Hundreds of housing units have been created in Danville in the past few years, but there’s still a lack of temporary housing for people between homelessness and a permanent home, said Shakeva Frazier, executive director of Third Chance Housing.
Danville has been working to increase its housing stock across all categories as it faces an ongoing housing shortage. Still, Frazier said she has noticed increasing demand for a specific type of housing that is in low supply.
Transitional housing is temporary housing that allows people to stay for longer periods of time than a traditional homeless shelter. It offers resources like financial management, addiction services and housing education, and it’s meant to provide a step between homelessness and permanent housing.
Through her work with Third Chance Housing, a regional homelessness prevention and housing organization, Frazier began researching ways to create more transitional housing in Danville.
One problem: Danville didn’t have a zoning designation for transitional housing.
The city’s zoning code was written in 2004, and though it has seen smaller, piecemeal updates, there hasn’t been a thorough rewrite in that time.
“We wanted to house people and offer wraparound services, provide resources that were not in the code,” Frazier said. “You cannot legally have transitional housing without a zoning code for it.”
Danville has the House of Hope, a homeless shelter, and some smaller transitional developments, but nothing as large as what Frazier wanted to create.
“We knew on this magnitude, we had to do it the right way if we want to see it sustained,” Frazier said. “If we didn’t have a zoning code, we couldn’t do it.”
Luckily, and unbeknownst to Frazier, the city was in the process of overhauling its zoning code to bring it up to date. This was the perfect opportunity to advocate for a traditional housing designation, Frazier said.
“We caught it at the right time, because they were working on editing the code,” she said. “Had that not been happening, we might have had to go through a lot of rezoning.”
Zoning provides a way for local governments to regulate how land is used; it typically designates parts of a locality for compatible uses, like residential, agricultural, industrial and commercial.
Frazier and the Rev. Philip Campbell, pastor of Bibleway Cathedral in Danville found a building on the church’s campus that could be used for transitional housing. The pair met with city officials a few months ago about the potential to create transitional housing in a largely unused church building.
The rewritten zoning code went into effect this month — with a designation that includes transitional housing.
Housing has been one of the biggest changes in the rewritten zoning code, said Renee Burton, director of planning and zoning for the city.
And feedback from residents like Frazier and Campbell greatly influenced the rewrite, Burton said. The city held dozens of outreach meetings this year to gather resident input on what they wanted to see in the updated code.
“We made changes based on what people said,” Burton said. “We wanted to hear their voices, and we wanted to make sure that they could see the results of that.”
Marrying the zoning code and the comprehensive plan
Last year, Danville overhauled its comprehensive plan, a guiding document for a locality, through a long, community-driven process.
It’s natural for a zoning update to follow a comprehensive plan update, because the two documents work in lockstep with each other, Burton said.
“A comprehensive plan is kind of a road map for the future. You’re looking ahead 10 to 15 years,” Burton said. “The zoning code itself lays out regulations for the here and now for any uses that may be desired within the city.”
Comprehensive plans are long-range planning documents that suggest goals and strategies meant to guide future growth and development, she said. Zoning ordinances provide more specific regulations for how to achieve those goals.
The state mandates that comprehensive plans are revisited every five years, and they’re usually more thoroughly updated every 20 years, Burton said.
Danville’s growth had outpaced its comprehensive plan, necessitating a complete overhaul.
The city updated this document in 2024 through an effort called PLAN Danville, which engaged tens of thousands of community residents who shared feedback on what they’d like in the city’s future.
This was a more in-depth process than Danville had ever done before, and the time and effort was worth it to create a document that reflected the community, Burton said. The city embarked on a similar process for the zoning rewrite at the start of this year.
“It’s kind of a natural progression to go from the comprehensive plan to the zoning code,” Burton said. “We had 60 different outreach opportunities, from open houses to meetings specifically for the zoning code. … We’re estimating we talked to probably a little more than 1,000 people directly in this process.”
There’s been a lot of change in Danville since 2004, when the code was last updated. In 2004, the city’s economy was still powered by textile giant Dan River Mills. When the mill closed in 2006, about 14,000 people lost their jobs and the city experienced a period of economic decline.
Danville has worked to bounce back from this over the past decade, dedicating time and money to attracting industry, revitalizing its downtown and kickstarting economic and job growth. Now, the city is home to a casino resort, a U.S. Navy shipbuilding program and several domestic and international manufacturing companies.
“Our way of life has changed drastically in 20 years,” Burton said. “We’ve had to address uses in the zoning code that weren’t around in 2004.”
Transitional housing in the new code
Many of the zoning code changes relate to housing, Burton said. The city wants to continue to increase its housing capacity, and do that in a sustainable way.
The rewrite now addresses newer types of housing developments in Danville, including mixed-use housing and short-term rentals.
Guidelines for short-term rentals did not exist in the former zoning code because they were not popular in Danville in 2004. As this type of development became more prevalent, the city added an ordinance to the former code to address them, but the rewrite establishes a more concrete framework for short-term rentals, Burton said.
Allowance for transitional housing is also now included in the zoning code under a wider designation called Supportive Housing.
Supportive housing is described in the code as “a structure other than a single-family dwelling where more than four unrelated persons reside under supervision for special care, treatment, training or similar purposes on a temporary or permanent basis.”
This type of housing can exist in several zoning districts in the city, but only with a special-use permit. If a permit is approved, it could exist in urban, suburban and rural neighborhoods, commercial areas, and the River District.
It allows for a maximum density of 12 people, although density may be expanded with a special-use permit.
Frazier and Campbell envision a development that could house at least 40 people for up to six months.
“You’re not talking about someone coming in and moving all their furniture,” Frazier said. “But they’re getting their mental health needs met, workforce services are coming in, different organizations are coming in helping with food.”
Frazier said she and Campbell have already gotten studies of the space, a building that sits on Bibleway’s campus, and talked to a developer from Baltimore who is interested in the project.
The building has previously held community dinners and after-school programs for kids. Right now, most of the space is unused, Campbell said.
It’ll take a lot of community partners to make this project happen, but Bibleway has a good reputation in the city and already has the trust of much of the community, Frazier and Campbell said.
The church has a long history in Danville, serving as a primary meeting space for demonstrators during the city’s civil rights movement in the 1960s. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Bibleway that summer, and the church has routinely held clothes drives, food drives and other community programs, “going above and beyond” to serve the area in the years since, Campbell said.
The proposed project, which Campbell said he wants to see complete in two years, would be called the L.G. & Gloria Campbell Transitional Housing Development, after Campbell’s parents, who were civil rights activists and the founders of Bibleway.
“We have a place that’s shown integrity and long-standing commitment to this community, and that makes a difference,” Frazier said.
The location is close to a bus stop, which would allow easy access to transportation for people staying there, she said.
“We’re talking about a population of veterans, a population of people who are below the poverty line, who are sometimes unemployed,” Frazier said. “We want to give them that safety net…just trying to be that middle piece while they’re transitioning from whatever got them where they are to where they’re going.”
Having zoning in place to allow transitional housing will make it easier for other transitional housing developments in the city to come together as well, because there will be exact guidelines in place, Frazier said.
What else to expect in the new zoning code: user-friendliness and expansion of historic overlay
Another goal of the zoning code rewrite was to make it more user-friendly, Burton said. The new code includes graphics, tables and color coordination to make it easier to understand.
“Just like our comp plan, we always said we want this to be kitchen-table talk,” Burton said. “We wanted a language that everyone could comprehend and that they could share with others. Zoning isn’t always discussed around the table, but if you were to have that conversation, we wanted the language to empower you to feel like you could confidently talk about it and understand it.”
Graphics illustrate setbacks, facades and what different zoning designations look like.
“It allows for ease of comprehension, ease of use, so that you can look at that and say, ‘OK, this graphic is showing me exactly what a setback is. I’m not reading the language and trying to comprehend what it’s saying,’” Burton said.
The last major change in the new code is the creation of an architectural review overlay, which groups the North Main Business District in with other historic districts in the city, like the Old West End and the River District.
The overlay is designed to protect historic features and designated landmarks, preventing their destruction.
“The overlay also ensures that any new development or land use is compatible with the existing historic architecture,” the code document says.
Also, a new board will be formed to consider construction, exterior renovations and signs in all three of these districts. Previously, the Commission of Architectural Review did this work for only the Old West End and River District.
The new board, which is expected to become active in the spring, will consider the North Main Business District as well. This area is the city’s current target for revitalization, after the largely successful effort to revitalize the River District.
“Expanding that overlay to include the North Main Business District will encourage development and growth there,” Burton said.
Council approved the new code, which can be found here, at its Dec. 2 meeting. It took effect Jan. 1, with the exception of two final updates that will be added to the document in summer 2026.