Happy New Year (Kind Of)

Happy New Year (Kind Of)
By Tommy Herbert, VAMA Manager of Government Affairs

Rosh Hashanah, the New Year in the Jewish faith, begins on September 25th this year. The Chinese lunar New Year celebration, the “Spring Festival,” or Chūnjié, occurred on February 1 this year, and will return next January 22. There are many peoples and cultures across the world that choose to ignore Pope Gregory XIII, who in 1582 became the last figure to modify the 12-month calendar that most of the Western world still use today. The system he produced still bears his name; the Gregorian Calendar.

But in Virginia, in the context of our laws and government, for most intents or purposes, the first day of the new year is July 1. That is the day that most laws that were previously passed by Virginia’s General Assembly the previous January and February go into effect. Looking out over a new “year” in Virginia, we are also faced with new questions about policy and the future of apartment housing in the Commonwealth.

While this year’s changes to the VRLTA were sparse, the expiration of Virginia’s previous emergency pandemic eviction process with the expiring State Budget constitutes the biggest operational change that came on July 1. There are no more mandatory payment plan requirements, no more requirements to apply for rent relief, and Virginia’s housing providers move back to a 5-day notice to pay or quit timeline. VAMA has produced a suite of documents to help both CARES Act-covered and non-CARES communities in Virginia keep up with these changes in the law, which members can find here.

This new year also brings us to a crossroads of history. We are emerging from a global crisis unseen for almost exactly a century, which precipitated massive movement of people that disrupted a trend in demography of human concentration in cities that had been going strong for nearly a decade. What that meant over the pandemic was a tight single-family market full of fleeing urbanites seeking space and calm in the suburbs or exurbs. Now, there are indications that those trends are reversing again to resemble pre-pandemic attitudes, even if city-seekers now target smaller locales than NYC or LA. With the return to normal housing operations in Virginia, which houses many such destinations, hopefully a natural level of “churn” in the market can resume and take some of the pressure of demand off of rising rents.

But we need to be thinking over the long-term and embracing the advances and the changes that will help the housing industry actually provide the homes that this new urban influx demands. How can modular construction bring down total building costs? What impact will 3D printing have on the single-family market as it scales up? These are just a couple of the questions that a new generation of housing providers will be faced with. We know that making housing affordable is not a matter of manipulating the operation of current supply but in creating enough new supply that competition returns to the market.

As we emerge into these new conversations from the last three years of government intrusion into the operation of housing, these look like hopeful questions. With COVID in the rear-view mirror, and a host of new goals for our communities, our residents, and our teams, the new (old) year seems very bright.