Virginia Beach is the latest city to have a proposal submitted by the nonprofit agency Virginia Supportive Housing, the Pilot reports. The proposed development would provide 60 subsidized efficiency apartments and would house single adults from Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake.
A long time ago, I was involved with St. Columba Ecumenical Ministries, Inc., a nonprofit based in Norfolk whose work with the homeless population was extraordinary for its time. The concept of efficiency apartments – also known as SROs (single room occupancy) – was something that we talked about twenty years ago. The one group of homeless that is most underserved are single adults. The fact that it has taken this long for SROs to come to the area is sad.
The Virginia Beach project, if approved, will be the second one in the area. The other one is located in the Park Place section of Norfolk. There were tremendous hurdles associated with the Norfolk project, Gosnold Efficiency Apartments, with many of the members of the community being opposed to the location. It appears that VSH has learned from that: the location of the new project is not in a residential area, but is on a bus route with services, such as a grocery store, nearby.
Given that the cities seem to have “found” a lot of money recently, I think this is an appropriate use of those dollars. Providing housing to the homeless is a worthy goal. I hope the cities agree and pony up the requested $1.75 million.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Good for VB. It’s a very tricky thing, siting housing like this. To no one’s surprise, it’s very hard to get them in established residential areas, and putting them in some distant industrial ghetto is a recipe for disaster. My own idea is that small numbers (say, 5-10apts a site) spread throughout middle class areas would be great (and more acceptable to the NIMBY folks), but then costs shoot up and you lose the benefit of centralized services.
I look forward to hearing more about this project, as it develops.
Would be nice to see other cities do that but we have a guessed at 5,000 homeless here in Charlotte and I seriously doubt our City Council will pony up that kind of money.
As an aside and feel free to edit this out once you read it, staff had mentioned that they have fixed the Norfolk tag issue in this post but I could have sworn that you had recently mentioned that it was still an issue. Care to comment?
Thanks,
-drmike
Dr Mike – I updated the thread. Thanks for the reminder.