A little stability

Affordable housing for cops, firefighters, and teachers? There's some hope

Date published: 11/26/2008

BARRING AN ATTACK of jaw- dropping cussedness, the Spot- sylvania County Board of Supervisors last night should have approved a proposal to explore participation in an affordable-housing program bankrolled by Uncle Sam. Assuming Spotsy's concurrence, all five jurisdictions in the George Washington Regional Commission now agree, as a group, to look into the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program. For the sake of local residents, this expedition should break camp at once to find some actual residences that critical public workers can afford to occupy.

Spotsylvania, Stafford, Caroline, and King George counties, along with Fredericksburg, once again find themselves too close to Washington for their own good. Beltway jurisdictions offer wages that area localities can't match. Combine that economic fact of life with mortgages that eat up an outsized share of many working families' incomes, and the daily Great Trek North is swollen by police officers, firefighters, teachers, and others who need Nova wages to live tolerably in Rappahannock-area homes--whose prices, despite the recent tough housing market, nonetheless remain inflated by the growth rampage that defined our region for 20 years.

This career exodus is bad for Greater Fredericksburg in at least two ways. First, seasoned workers are lost, taking with them experience that could improve local services. Second, as Fredericksburg City Councilman Matt Kelly pointed out in a recent Viewpoints commentary, Nova's poaching of local public workers forces area jurisdictions to spend more tax money on training, recruitment, and retention than if turnover were normal.

The Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a HUD initiative, allows localities hard-hit by the recent wave of foreclosures to acquire and redevelop dispossessed properties, selling them at bargain prices. Virginia gets more than $38.7 million in NSP funds, and there's no reason Fredericksburg and its four neighboring counties shouldn't apply for some of it. After all, while our region comprises just 4 percent of the state's population, notes the GWRC's Kevin Byrnes, it has suffered 15 percent of statewide foreclosures.

Houses that stay empty drive down a neighborhood's housing values--as if homeowners needed any more sapping of their equity--but the beauty of NSP locally is its potential to keep emergency workers and teachers both living and working in their communities. To be sure, others hereabouts besides cops, firefighters, and educators could use a deep housing discount, but perhaps those workers could stand at the front of the line or at least be given a preference similar to that which veterans enjoy on postal exams.

In any case, this is more than an idea "worth exploring." It's worth doing. Losing to Northern Virginia the services of those who protect our lives and property and teach our children--and paying more of our taxes for the pleasure--is the policy equivalent of a tarpaper shack.

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Date published: 11/26/2008