Virginia will help fund housing construction alongside major business development to help address growing housing costs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Thursday.
Youngkin said the state’s successfully attracting businesses with state funding to help localities prepare sites for development — but that’s only part of the equation.
“Imagine announcing 500 new jobs in a community that doesn’t have the housing to provide 500 new great job-seekers,” the governor told a crowd at the Governor’s Housing Conference in Virginia Beach.
The state desperately needs to ramp up housing supply to battle rising costs, he said. A 2021 state study cited a shortage of 200,000 affordable housing units.
The new Workforce Housing Initiative, created by an executive order Youngkin issued Thursday, will spend $75 million over the next five years to help local governments build up to 5,000 housing units specifically for workers near large employers.
The order also mandates that any localities seeking funding through Youngkin’s flagship economic development program, the Virginia Business Ready Sites program, include their own housing plan to show that the surrounding area either can or has plans to be able to handle any new employees attracted by economic development efforts.
“Part of our evaluation for sites that are going to receive money … is going to be having a housing plan,” Youngkin said. “It doesn’t mean you have to go execute it, you just have to have a plan and we’ll go work on it together.”
Youngkin made the announcement in Virginia Beach - a city where studies show many employees can’t afford to live where they work.
