11,230 approved units with the 3,986 pending approval – we come up with 15,216 homes in the Development Pipeline, of which 3,051 (20%) are affordable.
Of course, like we learned earlier, that leaves at minimum 4,789 more affordable homes needed by 2040 to meet population needs. If we go back to our handy-dandy Land Use Buildout, we can see that there are an estimated 6,428 further homes that could be built in the development areas, beyond our pipeline.
Out of those 6,428 homes, we need at least 4,789 to be affordable. Or, to put it another way: in order to build enough affordable housing, 75% – three out of every four homes built beyond our development pipeline – would have to be affordable housing.
Here, I visualized that:
In case you can’t tell: that’s very likely not going to happen. Not without a a miracle…or at least, not without taking serious steps to fix our supply-side problems.
A Frustrating Mismatch
The county appears to have all the information they need. The annual housing report tells us how many homes we need available at different percentages of the Area Median Income by 2040 to serve our population. The CO reports and internal data from the Department of Community Development suggest that the County at the very least could get an idea of the rate of residential construction. The Land Use Buildout analysis tells us how much housing we can realistically expect to be built given the land we have. I recognize I’ve used some napkin math and assumptions in this blog post, but I feel confident I’m still playing baseball in the ballpark.
And all of this adds up to say: it’s not enough! Not even close!
Every year, assessments go up. Housing prices in our area go up. The median home sale price in the County in the first quarter of 2025? Almost $550,000. I’ve heard a lot of demand-side explanations for this, and most of them hold some amount of water – high-income jobs driving up the AMI, remote workers with wages untethered from geography out-competing locally-based workers. I’ve often heard versions of what I call the “One Boomer Theory:” One wealthy boomer outbidding everyone else for a home purchase drives up assessments for nearby houses. And we’re subject to the cruel tides of national trends. Right now, I’m sitting at a 4% interest rate on our mortgage. Any benefit we’d see from the appreciated equity in our ever-rising home value would be completely offset by 1) the 6%+ interest rates we’re living with now and 2) the similarly-rising price of everyone else’s home. Under these conditions, demand is driven by those with the cash or income to make a 6% interest rate a negligible problem.
Like I said: a lot of demand-side explanations for the affordability crisis. But I’m getting sick of being told the supply-side explanations are YIMBY pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams, or developer propaganda, or destructive gentrification. Seventy percent – seventy percent – of the possible future homes in the development areas are in the Development Pipeline already. Fifty-two percent have been approved and are just awaiting construction. Our supply will only grow less and less elastic, and inelastic supply plus consistently high demand equals price growth. The housing market may have its idiosyncrasies, but gravity still makes apples fall.
We continue to slide towards an inevitable and obvious cliff. We do not have enough developable land to just continue with our policies as they exist now and expect the magical manifestation of five to ten thousand affordable homes – let alone the specific needs of, say, two thousand homes affordable at less than 30% of the Area Median Income.
I won’t pretend it’s a problem that we can solve with One Weird Trick. I do believe that releasing some of our tight controls on housing supply will help. Building more housing helps. Research proves it, basic economics proves it. And, absolutely, that will require public dollars invested in infrastructure to serve all our neighbors well. We’re also going to need to put public dollars towards housing. Housing vouchers are good, but we need to more aggressively subsidize housing with public money. It’d be great if we had a functioning federal government that could help with that; for now, it’s up to us and the Dillon Rule commonwealth in which we live. Local housing nonprofits are great, and can help fill the gap, but they’re still subject to the same tight controls on local supply as every other developer in our area.
Above all, we really need to take seriously both:
- Increasing the by-right density in development areas, allowing for more new construction without needing zoning applications, and
- Increasing the amount of developable land in the County, to include expanding the development areas.
Often, when development area expansion comes up, there’s a few cautions people like to issue. Won’t this just induce demand for housing? Won’t this inflate the property values of the new development area land, offsetting the price decreases from increased inventory? And sure, it’s true that in any approach we take, we have to be thoughtful and intentional. Sprawl is bad development; blithely fostering sprawl is bad policy.
But on a fundamental level, after walking through this data and opening my third eye, here’s what I have to say to those (including my past self) who are skeptical about any development area expansion:
Where are my neighbors going to live? Where are, at minimum, the five thousand families who need affordable homes by 2040 going to live? Where are my neighbors who rely on SSDI or Social Security going to live? What homes will be built for them? Over half of renter households in Albemarle County are cost-burdened today – where will they live? Almost two-thirds of households with an income below $75k are cost-burdened – where will they live? My neighbors who work in childcare, who are cashiers, who are nursing assistants, home health workers, EMTs, bus drivers – where are my neighbors going to live? Where are my neighbors going to live?
Sorry, Charlottesville is walkable, bikeable and everything except affordable. And it is only going up…
Fair point, and I’d gently push back on the fatalism. Yes, Charlottesville keeps going up. But *why* it keeps going up matters, because the answer tells us what to do about it.
The data in this post is pretty unambiguous: we are not building enough. Albemarle needs roughly 10,000 affordable units by 2040 and currently has about 2,230. Even accounting for everything in the pipeline, we’re still short by approximately 4,800 units — and closing that gap would require 75% of every home built beyond the current pipeline to be affordable. That’s not going to happen without a fundamental change in how we approach supply.
Basic economics still applies here, even in markets with idiosyncrasies like ours. Constrained supply plus sustained demand equals rising prices. Building more housing — even imperfect, market-rate housing — exerts downward pressure over time. The research on this is consistent, and our local numbers bear it out. We’ve been restricting supply for decades and wondering why affordability gets worse.
Here’s something worth paying closer attention to: UVA is actively adding significant on-Grounds student housing. The Board of Visitors approved a [$160 million Ivy Corridor project in February 2025](https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026/02/ivy-corridor-student-housing-set-to-open-by-2027) — 750-800 beds in apartment-style housing set to open by 2027, part of a broader 2,000-bed initiative.
Applications for upperclass on-Grounds housing increased 81% from Fall 2021 to Fall 2025, which tells you the demand for on-Grounds living is real and growing.
When students move back on Grounds, they vacate off-Grounds rental units that have historically been locked up by the student market. Those units re-enter the broader rental pool — available to the childcare workers, EMTs, bus drivers, and service workers who have been competing for housing against students with parental subsidies or financial aid covering rent. That’s a meaningful supply injection.
Walkability matters — enormously — but it’s a complement to affordability, not a substitute for it. We’ve built walkable and unaffordable before. The answer is to build more, at more price points, with the infrastructure to support it. That requires getting serious about density, about the development area boundaries, and about the fact that we are nearly out of runway under current policy.
The people who need affordable housing by 2040 don’t have the luxury of waiting for perfect solutions.
Yes, anything is possible but, the majority of people moving to the Crozet Growth Area do not want an Urban Area. And the County never promised one. What you say about Charlottesville sounds logical but how do you convince people with heavily mortgaged properties to suddenly accept less money? The same for Old Trail.
You have local people that bought up “cheap” housing units that are living way beyond their means with the crazy rent they are charging. another fact is the only logical reason for the great migration to Crozet is demographics. Having driven a lot of the local population out what remains does not reflect what Western Albemarle used to represent. People did not flee from the large Northern Cities to nowhere just to create the demographic they left. And Charlottesville currently is looking for solutions for the poor and homeless. The renovation of the poorest areas is more a priority as with partnering with Habitat. When you drive under a bridge in town look closely under it. You will probably see someone looking back at you. As a life long resident it is embarrassing to me to see this. The county and city need to create a partnership to create subsidized housing in the growth areas. This would change the demographics which would then cause people to leave which would then create a more favorable housing market for all. I cannot understand humans that continue to advocate what they want over the needs of people that have nothing at all. When we were a community all voices were heard…
We constantly hear about maximizing the development potential in our growth area. When the original Crozet Master Plan was being developed, the county hired a consulting firm to aid in the planning process. By the end of the process, the total number of consultants came to 17. It was these 17 consultants who developed what they termed the “Ideal Maximum Population” for Crozet. The number they arrived at was 12,198. At this point, Crozet may well have a buildout population of closer to 16,000.
You made the following statement in this article: “We need to build generationally — mixed use, meaning housing on top of coffee shops and shopping centers, integrating appropriate infrastructure, and jobs. We need places where people can live and work close-by.” It will be interesting to see if the plan for Crozet downtown comes close to what you describe, especially since the first rendering presented to the community was nothing like your ideal.
If you have ever read the original Crozet Master Plan, you would find language very similar to your own statement. The development model found in the Crozet Master Plan best fits the language of “New Urbanism”. It called for a mix of housing types, and the community went so far as to have one of our local artists render a design of this form of development, which was presented before the BOS during the rezoning for the Gray Rock development.
Despite the community’s efforts to implement the new design model, the BOS voted for the “same old, same old” development pattern. The Crozet Community, however, was not without success. Two developments, “Wayland’s Grant” and Bargamin Park, along Jarman Gap Road, both have a mix of housing types and a range of affordability. Unfortunately for Crozet, this new form of development became the exception and not the rule.
This is not to mention the fact that the community had multiple meetings with PHA to build a mixed-use development in a new urbanist style, only to have PHA sell the land, and what we got was a new apartment complex that destroyed one of the older homes in Crozet.
Finally, the 15 percent affordable housing proffer has been a miserable failure, as a Crozet Gazette article shows, with a 9 percent success rate in Crozet. I did a bit of simple math and looked at the number of developments built in Crozet since the original Master Planning process, using the 15 percent affordable housing proffer, to find that, if implemented, there would be one affordable house for every 9 acres in the growth area.
In fact, the biggest threat to affordable housing is the potential redevelopment of Crozet’s older neighborhoods. Recently, a perfectly good brick ranch house on Jarman Gap Road was demolished, and in its place will go a new home costing over a million dollars.
It is indeed good to hear your ideas, which are consistent with the Crozet Master Plan. However, while I may agree with your statement above, for the most part, they are too little, too late for Crozet, except for our downtown, and I do not hold out much hope for a development form we would both like to see in the future.
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Jim’s edit: I put line breaks in so that the comment is more readable.
Thanks Tom. I agree with most of what you wrote.
One point —
I’d argue that older houses that are torn down should be replaced by tri- or quad-plexes.
Would that not be denying an owner their property rights? Why should we convert rural land to urban housing? Most newcomers enjoy the mix of rural and semi rural that we now have. Since the County has done this before, expand public housing in the Growth area, change the demographics and the current bunch will flee again causing a glut of empty homes which will lead to affordability. If you are truly interested in lowering the cost of housing these are doable options along with
again allowing mobile homes on 1/2 acre lots. You realize that property rights are very strong in Virginia.
I don’t think the government should *force* that, but to incentivize more dense infill would be an appropriate use of government zoning and regulations.
Ok, but don’t you think that the County building more Public Housing and allowing Mobile Homes on 1/2 acre lots would address this problem faster? A zoning change would only take months and Public Housing can go up quickly as witnessed by the Southwood development in Charlottesville. If the goal is more affordable housing that is the proven way to do it. If you want to continue population/demographic control there are these other ways.
What are you talking about? Seriously. Southwood development has been ongoing – and will continue to be ongoing – for years.
And I know you know that zoning changes are *never* done in “months.” Not the best example, but Windy Knoll has been trying for a long time to get things done.
And what Public Housing has been built?
Habitat is not public housing.
The problem with your solution is that none of the older developments in Crozet have either sidewalks or curb and gutter, and the community decided a long time ago not to use our children as a traffic-calming measure, not to mention the county is sure as hell not going to pay for a retrofit of the necessary infrastructure.
Which Community are you claiming to represent? When you claim things like that even the good ideas you have lose all credibility… If we, residents and property
owners, wanted what you claim is wanted we would of had it long ago. We went along with a growth area, not an Urban area and none was ever promised. I will say with some knowledge that a majority of Western Albemarle residents are happy to be here and do not want to pay even higher taxes to create an small city in Crozet.
Since Crozet does not pay it’s own way, that is a fact. If Crozet would incorporate it could, but then I doubt that most of them would agree to the higher taxes. Too bad that you moved to such an area that is so difficult for you that you have to claim that children are being used as a traffic calming measure. What possibly do you think that you gain by saying that???
Jim, here is what Southwood is: “Southwood Redevelopment
Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville is supporting the redevelopment of the Southwood Mobile Home Park as the nonprofit owner, developer, and property manager. Habitat purchased the park in 2007 to prevent massive and catastrophic resident displacement and has invested more than $25M to stabilize operations ever since. Long term, Habitat’s goal is to turn over complete ownership to the residents themselves in a redeveloped community of sustainable, permanent housing”. And why can’t the County build public housing or allow mobile homes on 1/2 acre lots? Just because you are not willing to go that far to actually get affordable housing does not mean it cannot get done. Hopefully will finally get the population mix in Crozet back to where it was before the invasion. Most will not admit it but, that mix of people created the area that everyone, now it seems, wants to come to. Fastest solution is mobile homes on 1/2 acre lots then get whole County buy-in on subsidized public housing like what exists up by 250 and across the tracks opposite Buck Road. With County support Habitat could develop a tract of land in the Growth Area. Instead of tract housing we would have something that actually benefits the local population.
Where have you lived before this that poor people were totally ignored??? On the County level there is currently the right mix of people where this could get done.