Prince William County needs more housing, especially more affordable housing. But county officials need more tools to reach those goals, and some supervisors say progress isn’t coming fast enough.
“We need to average about 3,000 new units in the county,” Wade Hugh, deputy county executive for development services said during the supervisors Tuesday, Oct. 17 work session on affordable housing. That’s the number of housing units the county needs to add each year through 2030 to meet the housing goals set by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
At one point, the county was steadily adding new housing and reached an annual high of 7,000 new units in 2005.
But that changed during the Great Recession, when the annual number of new housing units plunged below 3,000. Since then, the number has stayed well under 3,000, falling short of demand. In 2023, the county issued only about 1,000 occupancy permits for new homes, according to statistics shared with the supervisors during the Oct. 17 work session.
For more than a decade, the county has been in a “housing shortfall” as evidenced by the inability to add at least 3,000 new housing units a year since about 2010.
Source: the Prince William County Planning Commission Office
And while the county wants to add more units, the supervisors are hoping to incentivize developers to set aside some of them for affordable housing. But the county can’t do so without an affordable dwelling ordinance, which supervisors are hoping to pass by the end of the year.
Some supervisors expressed frustrations during the meeting about the lack of affordable housing progress over the last few years.
“We are not nearly as close as we should be after three years,” said Supervisor Margaret Franklin, D-Woodbridge. “I expected to have an ordinance by the end of this term.”
An affordable dwelling ordinance a locality to more easily boost affordable housing units and make decisions surrounding it. Under the ordinance, supervisors could offer incentives to encourage real estate developers to build affordable housing within the county.
Hugh said the county’s planning staff is working on a draft affordable housing ordinance that would allow the county to offer developers incentives to set aside up to 35% of units in a new development that would qualify as affordable for certain income groups.
To be considered “affordable” the monthly rent or mortgage payment—as well as utility costs— must not exceed 30% of the renters’ or homeowners’ monthly income.
The ordinance has to go through a series of steps before it is presented to the supervisors for a vote.
If it is adopted in December, Hugh said the next steps would begin in early 2024 and would include rewriting the zoning code to incorporate the provisions of the affordable housing ordinance.
The supervisors also plan to create a “housing trust fund” that would be used to help provide more housing opportunities for residents. The county already has $2.5 million in a housing proffers—money given by developers toward affordable housing—in the planning office, said David McGettigan, the county’s acting planning director.
“That’s not chump change,” said Chair Ann Wheeler, D-At-Large.
No plans have been announced yet for how the affordable housing proffer money will be used. In the meantime, the county does provide housing help through the Housing Choice Voucher Program and a first-time homebuyers’ program. Both are funded by the state and federal governments.
Still, supervisors said the need is far from being met.
“Once a week, I get a housing phone call,” Franklin said. “This is something we have to figure out what our options are by the end of the year.”
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