Anyone who’s tried to buy a house in Virginia in recent years will tell you it's not easy. There aren’t many houses available, and that leads to inflated prices and bidding wars. But changes from state agencies and the legislature are giving some hope.
“We’re at a shortage on single-family homes," Delegate Carrie Coyner told Radio IQ after a meeting of the Virginia Housing Commission Tuesday morning. "It’s really hard to attract and keep young people and stay top for business.”
The meeting included a presentation by Virginia Association of Realtors and it painted a grim picture of the Commonwealth’s housing market now and into the future.
Beyond the need for affordable housing, the realtor group mathed out demand from those who want houses but can’t get them: Senior downsizers, long term renters, adult kids living with their parents. Currently, they estimate we’re 187,000 units short. But…
“At the current pace of construction, we’re likely to see that deficit increase to 214,000 in the next half a decade,” Virginia Realtor’s Ryan Price told the committee. He stressed deregulation and zoning reform was needed to avoid catastrophe.
Andrew Clark with the Virginia Home Builders Association said Governor Glenn Youngkin and Democrats in the legislature have already gotten things off to a good start.
But many of those changes, including consolidating stormwater guidance from nine, sometimes conflicting documents into one handbook, streamlining the planning commission administrative processes and shortening timeframes for local approvals of projects, are just now starting to go into effect.
“In reality it's a culmination of a lot of small, different things coming together to make the process more efficient, more streamlined, more predictable,” Clark said.
Clark predicted these changes will see impacts soon, but it’s the next governor who will have to continue the effort to make sure Virginia can meet the demand.
But there’s also Coyner’s point about competitiveness. Comparisons to North Carolina’s recent housing boom were often mentioned during Tuesday’s meeting.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographic researcher with UVA's Weldon Cooper Center also details how migration in and around Virginia has changed in recent years. He said folks were leaving densely populated Northern Virginia and moving south, with Roanoke, Richmond and other cities outside the beltway making room for them as remote work continues.
Lombard told the committee that data on remote work was hard to find but an assessment from December of last year suggested about 24,000 remote workers moved into rural parts of Virginia between 2019 and 2023.
“That’s equivalent to the Pentagon moving to rural Virginia,” he said. And business creation has increased in rural counties too: “it’s a trend across the country, business creation in rural areas despite high interest rates.”
Delegate Dave Bulova asked about numbers that suggested his NOVA district was losing residents, but it wasn't dropping home sale values.
“The population is aging rapidly but household size is shrinking," Lombard said, "There’s a demand for housing but the population isn’t growing. You can do infill, apartments, but they’re not in high demand."
"NOVA is building less single-family homes, few families will live in apartments,” he added. “As millennials grow families they want homes, that doesn’t push for more density.”
Martin Johnson with Virginia Realtors said fixing the issue is going to require “getting people around the table.”
“Whoever is gonna be the next governor has to meet with House and Senate leadership to make sure housing is a focal point from an economic competitiveness and job creation perspective,” he said. “What we’re seeing is economic factors around competitiveness that are putting us at a disadvantage.”
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
