To: Virginia General Assembly
From: [Your Name]

Organizations across Virginia are coming together to support bipartisan legislation that will ensure all Virginians have a place to call home. Everyone must have access to a safe, affordable home near jobs, services, and opportunity. Achieving this vision requires ending the housing shortage across Virginia.

Our coalition will work to advance legislation in the 2024 session of the Virginia General Assembly that removes barriers to creating more housing in communities across Virginia, including legislation to legalize backyard cottages, expand workforce and affordable housing near job centers, allow faith institutions and schools to provide needed homes, and cut red tape to create more family-sized apartments.

Our Principles
- Every Virginian should be able to find a home they can afford. We all have the fundamental right to housing, to opportunity, and to affordability;

- People should be able to find homes near jobs, amenities, good schools, and transit;

- Building more homes of different sizes, values, and types will lower the cost to rent and to own;

- By ending Virginia’s housing shortage, we can create a more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable future for Virginia;

- Our housing markets and systemic challenges are regional, and we need the state to take action to ensure more Virginians can find a place to call home.

The Problem
Virginia is facing a severe shortage of housing all across the state that is harming our economy and the livelihood of our communities. This shortage is most severe in high-opportunity job centers, where rising housing costs are leaving too little money for the basics like food, medicine, and transportation costs. Even the cheapest housing available is becoming too expensive for the lowest income earners, contributing to rising homelessness and housing instability. Meanwhile, what housing does exist is far from jobs and amenities, leading to long car commutes, needless pollution, and traffic gridlock.

The housing shortage is failing Virginians at every stage of life: seniors, empty-nesters, young families, and young professionals–all are struggling to find affordable housing that meets their needs. And these impacts are even worse for minority groups. Zoning, lot-size, and other traditional housing limitation measures have historically disenfranchised communities of color, which has only increased the inequality of housing access in Virginia and across the country.

Our Solution and Legislative Agenda
The housing shortage persists in large part because of exclusionary zoning and land use rules designed to prevent the construction of smaller and less expensive home types. With housing needs in our community reaching a critical level, it is time for the state to take action. More homes in our communities is too important an issue to leave to local municipalities any longer.

We are calling on the Virginia General Assembly to pass four bills in 2024:

1. Allow more housing near jobs by legalizing apartments and mixed-use buildings in commercial areas, including near offices and retail.

2. Legalize accessory dwellings aka ‘granny flats’ and make it easy for homeowners to build and rent them out in their backyards, and accommodate family members.

3. Build more affordable housing where it is most needed by allowing churches to build affordable housing on their land through a streamlined process.

4. Build more family size apartment buildings by legalizing a common apartment building type in the rest of the world - the single stair apartment to six stories.

By legalizing homes of all shapes and sizes, especially in places with existing jobs and infrastructure, Virginia can improve residents’ quality of life, grow more jobs and population, reduce the inconvenience and impact of long commutes, reduce pollution from transportation and buildings, boost the economy in older walkable downtowns and suburbs, and increase access to housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods and school districts for all Virginians.