The Virginia Beach City Council met on October 15, 2025, to discuss and receive briefings on three major items: the first applications under the Attainable Workforce Housing Performance Grant program (Grant Lake Senior Apartments and Silos Apartments), the draft 2026 legislative agenda, and the close-to-final draft of the 2040 Comprehensive Plan. The meeting included presentations from staff, extensive council discussion, and a motion to recess into closed session. No public comments were made. Key outcomes included guidance on the legislative agenda, directions for the comprehensive plan, and the mayor's announcement of a task force on e-bike safety.
Attainable Workforce Housing Grants
Draft 2026 Legislative Agenda
2040 Comprehensive Plan
Good afternoon, everyone. Uh, we're ready to get going. Welcome one, welcome all. Uh Mr. DeMahy, let's go ahead and get going. All right, so maybe members council. The first presentation will be provided by Ruth Hill, Director of Housing and Neighborhood Preservations. On our first two attainable housing grant programs, the first thing would be for Grant Lake Senior Apartments and also the SALO Apartments. Good afternoon, Mayor Dyer, Vice Mayor Wilson, extinguished council members, City Manager Duhaney, and City Attorney Styles. I'm glad to be here with you today. So why are we here? Today we wanted to talk about the uh affordable, excuse me, the attainable workforce performance grant. And if you remember, council approved the ordinance in April of 2024, and VBDA passed a resolution officially creating this grant process. And it aims to provide private development of safe quality, affordable multifamily rental housing units in the city. I'm going to provide you an overview of the affordable affordability challenges here in Virginia Beach. We're going to talk about the grant requirements, and then I will go over brief synopsis of each of the two projects. The first will be Grand Lakes, and the other will be the SIBOs. So if you remember in 2024, there was a housing study report that was commissioned by Virginia Center for Research at Virginia Tech and Housing Forward Virginia. And they provided us data that indicated that households, one in three households in Virginia is housing cost burden. That is about 30% of their income is they're spending more than 30% of their income on housing cost. That actually indicates they're about people in Virginia Beach. There's about 5900 households here in Virginia Beach that fall into that category. And a household would need an income of about $70,000 or $34 an hour to afford the median rent here in the city of Virginia Beach, which is about $1,730. So there's a critical concern for the lack of affordable units to the very low-income households, the study indicated. And many of those are employed in our region's top 10 most common occupations. They often bear that burden of the high housing costs to remain here in the city of Virginia Beach. Excuse me, I jumped too fast. So the new program that was developed in to help meet the need. Council approved the ordinance in April of this year, and then BBDA passed a resolution in May of 2024 to create this attainable workforce housing performance grant. The idea is that it would be self-sustaining and performance-based. So the annual grants are provided to the developer based on the incremental real estate taxes generated by their approved development. So the eligibility requirements. It must be new construction. It must be developed by a for-profit entity. Only new multifamily affordable rental housing units that have not started construction are eligible. And there must be a demonstrated gap in the pro forma or the project financing. Commercial and residential are both allowable under the eligibility. Projects that involve any kind of demolition of existing rental units would only be eligible if they then build a minimum of 20% affordable units in this new project. Projects could have their zoning approval or they would have to be in the process of attaining approval through the city's planning process before they can submit an application. So the first grant request is Grand Lake Senior Apartments. It is 172 units of senior housing for those that are age 62 or older, and it is 100% residential. It is development, it is developed by Grand Lakes Limited Partnership, which is the principal owner is Franklin Group companies. It is new construction on vacant land, and there are no other improvements on this property. They will also be using low-income tax housing, excuse me, low-income housing tax credits, LITEC, and they council did approve a zoning, conditional zoning, rezoning on December 10th of 2024. They expect to start December 2025, and they have a funding gap of $2,150,000. So this is the site location. It is in Dr. Ross Hammond's District 4, and it is behind the AAA building on off Virginia Beach Boulevard. They're looking to subdivide a portion of that back, the back of that lot. So Grand Lakes affordability.