It’s not too late to participate in the City’s housing study, even as preliminary findings cite an overabundance of homes that don’t appeal to millennial buyers.
There’s now an online survey, the City said in a release Tuesday. The anonymous online quiz is designed to get residents to share their views about housing in Virginia Beach. Is it affordable, for example? It also asks participants for information such as where they live, how long they have lived in the City, whether they rent or own, and whether school quality influences housing prices.
The online survey comes as part of a broader effort, undertaken by the Department of Housing and Neighborhood Preservation earlier this year, to study housing in Virginia Beach. The aim is to use the results to shape future policy and funding, according to the department’s website.
The study is being done by the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech and czb LLC, a neighborhood-planning firm based in Alexandria. Earlier this month, at public meetings on Aug. 10, they presented preliminary findings, including:
• The City’s population of Generation X adults, between the ages of 35 and 49, dipped by 19,196, or 18 percent, from 2005 to 2014.
• During the same time period, the city’s population of millennials, who are between 18 and 34, surged by 21,090, or 21 percent.
• The City has an oversupply of single-family homes built from the 1960s through the 1980s; these homes were attractive to middle-class baby boomers, but do not appeal to younger buyers.
“Today that stock has become a high-risk mismatch, since an even larger generation of Millennials are less interested in the tens of thousands [of] 50-year-old ranch houses and 30-year-old townhomes that dominate so much of Virginia Beach,” the presentation says.
In addition to the online survey, residents can weigh in through a Virtual Town Hall. Both are available through Sept. 16.
