Few things are as essential to addressing people’s concerns about affordability as bringing down the cost of housing.
Democrats campaigned hard on promises to address Virginia’s housing crisis and there are a lot of bills aimed at doing just that working their way through this year’s legislative session.
Broadly speaking, housing advocates are tackling two major areas of housing policy.
One is strengthening tenants’ rights by doing things like giving them more time to come up with what they owe their landlords. And the other is giving localities more options to increase the supply of affordable housing, and in some cases, putting more pressure on them at the state level to do so.
Some bills are facing more pushback than expected and not all are sailing through the General Assembly.
One reason for that has to do with the tension in Virginia between state and local authority.
As the housing crisis has worsened, some feel that localities should be doing more to address it, hence the need for the state to put pressure on them.
“We’ve been leaving it to localities to try to fix it,” said Laura Dobbs, director of policy at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (HOME of Virginia). “We have plenty who have been really good partners, increasing housing, but when it’s only a handful, it’s just not enough to make up for the huge hole we find ourselves in.”
