The Chesapeake City Council met on October 24, 2023, for a work session at 5:00 p.m. and a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall Council Chamber. The work session featured a presentation on demographics and housing market analysis, while the regular meeting included public hearings, a consent agenda, citizen comments, appointments, and a land bank authority update. All votes were unanimous except where noted.
Welcome everyone to our work session, October twenty fourth, twenty twenty-three. This time I'd like to ask our attorney, Miss Lindley, to please read the language for a close session. A motion to conduct a closed meeting to discuss the acquisition and conveyance of real property where discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body as permitted by Section Two Pet point two dash thirty seven eleven A three of the code of Virginia. Motion to conduct a closed meeting is adopted by a nine oh vote. Oh no, we don't have a different thing. So it was a once again, welcome to our closed session. Once again, welcome to our closed session. Mr. Manager, uh Tom is of an essence here. Do you want to uh at the work session followed? We have a consultant team here for the planning items, so I'll turn it over immediately to the planning department for the uh demographic and housing analysis. Okay. In the interest of time, I'm gonna introduce Ms. Ferretti, who will be going over our uh our uh presentation for this evening. Very good, thank you. I'll be reviewing the demographic um and the housing needs and an overview of the real estate trends, and then Anita, my partner will be talking about the future growth policy recommendations as they relate to keeping Chesapeake's economy um stable and growing into the future. So when we think about the demographic trends, uh we looked at what's going on in Chesapeake. Obviously, the population is reached about 255,000 folks, and that represents about 94,000 or a little less than 94,000 households. But those households are about 55 percent of which they're small households, they're made up of one or two persons, and that's really important. We're gonna talk about that more in the future, but that's just one of those things I like to point out. We also notice that Chesapeake's become more diverse. It's similar to the racial and ethnic mix that we see in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. And we notice that as we look at folks that are aging in place, we see that those over the age of 65 continue to make a large share of our population here in Chesapeake, and in fact, the senior population increased by about 15,700 people over a 12-year period from 2010 to 2022. Nothing that we don't see in other communities throughout the U.S., but something to be made note of here in Chesapeake. When we looked at these population projections, we just didn't look at what had happened over a period of time, but we looked out into the future into 2045, and you can see that it's going to grow to about 299,000 people, which is a 17.4% increase over uh the 2022 level. It's sort of an important point when we look at that. But for our purposes as economists, Anita and I come in and we always take a look at what's the temperature, what's going on in terms of the economy. So we look at the regional strengths, which here in the Hampton Roads area, uh obviously the defense activities, which account for roughly 35 to 40 percent of the gross regional product, but we also think about um the port activity and tourism. Chesapeake itself has some competitive advantages. It's got the same uh regional military presence and the strength of the port of Virginia being nearby, but the coastal location and the skilled labor force make up what we consider some of the other strong economic attributes. Chesapeake's unemployment rate uh when we looked at it in comparison to the region, it's about 2.9% in 2022, which is lower than the Hampton Roads average, which is about 3.2%. And in fact, when we look year over year, we see that Chesapeake is continuing to recover from the pandemic, with um an addition of 4,000 jobs that were lost during COVID being recovered currently. We looked at the residential conditions for the residential landscape, kind of taking a picture of what's the existing marketplace and the the nature of the suburban development in Chesapeake, which really has maintained reflects this single family detached housing, which represents more than two-thirds of your housing stock. When you add in townhomes and condominiums, you get another 12%. But when you compare this to your neighboring jurisdictions, you'll see that Chesapeake's multi-family housing units, if you were just to look at those that are in five units or more in a building, is about 13% of your total stock. That compares to like a place like Port Smith that'll have 18%, Virginia Beach at 19%, or even Newport News, where 31% of their stock is multifamily. So you have a lot less than other locations. When we look at the building permits, we looked at 10-year trend, we tried to understand well, what's happening? What are people building? What are folks out there doing? We see that the housing mix um really is more about single family development. And in fact, if you look at the last five years alone, you can see that about an average you'll have a thousand units being built every year compared to only about a hundred units of multifamily built. So you can see on this graph here, the little bit of gray on top is your sprinkling of multifamily, which you don't have very much. You're having much more single family. Obviously, multifamily responds more quickly to changes in a city, and the advantage is that it spreads that land cost over more units and it helps reduce the rents and the prices over time. So you want to have a mix of both in any community to be successful. We looked at the trends for residential. So we considered what was happening with the for sale market, and here is the map that just kind of breaks down the sales that we see throughout this city by zip code to get a sense of where you see some of the price points grumping up. What jumps out to us as economists is that Chesapeake's median sales price for single family homes reached about 400,000 in the spring of 2023, which is about a 25% increase from what it was three years previous. If you look at townhomes, they're reaching upwards very close to that point.