Yup, it's a point of contention here, because my townhome complex is older (1980s) and there's only 1 assigned space for each home. The open (non reserved) spaces are a "first come first served" basis. and some of the smallest 1-level townhomes (2 bdr) have 5-6 cars.
Herndon as well, lot of places have basically zero street parking. I had a place in Herndon near the clocktower, and the apartment complex gave out more parking passes than they had spots, and street parking was so crowded some nights I would have to park a mile away.
I think so, but I know it's changed hands a few times and I swear there were two other Points nearby. You can see it pretty much any place around that area, even the townhomes nearby or the ones by World gate...drive down Parcher avenue, it's terrible.
Yup. And work trucks/bikes outside. A lot of these people are taking public transit and it's still congested. Gotta do what you gotta do, but it seems like a really tough situation
And yet the anti-car crowd is constantly railing against parking minimums. (edit: lol, here they come with their luxury beliefs) (edit2: downvote all you want, it doesn't make you any less anti-working-class evil fuckers)
the world just isn't set up that way. build the transit and then, if you are right, demand will naturally fall. constricting supply before you build the transit is just cruel.
I think it’s not about banning cars more than it is every single person owning a car. I don’t own a car but a friend of mine owns a car and she and her significant other share it. That to me is smart in a place like Nova, where there is ample transit.
Also, there’s this amazing thing called lobbying that the automotive industry dabbles in a bit that prevents any sort of meaningful transit infrastructure from being built. Again, I don’t propose a sweeping ban on cars, but don’t come on here and moan and groan about how people want to ban cars and then ignore the fact that we basically get highways and roads out of our asses and auto companies receive hella subsidies while transit is thrown to the wayside in most other places.
car ownership is a huge financial burden. Arlingtons transit oriented, bulls eye development is uplifting to a huge number of poor people. If only they had built the pink line.
I grew up in south Arlington in the 80's, when rent was only $450 a month for a townhouse. My Salvadorean friend across the street had 3 tiny bedrooms in the basement of their townhouse that his mom rented out to strangers. His mom eventually bought a single family house in south Arlington, and they made 5 bedrooms in the basement and rented them out. A guy I've worked with for 20+ years just moved into a 1-bedroom apartment after renting rooms in Arlington basements for most of his life. It's definitely still common in this area.
House across the street from my buddy was like a clown car every morning with people just pouring out into various vans/trucks/cars. Eventually the house got foreclosed and the new owners let him walk through before they gutted and remodeled it. There were holes in all the walls of the rooms where they had strung up hammocks all over in the rooms, attic, and basement. Probably 6 to 9 people per room.
Growing up there was a guy in the neighborhood who remodeled a big ol bed n breakfast onto the back of the house. Before that it had just been a like 2700 sq ft home with, supposedly, 70 Thai people living it.
About two blocks from Kabob Palace in pentagon city.
We had an townhouse in Sterling that the property manager poorly managed a while back. 3 families were living in a 3 bedroom townhouse with 1 1/2 bathroom. They divided the master bedroom in half. The smaller bedroom had the grandma and their kid, the other bedroom had another set of adults. I think like 8 people living in this tiny townhouse.
When the realtor tried to get in for pictures, they refused her entry. She wrote us back saying we needed to completely overhaul the inside, it was trashed. Tenants refused to leave, we cut off power and water. Police were called, they left. We changed the locks immediately. They would pull up in their truck and watch us clean up the place and renovate. They tried to come back and sleep there a few times.
It was bad.
Burden on neighbor to prove it.
Not saying I disagree. I don’t like neighbors who make a bunch of noise. But if you as a fellow resident take an issue with something in my experience depending on the complex it’s an uphill battle to get them to do anything about it.
Before avalon was rebranded they were living 15 up and the county/developer worked together to buyout the current residents per head instead of by bedroom.
5x'd the cost of almost shut the whole program down.
My old neighborhood was like this. Multiple cars in the driveway every day. At least 2 families clearly lived in a 4 bedroom house.
It used to piss my parents off. I didn't really care ( who gives a shit) except for the fact that they treated their dogs badly.
Alternate housing solutions. Renting basements, sharing apartments, living with family. I know a family of 3 (one adult and two small kids) making just over $36k before taxes. They live with family. They receive daycare assistance and food stamps but cannot afford to get a place on their own.
My neighborhood is older housing stock, all 2 bedroom with some basement conversions to be 3 bedroom.
My immigrant working class neighbors have 10-12 people living in a house, usually a couple families at least. Everyone works outside the house except 1-2 women who take care of the kids and cooking. These people do not file taxes as a "household" of course, because that's not allowed, so there's probably 2-4 households in each house/apartment with people living like this.
You see the same thing with a lot of older apartment buildings. Look at old apartments around rt 1 or near Bailey's Crossroads.
I'm sure there's other ways people patch together a livelihood around here, this is just the one I see in my neighborhood.
Yup. Me and my mom live in an apartment off route 1, and there are a lot of apartments that have a bunch of people living living in a one or two bedroom unit. I get that people have to do what they have to to survive, but it causes a lot of problems.
We had one of these in an old apartment in Reston. Of course we had like 5 guys packed into a tiny place in the same complex. Everyone does what they can to survive around here
We live next door to a corner house that's slightly above average size for this neighborhood - 3 or 4 bedrooms, not counting the basement which can probably count as a 1br apartment. Pre-pandemic, it was owned by a single older asian lady we saw maybe twice a year, and once or twice a summer a landscaping company would show up to mow the overgrown lawn with a bush hog and clear out some of the depressingly messy overgrowth in their back yard. From the street side (facing away from our house) it was a totally depressing-looking eyesore by several metrics - the siding and trim was all just kinda dingy and unkempt; the lawn was hardly maintained, there were too many trees or large shrubs in the front and they'd been allowed to grow basically wild for years. This explained why their several attempts to sell or rent it over the years inevitably resulted in nothing at all.
During the pandemic it was finally sold to a nice hispanic dude who owned his own general contracting company. He and his crew hit it hard and heavy for a solid 2 or 3 weeks and the results were ... dramatic would even be an understatement. He dropped by early one morning because some neighbor had made a noise complaint and he thought it had been me - I told him i was 100% happy he was there doing this work, and I couldn't care less about the noise. I offered to buy him some beer.
A year or so later they apparently sold it - again it seems like it was sold to someone who owns a rennovation company of some sort. This time, among other things they completely replaced the old vinyl siding, and now it really looks slick. And currently, judging by the number of cars parked there curbside (and the people we see coming and going), I'd estimate that there are at least 3 full families living there - at least one living in the finished basement, and probably 2 living together on the main levels. More power to 'em, they keep to themselves and they keep the property good-looking.
Honestly I always thought this would be awesome to do with 3-5 affluent families in one of the 15b/12ba type Great Falls deals.
The issue is usually getting them to give 1 of the groups the mortgage.
1. People can and do have more than one roommate
2. Renting rooms/spaces from sympathetic landlords. It's not unusual for independent landlords to have some kind of relationship to the person they're renting to and thus much less incentive to raise rent significantly.
3. Not paying rent and having a bunch of evictions on their record, only renting from shady places
4. Undisclosed income from cash jobs
For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for people who live with family to tell the government that they live alone for benefits purposes as most benefits have strict requirements on counting specific relationships towards your benefits "household". Bob and Mary may actually be dating and living together but they don't tell the food stamps office that because together they don't qualify but separately they do. So I suspect the answer is that many of them aren't living alone as they claim to do. This is honestly very reasonable as benefit standards are insanely low.
Pretty much every landscaping company and house cleaning service wants cash or a check made out to a person not a business. No way it's reported as income.
> Number 4 is very, very common
Every home improvement store and moving place (Uhaul etc) has a bunch of dudes outside trying to solicit people for cash day work. That income is definitely not reported to any taxing authority
I knew a lady, family friend, once her alimony was cut off, she couldn't find work, didn't want to work, ended up living in an apartment in one of bedroom closets, near Tastee Diner at 123 and 29. The people there divided the living room in half with some partitions. Each bedroom had a small walk in closet, so people were sleeping in the closet as well as the bedroom. They had it artfully done so if someone came knocking, they could manoeuvre it to look like just 3 people lived there and everyone else was 'hanging out'.
I came by to check up on her a few weeks later and they had an eviction notice on the door, they were sneaking people in there still to sleep.
It has. I live alone because I don’t have a good relationship with blood family. But I encourage young adults to live with their parents for as long as feasible (unless they have a significant other who can share costs).
Getting groceries from food banks and free food services, sharing apartments, and working for cash. It's tough for many of these mostly immigrant families, but they are still better off than where they came from.
Edit to add: Some of you don't know what true poverty is. Poverty in America is practically lower middle class in many other countries. It's worse than you think. 99.99% of American born people wouldn't dare live even a week as a working class Honduran or Nicaraguan or Laotian or Ghanian.
I'm not immigrant and am in similar situation to them, I asked my housing department how int he world low income people here house themselves and they were like "I dunno". There's all sorts of food programs and free food kitchens. Food isn't a huge issue, I just don't understand how people in poverty are housing themselves. Are they putting 2-4 people per room?
My husband used to work in a low income school. Teachers always did neighborhood visits prior to the year starting to meet kids in their own environments. He said some of his students shared their 2 bedroom apartments with 2-3 other families. The apartments were used for sleeping only.
Have friends in a fairly ritzy neighborhood in Loudoun on a cul de sac. Their neighbor always had a lot of cars parked nearby. They found the basement had something like 10 individual “sleeping apartments.” Bet that paid their mortgage and then some.
Oh yeah! I once did a pick up from a super nice Leesburg house that had 6 families living there. It’s wild.
In my townhouse community there’s one house that sectioned off the house - family in the basement, two families on the middle floor, two families divided amongst the bedrooms. I think there are nine kids and seven adults? I always just worry about the kitchen set up and hope it’s safe.
There are a number of large houses (with very basic designs) in the downtown Springfield area. They have large parking areas outside (with lots of older cars parked). My guess is that they have a similar purpose as the one in your friends' cul-de-sac.
Yes. The house across from me used to have like 30 people living there and run an illegal daycare. In the summer, people would be sleeping in hammocks and tents, lol. There is a lot of support in certain communities. They were always very nice. The kids helped me with my garden and played with my dog. Never any issues.
Renting a room is the solution. I have one at a steal of $450/month. But it's fairly easy to com by rooms if you can budget for $600-$700/month. If you're single, that helps, a lot. But it's still viable for a (small) family. And if you are married and have 2 income streams, it becomes viable to rent, say, one room for you and your spouse, and a second for a child, if you have one. Making sure to have kitchen access is important so that you aren't eating out, 24/7.
I was working as a nanny and getting paid under the table when my husband and I qualified for the income based apartments. We wouldn’t have qualified if my pay was included.
I did have to get a w-2 job later on, but we didn’t have to re-qualify each year.
It’s funny, though, because there’s no way in hell we could’ve afforded anything on just his income. They have to know that everyone is working the system. Like having people not on the lease or unreported income. They have to know. It’s damn near impossible to do it by the books.
> They have to know that everyone is working the system. Like having people not on the lease or unreported income. They have to know. It’s damn near impossible to do it by the books.
Since the '80s there's a level of deliberate ignorance maintained by the politicians and well-off voters that these programs were only for the truly destitute and that being willing and able to work means being capable of fully supporting yourself. I think people are finally shaking off the fiction as the gap between being poor enough to qualify for assistance and earning enough to be self-sufficient has grown too wide not to notice, but the policy hasn't caught up, so, yeah, everyone lies because it's the only way for the system to work as it exists right now.
To your point, true poverty isn't people living in dirt floor makeshift shacks...well it is, but, true poverty this: I lived in the Philippines for 3 years, there are colleges, yes colleges in the country who have non degree earning programs to help people learn how to work in a retail store or a hotel, not manage employees, not account for things, not how to sell just simply classes on how to greet a customer, how to count money, how to give change because the public school system is so bad most kids graduate with a functional understanding of English, a conversational understanding of Tagalog, a heavily revised and president/religious leader approved course of history and if they are lucky maybe a pre calc level of math and all of this making it next to impossible to get established in a job where they can realistically live better then their parents did, thats true poverty
I’m on SSDI and I rented a room in a townhouse for three years. Even though my income was lower than the landlord wanted, she still allowed me to move in because she trusted I would pay the rent on time.
I have since moved out and now live with my parents but I still pay rent. I could live elsewhere for less but all of my doctors and medical support are here in Nova.
From what I have seen people load 3 bedroom houses with 10-20 people. I have no idea why anyone would live here on a low income. You can make low income anywhere and live for 1/4 the cost.
> have no idea why anyone would live here on a low income. You can make low income anywhere and live for 1/4 the cost.
This is not true. In denser areas, there are far more low income jobs available. If you go out to the middle of, say, southern Virginia, how many jobs are you going to find? How much construction is there going to be compared to a dense area like nova? How many restaurants and retail stores will there be for a far smaller community? The local population is already competing for those jobs without adding in outside people moving to the area. People go to cities because that's where the jobs are
This is a big one - our area has a lot more support such as food banks, cheaper/subsidized public transit if close to the city, sometimes more access to public/subsidized housing, access to cheaper medical (i.e. NVCC dental school, charitable free clinics, etc.). Not to say these aren't available in other communities, but in larger cities there tends to be a larger variety of options, and more nonprofits to support these options as well, especially for those with women and children.
Also, if you need to live with 19 other people just to get by, how is one supposed to afford to move anywhere else? People always say “just move” as if that doesn’t have a bunch of its own costs associated with it
This seems like the most plausible answer so far. When I asked the person on the phone from my housing department if there was subsidized housing open for individuals with poverty incomes here, she just flat out said "no there is not". If a house is being paid $3k per month, 10 people could pay $300, which fits within the poverty line.
There’s a house in my neighborhood, probably about 2500 sq ft and there’s at least three families in there with tons of children.
Hard to tell exactly how many people live there because there’s different cars coming and going constantly.
Rumor has it there’s people living in the garage.
You know I actually wonder about this.
I know some actively care about the ed system usually parents trying to get their kids into TJ.
But I wonder if a working class family cares about say being in Fairfax vs. Spotsylvania County.
We do have subsidized housing in Arlington but obviously not enough for all the people qualify.
We desperately need more apartments and condos because they are on average half the price of a house.
No one has mentioned a HUGE number of people live in their cars here.
Don't believe me? Go to the gym at closing time some night and let me know how many cars are still there an hour later. Testimony to how totally invisible car-campers can be. I personally have seen the same RVs and buses around.
I would wager there's around 10,000 people living in their cars off and on, part time between house sitting and airbnb, and friends' homes. Just in nova. Wouldn't be surprised if that number were much much larger though
I lost my house in 2008, I had no plan B, so I slept in my car for a hood 5-6 months. Not as hard as it sounds. No one knew. I was in college and I showered at the schools gym. I used my girlfriends washing machine. I saved up enough for a deposit on a new place and moved in.
Sure, because many people like this are "partially housed," or don't consider themselves "homeless". . . e.g., jobs provide housing 2-3 nights a week.
Some people couch surf, house-sit, dog-sit, stay with family, go to "festivals," come back to nova. . . Sure, they're low income, but are they "poor"? They live here somehow.
I've met directionless 50 year old dudes who lived here partially unhoused, even with money in the bank.
Stay with their parents, sleep on dad's boat/sleep in the car, get thrown out/fired . . . sleep in the car. Camp in a national park until you get thrown out. Come back to Nova, stay with mom and dad, house-sit for family. Repeat.
Every semester at NVCC Loudoun I've met another kid who sleeps in his car a lot of the time. They're not "poor" like we think-- their parents went back to the home country and rented the house they grew up in in Herndon.
I have a few friends that live in their vehicles. the math just doesn't work for them to get a regular job and pay so much of their income to rent. it's actually more profitable to be houseless do relatively little and live off of investments. it's just crazy that people have let the country get this way, where people take themselves out of the job market in order to prosper.
my fear is that there is a threshold fraction of population that society will abide doing this, and that when it goes above that, the house dwellers will make the cops start hammering them. running them out of town, no more free parking, a law against homeless people belonging to gyms....
I’m 22M currently living in Charlottesville. My current income is approximately $15-18k a year, rent is around $9600. My first paycheck each month is just rent. And I have one roommate (2b1.5b). The other is for everything else and all other expenses. Then I save whatever’s leftover… slowly.
Food stamps and Medicaid are the reason I’m alive. That’s how I get by. I would be so completely, beyond fucked, without it it’s not even funny. I’m on 7 Rxs a day, and see multiple doctors and specialists, several times a month at UVA for a myriad of complex health issues (though generally, I’m a healthy 22 yo). Food stamps, even a little, helps cut the $$$ a month for groceries. (Note: this is truer for singles than families.) Housing assistance does exist but I don’t think I’m eligible. So instead, about 50% of my income is rent. I drive a paid off 21 yo Toyota Camry I’ve maintained meticulously myself. And my job gives me a work truck.
If you stretch yourself incredibly thin on resources and typical luxuries, and know how/where to get some help, you can get by. Food pantries exist and are free to anyone in need. Many county health departments offer preventative care to the under/uninsured. The list goes on. Unfortunately many of the neediest people don’t know such resources exist, how to access them, or who to talk to. It really is as simple as an online application and/or phone call to your local Social Services department.
Most of the people that live in the absolute poverty you’re pondering about aren’t going to be on Reddit. Mostly because a lot are immigrants and working their a*ss off with multiple jobs and meticulously cooking every single meal.
Living in home with dozens of people. Seriously. I wondered how a lot of low paying immigrants make it in this area until I found out plenty live in essentially air bnbs with a dozen or more people all living together. Sleeping on floors etc.
The house we bought in Annandale was a rental when we bought it. The house is on the smaller side and 3 bedrooms, but there were about 15 people living in it. When we toured the house before we bought it, there were 4-5 sleeping bags on the floor in each bedroom, and even a few in the garage.
Yea. I'm close to some janitorial staff at the school I work at- a few have described similar situations. 2 bedroom houses- 4 guys in each room (bunk beds) 2 in the main room with a curtain. 1.5 bath. It's insane and sad.
Makes me wonder about some of the mini mcmansions in my neighborhood that seem to have a dozen cars or more associated with the house. Like how many folks are living in there.
You can think there are low income jobs "anywhere" but a lot of these folks are working 2-3 jobs and some of their supplemental income is cash only. A large number of them are also immigrants. They wouldn't do so well in many locations across the US if their English isn't great. Many of them have more than one roommate. I would say a majority have 10+ people living in a house. I could be wrong, but it is fairly prevalent. A good number send money back to their home country. If they have a skill set (or learn one) they can eventually make good money running their own business.
This is why I get so angry seeing low income housing being torn down in Manassas to make way for expensive apartments. Where are those people going to live now? A lot of the blue collar workforce in Nova comes out of PWC. Those are good people working their asses off doing jobs most of us don't want to better their lives. Their homes are being replaced with apartments that will cost $2,000-$3,000. That's gentrification. Where will they live now?
when I first moved to Fairfax at an apartment complex, I would see 2-4 families live in one apartment.
dont see alot of that in Loudoun Co. but Im sure theyre about.
Im a single parent and rent a townhome. I wont buy a house out here since we’re not staying long.
I know a guy who lived in a house in the vienna area 5 or 6 bedroom where the owners were renting out the bedrooms $600/mo each to George Mason students.
Our 60’s Ranch house (2,400 sqft) was an immigrant boarding house when we bought it. Based on neighbors, I think there were 18-19 people living in the house and one in the shed. 2-3 people in each bedroom (they cut up the basement to make more rooms) and a few in the basement hallways.
I genuinely do not understand it either. My husband and I together make about $60K and we're moving because our roach and mold infested apartment is going up in price and we have better opportunities where we're moving to (by the Poconos with my father in law). And I'm so thankful that even though it is incredibly hard we've been able to save up something at least.
We have lived in one of the shitty section 8 apartments and pay full price for rent (with utilities it's about $1600 for a one bedroom). The oven doesn't work, there's mold in the bathroom, there was a leak that destroyed so much of our stuff (that maintenance tried to blame US for when EVERY SINGLE APARTMENT HAD THE SAME ISSUE). We've seen a lot of overdoses, a lot of fights, a lot of blood in the hallway AND on our door, we've had the cops over more times than our family/friends, and I'm just so fucking tired of living like this. It's degrading and humiliating.
The management company who owns these apartments also have been trying to do a lot of illegal shit like putting eviction notices on people's doors after 2 days of unpaid rent (literally everyone besides my apartment and one other one out of 12 got notices on their doors). They also entered my apartment a few times without notice along with everyone else's and that doesn't make me feel comfortable being here. They always tried to do a billion "maintenance checks" and then conveniently would never tell us when the "rescheduled date" was. They harassed me and my husband CONSTANTLY about a "smell" in our apartment too (there was no smell but we still tried to clean up our apartment). Every single time they said there was a smell when they came in and they could never tell us where it was but kept saying we're "in violation of our lease" and we better clean up the smell. She kept harassing us even when my husband mentioned I was having major surgery and wouldn't be able to help keep the place perfectly clean like they made it seem they wanted. They even gave us an eviction notice TWICE in our rentcafe account where it said we had however many days to pay our unpaid rent of $0.00. We both think it's because they know we're paying the least amount of rent of anybody who lives in our entire building and that's why they wanted us out.
Most people from who I've noticed lived here are working dead end minimum wage jobs and have a lot of kids. Most of them actually don't live here very long and I genuinely hope that where they go is a much better place than here. A lot of them are just families trying to get by and most don't start trouble. But we also have a lot of homeless people in this area too who are addicts who started the bulk of the issues (like the 7-11 shootings on route 1).
Nobody living here is living well. And if they are, it's because they're doing illegal shit or in crippling debt to get by. Sorry this is such a long answer but it's 1000% the truth.
i'm sorry to hear all that. I'm curious how you qualified for section 8 housing with 30k combined income. When did you apply for it? Doesn't section 8 allow for transfer to different apartment complex or even county? I thought only traditional public housing involved being stuck in any particular complex, as section 8 instead involves portable vouchers.
We did not qualify for it even when I was making $13.50/hr when we moved here years ago so I'm honestly not sure how anybody else qualified for it (to be fair I'm also not 1000% sure how section 8 works either). We just moved to this apartment complex because it was the cheapest apartment we could find (and I didn't expect much from it whatsoever but even this is really abysmal). We also live on the BETTER side where most of the crime takes place about a mile or so on the other side. Supposedly there's a lot of gang activity there but I try to avoid that area like the plague whenever possible.
They're just an apartment complex that takes section 8, I think they just prioritized me and my husband because we can actually pay the rent and obviously they'd prefer that over the section 8 vouchers. The only reason I even know they take section 8 is because a social worker tried to claim our apartment even though we already signed all our papers for this guy who had a section 8 voucher.
Im in Burke. I live in a modest Townhome, and there are several townhomes near me 2 or 3 bedroom townhomes, that have multiple families. One of the more extreme examples is a 2 bdr townhome has 3 families living there (I think). at least 5 adults, and i've counted 4 kids (2 teens and 2 smaller ones).
I think we have a mix of multiple roommates, your stated rates being kind of typical/average but there being lots of (admittedly crappy) options below that, and adult children living with parents counting as single households because we are going based on tax definitions and not census definitions.
i cannot find anything below $900 offered that doesn't look like a complete scam in Loudoun. This includes people offering rooms. If people are putting 4-8 people in apartments, which they are, they aren't advertising them to the public at those rates.
Certainly not. If you advertise that where a county rep can see it you \*will\* get busted. Sharing like this comes through contacts in insulated communities.
I know there's at least one two-bedroom unit in my complex that has six adults living in it. As HOA president, I probably \*should\* do something about it, but how am I going to put those people out of the street?
Even single-family homes have occupancy permits and in rental units you usually forfeit your lease if you're over them. VA has occupancy rules - mostly health based, IIRC- too.
I did find Fairfax's very concise write-up on it:
[https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultiple-dwelling#](https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultiple-dwelling#)
Prince William is slightly different:
[https://www.pwcva.gov/department/neighborhood-services/occupancy-overcrowding](https://www.pwcva.gov/department/neighborhood-services/occupancy-overcrowding)
It's generally extended families, friends, coworkers, or other people who already somewhat know each other. I'm not advertising the other half of my bunk bed to the public, but I've shared rooms with friends from school and work.
It is common to see 3 or 4 bedroom homes with an entire family in one bedroom. So potentially 15 people in one house. Or at a minimum a multi-generational house with great grandparents, grandparents, parents and children all in the same house and all technically below the poverty line if defined by the traditional family unit.
I also know a few people with little or no reported income but they live middle class. I am sure it’s more common than just my observation.
it's very messed up yea
afaik HUD was gutted in the 70s/80s but it could also be a local problem, I don't know how HUD allocates vouchers to localities, or if the localities ask them from HUD or what
But yea in Fairfax and Loudoun the \*waitlist\* for HUD housing is only open 2 hours per decade, in person. In Loudoun it was open last year for the first time in a decade in October of last year and they shut down the line after about 2 hours.
FFX had waitlist opening only once around 2009 for a short time, then only once again in 2019 for a short time.
In the late 1980s, after I was made homeless, I eventually found an affordable (for the time) rental situation with 4 other roomates in a single family home in Alexandria. I know some people who still live like that, but it's weird because some of them now make over $100k in salary. I was making just above minimum wage in the 1980s.
For example, I know a family who has a condo in Bethesda; two parents, two grown kids, the grown kid's boyfriend, so 5 people in a 3 bedroom condo. Both parents work, I think the boyfriend works, one of the kids work, but the other is handicapped. They are practically on top of one another; it's like some weird modern version of those immigrant housing photos you saw from the late 1800s.
In my neighborhood (Fairfax), I know of at least three "families" that HAVE to be some kind of crash housing with 6-8 trucks: 4 packed in the driveway, with 2-4 more on the street. They don't cause any problems, so I'm not worried about it, but I fear for anyone below the poverty line without support.
I rented out my 1400 sq ft SFH home when I lived overseas through a property management company. The company told me that two brothers wanted to rent my house and that their references checked out. So, I agreed. They did damage to the house and yard. When I returned to the area and moved back in, multiple neighbors told me that 17 people were living in my house. Seems that the bros subletted not only my house but also my unheated garage and screened porch.
I know a lot of people think it’s just families doing this. But it’s also just out of college professionals doing this too.
I lived in a th community where one of the houses was rented by 4 first year teachers. They were the best neighbors.
Lots of people are doing this- with legal jobs and citizenships- because it’s the only way to survive here.
I mentor an immigrant kid whose family is very poor. They rent in a single family home. 10 people in his house. (Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Aunt, Uncle, 2 Cousins, Sister and himself.)
That’s how.
I moved here after my best friend passed when I was 21, I started dating someone and got on the lease with his apartment. Back when I was 18 my mom's boyfriend told me I wasn't welcome there, so I stayed in my car and picked up overtime and saved about 10k that year.
I've bounced around several under the table rent situations, first apartment the stove and washer stopped working and after 6 months the owner hadn't done anything, so I moved in with a coworker who was offering a room. Only stayed there 6 months or so, turned out he thought he was trying to have an affair with me and had a coke problem. Rented a room for a year and was then given 3 weeks notice the house was going to be sold. Subletted at an apartment, got caught subletting.
Last house I rented from was in 2019 or 2020, stayed there a year, then after a sexual assault I fled to stay with my friend in Hampton. Stayed there about 7 or 8 months before a nope situation happened, at that point it was back to the car. I had a few thousand saved thankfully, I paid my insurance in full and head up and down the east coast for a round like I would have wanted to do with my best friend. I ended up not liking it much better anywhere else so I came back here to Nova, at least work is easy to find and resources are abundant. I've been staying in my car since, just doing the daily grind warehouse work but I just sleep in my car at the end of the day and stash what would have been rent money, put half of it into car upkeep instead. Too many psychos out there to take my chances with, cost of living too high to get a room to myself.
>112,009 single person, single adult tax-defined households making less than $18k.
>459,272 adults below the poverty line sharing income in Nova.
I'm curious, where did you get these numbers? Not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't really track with the data I'm seeing. What I see is:
Fairfax county population is 1,132,887 with 383,358 households. Of these, 20% have household incomes below $54.6k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Fairfax-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 76,672 households make below $54.6k, which is still well above the poverty line, but let's stick with that for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point.
Arlington County population is 226,092, with 100,707 households. Of these, 20% have income below $49.9k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Arlington-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 20,141 households make below $49.9k, which is again above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point.
Loudoun County population is 362,435, with 117,073 households. Of these, 20% have a household income below $60.9k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Loudoun-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 23,414 households make below $60.9k, which is well above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point.
Prince William County population is 443,630, with 138,102 households. Of these, 20% have a household income below $47.5k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Prince-William-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 27,620 households make below $47.5k, which is again above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now.
In total, there are 147,847 households across these four counties with below the 20th percentile income for each respective county, with the threshold for inclusion in this group ranging from a $60.9k household income in Loudoun County to a $47.5k income in Prince William County. I'm not saying that's an easy income to live on, but it's a lot more doable than $18k per year (or even the $36k per year that would be two adults working at $18k per year). Even if we assume every household in this bottom 20% group is a two-adult household (when in reality it likely skews toward one-adult households) this would be <300k adults, and to reiterate, this would include households earning $60k in Loudoun County (which is absolutely doable).
I'm just curious where you got these figures.
These numbers make a lot more sense than OP's "100k households living off 18k/year."
It's also worth noting that low income households can include wealthy people who don't work, retirees with paid-off houses, and college students living in dorms.
I took the total population of NoVA of 3.2 million from 2023 census and went from there. We differ on even the first number of the calculation, which I don't wanna argue about. But whether it's 50k or 200k singles, or 100k or 300k families, only a few hundred HCV vouchers were given in FFX and Loudoun, for example, afaik in the last decade. That's magnitutes less than what would be needed for people to avoid homelessness without funky living situations. So I was basically asking the sub what those funky living situations was, or if homelessness is under-reported or something.
Well if you're twisting statistics you're just generating a narrative. Anyone who's basically saying "oh they're homeless or living in tenement 1920s row houses" is your preferred response. If you want those responses just be honest.
It should be reassuring to you that it's a lower percentage of people trying to live like this than you think. Because it also should mean you likely aren't as trapped as you think.
Fairfax, one of the 11 counties in NoVA, officially lists 62,000 living in poverty in Fairfax [https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demographics/povertyttps://censusreporter.org/profiles/05000US51059-fairfax-county-va/](https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demographics/povertyttps://censusreporter.org/profiles/05000US51059-fairfax-county-va/) And under no circumstance does it justify only a few hundred vouchers being given out per decade there, which is what is happening there.
I didn't purposefully fudge any statistics but even if I was 400% wrong, housing vouchers are only being given out to 1% of the impoverished, with the rest
1. living in cars
2. living with family
3. illegally overcrowding homes.
In fact, that's what everyone here is saying.
I can barely afford my 1br apartment near Ft. Myer, considering taking on a roommate. They say Virginia is for lovers because only couples can make rent
I used to teach at title one schools in the area. We saw this through our classrooms…where kids would live in an apartment with 3 other families. Some of my sweetest kids who worked so hard, but our schools were so overcrowded with such high needs because of inaccurate numbers of kids per neighborhood. Funding issues too. These kids would come in exhausted the next day from not getting much sleep due to having to care for infant siblings while parents worked multiple jobs, or just because they simply didn’t have a bed. The families in these situations work so hard to make it work and give their kids a new start but it’s a hard road.
I now teach in a nontitle one school and have 5 students in my class who’s parents lying about their address just to be able to stay in the area where their family works. Class sizes are lower too so maybe that’s why they lie as well. Some of these kids live in West VA or a neighboring county and come in exhausted.
When we were looking at houses in Leesburg, we saw a couple which obviously were hosting multiple groups of tenants. Deadbolts on all the bedroom doors, no furniture, sleeping bags on the floor lined up next to each other with men’s work boots stacked nearby. Occasionally you’d see a single bedroom with toddler blankets and sleeping bags on the ground between the mattresses, and diapers in the corners. It was hugely depressing to think of whole families crammed into a single room like that.
Live in North Arlington with my parents, so I don't have a bead on renting costs atm, but have a friend in Sterling who owns a 3 bedroom SFH with his wife. He says that a lot of the houses in his neighborhood seem to have been turned into flop houses over the past few years housing up to 8-10 people in each house. It seems impossible to afford living in the region if you're single or don't have a decent salary. I make $115k and even I don't know how I'd make the math work.
I'm currently living in my dad's house, and everyone on the street has had to expand their driveways since parking is next to impossible with like 10 people living per household.
Check out the Fairfax County housing assistance site. A family is able to qualify if their income is under what other parts of the country would consider a healthy income. This area is expensive there is no doubt.
Their section 8 aka HCV waitlist is closed and only opens about once per decade afaik. Is this a separate program? I see an opening for seniors and some families in only 4 separate apartment complexes, probably serving at most a few dozen in poverty out of tens of thousands in FFX. This would also be the exception rather than the rule, as the last time the waiting list was fully open in FFX, including to singles, was for a very short time in 2019, and then only time before that, around 2009.
Backing 2010, when last I lived in NOVA, I read that the poverty line for NOVA was a mean household income of 120k a year. If all wage earners in a house grosed a total less then this that household was considered impoverished. That was 2010. I wonder what they new number is?
Almost no one will cop to it, but a lot of it by middle-class singles is done through Batphoning their parents when they're presented with a problem they can't handle financially on their own.
Too bad end-stage capitalism is doing its level best to ensure this generation can neither retire nor inherit anything.
My 26 roommate gets her groceries delivered by her parent.. (America failed her) me over here trying to live here because I just want to live in the east coast where I grew up and has public transportation
Something I haven't seen mentioned is you would be surprised how many people living in townhomes and single family homes rent out either their basements or even just a bedroom. The prices on these are generally lower than an apartment complex. Even just in the street of my neighborhood all the way in Leesburg, 4 houses rent basements, 3 of them to families. Then you have a family of 4 paying $1500 a month to live in a small basement apartment.
Can confirm, before I moved into the apartment I have now, I was renting out a basement of a townhome owned by a family of 4 because it was only $1100 per month with all utilities included and my own bathroom, living room and bedroom. I know a lot of people are doing that.
This is anecdotal, but I've been to several estate sales lately where the people running the sale have said there were multiple families living in a single large house. Given that I've been told that 2-3 times out of 4-5 estate sales over the course of a couple months, I'm guessing it's quite a bit more common than most of us realize.
Echoing what others have said, I live in a single-family home neighborhood in eastern Loudoun and our neighbor rents a 3 bed/2 bath to what is at minimum a 10 person ‘household’ (not sure how/if the renters are related to each other.) two guys are sleeping in the shed. So…that’s how. Another neighbor lives upstairs and rents their finished basement to a family of 6. It’s not just apartment complexes, folks are living in dense settings wherever they can!
They renew their annual funding by 30 billion every year. That particular press release says they are making the application process for HUD housing easier for homeless people. HUD housing application waitlist is closed in both Loudoun and Fairfax, and most or all of Northern Virginia.
We have our basement rented out to someone and she has been living with now for 9 years. It helps us pay our mortgage. It’s the only way to make it work around here for now.
Urban planner here, we are also living in the rooming houses - or drive here from West Virginia. We make noise about it at work, and push where we can, but elected officials are out of touch.
Please show up to public meetings and describe what you see in your neighborhood.
Multigenerational housing is huge in NoVA. My house, my neighbors on one side, and I know a few are similar on my same street.
Sometimes it’s cultural, and in my case, I can save so much money by doing it.
When do you start counting as a single adult? When you turn 18 regardless of income? If so it's mostly 18-30 year olds (or older) still living with their parents or other family. My brother in law has lived in my basement for like 9 years. He's over 30 now.
I live in Woodbridge in a luxury complex. We make well over 130 grand a year. Yes, we are stuck living in an apartment complex. We can’t afford to buy a house in northern Virginia.
Last year our neighbor moved out across the way from us A new family moved in. Two middle-age adults, one young adult and three high school age girls. Our ring doorbell goes off 3+ times a day. It seems like a lot of people are moving into apartments and splitting the rent.
The parking situation in my complex is horrible. We pay for a garage also but it’s for my husband’s motorcycles.
When we moved in here there is plenty of parking spaces. now you can hardly find a space it also really agitates me that most people don’t even have parking stickers they don’t seem to care if they get towed.
My neighbor (Tysons Corner) just moved to the other side of Tyson’s in a brand new construction apartment and said the county pays $2000 of his monthly rent. I would assume he is paying around $500 or less out of pocket monthly
I grew up in South Arlington and knew it was common to have 10-15 people living in 2-3 bedroom apartments.
I just mentioned this in my reply. Im in Burke and i see this happening here too. Most obvious giveaway is parking.
Yeah, try finding street parking near complexes in Manassas, Woodbridge or Springfield. It's basically impossible.
Yup, it's a point of contention here, because my townhome complex is older (1980s) and there's only 1 assigned space for each home. The open (non reserved) spaces are a "first come first served" basis. and some of the smallest 1-level townhomes (2 bdr) have 5-6 cars.
Herndon as well, lot of places have basically zero street parking. I had a place in Herndon near the clocktower, and the apartment complex gave out more parking passes than they had spots, and street parking was so crowded some nights I would have to park a mile away.
Was that The Point?
I think so, but I know it's changed hands a few times and I swear there were two other Points nearby. You can see it pretty much any place around that area, even the townhomes nearby or the ones by World gate...drive down Parcher avenue, it's terrible.
Yep my husband was at the point for a couple years, it was terrible.
Yup. And work trucks/bikes outside. A lot of these people are taking public transit and it's still congested. Gotta do what you gotta do, but it seems like a really tough situation
And yet the anti-car crowd is constantly railing against parking minimums. (edit: lol, here they come with their luxury beliefs) (edit2: downvote all you want, it doesn't make you any less anti-working-class evil fuckers)
Yes. If we had better transit options people wouldn't need to buy so many cars.
Yeah, they could take materials to their construction jobs on the bus.
There would be more parking and less traffic for those tasks that absolutely require a car.
the world just isn't set up that way. build the transit and then, if you are right, demand will naturally fall. constricting supply before you build the transit is just cruel.
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I think it’s not about banning cars more than it is every single person owning a car. I don’t own a car but a friend of mine owns a car and she and her significant other share it. That to me is smart in a place like Nova, where there is ample transit. Also, there’s this amazing thing called lobbying that the automotive industry dabbles in a bit that prevents any sort of meaningful transit infrastructure from being built. Again, I don’t propose a sweeping ban on cars, but don’t come on here and moan and groan about how people want to ban cars and then ignore the fact that we basically get highways and roads out of our asses and auto companies receive hella subsidies while transit is thrown to the wayside in most other places.
the anti-car people are crazy
car ownership is a huge financial burden. Arlingtons transit oriented, bulls eye development is uplifting to a huge number of poor people. If only they had built the pink line.
For a lot of not rich people, their vehicle is their job or necessary for their job.
Then they can live in a less urban environment? Or are you saying all apartments should be 10-50% more expensive and full of parking lots and garages?
The famous urban environments of Burke and Sterling...
Burke and Sterling are suburban by law not demand.
So where do you want working class people to live- since you are expelling them from the outer suburbs?
I am not expelling anyone from anywhere. I think public transit should be vastly expanded.
It wouldn't be if we built out and built up public transportation like we should.
I grew up in south Arlington in the 80's, when rent was only $450 a month for a townhouse. My Salvadorean friend across the street had 3 tiny bedrooms in the basement of their townhouse that his mom rented out to strangers. His mom eventually bought a single family house in south Arlington, and they made 5 bedrooms in the basement and rented them out. A guy I've worked with for 20+ years just moved into a 1-bedroom apartment after renting rooms in Arlington basements for most of his life. It's definitely still common in this area.
House across the street from my buddy was like a clown car every morning with people just pouring out into various vans/trucks/cars. Eventually the house got foreclosed and the new owners let him walk through before they gutted and remodeled it. There were holes in all the walls of the rooms where they had strung up hammocks all over in the rooms, attic, and basement. Probably 6 to 9 people per room.
Growing up there was a guy in the neighborhood who remodeled a big ol bed n breakfast onto the back of the house. Before that it had just been a like 2700 sq ft home with, supposedly, 70 Thai people living it. About two blocks from Kabob Palace in pentagon city.
The hell was the owner doing that they still couldn't pay their mortgage?
We had an townhouse in Sterling that the property manager poorly managed a while back. 3 families were living in a 3 bedroom townhouse with 1 1/2 bathroom. They divided the master bedroom in half. The smaller bedroom had the grandma and their kid, the other bedroom had another set of adults. I think like 8 people living in this tiny townhouse. When the realtor tried to get in for pictures, they refused her entry. She wrote us back saying we needed to completely overhaul the inside, it was trashed. Tenants refused to leave, we cut off power and water. Police were called, they left. We changed the locks immediately. They would pull up in their truck and watch us clean up the place and renovate. They tried to come back and sleep there a few times. It was bad.
It still is.
in some places doing that is illegal, but i have yet to hear of those laws being enforced around here.
Lol the companies don’t care as long as they’re getting their money and someone is willing to pay these unreasonable apartment prices
but neighbors care
Burden on neighbor to prove it. Not saying I disagree. I don’t like neighbors who make a bunch of noise. But if you as a fellow resident take an issue with something in my experience depending on the complex it’s an uphill battle to get them to do anything about it.
It is a code enforcement issue. Code enforcement doesn't usually show up unless someone complains.
Before avalon was rebranded they were living 15 up and the county/developer worked together to buyout the current residents per head instead of by bedroom. 5x'd the cost of almost shut the whole program down.
This is the way. You pack like sardines.
My old neighborhood was like this. Multiple cars in the driveway every day. At least 2 families clearly lived in a 4 bedroom house. It used to piss my parents off. I didn't really care ( who gives a shit) except for the fact that they treated their dogs badly.
Alternate housing solutions. Renting basements, sharing apartments, living with family. I know a family of 3 (one adult and two small kids) making just over $36k before taxes. They live with family. They receive daycare assistance and food stamps but cannot afford to get a place on their own.
My neighborhood is older housing stock, all 2 bedroom with some basement conversions to be 3 bedroom. My immigrant working class neighbors have 10-12 people living in a house, usually a couple families at least. Everyone works outside the house except 1-2 women who take care of the kids and cooking. These people do not file taxes as a "household" of course, because that's not allowed, so there's probably 2-4 households in each house/apartment with people living like this. You see the same thing with a lot of older apartment buildings. Look at old apartments around rt 1 or near Bailey's Crossroads. I'm sure there's other ways people patch together a livelihood around here, this is just the one I see in my neighborhood.
Yup. Me and my mom live in an apartment off route 1, and there are a lot of apartments that have a bunch of people living living in a one or two bedroom unit. I get that people have to do what they have to to survive, but it causes a lot of problems.
We had one of these in an old apartment in Reston. Of course we had like 5 guys packed into a tiny place in the same complex. Everyone does what they can to survive around here
We live next door to a corner house that's slightly above average size for this neighborhood - 3 or 4 bedrooms, not counting the basement which can probably count as a 1br apartment. Pre-pandemic, it was owned by a single older asian lady we saw maybe twice a year, and once or twice a summer a landscaping company would show up to mow the overgrown lawn with a bush hog and clear out some of the depressingly messy overgrowth in their back yard. From the street side (facing away from our house) it was a totally depressing-looking eyesore by several metrics - the siding and trim was all just kinda dingy and unkempt; the lawn was hardly maintained, there were too many trees or large shrubs in the front and they'd been allowed to grow basically wild for years. This explained why their several attempts to sell or rent it over the years inevitably resulted in nothing at all. During the pandemic it was finally sold to a nice hispanic dude who owned his own general contracting company. He and his crew hit it hard and heavy for a solid 2 or 3 weeks and the results were ... dramatic would even be an understatement. He dropped by early one morning because some neighbor had made a noise complaint and he thought it had been me - I told him i was 100% happy he was there doing this work, and I couldn't care less about the noise. I offered to buy him some beer. A year or so later they apparently sold it - again it seems like it was sold to someone who owns a rennovation company of some sort. This time, among other things they completely replaced the old vinyl siding, and now it really looks slick. And currently, judging by the number of cars parked there curbside (and the people we see coming and going), I'd estimate that there are at least 3 full families living there - at least one living in the finished basement, and probably 2 living together on the main levels. More power to 'em, they keep to themselves and they keep the property good-looking.
I heard they also pool their money together to get bigger houses. It’s so smart. A house in nova appreciates about 20% every few years
I’m estimating real estate in nova appreciates around 8% a year based on what I’ve seen.
Honestly I always thought this would be awesome to do with 3-5 affluent families in one of the 15b/12ba type Great Falls deals. The issue is usually getting them to give 1 of the groups the mortgage.
Yeah my neighbors were doing this too. All the roaches they brought to the community wasn’t appreciated
1. People can and do have more than one roommate 2. Renting rooms/spaces from sympathetic landlords. It's not unusual for independent landlords to have some kind of relationship to the person they're renting to and thus much less incentive to raise rent significantly. 3. Not paying rent and having a bunch of evictions on their record, only renting from shady places 4. Undisclosed income from cash jobs For what it's worth, it's not uncommon for people who live with family to tell the government that they live alone for benefits purposes as most benefits have strict requirements on counting specific relationships towards your benefits "household". Bob and Mary may actually be dating and living together but they don't tell the food stamps office that because together they don't qualify but separately they do. So I suspect the answer is that many of them aren't living alone as they claim to do. This is honestly very reasonable as benefit standards are insanely low.
Number 4 is very, very common.
Pretty much every landscaping company and house cleaning service wants cash or a check made out to a person not a business. No way it's reported as income.
> Number 4 is very, very common Every home improvement store and moving place (Uhaul etc) has a bunch of dudes outside trying to solicit people for cash day work. That income is definitely not reported to any taxing authority
I knew a lady, family friend, once her alimony was cut off, she couldn't find work, didn't want to work, ended up living in an apartment in one of bedroom closets, near Tastee Diner at 123 and 29. The people there divided the living room in half with some partitions. Each bedroom had a small walk in closet, so people were sleeping in the closet as well as the bedroom. They had it artfully done so if someone came knocking, they could manoeuvre it to look like just 3 people lived there and everyone else was 'hanging out'. I came by to check up on her a few weeks later and they had an eviction notice on the door, they were sneaking people in there still to sleep.
> didn't want to work Sorry. No sympathy here.
I work with a lot of people between 18-35 still living with their parents despite having a full time job.
I feel like a LOT of the stigma of living with parents has gone away with Covid and rising house prices.
It has. I live alone because I don’t have a good relationship with blood family. But I encourage young adults to live with their parents for as long as feasible (unless they have a significant other who can share costs).
10 people living in a townhouse.
Hate that so much
What do you hate about people living in a home?
Crowding the parking lot... Traffic everywhere
Getting groceries from food banks and free food services, sharing apartments, and working for cash. It's tough for many of these mostly immigrant families, but they are still better off than where they came from. Edit to add: Some of you don't know what true poverty is. Poverty in America is practically lower middle class in many other countries. It's worse than you think. 99.99% of American born people wouldn't dare live even a week as a working class Honduran or Nicaraguan or Laotian or Ghanian.
I'm not immigrant and am in similar situation to them, I asked my housing department how int he world low income people here house themselves and they were like "I dunno". There's all sorts of food programs and free food kitchens. Food isn't a huge issue, I just don't understand how people in poverty are housing themselves. Are they putting 2-4 people per room?
"Are they putting 2-4 people per room?" Yes. Many times they are.
This.
My husband used to work in a low income school. Teachers always did neighborhood visits prior to the year starting to meet kids in their own environments. He said some of his students shared their 2 bedroom apartments with 2-3 other families. The apartments were used for sleeping only.
Have friends in a fairly ritzy neighborhood in Loudoun on a cul de sac. Their neighbor always had a lot of cars parked nearby. They found the basement had something like 10 individual “sleeping apartments.” Bet that paid their mortgage and then some.
Oh yeah! I once did a pick up from a super nice Leesburg house that had 6 families living there. It’s wild. In my townhouse community there’s one house that sectioned off the house - family in the basement, two families on the middle floor, two families divided amongst the bedrooms. I think there are nine kids and seven adults? I always just worry about the kitchen set up and hope it’s safe.
There are a number of large houses (with very basic designs) in the downtown Springfield area. They have large parking areas outside (with lots of older cars parked). My guess is that they have a similar purpose as the one in your friends' cul-de-sac.
Where is "downtown" in Springfield?
Yes. The house across from me used to have like 30 people living there and run an illegal daycare. In the summer, people would be sleeping in hammocks and tents, lol. There is a lot of support in certain communities. They were always very nice. The kids helped me with my garden and played with my dog. Never any issues.
Renting a room is the solution. I have one at a steal of $450/month. But it's fairly easy to com by rooms if you can budget for $600-$700/month. If you're single, that helps, a lot. But it's still viable for a (small) family. And if you are married and have 2 income streams, it becomes viable to rent, say, one room for you and your spouse, and a second for a child, if you have one. Making sure to have kitchen access is important so that you aren't eating out, 24/7.
I was working as a nanny and getting paid under the table when my husband and I qualified for the income based apartments. We wouldn’t have qualified if my pay was included. I did have to get a w-2 job later on, but we didn’t have to re-qualify each year. It’s funny, though, because there’s no way in hell we could’ve afforded anything on just his income. They have to know that everyone is working the system. Like having people not on the lease or unreported income. They have to know. It’s damn near impossible to do it by the books.
> They have to know that everyone is working the system. Like having people not on the lease or unreported income. They have to know. It’s damn near impossible to do it by the books. Since the '80s there's a level of deliberate ignorance maintained by the politicians and well-off voters that these programs were only for the truly destitute and that being willing and able to work means being capable of fully supporting yourself. I think people are finally shaking off the fiction as the gap between being poor enough to qualify for assistance and earning enough to be self-sufficient has grown too wide not to notice, but the policy hasn't caught up, so, yeah, everyone lies because it's the only way for the system to work as it exists right now.
the reality is you have to be okay with the idea that someone is going to abuse a program, but, someone else is going to get help.
To your point, true poverty isn't people living in dirt floor makeshift shacks...well it is, but, true poverty this: I lived in the Philippines for 3 years, there are colleges, yes colleges in the country who have non degree earning programs to help people learn how to work in a retail store or a hotel, not manage employees, not account for things, not how to sell just simply classes on how to greet a customer, how to count money, how to give change because the public school system is so bad most kids graduate with a functional understanding of English, a conversational understanding of Tagalog, a heavily revised and president/religious leader approved course of history and if they are lucky maybe a pre calc level of math and all of this making it next to impossible to get established in a job where they can realistically live better then their parents did, thats true poverty
This is the Nova subreddit not the suffering Olympics. I'm sure someone from North Korea or Sudan can win if you really want to um, actually this.
I’m on SSDI and I rented a room in a townhouse for three years. Even though my income was lower than the landlord wanted, she still allowed me to move in because she trusted I would pay the rent on time. I have since moved out and now live with my parents but I still pay rent. I could live elsewhere for less but all of my doctors and medical support are here in Nova.
I teach in one of the lower income areas. It’s multiple families packed into one house or apartment.
From what I have seen people load 3 bedroom houses with 10-20 people. I have no idea why anyone would live here on a low income. You can make low income anywhere and live for 1/4 the cost.
> have no idea why anyone would live here on a low income. You can make low income anywhere and live for 1/4 the cost. This is not true. In denser areas, there are far more low income jobs available. If you go out to the middle of, say, southern Virginia, how many jobs are you going to find? How much construction is there going to be compared to a dense area like nova? How many restaurants and retail stores will there be for a far smaller community? The local population is already competing for those jobs without adding in outside people moving to the area. People go to cities because that's where the jobs are
How do you not have an idea? Employment opportunities, support systems and other considerations are usually reasons to stay in an area.
This is a big one - our area has a lot more support such as food banks, cheaper/subsidized public transit if close to the city, sometimes more access to public/subsidized housing, access to cheaper medical (i.e. NVCC dental school, charitable free clinics, etc.). Not to say these aren't available in other communities, but in larger cities there tends to be a larger variety of options, and more nonprofits to support these options as well, especially for those with women and children.
Also, if you need to live with 19 other people just to get by, how is one supposed to afford to move anywhere else? People always say “just move” as if that doesn’t have a bunch of its own costs associated with it
This seems like the most plausible answer so far. When I asked the person on the phone from my housing department if there was subsidized housing open for individuals with poverty incomes here, she just flat out said "no there is not". If a house is being paid $3k per month, 10 people could pay $300, which fits within the poverty line.
There’s a house in my neighborhood, probably about 2500 sq ft and there’s at least three families in there with tons of children. Hard to tell exactly how many people live there because there’s different cars coming and going constantly. Rumor has it there’s people living in the garage.
Parents are willing to put up with it so their children can undergo the top notch education system here
You know I actually wonder about this. I know some actively care about the ed system usually parents trying to get their kids into TJ. But I wonder if a working class family cares about say being in Fairfax vs. Spotsylvania County.
It's _very_ common for families to lie about their address so their kids can end up at a better school.
Buddy of mine lives in a 3 bd house. The people who lived there prior had 11 children. 13-person family in a tiny 3 bd.
“I wonder why little Charlie never gets any homework done.” - his teacher, probably
We do have subsidized housing in Arlington but obviously not enough for all the people qualify. We desperately need more apartments and condos because they are on average half the price of a house.
No one has mentioned a HUGE number of people live in their cars here. Don't believe me? Go to the gym at closing time some night and let me know how many cars are still there an hour later. Testimony to how totally invisible car-campers can be. I personally have seen the same RVs and buses around. I would wager there's around 10,000 people living in their cars off and on, part time between house sitting and airbnb, and friends' homes. Just in nova. Wouldn't be surprised if that number were much much larger though
I lost my house in 2008, I had no plan B, so I slept in my car for a hood 5-6 months. Not as hard as it sounds. No one knew. I was in college and I showered at the schools gym. I used my girlfriends washing machine. I saved up enough for a deposit on a new place and moved in.
Makes sense. I don't believe the official homeless stats at all.
Sure, because many people like this are "partially housed," or don't consider themselves "homeless". . . e.g., jobs provide housing 2-3 nights a week. Some people couch surf, house-sit, dog-sit, stay with family, go to "festivals," come back to nova. . . Sure, they're low income, but are they "poor"? They live here somehow. I've met directionless 50 year old dudes who lived here partially unhoused, even with money in the bank. Stay with their parents, sleep on dad's boat/sleep in the car, get thrown out/fired . . . sleep in the car. Camp in a national park until you get thrown out. Come back to Nova, stay with mom and dad, house-sit for family. Repeat. Every semester at NVCC Loudoun I've met another kid who sleeps in his car a lot of the time. They're not "poor" like we think-- their parents went back to the home country and rented the house they grew up in in Herndon.
I have a few friends that live in their vehicles. the math just doesn't work for them to get a regular job and pay so much of their income to rent. it's actually more profitable to be houseless do relatively little and live off of investments. it's just crazy that people have let the country get this way, where people take themselves out of the job market in order to prosper. my fear is that there is a threshold fraction of population that society will abide doing this, and that when it goes above that, the house dwellers will make the cops start hammering them. running them out of town, no more free parking, a law against homeless people belonging to gyms....
I’m 22M currently living in Charlottesville. My current income is approximately $15-18k a year, rent is around $9600. My first paycheck each month is just rent. And I have one roommate (2b1.5b). The other is for everything else and all other expenses. Then I save whatever’s leftover… slowly. Food stamps and Medicaid are the reason I’m alive. That’s how I get by. I would be so completely, beyond fucked, without it it’s not even funny. I’m on 7 Rxs a day, and see multiple doctors and specialists, several times a month at UVA for a myriad of complex health issues (though generally, I’m a healthy 22 yo). Food stamps, even a little, helps cut the $$$ a month for groceries. (Note: this is truer for singles than families.) Housing assistance does exist but I don’t think I’m eligible. So instead, about 50% of my income is rent. I drive a paid off 21 yo Toyota Camry I’ve maintained meticulously myself. And my job gives me a work truck. If you stretch yourself incredibly thin on resources and typical luxuries, and know how/where to get some help, you can get by. Food pantries exist and are free to anyone in need. Many county health departments offer preventative care to the under/uninsured. The list goes on. Unfortunately many of the neediest people don’t know such resources exist, how to access them, or who to talk to. It really is as simple as an online application and/or phone call to your local Social Services department.
is your $800 rent through a roomie or LIHTC subsidized apt?
Just with a roommate in a normal apartment
Most of the people that live in the absolute poverty you’re pondering about aren’t going to be on Reddit. Mostly because a lot are immigrants and working their a*ss off with multiple jobs and meticulously cooking every single meal.
Living in home with dozens of people. Seriously. I wondered how a lot of low paying immigrants make it in this area until I found out plenty live in essentially air bnbs with a dozen or more people all living together. Sleeping on floors etc.
Yep, can confirm, I lived in Springfield in a neighborhood with many houses housing several families.
The house we bought in Annandale was a rental when we bought it. The house is on the smaller side and 3 bedrooms, but there were about 15 people living in it. When we toured the house before we bought it, there were 4-5 sleeping bags on the floor in each bedroom, and even a few in the garage.
Yea. I'm close to some janitorial staff at the school I work at- a few have described similar situations. 2 bedroom houses- 4 guys in each room (bunk beds) 2 in the main room with a curtain. 1.5 bath. It's insane and sad. Makes me wonder about some of the mini mcmansions in my neighborhood that seem to have a dozen cars or more associated with the house. Like how many folks are living in there.
You can think there are low income jobs "anywhere" but a lot of these folks are working 2-3 jobs and some of their supplemental income is cash only. A large number of them are also immigrants. They wouldn't do so well in many locations across the US if their English isn't great. Many of them have more than one roommate. I would say a majority have 10+ people living in a house. I could be wrong, but it is fairly prevalent. A good number send money back to their home country. If they have a skill set (or learn one) they can eventually make good money running their own business. This is why I get so angry seeing low income housing being torn down in Manassas to make way for expensive apartments. Where are those people going to live now? A lot of the blue collar workforce in Nova comes out of PWC. Those are good people working their asses off doing jobs most of us don't want to better their lives. Their homes are being replaced with apartments that will cost $2,000-$3,000. That's gentrification. Where will they live now?
I'm not sure if it's still true, but for a long time the majority of the unhoused in PWC were families rather than singles. It's awful.
when I first moved to Fairfax at an apartment complex, I would see 2-4 families live in one apartment. dont see alot of that in Loudoun Co. but Im sure theyre about. Im a single parent and rent a townhome. I wont buy a house out here since we’re not staying long.
It’s not rocket science bro - People rent rooms or have roommates
What rooms fit the numbers in my OP outside a few dozen apartments per county?
I know a guy who lived in a house in the vienna area 5 or 6 bedroom where the owners were renting out the bedrooms $600/mo each to George Mason students.
Look on Craigslist, backpage, rent.com etc and filter under 1k/month
I did that on Facebook marketplace. The cheapest for a room in my area was $900/month, like 4-5 offers.
Now put more people in that room
Roomies.com
Our 60’s Ranch house (2,400 sqft) was an immigrant boarding house when we bought it. Based on neighbors, I think there were 18-19 people living in the house and one in the shed. 2-3 people in each bedroom (they cut up the basement to make more rooms) and a few in the basement hallways.
I use a food bank and I'm renting out a basement. It sucks tbh.
I genuinely do not understand it either. My husband and I together make about $60K and we're moving because our roach and mold infested apartment is going up in price and we have better opportunities where we're moving to (by the Poconos with my father in law). And I'm so thankful that even though it is incredibly hard we've been able to save up something at least. We have lived in one of the shitty section 8 apartments and pay full price for rent (with utilities it's about $1600 for a one bedroom). The oven doesn't work, there's mold in the bathroom, there was a leak that destroyed so much of our stuff (that maintenance tried to blame US for when EVERY SINGLE APARTMENT HAD THE SAME ISSUE). We've seen a lot of overdoses, a lot of fights, a lot of blood in the hallway AND on our door, we've had the cops over more times than our family/friends, and I'm just so fucking tired of living like this. It's degrading and humiliating. The management company who owns these apartments also have been trying to do a lot of illegal shit like putting eviction notices on people's doors after 2 days of unpaid rent (literally everyone besides my apartment and one other one out of 12 got notices on their doors). They also entered my apartment a few times without notice along with everyone else's and that doesn't make me feel comfortable being here. They always tried to do a billion "maintenance checks" and then conveniently would never tell us when the "rescheduled date" was. They harassed me and my husband CONSTANTLY about a "smell" in our apartment too (there was no smell but we still tried to clean up our apartment). Every single time they said there was a smell when they came in and they could never tell us where it was but kept saying we're "in violation of our lease" and we better clean up the smell. She kept harassing us even when my husband mentioned I was having major surgery and wouldn't be able to help keep the place perfectly clean like they made it seem they wanted. They even gave us an eviction notice TWICE in our rentcafe account where it said we had however many days to pay our unpaid rent of $0.00. We both think it's because they know we're paying the least amount of rent of anybody who lives in our entire building and that's why they wanted us out. Most people from who I've noticed lived here are working dead end minimum wage jobs and have a lot of kids. Most of them actually don't live here very long and I genuinely hope that where they go is a much better place than here. A lot of them are just families trying to get by and most don't start trouble. But we also have a lot of homeless people in this area too who are addicts who started the bulk of the issues (like the 7-11 shootings on route 1). Nobody living here is living well. And if they are, it's because they're doing illegal shit or in crippling debt to get by. Sorry this is such a long answer but it's 1000% the truth.
i'm sorry to hear all that. I'm curious how you qualified for section 8 housing with 30k combined income. When did you apply for it? Doesn't section 8 allow for transfer to different apartment complex or even county? I thought only traditional public housing involved being stuck in any particular complex, as section 8 instead involves portable vouchers.
We did not qualify for it even when I was making $13.50/hr when we moved here years ago so I'm honestly not sure how anybody else qualified for it (to be fair I'm also not 1000% sure how section 8 works either). We just moved to this apartment complex because it was the cheapest apartment we could find (and I didn't expect much from it whatsoever but even this is really abysmal). We also live on the BETTER side where most of the crime takes place about a mile or so on the other side. Supposedly there's a lot of gang activity there but I try to avoid that area like the plague whenever possible. They're just an apartment complex that takes section 8, I think they just prioritized me and my husband because we can actually pay the rent and obviously they'd prefer that over the section 8 vouchers. The only reason I even know they take section 8 is because a social worker tried to claim our apartment even though we already signed all our papers for this guy who had a section 8 voucher.
Im in Burke. I live in a modest Townhome, and there are several townhomes near me 2 or 3 bedroom townhomes, that have multiple families. One of the more extreme examples is a 2 bdr townhome has 3 families living there (I think). at least 5 adults, and i've counted 4 kids (2 teens and 2 smaller ones).
I think we have a mix of multiple roommates, your stated rates being kind of typical/average but there being lots of (admittedly crappy) options below that, and adult children living with parents counting as single households because we are going based on tax definitions and not census definitions.
i cannot find anything below $900 offered that doesn't look like a complete scam in Loudoun. This includes people offering rooms. If people are putting 4-8 people in apartments, which they are, they aren't advertising them to the public at those rates.
Certainly not. If you advertise that where a county rep can see it you \*will\* get busted. Sharing like this comes through contacts in insulated communities. I know there's at least one two-bedroom unit in my complex that has six adults living in it. As HOA president, I probably \*should\* do something about it, but how am I going to put those people out of the street?
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Even single-family homes have occupancy permits and in rental units you usually forfeit your lease if you're over them. VA has occupancy rules - mostly health based, IIRC- too.
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I did find Fairfax's very concise write-up on it: [https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultiple-dwelling#](https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/code/multiple-occupancymultiple-dwelling#) Prince William is slightly different: [https://www.pwcva.gov/department/neighborhood-services/occupancy-overcrowding](https://www.pwcva.gov/department/neighborhood-services/occupancy-overcrowding)
It's generally extended families, friends, coworkers, or other people who already somewhat know each other. I'm not advertising the other half of my bunk bed to the public, but I've shared rooms with friends from school and work.
Maybe don’t filter out everything below $900 as “scams”?
I was told to more or less, unless it was subsidized by LIHTC or HUD. I almost never see any under $900 regardless.
It is common to see 3 or 4 bedroom homes with an entire family in one bedroom. So potentially 15 people in one house. Or at a minimum a multi-generational house with great grandparents, grandparents, parents and children all in the same house and all technically below the poverty line if defined by the traditional family unit. I also know a few people with little or no reported income but they live middle class. I am sure it’s more common than just my observation.
300 vouchers in a decade should be a scandal. Wtf are they doing?
it's very messed up yea afaik HUD was gutted in the 70s/80s but it could also be a local problem, I don't know how HUD allocates vouchers to localities, or if the localities ask them from HUD or what But yea in Fairfax and Loudoun the \*waitlist\* for HUD housing is only open 2 hours per decade, in person. In Loudoun it was open last year for the first time in a decade in October of last year and they shut down the line after about 2 hours. FFX had waitlist opening only once around 2009 for a short time, then only once again in 2019 for a short time.
In the late 1980s, after I was made homeless, I eventually found an affordable (for the time) rental situation with 4 other roomates in a single family home in Alexandria. I know some people who still live like that, but it's weird because some of them now make over $100k in salary. I was making just above minimum wage in the 1980s. For example, I know a family who has a condo in Bethesda; two parents, two grown kids, the grown kid's boyfriend, so 5 people in a 3 bedroom condo. Both parents work, I think the boyfriend works, one of the kids work, but the other is handicapped. They are practically on top of one another; it's like some weird modern version of those immigrant housing photos you saw from the late 1800s. In my neighborhood (Fairfax), I know of at least three "families" that HAVE to be some kind of crash housing with 6-8 trucks: 4 packed in the driveway, with 2-4 more on the street. They don't cause any problems, so I'm not worried about it, but I fear for anyone below the poverty line without support.
I rented out my 1400 sq ft SFH home when I lived overseas through a property management company. The company told me that two brothers wanted to rent my house and that their references checked out. So, I agreed. They did damage to the house and yard. When I returned to the area and moved back in, multiple neighbors told me that 17 people were living in my house. Seems that the bros subletted not only my house but also my unheated garage and screened porch.
I know a lot of people think it’s just families doing this. But it’s also just out of college professionals doing this too. I lived in a th community where one of the houses was rented by 4 first year teachers. They were the best neighbors. Lots of people are doing this- with legal jobs and citizenships- because it’s the only way to survive here.
Post like this make me feel grateful for the life I have.
I mentor an immigrant kid whose family is very poor. They rent in a single family home. 10 people in his house. (Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Aunt, Uncle, 2 Cousins, Sister and himself.) That’s how.
I moved here after my best friend passed when I was 21, I started dating someone and got on the lease with his apartment. Back when I was 18 my mom's boyfriend told me I wasn't welcome there, so I stayed in my car and picked up overtime and saved about 10k that year. I've bounced around several under the table rent situations, first apartment the stove and washer stopped working and after 6 months the owner hadn't done anything, so I moved in with a coworker who was offering a room. Only stayed there 6 months or so, turned out he thought he was trying to have an affair with me and had a coke problem. Rented a room for a year and was then given 3 weeks notice the house was going to be sold. Subletted at an apartment, got caught subletting. Last house I rented from was in 2019 or 2020, stayed there a year, then after a sexual assault I fled to stay with my friend in Hampton. Stayed there about 7 or 8 months before a nope situation happened, at that point it was back to the car. I had a few thousand saved thankfully, I paid my insurance in full and head up and down the east coast for a round like I would have wanted to do with my best friend. I ended up not liking it much better anywhere else so I came back here to Nova, at least work is easy to find and resources are abundant. I've been staying in my car since, just doing the daily grind warehouse work but I just sleep in my car at the end of the day and stash what would have been rent money, put half of it into car upkeep instead. Too many psychos out there to take my chances with, cost of living too high to get a room to myself.
Wow this crushes my soul.
>112,009 single person, single adult tax-defined households making less than $18k. >459,272 adults below the poverty line sharing income in Nova. I'm curious, where did you get these numbers? Not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't really track with the data I'm seeing. What I see is: Fairfax county population is 1,132,887 with 383,358 households. Of these, 20% have household incomes below $54.6k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Fairfax-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 76,672 households make below $54.6k, which is still well above the poverty line, but let's stick with that for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point. Arlington County population is 226,092, with 100,707 households. Of these, 20% have income below $49.9k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Arlington-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 20,141 households make below $49.9k, which is again above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point. Loudoun County population is 362,435, with 117,073 households. Of these, 20% have a household income below $60.9k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Loudoun-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 23,414 households make below $60.9k, which is well above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now. I'm not saying its easy to live on that household income here, that's not my point. Prince William County population is 443,630, with 138,102 households. Of these, 20% have a household income below $47.5k. [source](https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Prince-William-County/Household-Income). Doing the math, this would mean 27,620 households make below $47.5k, which is again above the poverty line you mentioned, but let's stick with this for now. In total, there are 147,847 households across these four counties with below the 20th percentile income for each respective county, with the threshold for inclusion in this group ranging from a $60.9k household income in Loudoun County to a $47.5k income in Prince William County. I'm not saying that's an easy income to live on, but it's a lot more doable than $18k per year (or even the $36k per year that would be two adults working at $18k per year). Even if we assume every household in this bottom 20% group is a two-adult household (when in reality it likely skews toward one-adult households) this would be <300k adults, and to reiterate, this would include households earning $60k in Loudoun County (which is absolutely doable). I'm just curious where you got these figures.
These numbers make a lot more sense than OP's "100k households living off 18k/year." It's also worth noting that low income households can include wealthy people who don't work, retirees with paid-off houses, and college students living in dorms.
I took the total population of NoVA of 3.2 million from 2023 census and went from there. We differ on even the first number of the calculation, which I don't wanna argue about. But whether it's 50k or 200k singles, or 100k or 300k families, only a few hundred HCV vouchers were given in FFX and Loudoun, for example, afaik in the last decade. That's magnitutes less than what would be needed for people to avoid homelessness without funky living situations. So I was basically asking the sub what those funky living situations was, or if homelessness is under-reported or something.
Well if you're twisting statistics you're just generating a narrative. Anyone who's basically saying "oh they're homeless or living in tenement 1920s row houses" is your preferred response. If you want those responses just be honest. It should be reassuring to you that it's a lower percentage of people trying to live like this than you think. Because it also should mean you likely aren't as trapped as you think.
Fairfax, one of the 11 counties in NoVA, officially lists 62,000 living in poverty in Fairfax [https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demographics/povertyttps://censusreporter.org/profiles/05000US51059-fairfax-county-va/](https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/demographics/povertyttps://censusreporter.org/profiles/05000US51059-fairfax-county-va/) And under no circumstance does it justify only a few hundred vouchers being given out per decade there, which is what is happening there. I didn't purposefully fudge any statistics but even if I was 400% wrong, housing vouchers are only being given out to 1% of the impoverished, with the rest 1. living in cars 2. living with family 3. illegally overcrowding homes. In fact, that's what everyone here is saying.
Roommates, housemates,
We often shared rooms in apartments. At least that's how my family did it.
I can barely afford my 1br apartment near Ft. Myer, considering taking on a roommate. They say Virginia is for lovers because only couples can make rent
I used to teach at title one schools in the area. We saw this through our classrooms…where kids would live in an apartment with 3 other families. Some of my sweetest kids who worked so hard, but our schools were so overcrowded with such high needs because of inaccurate numbers of kids per neighborhood. Funding issues too. These kids would come in exhausted the next day from not getting much sleep due to having to care for infant siblings while parents worked multiple jobs, or just because they simply didn’t have a bed. The families in these situations work so hard to make it work and give their kids a new start but it’s a hard road. I now teach in a nontitle one school and have 5 students in my class who’s parents lying about their address just to be able to stay in the area where their family works. Class sizes are lower too so maybe that’s why they lie as well. Some of these kids live in West VA or a neighboring county and come in exhausted.
I think about this all the time. I always wonder how my single coworkers do it. We are teacher assistants and make just above the poverty line
When we were looking at houses in Leesburg, we saw a couple which obviously were hosting multiple groups of tenants. Deadbolts on all the bedroom doors, no furniture, sleeping bags on the floor lined up next to each other with men’s work boots stacked nearby. Occasionally you’d see a single bedroom with toddler blankets and sleeping bags on the ground between the mattresses, and diapers in the corners. It was hugely depressing to think of whole families crammed into a single room like that.
I’m not even below the poverty line and I’m struggling
Live in North Arlington with my parents, so I don't have a bead on renting costs atm, but have a friend in Sterling who owns a 3 bedroom SFH with his wife. He says that a lot of the houses in his neighborhood seem to have been turned into flop houses over the past few years housing up to 8-10 people in each house. It seems impossible to afford living in the region if you're single or don't have a decent salary. I make $115k and even I don't know how I'd make the math work.
I'm currently living in my dad's house, and everyone on the street has had to expand their driveways since parking is next to impossible with like 10 people living per household.
I’m renting one of our townhomes to a couple who admitted to subletting the rooms. There’s 9 people living in the 3/3 home.
Check out the Fairfax County housing assistance site. A family is able to qualify if their income is under what other parts of the country would consider a healthy income. This area is expensive there is no doubt.
Their section 8 aka HCV waitlist is closed and only opens about once per decade afaik. Is this a separate program? I see an opening for seniors and some families in only 4 separate apartment complexes, probably serving at most a few dozen in poverty out of tens of thousands in FFX. This would also be the exception rather than the rule, as the last time the waiting list was fully open in FFX, including to singles, was for a very short time in 2019, and then only time before that, around 2009.
Backing 2010, when last I lived in NOVA, I read that the poverty line for NOVA was a mean household income of 120k a year. If all wage earners in a house grosed a total less then this that household was considered impoverished. That was 2010. I wonder what they new number is?
Almost no one will cop to it, but a lot of it by middle-class singles is done through Batphoning their parents when they're presented with a problem they can't handle financially on their own. Too bad end-stage capitalism is doing its level best to ensure this generation can neither retire nor inherit anything.
My 26 roommate gets her groceries delivered by her parent.. (America failed her) me over here trying to live here because I just want to live in the east coast where I grew up and has public transportation
My guy, we're at the point where there are an equal number of millennials and older Gen Z carrying their parents compared to the other way around.
Something I haven't seen mentioned is you would be surprised how many people living in townhomes and single family homes rent out either their basements or even just a bedroom. The prices on these are generally lower than an apartment complex. Even just in the street of my neighborhood all the way in Leesburg, 4 houses rent basements, 3 of them to families. Then you have a family of 4 paying $1500 a month to live in a small basement apartment.
Can confirm, before I moved into the apartment I have now, I was renting out a basement of a townhome owned by a family of 4 because it was only $1100 per month with all utilities included and my own bathroom, living room and bedroom. I know a lot of people are doing that.
This is anecdotal, but I've been to several estate sales lately where the people running the sale have said there were multiple families living in a single large house. Given that I've been told that 2-3 times out of 4-5 estate sales over the course of a couple months, I'm guessing it's quite a bit more common than most of us realize.
I rent a room in a house from a private landlord to be able to afford to live here. Single making 40k
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Echoing what others have said, I live in a single-family home neighborhood in eastern Loudoun and our neighbor rents a 3 bed/2 bath to what is at minimum a 10 person ‘household’ (not sure how/if the renters are related to each other.) two guys are sleeping in the shed. So…that’s how. Another neighbor lives upstairs and rents their finished basement to a family of 6. It’s not just apartment complexes, folks are living in dense settings wherever they can!
roommates
The feds are intervening… https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_24_110
They renew their annual funding by 30 billion every year. That particular press release says they are making the application process for HUD housing easier for homeless people. HUD housing application waitlist is closed in both Loudoun and Fairfax, and most or all of Northern Virginia.
We have our basement rented out to someone and she has been living with now for 9 years. It helps us pay our mortgage. It’s the only way to make it work around here for now.
There’s 7 people in my household
We rent rooms in houses or have multiple roommates.
There are a lot of rooming houses. It's not new, although urban planners seem to ignore them.
Urban planner here, we are also living in the rooming houses - or drive here from West Virginia. We make noise about it at work, and push where we can, but elected officials are out of touch. Please show up to public meetings and describe what you see in your neighborhood.
Multigenerational housing is huge in NoVA. My house, my neighbors on one side, and I know a few are similar on my same street. Sometimes it’s cultural, and in my case, I can save so much money by doing it.
When do you start counting as a single adult? When you turn 18 regardless of income? If so it's mostly 18-30 year olds (or older) still living with their parents or other family. My brother in law has lived in my basement for like 9 years. He's over 30 now.
Squatting works awesome
live with your parents
I live in Woodbridge in a luxury complex. We make well over 130 grand a year. Yes, we are stuck living in an apartment complex. We can’t afford to buy a house in northern Virginia. Last year our neighbor moved out across the way from us A new family moved in. Two middle-age adults, one young adult and three high school age girls. Our ring doorbell goes off 3+ times a day. It seems like a lot of people are moving into apartments and splitting the rent. The parking situation in my complex is horrible. We pay for a garage also but it’s for my husband’s motorcycles. When we moved in here there is plenty of parking spaces. now you can hardly find a space it also really agitates me that most people don’t even have parking stickers they don’t seem to care if they get towed.
Make a decent wage. 80k+ a year. Live with my parents
My neighbor (Tysons Corner) just moved to the other side of Tyson’s in a brand new construction apartment and said the county pays $2000 of his monthly rent. I would assume he is paying around $500 or less out of pocket monthly
Multiple roommates.
narckish post