Editorial: Roanoke’s Housing Math Doesn’t Add Up — And City Hall Knows It
If the city adds 4,100 jobs over three years and produces 900 new units, rents will do what rents always do when the math breaks.
By The Editorial Board
Roanoke City Manager Bob Cowell’s most recent annual projections report, issued quietly to City Council in late March, contains a pair of numbers worth staring at for a while.
The first: the city expects to add, between existing pipeline announcements and reasonable extrapolation, roughly 4,100 net new jobs over the next three years. Carilion’s Riverside Research Tower alone will account for 800 of those. The Amtrak platform expansion’s ripple will add perhaps 200 more. The rest come from a mix of health care, advanced manufacturing, and backfill in small business.
The second: the city’s housing pipeline, at the same three-year horizon, yields roughly 900 new units. That includes the Norfolk Avenue conversions, the Old Southwest infill projects, the possible Grandin Road corner that the Planning Commission couldn’t agree on last week, and — generously — every accessory dwelling unit that gets built on a weekend.
Four thousand one hundred jobs. Nine hundred homes. That is not a housing market. That is a waiting list.
We do not need to be economists to see what happens next. Rents, which rose 9% in Roanoke last year and 8% the year before, will keep rising faster than wages. Tenants in the price-sensitive middle — nurses, teachers, mechanics, line cooks — will keep getting squeezed out of the neighborhoods where they want to live. And the city’s long habit of arguing house-by-house over three-story buildings will keep producing outcomes like Wednesday’s deadlocked planning commission vote: growth, but not enough of it; change, but not fast enough.
Something has to give, and it should not be the people who do the work this city runs on.
We are on record supporting more density at the corners of Grandin and Memorial, along Williamson Road, around the innovation corridor, and in a dozen other places where a careful fourth floor would change the math. We remain on record supporting the stormwater fee the city is about to raise, because good drainage is the price of a city that wants to keep building in its floodplains. And we remain on record believing Roanoke’s neighborhoods are the most beautiful asset this valley has — which is precisely why the next 4,100 people who get hired here deserve a real shot at living in one.
City Council has a choice in front of it over the next six meetings. It can keep approving housing one painful project at a time. Or it can pass a corridor-level plan — Grandin, Williamson, Jefferson — that tells developers yes by default and asks neighborhoods to negotiate on design, not existence.
The math is not subtle. Nine hundred is not four thousand one hundred. The longer the city pretends otherwise, the more expensive the correction will be.
