Charlottesville Affordable Housing Plan
HR&A developed an Affordable Housing Plan for the City of Charlottesville that centers racial equity and regional collaboration to guide the city’s investments in affordable housing programs and policies. Charlottesville has made significant progress on the Plan’s three major initiatives including: dedicating $10M a year to affordable housing, building inclusive governance throughout the City’s housing ecosystem, and adopting progressive, inclusionary zoning reforms — all of which are shaping a denser, more economically diverse Charlottesville.
As part of the planning process, we worked with multiple stakeholder groups to understand the existing affordable housing landscape in Charlottesville — assessing existing challenges and building consensus around proposed solutions. With this input, the HR&A team developed a robust Affordable Housing Plan that included actionable solutions stakeholders were already invested in. The City approved the plan in March 2021, and our work informed related efforts to update the City’s comprehensive plan and zoning code.
Following the Affordable Housing Plan’s adoption, we continued working with the City and the planning team to evaluate the feasibility of a new inclusionary zoning policy. The team used a series of financial models based on Charlottesville’s existing market conditions and land use plans to determine the feasibility of requiring affordable housing production as a percentage of all new housing development by offering density bonuses or other incentives. We tested various scenarios for incentives and affordability requirements as well as multiple development types.
The team also reviewed the Future Land Use Map’s requirements and established market and development assumptions to evaluate the rate of change of the policy’s impact on property value and new housing production. The final recommendations of the study were implemented into Charlottesville’s new Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) Policy, which was unanimously approved by the City Council in December 2023.
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“It’s finally here: Charlottesville has a new zoning ordinance”— Charlottesville Tomorrow
