Sally understands the urgent need for more housing. She supports:
- Creating a robust Housing Trust Fund
- Expanding the Albemarle County Emergency Relief Program
- Allowing more housing throughout the Development Area
- Revitalizing Crossroads Communities
- Thoughtfully expanding the Transition Area to create more density in the urban ring
- Preserving and increasing deeply affordable housing such as mobile homes
Why Housing?
I’m passionate about housing because I know what it’s like to lose your home. I know how difficult it is to find a rental home when you have kids. The uncertainty you feel when the lease comes up for renewal and you know the rent is going to increase, and ultimately, there is nothing you can do about it. In the aftermath of the Great Recession I lost my home to foreclosure, and ever since I moved to Virginia in 2013, I’ve lived in single-family rentals, where we’ve had a yard, a place to build a bonfire, and room for the kids to have their own spaces. I’ve gotten very lucky in my rental situations, and finding a home to build a life in should not depend on luck. If it feels impossible to buy a home in Albemarle County, or even to find a reasonable place to rent, you are not alone. But the hopeful news is that the housing crisis is a solvable problem, and I’m running for Board of Supervisors to be part of the solution.
Albemarle County is more than the land.
There’s no denying the issues around housing are challenging. Managing growth, density, and traffic is complicated enough without also including the ridiculously high cost of housing itself. But solutions to these issues do exist. This is not an impossible task. Albemarle County can have a future where density does not look like NoVa. We can be a county where growth looks like a bigger community, in the best sense of the word. We should be pursuing reasonable and realistic investments in our kids and grandkids – our goal should not only be to preserve the views for them, but to give them opportunities to live on the land – rural is also residential.
Living in this county is a gift and we should consider ourselves fortunate that we get to share it with others. Increasing housing is an invitation. Investing in housing, and in the transit necessary to make it work, is also an investment in permanence. It is an investment in the stability of employees, the creation of institutional knowledge, the building up of a community that can call Albemarle County home for generations to come. It is an investment in the people who live here, and their children who also deserve to continue to have *home* be the community they’ve grown up in. Albemarle County is more than the land. It is more than the views and the tourists and the history. Choosing to invest in housing is choosing to invest in a better future for all of us.
Finding a home to build a life in should not depend on luck.
