Category: Housing
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General Assembly Acts to Curb Evictions
by Richard Hall-Sizemore Virginia has made another “top-10 in the nation” list. But this one is not one to be celebrated. Last spring, using national eviction data, researchers at Princeton University released eviction rate rankings of large cities in the United States. Cities in Virginia comprised five of the ten cities with the highest eviction…
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Senate Addresses Supply of Affordable Housing
One in three households in the state spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing, reports the Virginia Mercury. The apartment industry argues that housing will become unaffordable for even more as the state’s population grows faster than the housing supply. If I were a middle-class Virginian most of whose net worth was…
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A Crime-Fighting Experiment at Gilpin Court
The Attorney General’s office is funding an interesting social experiment. On the theory that fighting crime requires addressing root causes over and above actually, uh, fighting crime, the AG is providing $1 million to fund programs designed to improve health, education and economic outcomes and strengthen neighborhood ties at the City of Richmond’s largest housing…
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Dissecting Virginia’s Amazon Deal
Virginia has committed to investing a sum unprecedented for an economic development deal in the Commonwealth — roughly $2.5 billion in state and local dollars to bring Amazon, Inc. to Northern Virginia. In a presentation to the House Appropriations Committee yesterday, Stephen Moret, CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) provided a detailed account…
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Market-Based Social Justice: Roll Back Zoning Restrictions on Housing Supply
Unaffordable housing is a problem for more Virginians today than it was during the 2000s housing bubble. Median rent has increased at three times the rate of incomes since the end of the recession, says Hamilton Lombard with the Demographics Research Group at UVa on the StatChat blog. Among Virginians earning between $35,000 and $75,000…
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“Government Failure” in the Housing Market
Something is seriously out of whack here. The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) has a vision — a commendable one, I might add — of demolishing the city’s six public housing projects to end concentrated pockets of poverty, crime, substance abuse and social dysfunction. But it turns out that the price of developing new…
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Would an Eviction-Diversion Program Help or Hurt?
Renters-rights defenders and landlord advocates may be reaching common ground on how to reduce the rate of evictions in Richmond: Create an eviction diversion program. Reports Ned Oliver in the inaugural edition of the Virginia Mercury: Planning is still in its early stages, said [Martin Wegbreit, director of litigation at the Central Virginia Legal Aid…
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Use the Tenant’s Money to Cure the Tenant’s Rent Shortfall
by Martin Wegbreit Recently, Virginia drew national attention for reportedly high eviction rates, especially in central Virginia and Hampton Roads. This has inspired many efforts to address the issue. These include a Campaign to Reduce Evictions, an evictions workgroup at the Virginia Housing Commission, and a possible Eviction Diversion Program in Richmond and elsewhere. These…
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A Partial Defense of RRHA Eviction Policies
I never thought I’d find myself defending the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA), which I criticized last year for running up a $150 million maintenance backlog on its 4,000 public housing units. But the wheel of public policy debate turns in unexpected ways. Now, RRHA is being dinged for its high eviction rates. Here’s…
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Tenant-Rights Activists, Meet the Housing Shortage
The debate over tenant evictions is gaining traction now that the Virginia Housing Commission has taken up the issue. Two concrete proposals were put before the Commission during a Tuesday hearing. One would extend the time from five days to two weeks before rent is declared to be late. A second would give tenants more time…
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Proceed Cautiously with Eviction Reforms
Carlos Lopez, a Los Angeles landscaper, inherited a house and let it out to rent. When the original tenant went to jail, a woman Lopez had never seen before was occupying the premises and refusing to pay any rent. He engaged an attorney to evict her. The squatter lawyered up, too, obtaining free legal services…
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Virginia Eviction Laws Stacked Against the Poor
by Marc Lockhart Last Tuesday I joined more than 100 people for the inaugural meeting of the Campaign to Reduce Evictions (CARE), sponsored by the Virginia Poverty Law Center, at First Baptist Church in Richmond. We assembled for two hours to investigate why Richmond has the second highest eviction rate in the country among large…
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Golden Goose to Emerald City: Drop Dead
By Stephen D. Haner The brief snippet on the telly that caught my attention showed a massive Seattle office building being developed by Amazon, and the report was that construction is slowing because the company might start reducing its footprint and headcount in the Emerald City of Oz due to yet another Occupy Wall Street-inspired…
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Henrico’s Housing Whack-a-Mole
Henrico County, following the priorities of its new Democratic Party majority on the Board of Supervisors, has created a $2 million fund to head off neighborhood blight by financing renovations and redevelopment of the county’s aging housing stock, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. As an example of what the fund can do, county officials pointed to…
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Virginia’s Housing Shortfall
Between 2000 and 2015, 23 states fell 7.3 million units short of meeting the housing needs of their growing populations — equivalent to about 7.3% of the housing stock of the United States, according to a new study, “Housing Underproduction in the U.S.,” published by the Up for Growth Coalition. Although not the worst offender,…