Virginia House Delegate Ibraheem Samirah, who represents parts of Fairfax and Loudoun counties, has introduced a bill that would legalize duplex homes across the commonwealth in any area currently zoned for single-family housing.

Like much of the region, Virginia faces a dire shortage of affordable homes, and Amazon’s arrival in the Crystal City area could make the crunch even worse in the years to come. Area politicians are very interested in finding ways to address this shortage.

Samirah explained his bills in a Twitter thread:

Today I introduced six new bills dealing with affordable housing supply and exclusionary zoning practices.



The most impactful bill, HB152, would legalize two-unit housing types on any lot zoned for single-family use only.



More in my thread here pic.twitter.com/tIuAnnsFWG — Delegate Ibraheem Samirah (@IbraheemSamirah) December 19, 2019

He explained:

Across the country, there is a shortage of affordable units that is putting a squeeze on working families and contributing to rises in rents for existing units. Unfortunately, the kind of dense “middle housing” that could be built to alleviate the shortage is banned on most lots. Because middle housing is what’s most affordable for low-income people and people of color, banning that housing in well-off neighborhoods chalks up to modern-day redlining, locking folks out of areas with better access to schools, jobs, transit, and other services and amenities. Single-family zoning is also the least efficient way to organize communities, leading to a much larger carbon footprint. Upzoning would make it easier to cluster around environmentally-friendly transit options and reduce commutes by allowing you to find housing closer to a job. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution and this alone will not fix our housing shortage. We need $$ investments in low-income housing. We also need to start looking at solutions like rent control and anti-gouging that tackle the greed in rental markets. I will certainly get pushback for this. Some will call it “state overreach.” Some will express anxiety about neighborhood change. Some may even say that the supply issue doesn’t exist. But the research is clear: zoning is a barrier to more housing and integrated communities. You can read all six of my proposed bills at the link here. They are HB147 through HB152. I look forward to making the case for this legislation in session and working with anyone who is serious about making housing more affordable to get it passed.

Here’s what our Housing Program Organizer, Alex Baca, has to say about Samirah’s proposal:

Del. Samirah’s bill represents a decently fair way to reform single-family zoning because it’s a statewide effort. Zoning can be used to manipulate the value of space; this system depends on adjacent space having some sort of varying quality. Smoothing this out statewide ensures that the baseline is uniform across the board. That that baseline is a duplex, and not a single-family home, is critical, because there’s no good reason for single-family zoning to be on any jurisdiction’s books. Here are a few reasons why. First, single-family zoning is not environmentally sound. When you’re only allowed to build single-family homes in an area, you can only build out, so accommodating more people necessarily leads to more sprawl. Sprawl, in turn, leads to more car trips and other environmentally destructive outcomes. Plus, only allowing single-family homes makes it harder than necessary to build affordable housing. Capital-A, subsidized affordable housing is nearly always a multifamily building, which is illegal in places zoned solely for single-family homes. Even housing with a more middle-of-the-road price tag is made more expensive when we require that houses built in certain areas always be single-family structures. More than that, its history is ugly. Single-family zoning in America originated to segregate types of buildings as a proxy for segregating people, mostly by race and income. We do not need words in our laws today that continue to enable patterns that echo that history.

Readers: What do you think about the bill?