Shine the Light Chat with Jovan Burton

SHINE THE LIGHT CHAT

SMBW sat down with Jovan Burton from the Partnership for Housing Affordability to discuss the ongoing housing crisis.

What is your role at the Partnership for Housing Affordability and what does your organization do?

I am the Executive Director at the Partnership for Housing Affordability. I've been in that role since January of 2022, and I've been with the organization since 2019. The Partnership for Housing Affrodability started with their annual Affordable Housing Awareness Week with the mission to bring more awareness to the issue of housing and put nonprofit providers, local government providers, and corporate executives in the shoes of someone who's going through housing instability. In the past few years, the organization has shifted to be more focused on data and research, collaboration with local governments, and policy. We’re now the lead housing policy agency in the region. We have several people from local governments who sit on our Board of Directors, and see us as an extension of their staff, helping to educate them on what their biggest housing needs are and strategize solutions to address them. Since we're not a direct service provider and we don't build housing, we're able to convene local governments and both forprofit and nonprofit developers to come together and figure out how we can address this issue at scale.

What regions does PHA serve?

Our organization covers the same footprint as our Planning District commission, including the Goochland, Powhatan, Chesterfield, Henrico, Hanover, Ashland, New Kent, Charles City and the city of Richmond. A lot of our policy work and research covers all of those jurisdictions. Most of our policy work is focused in the city of Richmond, Henrico, Hanover, Chesterfield, and the town of Ashland. Housing is a regional issue and extends beyond jurisdictional lines.

If someone is evicted in the city of Richmond, there's nothing preventing them from moving to Henrico. Or vice versa, someone who moves to this region, they may live in Chesterfield for a little while, or they may look to buy a home in Henrico. It's important for us to address these issues collaboratively. One in three households in the region are cost burden, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

This is an issue that impacts just about everyone; many times we don't notice it, we could be working with someone who's in that predicament. We could be walking past them on the street.

Describe PHA's specific programs and offerings?

Though we aren't a direct provider and we primarily work in partnerships and policy, PHA's Housing Resource Line effectively serves as the first line of defense for individuals that are trying to navigate housing and are unsure where to turn to for legal aid or financial assistance. So we provide that navigation, not the resources directly, but we connect residents with the organizations that do have resources.

Explain the barriers people face in trying to find or maintain housing.

The beauty of being a data driven organization is that we have real time data from people with lived experience through the resource line, and then we can corroborate that with census data that we collect on a periodic basis. So what we see daily from residents around the region is that the biggest need, far and away, is for people looking for an affordable place to rent. That is the number one issue, followed by those looking for financial assistance so that they can avoid an eviction or people looking for legal aid.

"The Partnership for Housing Affordability's mission champions housing policies that support healthy, affordable, quality living for all residents in the region through partnerships, collaboration, and research."

Jovan Burton Executive Director, Partnership for Housing Affordability

Explain affordable housing and the connotations behind that term?

It's a term that, quite frankly, is widely interpreted by different audiences in ways that are more often than not negative. If you are spending more than 30% of your income on housing, that's not affordable to you, and that's a standard that was established by the federal government 50, 60 years ago. Everyone needs affordable housing, but the reality is not everyone is able to afford to pay more than 30% or 40%—some people do that by choice and some people are forced to do that.

When it comes to the language and how it's perceived, there's a lot of misnomers about the quality; that affordable indicates inferior quality, inferior building products or is an indicator of crime, all of which are incredibly harmful to the people that stand to gain and benefit from building more affordable housing. But it's also, in most cases, just not true. Affordable housing that gets built in the United States and Richmond has to satisfy some pretty rigorous standards in order to get funded. If you don't adhere to those standards of quality and building, you won't get funded. It's an incredibly competitive process.

Explain housing equity— what makes housing equitable or inequitable?

Housing inherently isn't equitable or inequitable. It's the accessibility of it, who it's accessible to, who it's not accessible to, who is it affordable for, who it's not affordable for, and the availability of it at different levels.

Everyone needs housing that's affordable to them.

We have fewer and fewer units that are available and affordable to people that are on the lower end of the income spectrum. That's exacerbated by zoning policies that make it difficult to build the kind of housing that we need, the lack of funding from federal, state and local directly into housing to address this issue, and market forces. Richmond's become a very attractive place to live right now, and people from more expensive areas are moving here. What that does is drive up demand for housing —which is already through the roof—creating more competition and leading to increasing rent. It's great to be a growing, bustling region, but not everyone's going to benefit from that growth. It will require intentionality and investments at a pretty big scale in order to address some of those root causes, complemented by policy changes at the local and state level.

Luxury is also one of those misnomers; you say that something is luxury, it doesn't mean anything. You aren't required to include certain building materials just because you say something is luxury. In reality, since about 1990 affordable housing in the U.S. has been largely built through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which has a litany of requirements for design and construction.

Why is this issue so relevant today?

I want to be clear, this is not a new issue. There have been people who have been dedicating advocacy towards this issue for many, many decades. Recently though with COVID, when there was a microscope on many of the inequities in our communities, the visibility of housing issues has heightened. Whether you're looking at homelessness, rentals, or home ownership, there are these persistent, stubborn, enormous disparities shaping the outlook of our communities.

With Richmond in particular, there's been quite a few things that have happened recently. First, Richmond being cited as having the second highest eviction rate in the country. That turned a lot of heads when the Eviction Lab and Princeton put out that report in 2018. Five of the top ten cities were in Virginia; we have laws that make it very easy and incentivizing to evict people. Second, the influx of federal relief dollars from COVID removed the reluctance from localities and governments to invest directly into housing and housing instability to ensure that people could remain in their homes—we saw the value

of that. The third piece is homelessness. It's an issue that in many places across the country is untenable. Here in Richmond, the number of people who are unsheltered is the highest that it's been in 15 years. I want to put that in perspective, though; Richmond isn't one of those larger metropolitan areas with thousands and thousands of people that are unsheltered. We have less than 200 unsheltered people within the City of Richmond based on the most recent count, and the connection between affordable housing and issues like homelessness cannot be understated. The solution to homelessness is affordable housing.

It's best to think of it like a highway. Usually people think, you just add more lanes, that'll help with traffic.

Sometimes when it comes to homelessness, people think the answer is we need to just add more and more shelters. While that's certainly a temporary way to intervene and help people that are unsheltered and in life or death circumstances, but it's not a long term solution to homelessness. Shelters were never designed to be a solution. The problem is we don't have exits from our highway, because there's so few housing units. We need to create more exits. The more lanes we create, that's just more people clogged in shelters. During the pandemic, we saw especially longer stays in shelters—70, sometimes 80 days. So many people were trying to get in a shelter, stuck in traffic on the ramp to the highway, but now they can't even get into a shelter because we don't have any exits.

What are some of the physical, planning, and design limitations of “affordable housing”, and what can we do to foster more equitable housing?

On the development side, cost is a major barrier—it doesn't cost any less to build an affordable product.

Lumber, material, and labor costs, all of those are still the same, but it will sell for less profit. That's the math problem that perpetually plagues the issue of affordable housing.

As for the design, there's probably a lot more opportunity for flexibility and innovation. How do we think outside of the box in order to address this from a different angle?

Maybe we have become accustomed to building a certain type of affordable housing or certain way of getting from project conception to completion. A couple great examples that we've seen in recent years are shipping container homes and 3D printed homes. We are also seeing building innovations like using insulated concrete forms for residential and affordable housing as opposed to traditional stick or lumber builds in order to cut down on costs and find new ways to develop for this scale. The design space and architecture industry have the potential to offer the affordable housing sphere different creative solutions that haven't been thought of. There's just a lot more flexibility related to design than dealing with the financial and lending limitations.

What do you want our audience to take away from this discussion?

I'd like your audience to resonate with the issue, and find ways where they can plug in. We want people to care about and better understand these issues. How do you design more community center spaces for families with children or seniors that are on fixed incomes and need services more accessible to them? How do you work intentionally with the community in advance of a development to figure out what kind of amenities are needed to help people thrive? Richmond is a place with so many people wanting to live here, it is changing rapidly.

With the kinds of developments that are being built, we'd like to see a buy in from the community. Where can developers and the community meet in the middle?

There's been wonderful examples in recent years, and I'll call out this one specifically; there's a nonprofit here in Richmond called Project:Homes that bought a mobile home park in Chesterfield County. Before starting any kind of development, they knew that gaining the trust of the residents was going to be essential. This is a community where well over 90% of the residents speak Spanish.

So they needed to be intentional, and tell the community members, "All right, this is new ownership, We want to work with you, We want to know what it is that you want to see with some of the changes." After a lot of engagement, doing events on the weekend where they provided free AC units for the residents and hosting activities for the children, they asked "What are some of the challenges that the other owner didn't address?" It's essential to be intentional and collaborative with how you design, and understand what's needed and why you need to look at it a little bit differently than you would a traditional product.

Jovan Burton Partnership for Housing Affordability, Executive Director