Suffolk City Council is Doing a Good Job

Suffolk's Housing Development is Consistent with the Economic Realities of the 2020s

Housing construction, growth, and infrastructure are very contentious topics in Suffolk. If you are plugged into local groups, it’s hard to go even a day without hearing concerns about new housing, growth, traffic, and infrastructure. Many people suggest that the City Council and the Mayor are doing a poor job or are even corrupt.

The reality is that these are very complex and interconnected problems. Economists estimate that there is a housing shortage of 3.3-5.5 million homes, homes that must be built for housing prices to come down. This is a national issue that impacts us all locally. If we don’t build enough housing units, housing prices will continue to rise, but if we build more locally, it will impact traffic and our community. But the reality is that this same discussion is being had in every community in the country, and the vast majority of city councils are choosing to build far fewer homes than needed.

Suffolk City Council, on the other hand, has taken actions that are consistent with the economic research on housing affordability. Research by Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko from the Wharton School of Economics found that low-density zoning and other land-use controls restricting the development of housing were the primary drivers of increased housing costs.

Some argue that an influx of high-earning workers increases home prices in a region and that zoning changes will not stop price increases, but in “Zoning and affordability: A reply to Rodríguez-Pose and Storper”, they argue very strongly against this idea. One quote from that article summarizes the issue perfectly:

“If high earners drive prices, why do Cadillac Escalades cost about the same in San Jose and Kansas City, while San Jose’s median home is seven times more expensive than its Kansas City counterpart?”

The authors’ answer is simple. Escalades are easy to build, and if there aren’t enough of them you can ship more of them in. Housing construction is heavily restricted by zoning, and if there isn’t enough housing, the only option is for prices to go up.

To be clear, building housing in Suffolk is necessary. Suffolk and Hampton Roads are areas experiencing a large influx of high-paying jobs. There is nothing that Suffolk City Council can do to prevent companies in Newport News and Norfolk from hiring software engineers or other high-salary workers. Nor can the city council stop those workers from considering purchasing a home in North Suffolk. But the City Council can choose to build more housing and lessen the impact of increased demand by high-salaried workers.

So if one assumes that more housing supply is necessary to counter rising costs, the question should not be “should we build more housing”, but “how can we build housing without causing other problems?” This is where I think the City Council is really excelling. There are ongoing plans to expand existing schools and build new schools. Bridge Road is being expanded and the intersections are being reworked for better traffic flow and safety, alongside many other major traffic improvements throughout the entire city. There are studies to bring an Amtrak station back to the city. A new fire station has been built to support Northern Suffolk not just for Fire & EMS services, but also as a polling site for elections. New mixed-use developments are shortening the distances people need to travel to shop and eat, helping to reduce the number of people driving on major roadways.

The next challenge to ensure affordability is region-wide. Prices still increase in Suffolk because we are not just supporting growth for a single city, people moving into North Suffolk work all over Hampton Roads, and the other constituent cities of the region seem to have fallen much further behind on housing development than Suffolk has. And people who are priced out of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake are moving into Suffolk. There is a lot of work to do, and for any effort to be truly successful at reducing prices it needs to be a region-wide initiative.

I’ve lived in Suffolk since I was 12, for almost 20 years now. I have family roots in Downtown Suffolk going back to my great-grandparents. Suffolk today is a lot different than when I was a kid, but Suffolk when I was a kid was also a lot different than in their time. The reality is that cities change over time, and resistance to that change will only lead to higher prices and people who live here eventually being priced out and displaced, just as happened in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake when growth skyrocketed and was not met with appropriate housing development.

Suffolk City Council isn’t perfect, and no one should expect them to be when navigating problems this complex. But they deserve credit for making the hard, often unpopular choice to build, and for pairing that growth with real investments in schools, roads, and public services. The alternative isn’t a Suffolk that stays the same forever; it’s a Suffolk that becomes unaffordable for the people who already call it home. I’d rather live in a city that’s growing thoughtfully than one that’s pricing out its own residents by refusing to grow at all.