The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors has adopted the Unmet Housing Needs Strategic Plan (UHNSP), which is designed to help the county and its partners improve housing access, quality and affordability for all families. The plan identifies strategies and actions to address unmet housing needs in a systematic and comprehensive way with integrated programs. The plan also creates housing targets over the short term and the long term.
Plan Objectives
The UHNSP has five objectives with specific strategies and key actions that will help the county address housing needs:
- Establish a coordinated, collaborative and integrated housing network.
- Secure land resources needed to address unmet housing needs.
- Obtain viable funding sources.
- Provide incentives, establish priorities and increase access to affordable housing.
- Implement policy changes to support affordable housing production and preservation.
These five objectives and their associated key actions provide a comprehensive approach to begin to address the affordability gaps that exist in the county. This approach is based on research, best practices and Loudoun County’s specific housing needs and housing market.
Attainable Housing Goal
The UHNSP sets an attainable housing goal for 2040 of 16,000 units; this goal falls in line with the land use planning policies of the Loudoun County 2019 Comprehensive Plan, which calls for 20 percent of forecasted new Loudoun housing to be affordable housing. This would add 8,200 new affordable housing units to the supply by 2040. An additional 7,800 affordable housing units would be developed from existing housing.
Developing the Plan
The Board of Supervisors initiated the process of developing the UHNSP in September 2019 with public participation as a key element. In addition to comments made directly to members of the Board of Supervisors, members of the public were encouraged to attend community meetings about the plan and respond to an online survey on housing, community development needs and fair housing issues.
Quarterly Updates
The public can follow the progress of implementation of the UHNSP by viewing quarterly updates to the Board’s Transportation and Land Use Committee.
More Information
More information about the UNHSP, including the adopted plan document and a link to sign up for updates on the plan’s implementation, is available at loudoun.gov/housingneeds.
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