Affordable housing needs in Prince William ‘increasing daily’ as Amazon arrival looms

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — Once a refuge for low and middle-income workers priced out of Alexandria and Arlington, Prince William County is currently struggling to meet its population’s affordable housing needs.

Nonprofit organization directors in the area confirmed that the community is in need of housing assistance beyond the scope of existing support systems. But with fewer affordable communities planned in the county and housing programs that are already filled to capacity, no clear solution is readily available.

Amazon HQ2, the online behemoth’s new headquarters in Crystal City, will have “an impact on housing, if nothing more than the hype that has been created has already affected housing prices,” said Karen DeVito, executive director of Catholics For Housing, a nonprofit in Dumfries that helps families find stable, affordable homes.

“People seem to think there will be no housing available,” DeVito continued. The demand for affordable housing in the county is “increasing daily,” and “the housing costs continue to increase, but the wages do not keep pace.”

Requests for housing assistance with Catholics For Housing began increasing last year, DeVito told Potomac Local, though it cannot be stated for sure whether that was due to Amazon’s announcement.

Amazon has promised 25,000 jobs to the Northern Virginia area. Although some of those jobs are bound to go to local workers, many experts agree that outside hires will also be brought in from across the country, escalating the area’s already sky-high housing rates.

In Northern Virginia, a family of four making $58,000 is considered low-income. That is lower than 50% of Prince William County’s Area Median Income (AMI), a number calculated for all cities by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2018, that number was $117,200.

The average rent for a one-bedroom home in Prince William County is $1,425. For a two-bedroom, it is $1,600. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has generated a report indicating that a minimum wage worker would need to work four full-time jobs to sustain an average two-bedroom apartment in Northern Virginia.

Patricia Johanson, executive director of Good Shepherd Housing Foundation — a nonprofit in Woodbridge that helps low-income families and those with mental illness find homes — told Potomac Local that many of the people who come to them are only making roughly $30,000 to $40,000 when regulations are taken into account.

Good Shepherd has three group homes, ten apartments, and one townhouse that they rent out for much lower rates. For example, a three-bedroom rental with them is $600 to $700 a month — roughly $1,000 less than the county’s average.

“Whenever we have an affordable housing rental open up, we get upwards of 25 applications from families within the first few days alone,” said Johanson. “And it is not a quick application. It’s four or five pages and you have to have supporting documentation.”=

Prince William County offers rental assistance in the form of a housing choice voucher program, but applications to join the program have been closed since December 2010. At that point, they had more than 8,500 families.

“Currently, we are around 1,500 [families],” Billy Lake, director of the county’s Office of Housing and Community Development (OHCD), told Potomac Local. “We are only calling people from the waiting list when someone goes off the program and the funding for the voucher is freed for another household.”

As of now, it is unclear when or whether the housing choice voucher program will reopen.

Prince William County’s department of social services also has a coordinated entry system which is designed to ensure fair and equal housing access by identifying specific needs and referring people to different programs. But keeping up with the demand is challenging.

“There’s such a long list of people in need,” Johanson noted. “There just aren’t enough programs to help all of the folks that need help in Prince William County.”

Finding developers who want to build affordable communities is also a challenge, compounding the housing problem.

Many of the new communities coming to Prince William County are high-end or “luxury” and very few look to be affordable housing. Out of 222 planned communities listed on New Home Source, only 33 will offer homes for less than $375,000. More than half of the 222 communities are in the $400,000 to $700,000 range.

“The private market does a good job of meeting demand for housing for higher-income households; however, housing for low-income households is difficult and expensive to provide,” said Lake. “High construction costs and market prices for land, along with costs associated with the development review and approval process and state and local regulations, all contribute to the challenge with making projects with lower rents or prices ‘pencil out.’”

DeVito concurred. “Builders can make more money building ‘McMansions,’” she said.

Federal subsidies — such as grants, deferred loans and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) equity — have “declined precipitously and are now under threat of elimination altogether,” Lake said.

“To increase housing affordability, it is imperative that local governments examine and adopt strategies to replace and expand beyond these lost federal resources,” he continued.

DeVito opined that affordable dwelling unit ordinances were essential to ensuring communities provide for limited-income households.