Building more housing isn’t enough to tackle the affordability crisis for those with lower incomes.
That’s one of the messages from a wide-ranging discussion on the state of Virginia’s housing from the Hampton Roads Social Justice Conference at Christopher Newport University, which began Tuesday and runs through Wednesday.
A push to loosen zoning laws and allow the construction of more units per lot is one of the most visible current housing reform efforts.
Developers and advocates such as the YIMBY chapters popping up across the state argue that the No. 1 way to make housing cheaper is to build more.
But leaving it to the for-profit market won’t help those at the bottom of the economic ladder, said Ben Teresa, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and founder of the RVA Eviction Lab.
“We need a plan for the most vulnerable, and we need a plan for those who will not be served by this abundance agenda,” Teresa said during a panel discussion. “And that means enforcement. That means thinking about the conditions that create these really tight rental markets.”
Teresa said there’s no question there’s a housing shortage, but that’s the starting point on solving housing access problems, not the silver bullet solution.
Regina Cheney with the statewide advocacy group HOME of Virginia said building more can help, but only if there are ordinances to ensure that some percentage of the units built are set aside for those with low incomes.
But availability isn’t the only barrier, Cheney said.
Many who receive housing choice vouchers — formerly known as Section 8 assistance — get turned away by landlords because of where their rent is coming from. That violates the state’s ban on source-of-income discrimination.
Disability discrimination “has always been the top number of complaints that we receive,” Cheney said. “Race used to be No. 2, now it is source-of-income because of the discrimination against families who have housing choice vouchers and race has now gone down to No. 3.”
Sarah Black is the deputy director of Legal Aid of Eastern Virginia. She said many of Legal Aid’s clients face de facto discrimination, even when Norfolk’s housing authority gives them vouchers paying above the standard rate.
Things such as bad credit or previous eviction records often stand between renters and housing.
“If you put yourself on the Housing Choice Voucher list, chances are you are housing unstable … so, naturally, you might have a checkered rental history before you come into the program, and to have that held against you is very hard,” Black said.
But there are some bright points in the state’s housing landscape.
Teresa said evictions in Richmond are actually down below the levels before the pandemic, which surprised national researchers as evictions in cities elsewhere have skyrocketed.
Richmond, along with four other Hampton Roads cities, made headlines in 2018 when Princeton University’s Eviction Lab published a report listing it among the 10 cities in the nation with the most evictions.
Teresa credits longtime efforts to reform some basic practices of the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, such as taking tenants to court over small sums of money.
“Sixty-five percent of that difference was attributable to the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority alone. And I really think it's actually to the credit of our advocates, our service providers, who have been working for years in our public housing communities.”
