UR event addresses overlap between housing, education equity
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By Son Tran, Special to the Citizen
Researchers and advocates discussed zoning ordinances and education equity in the Richmond area at an event at the University of Richmond Oct. 3.
The event, titled “Reading Between the Lines: Zoning, Housing, and Education in the Richmond Region,” was hosted by UR in collaboration with Partnership for Housing Affordability, HousingForward Virginia, The Commonwealth Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education, VCU Research Institute for Social Equity, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia, and the RVA Eviction Lab.
Researchers from HousingForward Virginia spent the first half of the evening introducing the Virginia Zoning Atlas, a statewide map showing data about the impact of zoning on housing availability and related amenities. Metro Richmond, with more than 200 zoning districts, is the third region in the state to be visualized in this map, after Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, said Maria Dougherty, senior associate at HousingForward Virginia.
The data shows that 2% of land in the region allows for larger apartment buildings to be constructed by right, which is comparable to that in Hampton Roads but quite lower compared to Northern Virginia. This is a hurdle to creating more affordable housing in the region, especially rental units.
“By forcing so much of that housing through the entitlement process, through the public hearing process, we’re increasing the costs, which ultimately get passed on to residents and, in many cases, just killing those projects outright,” said Flora Valdes-Dapena, junior associate at HousingForward Virginia.
Researchers found the same trend among smaller multi-family housing.
In Henrico County, 9% of land allows for larger apartment buildings, while 3% allows for midsize apartment buildings – both distant seconds in the area to the city of Richmond, Valdes-Dapena said.
“Zoning is a necessary prerequisite, but it is not the only thing that we need to do to solve our housing challenges,” said Jonathan Knopf, executive director for programs at HousingForward Virginia. “But we have to do it in order to make the other stuff work efficiently.”
In the latter half of the event, faculty members from UR and VCU presented “The Live and Learn 2.0,” an update to the 2017 study titled “Confronting School and Housing Segregation in the Richmond Region: Can We Learn and Live Together?” examining the connection between housing and schooling segregation in the region. Researchers were encouraged by community members to continuously work and craft a new report to reflect changes in the Richmond area ever since, said Tom Shields, a co-author and education and leadership professor at UR.
The report shows that while the Richmond metro area has become more racially diverse in the past seven years, many communities are still facing what researchers call “triple segregation” – by race and ethnicity, by poverty and by language. Researchers found that schools serving neighborhoods with higher poverty tend to have larger rates of multilingual students and employ higher shares of inexperienced teachers.
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a co-author and educational leadership professor at VCU, said local decision makers in housing and education should work more closely with each other to solve school inequity.
“For example, if a developer is building a new development and the school needs to be able to serve the students, they need to talk, so they understand what kind of capacity is needed,” she said.
The evening concluded with a Q&A section, during which the speakers answered a range of questions from the audience about their works, the current progress of related legislation and how to advocate for changes. When asked for advice about how to convince people to move into more inclusive neighborhoods, Siegel-Hawley encouraged the audience to consider the benefits of putting children into more diverse classrooms.
“Diverse teams solve complex problems better because they don’t assume that they understand the perspective of everybody in the room,” she said. “It’s easy to see those benefits in schools that are designed to bring the kids together everyday around cooperative opportunities.”
