The City of Richmond has a long history of supporting affordable housing, adopting its first Affordable Housing Strategy in 2007. However, in the time since the adoption of the Affordable Housing Strategy, a number of factors—including demographic changes, community and regional growth, development pressures, and changing market conditions—resulted in significant housing affordability challenges in Richmond. Within this context, the City of Richmond engaged CitySpaces to update its Affordable Housing Strategy in 2016.
The Affordable Housing Strategy was developed in three phases. In an initial phase, CitySpaces worked with the City of Richmond to organize a series of consultation activities to identify current and anticipated housing needs and issues in Richmond. Consultation activities included a series of pop-up engagement events held at key community locations throughout the city; a series of workshops with targeted stakeholder groups that included non-profit housing and service providers, the development community, and the small builders community; and a public open house. Results from this stage of the Affordable Housing Strategy development process were documented in a Consultation Summary Report and informed the analysis of housing needs and gaps.
In a second phase of the Affordable Housing Strategy update process, CitySpaces worked with the City of Richmond to undertake a comprehensive affordable housing policy review, informed by research and consultation. A Policy Recommendations Report analyzed existing affordable housing policies with respect to meeting the housing needs of Richmond’s priority groups and identified additional municipal policy and practice options for consideration. These policy options were then shared with stakeholder groups, including representatives from social service agencies, non-profit housing providers, developers, and homebuilders. The Policy Recommendations Report was revised based on feedback from these groups.
The Policy Recommendations Report, once endorsed by Council, was used to draft and finalize the Affordable Housing Strategy, which identified specific actions for the City of Richmond’s response over the next 10 years to address local housing affordability issues. In this third and final stage of the Affordable Housing Strategy development, CitySpaces was engaged to provide professional editing, technical writing, content development, and communications services to the City of Richmond. These services ensured that the Affordable Housing Strategy was readable and understandable to a broad range of readers, including to the general public and stakeholders.
PROJECT TEAM:
Jada Basi Jim Beaudreau Linda Allen Talia Kerr