In the next 20 years, I envision a Charlottesville region where affordable housing becomes the launching pad for economic mobility. Through stable housing, the people who live here will no longer be stuck where they are in the system.
My experience with housing instability as a child grounds my work as the executive director of Piedmont Housing Alliance and my dedication to improving access to housing and increasing economic mobility.
By the time I graduated high school, I had lived in more than a dozen houses. My mother was scraping by, trying to find her place, her work and her family. She was a single mom of one, which became three after the twins were born.
She worked different jobs, including those not usually performed by women in the 1970s and ’80s. She built things and was an on-site property manager in a tough apartment complex. She was strong in body and in mind. Sometimes she worked for employers, but she liked those paychecks least, preferring to work for herself.
I worked the cash register as a fourth grader in my mom’s second-hand store. An entrepreneur in spirit and action, she was always hustling to bring food to the table and keep a roof over our heads.
After third grade, we moved from Albuquerque to small-town Vermont. Although we kept moving from house to house, the snow, fields and forests became my home. My new friends were like me. No one had money. The houses never stayed warm enough. We were all a little embarrassed by what we didn’t have, but we didn’t cast judgement on each other. And the summers were glorious in the woods.
What we felt, but did not speak, was how hard it was for our parents. My mother carried the persistent stress of unpaid bills and the instability of moving to the next house. There was no other choice.
My own experience became the catalyst for the work I do at Piedmont Housing Alliance. I knew early on that, somehow, I would strive to work in service of others. I had no other choice.
When I moved to Charlottesville from Austin in 2017 to start as executive director, my primary mandate was to facilitate the redevelopment of Friendship Court (now Kindlewood) in partnership with the residents. What I didn’t fully understand at the time was how profoundly fractured the economic system was in Charlottesville. I came here to accelerate the creation of housing that lower income families could access, ideally achieving a semblance of financial stability for themselves in an increasingly costly environment.
What I didn’t know was that housing was necessary, but on its own, insufficient.
The city, and surrounding area, has perpetuated a barbell-shaped economy for decades. We have extensive wealth on one end of the economic spectrum and uncommonly entrenched poverty on the other. The connective tissue between the two — the pathways of economic mobility — are tenuous and stifled.
The city of Charlottesville has the ignoble distinction of being a “persistent poverty” locality, which means maintaining a poverty rate of 20% or more for at least the last 30 years, based on data from the U.S. Economic Development Administration for the 2024 fiscal year.
The Orange Dot Report, a local study by Piedmont Virginia Community College and the Center for Community Partnerships at UVA, reinforces this trend. Between the 2011 report and 2024 report, the number of financially unstable households in Charlottesville stayed largely constant at 27% to 29%.
When I moved to Charlottesville in 2017, the area median income (AMI) across the region was $76,600, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Half of the region’s households had incomes below $76,600, and half above. In 2023, the area median income was $123,300 according to HUD. That’s a 61% increase.
Lower-income households, however, did not experience an average 61% increase in their yearly income. The folks who are moving into Charlottesville are not typically those with lower incomes. Those leaving the city are, and they often have few other choices.
One of the first clear, resident-driven imperatives I heard during planning for Kindlewood was that rebuilding housing alone wasn’t enough. The residents advocated for onsite services and legitimate opportunities for job creation or other pathways to prosperity. Ideally, the residents said, each phase of redevelopment would include meaningful community investment beyond housing to create pathways to opportunity and well-being.
By late 2026, when Phase 2 completes, Kindlewood will have a new early learning center focused on job creation and affordable, high-quality education for children ages birth to five; the first half of a public park with integrated community gardens; and a permanent location for our Financial Opportunity Center. Open to residents across the region, the FOC co-locates a full breadth of services in one place, from eviction prevention to financial coaching and homeownership counseling.
In future phases, the park will be completed and additional commercial and retail space will be developed, possibly including a micro-investing program for households typically excluded from investment opportunities.
With 501 Cherry Ave. on the cusp of breaking ground later this spring, affordable housing will be co-located with a new site for the Music Resource Center and ideally, a new neighborhood-scale co-op grocery that will create jobs and address food desert challenges in the Fifeville neighborhood of Charlottesville.
In the next 20 years, I hope that this model of co-location, coupled with a holistic approach to financial stability and economic mobility, will be standard practice for all developments at all levels of the economic spectrum.
My mother fought her way out of poverty with grit and determination, but she didn’t have to contend with the entrenched legacy of generational poverty that our region’s families have faced for decades. Over the next 20 years, our community needs vital investments in our economic connective tissue, in addition to housing. If we have any hope of breaking the cyclical chains of poverty that hold so many of our friends and neighbors down, in addition to sustaining investments in housing affordability, we have to strengthen pathways to upward economic mobility.
The first step to creating our shared future is imagining it.
For Charlottesville Tomorrow’s 20th anniversary, we are inviting central Virginians to share their visions for the next 20 years.
