New Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s first-year housing agenda delivered new cash and new instruments for reasonably priced housing preservation, nevertheless it fell brief on the bundle’s largest supply-side proposal: a statewide push to permit multifamily housing by proper in lots of commercially zoned areas.
A pair of payments would have required native zoning codes to permit multifamily and mixed-use residential growth by proper throughout broad swaths of commercially zoned land. Supporters stated the strategy might convert underused strip malls, parking tons and workplace corridors into hundreds of flats with out case-by-case rezonings.
Each measures superior by the Home and Senate earlier than stalling amid objections from native governments and a few suburban lawmakers, who stated the proposal would erode native management over land-use choices and infrastructure planning.
The failure of the by-right proposal leaves Virginia’s housing affordability technique weighted towards subsidies and preservation, even because the state’s reasonably priced housing scarcity is estimated at a minimal of 300,000 houses.
Preservation and subsidy measures transfer ahead
Even with out the zoning overhaul, lawmakers accepted a number of elements of Spanberger’s housing bundle.
The Common Meeting handed a right-of-first-refusal framework for sponsored reasonably priced properties. The coverage offers localities an opportunity to step in when properties are susceptible to sale, permitting cities and counties to protect current reasonably priced models quite than see them convert to market-rate housing.
Lawmakers additionally accepted a revolving mortgage fund supposed to help mixed-income developments.
They expanded the Virginia Eviction Discount Program, directing extra funding towards protecting tenants housed.
Along with enabling laws for native reasonably priced housing applications, the measures present native governments with extra funding streams and administrative instruments to help reasonably priced housing efforts inside current zoning guidelines.
Native management issues derail zoning rewrite
Virginia — significantly Northern Virginia throughout the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. — has confronted sustained housing price pressures.
“As hire will increase proceed to outpace revenue development, one in three households in Virginia is housing price burdened,” the Virginia Housing Alliance stated in a 2025 report.
Supporters of the by-right payments argued that Virginia’s strict separation of business and residential makes use of limits housing manufacturing in job-rich areas.
Opponents countered {that a} statewide mandate would impose a “one-size-fits-all” strategy and constrain native choices about roads, colleges and utilities. Some suburban legislators additionally cited constituent issues about visitors and college crowding.
Native officers in Arlington County and Alexandria raised issues as nicely. Each jurisdictions have enacted native ordinances to permit extra “lacking center” housing, and each have confronted resident backlash and lawsuits.
By early March, the Senate successfully killed the Home invoice. With the session nearing its finish, there was no clear path to revive the measure this 12 months.
“Housing close to jobs would have been probably the most impactful invoice we might have handed on housing affordability,” Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg told a neighborhood radio station.
The Senate model was not taken up for a ultimate vote within the Home and was despatched again to committee, leaving open the likelihood that lawmakers revisit the difficulty in a later session.
