Virginia Dems pass slate of housing bills

As Virginia’s General Assembly legislation approaches the halfway point, lawmakers have passed measures to strengthen tenants’ rights and to increase the supply of affordable housing. 

Virginia Democrats in both Legislative chambers passed a number of bills this month to increase the supply of housing and support tenants’ rights. 

The Virginia Senate has  passed a slew of housing-related bills, including ones that extend the time tenants have before they can be evicted and give localities more zoning flexibility to increase affordable housing options. 

“This session, Senate Democrats are taking action to protect Virginians by increasing transparency, providing more notice for lease terminations, and ensuring eviction processes are fair,” Senate Democrats said in a statement Tuesday. 

Virginia House Democrats released a statement of their own Tuesday, touting their passage of “commonsense housing bills focused on lowering housing costs.” 

Those bills include House Bill 1005, which passed on Monday and bans unnecessary maintenance fees and requires landlords to accept payments by any lawful means, including check, debit or credit card, and cash. House Bill 1093, which caps excessive attorney fees when tenants catch up on rent before an eviction court date, also passed the House on Monday. 

A top priority for Virginia Democrats, House Bill 4, aims to help localities preserve their stock of affordable housing, passed in the House last week and has been referred to a Senate committee. It’s one of the bills Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger included on her list of “Affordable Virginia Agenda” legislation. 

“I look forward to continuing to work with General Assembly leadership to make sure I can sign every piece of our Affordable Virginia Agenda into law,” Spanberger said in a statement on Monday. 

Spanberger also included House Bill 15, which passed the House last week, and its Senate companion bill on that list: the legislation would extend the amount of time tenants have to respond to an eviction filing from five days to 14 days

Housing, the biggest monthly expense for most Americans, is one of the key ways that Americans are feeling the pinch of the high cost of living, and it’s a crisis in the US and Virginia that’s been years in the making. 

Virginia Democrats from the top of the ticket on down campaigned hard last year on making housing more affordable. 

Laura Dobbs, director of policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (HOME of Virginia), said housing is increasingly a “huge affordability problem.” 

“More and more people are feeling the squeeze is why it’s finally risen to be an election issue and finally something that hopefully the legislature actually does something about,” Dobbs said. 

Another bill, House Bill 854, passed in the House with unanimous, bipartisan support. It’s a technical bill, but essentially the legislation clarifies that localities can exempt nonprofits from paying real estate taxes on affordable housing properties they control. 

Isabel Mclain, director of policy and advocacy at the Virginia Housing Alliance, said the bill could have a big impact in localities that choose to act on it given that a lot of Virginia’s affordable housing is controlled by nonprofits. 

“We’ve seen property taxes increase a lot with all the inflation of recent years, and it’s causing a lot of our nonprofit housing providers to go in the red each year,” McLain said. ‘“And it means that they have less finances to cover resident services or do maintenance.”

Not every housing-related bill is seeing smooth sailing. 

A bill to protect the rights of unhoused people was put on hold for the second year in a row. House Bill 1394 would prevent localities from imposing a civil or criminal penalty on unhoused people for basic activities like resting or shielding themselves from the cold in public because they have nowhere else to go. 

McLain could not say why the bill struggled to gain traction, but guessed it’s possible larger concerns about state versus local authority could have been on lawmakers’ minds. 

But in the shadow of a 2024 US Supreme Court ruling that got rid of guardrails for how localities treat their unhoused population, it’s important to create state-level legal protections for people with no alternatives, McLain said.  

“We feel like it’s really important that in state code we recognize that people experiencing homelessness have the same rights to exist in public places, and that they, by existing, are not automatically a threat to safety,” McLain said.