The events of the summer of 2017 served as a moral call for the City of Charlottesville to increase the amount of funding that goes toward maintenance and construction of housing units whose monthly rent or sales price is kept below the market rate.
The budget adopted in April 2017, months before the Unite the Right Rally, anticipated putting $2.5 million into the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund (CAHF) in FY2018 with a five-year total of $16.1 million.
While there was no dramatic change to the CAHF in the budget adopted in spring of 2018, the capital improvement program began to allocate funds directly to the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority at $500,000 a year. Advocates continued to put pressure on Council for the city to continue increasing funds for housing projects as well as reforming land use rules. This resulted in Council issuing a request for proposals in February 2019 for a firm to relaunch a Comprehensive Plan update that had stalled the year before…