After Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s term began just a few short months ago in January, she quickly got to work with the Democratic majorities in the Virginia Legislature to deliver for the people of the Commonwealth.

There were over 1300 unique bills and resolutions passed, 137 amended by the governor, and 6 vetoed, and we’ve conducted an analysis of all of them.

Despite national Republican’s senseless charges against the Governor, her record speaks for itself.

Securing Virginians’ Civil Rights

Three key constitutional amendments are headed to voters this fall:

• Reproductive freedom - establishes a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, restoring the Roe standard.

• Marriage equality - repeals Virginia's old constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage and requires equal treatment of marriages between any two adults regardless of sex, gender, or race.

• Right to vote and felon re-enfranchisement - makes voting a fundamental right and automatically restores voting rights upon release from incarceration, eliminating the current requirement that a person convicted of a felony petition the Governor.

Protecting and Supporting Workers

• $15 minimum wage - Raises the rate to $15.00 by Jan. 1, 2028, then indexes it to CPI annually starting 2029. Lifts pay for hundreds of thousands of Virginians and protects buying power against inflation going forward.

• End of farm-worker minimum wage exclusion - Effective Jan. 1, 2027. Closes a Jim Crow-era carve-out that has kept farm workers, many immigrants and people of color, earning low wages.

• $48/week unemployment benefits increase - Meaningfully raises a benefit that hadn’t kept pace with rents or grocery prices, helping laid-off workers stay housed and fed during job searches.

• First-responder PTSD workers’ compensation expansion - Covers incidents without a physical injury for police and firefighters. Recognizes that psychological trauma from on-duty incidents is a real injury and gives first responders access to treatment without fighting for it.

• State retirement savings program expansion - Brings retirement-savings access to workers at small businesses who currently have no employer-sponsored option.

• Employee Child Care Assistance Program - Matches employer contributions to employees’ child care costs. Lowers a major barrier to working for parents, especially mothers.

Fighting Against Gun Violence

• Firearm industry standards of conduct - Creates the ability to sue gun manufacturers for negligence or causing a public nuisance. Gives victims and the state legal options against irresponsible gun-industry practices that contribute to trafficking.

• Ghost gun ban - Strengthens bans on plastic and unserialized firearms, with felony penalties for repeat offenses. Closes a loophole that has let people assemble untraceable weapons at home, making it harder for police to solve gun crimes.

• Domestic violence firearm prohibition expansion - Adds dating partners and recent cohabitants and closes the boyfriend loophole, a major risk factor in domestic violence homicides, which are overwhelmingly committed with firearms.

• Locked storage of guns in unattended cars - Handguns must be in a locked case. Reduces the supply of stolen guns, since vehicle break-ins are now one of the largest sources of firearms used in subsequent crimes.

• Annual school safe gun storage parent messaging - For firearms and prescription drugs. Cuts youth suicides and accidental shootings, which research consistently shows are reduced by safe-storage awareness.

• Higher-ed campus carry tightening - Narrows the firearm-ban exemption to weapons used as part of curriculum. Keeps Virginia’s college campuses safer for students, faculty, and staff.

• Firearm transfer rules - Requires transferees to be over 21 and not living with the prohibited person. Prevents domestic-violence offenders from regaining quick access to firearms by handing them to a roommate or younger relative.

Supporting Tenant and Housing Rights

• Local right to purchase subsidized housing - To preserve affordability. Let’s cities and counties save existing affordable units before they’re sold and converted to market-rate, addressing Virginia’s affordable-housing crisis at far lower cost than building new.

• 14-day waiting period before eviction - Tripled from the previous 5 days. Gives families a realistic window to catch up on rent, get paid, or arrange assistance, preventing avoidable evictions.

• Local enforcement of habitability standards - Localities can sue landlords on tenants’ behalf for fire-hazard or habitability violations. Empowers cities and counties to hold landlords accountable when individual tenants can’t afford to litigate.

• Central A/C as an essential service - Under the Landlord and Tenant Act. Recognizes that during Virginia’s increasingly hot summers, A/C is a health-and-safety issue, especially for elderly and vulnerable tenants.

• Manufactured home park protections and resident rights - When parks are sold. Protects roughly 200,000 Virginians in manufactured housing from displacement when private equity buyers acquire parks and dramatically raise rents.

• Eviction Reduction Program - Funds initiatives that have been shown to keep families housed at a fraction of the cost of post-eviction homelessness response.

• Quicker approvals for affordable housing - Cuts months and tens of thousands of dollars off the development process for income-restricted housing, helping more get built.

• Removal of cap on local homeownership grants for public employees - Helps teachers, deputies, and other public workers afford to live in the communities they serve.

• Manufactured housing legalized by right - Increases access to housing across the state for residents choosing to buy, rent, or live in manufactured homes.

• Legalizing affordable housing on church property - Allows churches to use vacant space to provide more housing options.

• Reducing unnecessary parking restrictions - Reduces barriers to constructing housing based on required number of parking spaces.

Criminal Justice Reforms

• 10-year time limit on court fines and costs - Slashed from 60 (circuit) and 30 (district) years and bars collection during incarceration. Stops a debt trap that has kept Virginians in court debt.

• Mandatory community-service fine credit program - Credits work performed while incarcerated. Lets indigent defendants resolve their court debt without facing endless penalties they cannot pay.

• Shortened probation for good conduct - Criteria include education, employment, treatment, housing. Frees up probation officers to focus on people who need supervision and rewards individuals doing rehabilitation work.

• Parole eligibility restoration - Corrects an injustice for hundreds of Virginians whose juries handed down longer sentences under a mistaken assumption that parole would soften them.

• Earned sentence credits for detention before trial - Effective July 2028. Stops penalizing people who couldn’t afford bail by making sure their pretrial time counts toward sentence reduction.

• Crime of suicide abolished - Removes an archaic statute whose existence creates legal complications for survivors and life-insurance claims.

• Prisoner visitation standards - Minimum two-hour visits, posted dress codes, denial-review processes. Maintaining family contact is one of the strongest predictors of successful reentry and lower recidivism, which makes Virginia communities safer.

• Inmate access to legal counsel standards - Protects basic constitutional rights and reduces wrongful convictions, which save the state both money and reputation.

• Restorative discipline before suspension/expulsion - Reduces the school-to-prison pipeline and keeps students in classrooms learning.

• Limits on juvenile cell confinement - Solitary confinement causes lasting psychological harm to developing brains. Reducing it improves rehabilitation outcomes and protects the long-term mental health of incarcerated youth.

• Felony for masked impersonation of a police officer - Protects Virginians from being kidnapped or extorted by criminals posing as anonymous officers.

• New sexual extortion offense - Expansion of the unlawful-image-creation crime. Gives prosecutors and victims tools to address the explosion of sextortion cases.

  ---

Access to Healthcare

• Statutory right to contraception - Locks in access to birth control regardless of federal-court rulings or future state-level rollbacks.

• End of tobacco-use health insurance surcharges - Removes a penalty, up to 50% higher premiums, that has priced many smokers out of coverage entirely.

• Reinsurance program extension - Seeks Affordable Care Act waiver extension. Keeps individual-market insurance premiums down for the roughly 350,000 Virginians who buy their own coverage.

• Tiered prescription drug cost-sharing caps - Stops the practice of catastrophic out-of-pocket costs for life-saving medications like insulin, asthma inhalers, and cancer drugs.

• Physician review required for prior-authorization denials - Stops insurance companies from rejecting medically necessary care via algorithm or non-clinical staff.

• In-network referral protections - Bars insurer restrictions on referrals to in-network labs/pathology. Lets your doctor send your bloodwork to the lab they trust.

• Coverage for early refills of prescription eye drops - Ensures patients with glaucoma and other vision-threatening conditions have medication.

• Maternal mental health screening coverage - No prior authorization for treatment drugs absent safety concerns. Addresses a leading cause of maternal mortality, postpartum depression and related conditions.

• Severe Maternal Morbidity Surveillance and Review Program - Helps Virginia identify why mothers, especially Black mothers, are dying or suffering near-fatal complications at high rates, so the state can fix it.

• Hospital administration of medical cannabis oil - Lets terminally ill and chronically ill patients continue their prescribed treatment when hospitalized.

• Psilocybin rescheduling trigger - Positions Virginia to immediately offer breakthrough mental-health treatments for depression and PTSD as soon as they’re federally approved.

• HIV PrEP insurance discrimination ban - Removes a penalty that has discouraged at-risk Virginians from taking a medication that prevents HIV transmission.

• Sickle Cell Coordinated Access Network - Improves care for an estimated 5,000+ Virginians with a serious genetic disease that has long been under treated.

  ---

  Energy, Data Centers, and Environment

  

• Data center sound-impact site assessments - Protects neighborhoods, particularly in Northern Virginia, from the constant industrial humming that’s degraded quality of life and home values near new data centers.

• Data center water-use disclosure - Suppliers must separately report water deliveries. Gives Virginians visibility into how much of their drinking water is being consumed by data center cooling.

• Data center waste-heat reuse study - Directed to the Department of Energy. Could turn an environmental cost into a benefit by capturing data-center waste heat for nearby buildings, greenhouses, or district heating.

• Emissions cap on data-center backup generators - Cuts diesel pollution near data centers, where residents have complained about air quality during testing and outage periods.

• Infrastructure payments by large energy customers - Forces the largest power consumers to absorb more of the grid burden they create, rather than passing infrastructure costs onto residential ratepayers.

• Carbon trading program re-establishment - Re-creates Virginia’s market-based carbon trading program. Restores funding for coastal flood protection and low-income energy efficiency.

• Customer funded utility improvements overhaul - Forces utilities to seriously evaluate cheaper, faster alternatives to building expensive new transmission lines that ratepayers fund.

• In-state Renewable Energy Certificates requirements - Keeps clean-energy investment dollars in Virginia, supporting in-state jobs and tax base rather than buying credits from out-of-state projects.

• Virtual power plant authorization - Lets homeowners with batteries and smart appliances earn money by helping balance the grid.

• Accelerated clean energy buyer framework - Helps large employers buy renewable energy more easily.

• Rooftop solar authority for parking lots - Generates clean power on already-paved land while shading cars.

• Underground transmission lines pilot expansion - Lets communities choose to spare scenic views, property values, and historic landscapes from massive overhead transmission lines, with a fair cost-sharing arrangement.

• Smart Solar Permitting Platform - Cuts months off rooftop solar installation timelines, lowering the cost of going solar for homeowners.

• Local tree canopy preservation expansion - Protects the urban tree cover that reduces summer cooling costs, captures stormwater, and improves air quality.

• PFAS testing of sewage sludge - Stops forever chemicals from being spread on farmland and contaminating groundwater and food.

Voting Rights

• Election certification duty - Prevents partisan local officials from refusing to certify legitimate election results.

• Extended absentee ballot receipt deadline - From noon to 5:00 p.m. on the third day after Election Day. Gives mail-in voters a fairer window for postal delivery.

• Automatic voter registration study - Lays the groundwork for a more accurate, complete voter roll with less administrative cost and burden on individual citizens.

• Voter registration bribery ban - Closes a loophole and reinforces that voter registration is a not-for-profit.

• Broadened emergency absentee ballot eligibility - Ensures that hospitalization, family emergencies, or last-minute crises don’t keep Virginians from voting.

• Single-member districts in large localities - Required for localities of 400,000+ population. Improves representation by ensuring every neighborhood has its own elected voice on local government, rather than at-large systems.

  ---

  Education

  

• African American history graduation substitution - Allows AP African American Studies or African American History in place of World History I or World Geography.

• Through-year growth assessment repeal - For grades 3-8 reading and math. Reduces over-testing, freeing up classroom time for actual instruction rather than test administration and prep.

• School Performance Framework rebalancing - Gives credit to schools that take students from far behind to grade level, real teaching, rather than only rewarding schools whose intake is already high-performing.

• Evidence-based mental health training for school staff - Equips teachers and counselors to recognize and respond to youth mental-health issues.

• At-Risk Program funds for school nurses - Puts medical professionals in schools where many low-income students would otherwise have no health-care contact at all.

• Mandatory SAT School Day participation - Removes cost, transportation, and scheduling barriers to college access for students whose families couldn’t otherwise afford testing.

• Device-addiction instruction mandate - Gives students the tools to recognize and resist algorithmic manipulation.

• AI and digital literacy in internet safety curriculum - Prepares Virginia students for an information environment increasingly polluted by AI fakes, scam targeting, and manipulated content.

• High School CNA program - Creates a debt-free pathway into health-care employment for students who want to enter the workforce after graduation.

• Interstate teacher and school psychologist compacts - Helps Virginia recruit qualified educators from other states without bureaucratic licensing delays.

• 3-year teaching license - Expands access to college-credit and career training in Virginia high schools by letting community-college instructors teach in them.

• Library book censorship protection - Protects students’ freedom to read and stops politically motivated book bans from sweeping classics, LGBTQ+ titles, and works by authors of color off library shelves.

• School panic alarms - Authorizes wearable panic alarms for school employees. Reduces emergency response times during school shootings or medical emergencies.

Taxation and Finance

• End of Confederate organization tax exemptions - Stops Virginia taxpayers from subsidizing organizations whose central purpose is the celebration of a treasonous war fought to defend slavery.

• Repeal of Confederate and Robert E. Lee license plates - Removes state endorsement from symbols that exclude and demean Black Virginians, who make up nearly a fifth of the state’s drivers.

• Split-rate property tax authorization - For Charlottesville, Falls Church, Fredericksburg, and Newport News. Lets cities encourage development of vacant and underutilized lots while easing tax pressure on people who actually invest in their buildings.

• Fantasy sports contest taxation - 10% revenue tax plus 2.6% regulatory fee. Captures public revenue from a previously untaxed industry and dedicates a share to problem-gambling treatment.

• Sports betting credit card ban - Prevents bettors, from running up high-interest debt to fund gambling losses.

  ---

  Miscellaneous

• Trafficking-victim immunity for minors - Treats child sex-trafficking victims as victims rather than criminals, opening a path to services rather than juvenile detention.

• Statewide centralized child-abuse hotline - Effective July 2027. Eliminates the patchwork of local hotlines that have caused critical reports to fall through jurisdictional cracks.

• Noise-camera enforcement authorization - In Northern VA, Richmond-area, and Charlottesville-area planning districts. Addresses the modified-exhaust nuisance that has degraded quality of life in many Virginia neighborhoods.

• Comprehensive kratom regulation - 21+ age restriction, labeling, and potency caps. Brings consumer safety standards to a largely unregulated supplement that has been linked to overdoses.

• Plant-based meat labeling restrictions - Reduces consumer confusion at the grocery store while still allowing plant-based products to be sold.

• Open-captioning movie theater requirement - Opens cinema attendance to roughly 1 million Virginians with hearing loss.

• AI deepfake civil action - Gives Virginians legal recourse when their voice or image is hijacked for fake endorsements, non-consensual intimate imagery, or scams targeting their loved ones.

• Manufacturing grants - Two large economic-development funds totaling roughly $158M aggregate. Anchors thousands of high-wage manufacturing jobs in Virginia and strengthens domestic supply chains for both the electric grid and national defense.

  ---

  Vetoes

  

• Mattress Stewardship Program - Would have established an industry-administered mattress recycling program.

• Possession of controlled substance residue - Would have created a separate, lower-penalty offense for possessing trace residue rather than treating any quantity as a usable amount.

• Vehicle lien enforcement threshold- Would have raised the value cap for selling a vehicle at auction to satisfy a lien from $12,500 to $17,000.

• Plea agreement waivers- Would have prohibited plea deals from waiving Fourth Amendment rights, expungement rights, or record-sealing rights.

• Electronic skill gaming devices- Would have legalized, regulated, and taxed (25%) skill games.

• Fairfax County casino- Would have added Fairfax County to the list of casino-eligible localities.

  ---

What Didn’t Happen

Various taxes alleged by Republican media to have been implemented by the Governor were not supported or passed:

• Tax on regional commercial parking

• Regional sales and use tax for certain localities

• Tax on firearms and ammunitions sales

• State sales tax expansions:

  • Dog walking, dog grooming, gym memberships, counseling, vehicle repair, storage facility use, data storage, cosmetic services, dry cleaning, computer-related services, home repair, software application services, website hosting and design

• Tax on large employers

• Investment income tax on individuals, trusts, and estates

• Tax on transportation network companies

• Tax on retail deliveries

Conclusion

The Virginia Legislature and Governor Spanberger didn’t wait to take action. They made forward progress on the issues that matter most to Virginians, from access to healthcare to managing data center development.

These successes are a blueprint for states across the country to use their states as ‘laboratories of democracy’ to ensure that their communities thrive.

I have been writing on this Substack for 6 years now, from back when I was in high school.

Since that time, my media operation has grown to something so much larger than I first imagined. The Micah Erfan Substack is no longer a one-man operation. It’s something bigger.

We’ve expanded. I have a team of incredible young leaders working to tell the stories the mainstream media won’t, and we are firing on all cylinders.

With that change, our image needs to change too. And that is why we are rebranding to Erfan Media, a hub for all the content our Gen Z is producing to get the truth out in the age of algorithms.

Thank you to all our subscribers and paid supporters. It is you who have made this next phase possible.

There’s a narrative that Democrats don’t have an agenda. That they’re the party of opposition, not action.

That narrative is wrong. And the proof is in the states.

While Washington has been paralyzed by Republican obstruction, blue states have been quietly governing. Passing laws, signing bills, delivering results.

1. Paid Family and Medical Leave

The United States is one of the only developed countries without a national paid family leave program. The federal FMLA guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. But unpaid leave isn’t real leave for most workers. If you can’t afford to miss a paycheck, you don’t take the time off. You go back to work after having a baby. You skip the recovery time after surgery.

Democratic states have built real solutions.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted mandatory paid family leave systems, including California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Virginia. Nearly all use a social insurance model funded through pooled payroll contributions from employees and employers. Bipartisan Policy Center Minnesota launched in 2026. Delaware and Maine are coming online in the same year.

Wage replacement rates range from 50 to 80% across these states, and California’s program provides a maximum benefit of $1,620 per week, with higher replacement rates for lower-earning workers. Paycor

The payroll tax model is the right one. Costs are spread broadly, no single employer carries the whole burden, and the fund stays stable. This is how Social Security works. It’s how unemployment insurance works. The federal government should build a national program on the same foundation.

2. Free Community College, Trade School, and Apprenticeships

Every American who wants a good career should be able to get the training they need without going into debt. Community college. Trade school. Registered apprenticeships. The foundational education that connects people to stable, middle-class lives should be free.

Blue states are building this out.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer launched a free community college program for recent high school graduates with no income restrictions, setting a goal of 60% of working-age Michigan residents holding a postsecondary credential by 2030. Higher Ed Dive Massachusetts covers tuition and fees for all students regardless of age or income, with some students qualifying for an additional allowance for books and supplies. College Raptor Minnesota’s North Star Promise covers free tuition at all state colleges, universities, and tribal colleges, including trade programs and certifications, for families earning under $80,000. Scholarships360

These programs work. After Massachusetts launched its free college program, community college enrollment among adults 25 and older without a degree jumped 45% year over year. Higher Ed Dive.

3. A $15 Minimum Wage That Keeps Up Over Time

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. Adjusted for inflation, it has lost nearly half its purchasing power since 1968. Republicans have blocked every effort to change it. Blue states stopped waiting.

Since 2012, 15 states have adopted a path to a $15 or higher minimum wage, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. National Employment Law Project.

States have also solved one of the oldest problems with minimum wage policy: the political fight that has to happen every few years just to keep pace with rising costs. Indexing to inflation is now the law in nearly half of the states. Marketplace The most forward-thinking version ties future increases to median wages, not just inflation, so that as the economy grows, workers at the bottom share in that growth. A few states are experimenting with exactly that. It’s where the rest of the country should be headed.

4. A Universal Child Tax Credit

In 2021, the expanded federal Child Tax Credit cut child poverty in half. Then Republicans let it expire. Poverty shot back up. Democrats in the states didn’t accept that.

As of 2025, 15 states and D.C. provide Child Tax Credits for families with children. ITEP Colorado’s package is one of the strongest: lawmakers created a new Family Affordability Tax Credit worth up to $3,200 per child under 6 and $2,400 per child ages 6 through 16. Pn3policy Fully refundable credits are now available in California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont. ITEP

The CTC should be universal — available to every family with children, fully refundable, and not phased out at the bottom. A system where the poorest families receive the least has it exactly backwards. States are leading the way. The federal government needs to follow.

5. Medicaid Expansion

The ACA gave every state the option to expand Medicaid to low-income adults. The results in states that took it have been clear. In expansion states, the uninsured rate among low-income adults fell by more than half between 2013 and 2022. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Ten states still haven’t expanded. An estimated 1.4 million uninsured adults remain in the coverage gap, concentrated in Texas, Florida, and Georgia. GovFacts Those are Republican-governed states that have chosen to leave their own residents without coverage rather than accept federal money. That’s a political choice, and voters should know it.

Medicaid expansion has now been adopted by 41 states, including D.C., and over 21 million people are enrolled through the expansion. KFF. Every one of those people has coverage they didn’t have before. Expand it everywhere, and millions more get the same.

The Democratic agenda isn’t nonexistent. It is largely composed of an array of popular, common-sense, center-left policies aimed at helping working people and families get ahead.

The notion that Republicans destroy and Democrats do nothing needs to go.

Democrats are delivering, and we need to talk about it.

I’m a law student at UVA. I pay $1,800 a month in rent, not counting utilities, and that’s with a roommate.

That’s what life is like in Charlottesville in 2026.

I interviewed Governor Spanberger here during the campaign. She told me lowering costs for Virginians was a priority. I believed her then, and I still do. That’s why I’m writing this.

The average rent for an apartment in Charlottesville is now over $2,100 a month. 73% of Virginians say the state does not have enough affordable homes to rent or buy. When asked their top concern, 37% listed housing costs first, ahead of inflation and ahead of healthcare. Half of rural Virginians say they are worried about housing costs, too.

The legislature passed several important housing bills this session that would actually do something about this. Governor Spanberger has signed one of them, legalizing manufactured housing statewide. That’s real. But the two most consequential housing supply bills she was sent, SB 388 and HB 888, are still sitting on her desk. She has until April 13 to sign them. Here’s why she should.

Let Churches Build

Virginia’s faith communities own more than 74,000 acres across roughly 22,000 parcels statewide. A lot of that land sits in communities that desperately need affordable housing. Churches want to use it. Local land use laws stop them.

Right now, a church that wants to build affordable housing on its own property has to go through a full rezoning process: public hearings, lawyers, months or years of delay, with no guarantee of approval. The Church of the Holy Apostles in Virginia Beach had a large property on a bus line and wanted to build affordable housing. The obstacles were so overwhelming that they gave up and sold the land instead.

In the middle of a housing crisis, the law is stopping houses of worship from trying to help solve it.

SB 388 and HB 1279, the Faith in Housing Act, fix this. The bills allow by-right development on land owned by tax-exempt religious organizations and nonprofits. No special exceptions, no special use permits, no rezoning, no endless discretionary review.

This is not a blank check. At least 60% of units must be affordable housing and must stay that way for at least 50 years. Projects still follow local height limits, historic district rules, and environmental standards. The only thing being removed is the ability to drag churches through an approval gauntlet because a few neighbors don’t want new housing nearby. There is no good reason to veto this legislation.

Stop Forcing Developers to Build Parking Nobody Needs

Almost all Virginia localities require developers to build a fixed number of parking spaces for every housing unit, whether anyone needs them or not. A surface parking spot costs around $5,000 to build. A structured space can run up to $50,000. Add land acquisition on top of that.

All of it gets passed directly to renters and buyers. Near transit, where many residents don’t own cars, parking requirements are especially damaging. They inflate the cost of every unit before a single person moves in.

HB 888 requires localities near transit and affordable housing to approve at least a 20% reduction in parking requirements. Less mandatory parking means lower construction costs, more units on the same footprint, and more supply. This is basic housing economics.

The Pushback

Local governments are fighting these bills. Their argument is local control. But we already have complete local control over housing, and it has been a disaster. The absurd anti-housing policies of local governments are what got us into this mess in the first place. The fact that they are fighting bills this sensible tells you exactly why they should have less say.

If they were going to fix this, they would have done it by now. They haven’t. If the state doesn’t step in, this problem doesn’t get solved, and the campaign promise of doing everything possible to bring down housing costs turns out to have been empty.

The Deadline Is April 13

Governor Spanberger has taken affordability in other areas seriously. She cracked down on pharmacy benefit managers. She passed free tax filing. She has streamlined the permitting process for transmission lines. In housing, she deserves credit for working to reform permitting and signing the manufactured housing bill. For a state that spent the last four years vetoing housing reform, that’s a meaningful shift, and she deserves credit for it.

But SB 388 and HB 888 are not signed. Those are the two bills that would actually move the needle on housing supply in a serious way. Faith communities in Virginia are ready to build. Developers are ready to stop paying for parking nobody needs. Both bills are sitting on her desk right now.

She has until April 13 to say yes to progress on this serious issue. I dearly hope she does.

If you agree with this article, please tell Spanberger to sign these bills at this link:

https://www.governor.virginia.gov/contact/

Republicans have spent the last few months telling Virginians that Democrats are turning the Commonwealth into a radical communist dystopia.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Notice something about all these tweets? They never actually cite anything specific that Democrats have actually done. Just vague statements or outright lies, like the 50+ taxes claim. Not a single tax hike has been signed into law.

Here is why. When you look at what Virginia Democrats have done in just a few months of unified government, the right-wing hysteria is shown to be ridiculous pretty quickly.

So let’s look at what actually happened.

Workers finally got a raise.

Virginia’s minimum wage has been stuck in a losing battle with inflation for years. Republicans blocked a $15 floor twice under Youngkin. This session, Democrats passed SB1, raising the wage from $12.77 to $15 an hour by 2028. It’s done.

But that’s only part of the worker story. HB5 guarantees paid sick leave for every Virginia worker, one hour earned for every 30 worked. Not just full-time employees. Everyone. The nurse’s aide, the restaurant worker, the warehouse employee. No more going to work sick because missing a shift means missing rent. No more losing your job because your kid had a fever.

And then there is SB2, which is the one that matters most to me personally. Paid family and medical leave. Up to 12 weeks at 80% of wages when a worker has a baby, loses a parent, or faces a serious illness. Youngkin vetoed this bill twice. Spanberger has committed to signing it. When she does, Virginia will become the 14th state in the country to guarantee this right. The other 13 states haven’t collapsed. Their workers have just had a little more security when life gets hard.

They went after the people skimming your prescriptions.

There are many reasons healthcare is so expensive in this country, and pharmacy benefit managers are one of them. PBMs sit between your insurer and your pharmacy, negotiating discounts and keeping a cut that never makes it to the patient. This is why you hand over a prescription, and the price is somehow higher than last month, with no explanation. SB669 ended that, requiring PBMs to pass their negotiated savings on to patients. It passed unanimously, which tells you something. Even Republicans couldn’t defend the status quo on this one.

SB405 addressed Virginia’s healthcare workforce shortage, which has been quietly driving up wait times and costs for years. More providers mean more access, which means lower prices.

HB60 protected access to preventive care. This matters because a $200 annual checkup that catches something early is dramatically cheaper than the emergency care that follows from catching it late.

Housing got a little less ridiculous.

SB628 expanded the Virginia Eviction Reduction Program, getting evidence-based crisis assistance to people teetering on the edge of losing their homes. The research on eviction prevention is consistent: keeping people housed is cheaper than the cascade of costs that follows an eviction, for individuals and for governments alike.

HB655 and SB346 legalized manufactured homes anywhere single-family homes are permitted statewide. Local zoning had been blocking this for years, keeping one of the most affordable paths to homeownership off the table for people who need it most. That changed.

Spanberger also signed EO-3 on her first day, directing the state government to cut red tape on housing supply. More YIMBY bills are coming before April 13 that advocates, including myself, are very optimistic she will sign.

They invested in the grid and the future.

America’s transmission infrastructure is decades behind where it needs to be, and building more of it is one of the most important things a state government can do right now. HB889 and SB497 streamlined permitting for new high-voltage transmission lines, cutting through the bureaucratic delays that have been slowing this build-out for years. That is a genuinely significant reform.

HB369 encouraged investment in cutting-edge energy technology, including nuclear fusion, passing with bipartisan support.

HB1191 and SB377 ensured that data centers, which consume staggering amounts of power, pay for the infrastructure upgrades their operations require rather than passing those costs to ordinary ratepayers.

HB1225 and SB407 expanded EV charging access across the Commonwealth.

Beyond this, Spanberger is expected to sign Virginia back into RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which caps carbon emissions from power plants and generates revenue for clean energy investment. Youngkin pulled Virginia out in 2023 for reasons that were never particularly coherent. With the federal government having abandoned any serious climate leadership, state coalitions like this one are more important than ever. Virginia is about to go back in.

They did the most common-sense thing imaginable.

HB1180 created a free tax filing program for all Virginians. You should not have to pay a private company to comply with a legal obligation. The fact that Americans have been doing this for decades, while most of the developed world offers it for free, is a policy failure. Virginia just fixed it for its residents. It is honestly baffling that this took so long.

They took school safety seriously.

Mass shootings have become a defining feature of American life in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Spanberger signed a package of bills that take the threat seriously without waiting for federal action that is never coming. Red flag law training means law enforcement actually knows how to use a tool that research consistently shows reduces gun deaths. Panic alarm systems mean a teacher can summon help in seconds rather than minutes, and in a shooting, those minutes are the difference between life and death. Mental health support for at-risk students and after-school programs address the upstream conditions that lead to violence in the first place. Prevention is cheaper than tragedy, and it works.

The ghost gun ban, SB323, is on her desk. Ghost guns are unserialized firearms specifically designed to pass through metal detectors and evade background checks. They have become the weapon of choice for people who cannot legally buy a gun. Making them a felony to manufacture or possess does not infringe on anyone’s right to own a legal firearm. It just closes a loophole that never should have existed. She is expected to sign it.

They ended a policy that made no sense.

Until now, Virginians could legally possess cannabis but not buy it legally, which mostly meant they bought it illegally, with no testing, no regulation, and no tax revenue. HB642 fixes this, creating a licensed retail market starting in 2027 with testing requirements, public standards, and safety rules. Youngkin vetoed this. Spanberger has pledged to sign it. The black market will have some competition, and the state will have a new revenue stream.

In just a few months, with hundreds of bills still awaiting her signature, Virginia Democrats have delivered more concrete wins for working people than the state has seen in years. Wages up. Paid leave guaranteed. Drug costs down. Housing supply increasing. The grid being built for the future. Tax filing becoming free. School safety strengthened. The government has become a little more functional.

Republicans told you we were getting radical chaos. What we are actually getting is bipartisan competence. As usual, they are wrong.

This is what governing looks like when it works.

This is the Virginia Miracle.

Virginia Democrats just had one of the most productive legislative sessions in years. With a historic trifecta, the largest House majority in nearly four decades, a Senate majority, and Governor Abigail Spanberger in the Executive Mansion, they came to Richmond with a mandate: make Virginia more affordable for working families.

And they made real progress. Spanberger has signed legislation reining in pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who inflate prescription drug prices. Manufactured homes can now be built in more places. High energy users like data centers must now pay for their own infrastructure, shielding ratepayers from those costs. And a free state tax filing program, passed unanimously, means working Virginians no longer have to pay a private company just to file their taxes.

That’s a genuine start. But let’s be honest, it’s only a start. The affordability crisis in Virginia runs deep, and what’s been signed so far has only scratched the surface of what’s possible. Here are 20 proven ideas that would do exactly that.

HOUSING

Rising housing costs are the single biggest driver of financial stress for Virginia families. The diagnosis is simple: we don’t have enough homes. Building more housing, in more places, faster, is the most powerful lever Democrats have, and it doesn’t require a massive government spending program. It requires rolling back the local rules that are currently making affordable development impossible.

1. Reduce minimum lot sizes statewide.

Zoning rules that require large minimum lot sizes artificially restrict how much housing can be built on available land. A developer who wants to build three modest homes on a lot zoned for one simply cannot, not because of economic forces, but because of a government rule.

In some localities, the minimum lot size requirements are truly astounding. In Prince William County’s agricultural zone, the minimum lot size is 10 acres, over 400,000 square feet. For reference, the footprint of a typical townhome is often just 1,400 square feet.

That is not a market outcome. It is a government-imposed ban on affordable housing. And we should be honest about why these rules exist. They are not about safety. They are not about infrastructure. In many cases, they exist because existing homeowners and local officials want to keep housing scarce and expensive. They want to protect their property values. They want to keep working-class people out. That is the uncomfortable truth that too many politicians are afraid to say out loud.

Virginia Democrats should say it. And then they should do something about it.

Virginia should make it illegal for any locality to ban townhomes, capping the minimum lot size any locality can impose at 1,400 square feet. If a locality is using land use laws to price working families out of their community, the state has not just the power but the obligation to stop them.

2. Eliminate parking mandates.

Requiring developers to build a minimum number of parking spaces adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of every new unit. The cost of structured parking alone can run $30,000 to $50,000 per space, costs that get passed directly to renters and buyers. The mandates local governments are imposing are often completely arbitrary, inflating costs for no reason.

Furthermore, in walkable, transit-accessible areas, these mandates are especially absurd. Businesses already have an incentive to build parking for their customer. Imposing arbitrary parking mandates only raises costs and makes off-lot parking solutions (like pooled parking) illegal. The state should step in to end parking mandates, or, at a minimum, reduce them.

3. Legalize ADUs and multiplexes by right.

Accessory dwelling units, a basement apartment, a garage conversion, a backyard cottage, and small multifamily buildings should be legal to build everywhere in Virginia without requiring special permits, board hearings, or neighborhood approval. This is one of the fastest, least disruptive ways to add housing supply in existing neighborhoods. Homeowners get flexibility. Renters get more options. Everyone wins except the big landlords who benefit from artificial scarcity.

4. Limit standing in lawsuits against zoning changes.

This is the silent veto that almost no one talks about. Even when cities and states legalize more housing on paper, organized interest groups (usually wealthy homeowners) sue to block the changes and/or sue to stop individual projects. This drags out approvals for years and kills development even when the city supports it. Developers price in that legal risk, which raises costs, or they simply don’t build. Raising the standing threshold so plaintiffs must show concrete harm, not just “I don’t want this near me,” shortening the statute of limitations on zoning challenges, and requiring plaintiffs to post a bond would protect legitimate pro-housing reforms supported by local communities from being vetoed by wealthy, organized special interests.

5. Cap building permit fees.

In parts of Northern Virginia, permit fees and local charges add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of building a single home. These costs get passed directly to buyers and renters. They are effectively a government tax on housing construction, and they fall hardest on the most affordable end of the market, where margins are thinnest, and developers are most price-sensitive. Capping them statewide puts direct downward pressure on the cost of building homes.

TAX REFORM

6. Implement a split-rate property tax.

A split-rate property tax taxes land at a higher rate than the buildings on it. The logic is straightforward: taxing land value discourages speculation and landbanking, i.e., holding underbuilt or vacant property in high-demand areas while waiting for values to rise. Taxing buildings less encourages development and improvement. If you are a wealthy investor who owns a surface parking lot in the middle of a thriving neighborhood, your tax bill goes up, which creates real pressure to build something useful. Regular homeowners who actually use their land come out ahead. Renters and new buyers benefit from lower rents and lower housing prices. It is a pro-development, anti-speculation reform that doesn’t require a single dollar of new spending.

7. Eliminate the car tax in exchange for a higher land tax.

Virginia’s personal property tax on vehicles is one of the most unpopular taxes in the Commonwealth, and one of the most regressive. It hits working and middle-class families who depend on their cars to get to work the hardest, while wealthier Virginians who can afford to live close to transit feel it least. Replacing it with a higher land value tax shifts the burden from working people onto land bankers and wealthier property owners. The working class and middle class will come out way ahead from this trade, and Virginia will no longer have to maintain its complex vehicle property tax assessment scheme.

HEALTHCARE

Healthcare costs are squeezing Virginia families from every direction, at the pharmacy, in the hospital, and on their insurance bills. The common thread in each of the following proposals is the same: more competition, more transparency, more supply.

8. Allow full independent practice rights for nurses.

Virginia requires nurses to practice under physician supervision even when they are fully qualified to treat patients independently. The result is a government-enforced bottleneck that restricts the supply of care, particularly in rural parts of the state where physician shortages are most severe. Removing that restriction expands access, increases competition, and drives down costs. It is one of the clearest examples of occupational regulation that protects incumbents rather than patients.

9. Open accelerated medical school pathways.

The physician shortage is fundamentally a supply problem, and supply problems have supply solutions. Accelerated three-year MD programs, already piloted in states across the country, can increase the number of practicing physicians faster without reducing the quality of care. More doctors mean more competition. More competition means lower prices. This is not complicated.

10. Create a Virginia Centralized Health Insurance Claims Clearinghouse.

Every health insurance claim filed in Virginia is a bureaucratic obstacle course. A doctor submits a claim. The insurer reviews it under its own proprietary system. The claim bounces through multiple clearinghouses. The whole process takes four to six weeks and costs between $12 and $19 per claim. That waste is not free. It gets baked into your premiums, your copays, and your care.

We already solved this problem in banking. It does not matter that your employer banks at Wells Fargo and you bank at a credit union. Your paycheck arrives instantly because all banks use the same standardized clearinghouse. The cost of running that entire system is roughly $300 million annually, for more than $50 trillion in transfers.

Virginia should build the health insurance equivalent. Require every insurer in the Commonwealth to submit, process, and pay claims through one standardized system. Insurers still compete on price and coverage. The government just runs the pipes. McKinsey estimates a centralized claims clearinghouse could cut healthcare administrative spending by 10 to 12 percent. In Virginia, that is billions of dollars that could flow back to patients and lower premiums instead of disappearing into bureaucratic overhead.

11. Eliminate Virginia’s Certificate of Need law.

This may be the single most important healthcare cost reform on this list. Virginia’s Certificate of Need law requires hospitals and healthcare providers to get government approval before adding new services, hospital beds, or medical facilities. It was designed to prevent overbuilding, but in practice, it functions as an incumbent protection racket. Existing hospitals use the CON process to block competitors from entering their markets, suppressing supply and keeping prices artificially high. Eliminating it would open healthcare markets to real competition for the first time in decades. Several states, including some deep red ones, have already done it. Virginia should, too.

CONSUMER PROTECTION

12. Comprehensive junk fee ban and all-in pricing law.

Here is a simple principle that Virginia should put into law: if a fee applies to every single customer, it is part of the price. Period. It must be included in the advertised price, online, in print, at the point of first display, everywhere.

The list of fees this would eliminate is long and familiar. Resort fees and destination fees tacked onto hotel bills. Service fees and order processing fees added at the last step of buying a concert ticket. Apartment admin fees and lease initiation fees charged to every tenant. Telecom regulatory recovery fees buried in the fine print of your phone bill. Healthcare facility fees charged for routine outpatient visits that have nothing to do with the care you received.

These fees exist for one reason: to make the price look lower than it is. They are a form of consumer fraud that has been normalized by the industry. Virginia should follow the lead of other states and make them illegal.

13. Require interchange competition on credit card transactions.

Every time a consumer swipes a card, the merchant pays a fee, typically 2 to 3 percent, to the card network and issuing bank. Those fees are built into the prices of everything you buy, whether you pay with cash, card, or anything else. Small businesses pay them and have no choice but to pass them on.

The problem is not the existence of any fee. It is the lack of competition that allows the fee to be so high. Visa and Mastercard dominate the market and set fee schedules with little competitive pressure. Requiring card networks to offer merchants a choice of at least two unaffiliated routing networks, the model behind the federal Credit Card Competition Act, lets the market drive fees down. It is not a price cap. It is a competition mandate. And it would put real money back in the pockets of consumers and small business owners across Virginia.

14. Allow direct sale of cars.

Virginia law requires automakers to sell vehicles through franchised dealerships. This is not a market outcome; it is a government mandate that protects a middleman industry from competition. Consumers pay for it in the form of higher prices and a worse buying experience. Allowing manufacturers to sell directly to consumers, as Tesla and others have gotten permission to do in select states, introduces genuine competition into the car market and drives prices down. There is no consumer protection rationale for this restriction. It exists because dealers lobbied for it. That is not a good enough reason to keep it.

BUSINESS CLIMATE

15. Eliminate all Virginia corporate welfare, redirect the savings to business courts, and reduce business fees.

Virginia hands out hundreds of millions of dollars in targeted tax breaks, subsidies, and exemptions to specific industries and corporations every year. The data center tax exemption alone costs the Commonwealth nearly two billion dollars in a single fiscal year. Some of these giveaways may have made sense when they were created. Most have never been seriously evaluated. All of them represent a choice to favor politically connected industries over ordinary Virginians and small businesses.

Democrats should end them, every single one, and use the savings to do two things. First, create dedicated Virginia business courts: specialized courts with judges who have commercial expertise, designed to resolve business disputes faster and more predictably. This is a genuine competitive advantage for attracting investment and costs a fraction of what we give away in corporate subsidies. Second, use remaining savings to reduce the fees and taxes that fall on every Virginia business, not just the ones with lobbyists. The way to help Virginia businesses is not to give more special giveaways to megacorporations. It is to reduce the real unnecessary burdens that negatively affect all businesses, large and small alike.

FOOD & EVERYDAY COSTS

16. Reform Virginia’s Cottage Food Laws.

Right now, Virginia law severely restricts what home-based food producers can sell, where they can sell it, and how much they can earn doing it. A home baker who wants to sell bread at a farmers market, a jam maker who wants to supply a local grocery store, or a small food entrepreneur trying to build a business from their kitchen runs into a wall of regulations that have nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with protecting incumbent commercial producers from competition.

Reforming cottage food laws means raising or eliminating the revenue cap on home food businesses, expanding the list of approved products, and allowing direct sales through more channels, including online and at retail locations. It lowers the barrier to entry for small food entrepreneurs, increases the supply of locally produced food, and creates more competition that puts downward pressure on food prices. States like Wyoming have gone nearly fully deregulated on cottage food and seen thriving local food economies as a result.

This is a reform that Democrats should own proudly. It empowers working people to build businesses from their own kitchens, creates economic opportunity with zero public spending, and makes food more affordable and more local at the same time.

EDUCATION & WORKFORCE

17. Universal dual credit — 50% enrollment by 2029.

Dual credit programs allow high school students to earn college credits before they graduate, at little or no cost. Every credit earned in high school is a credit that doesn’t have to be paid for in college. Setting a concrete statewide target, 50 percent of Virginia students enrolled in a meaningful number of dual credit courses by 2029, creates accountability and puts Virginia on a path to dramatically reducing the cost of a college degree for the next generation. States like Tennessee have pursued this aggressively and seen real reductions in student debt and time-to-degree.

18. Expand auto-articulation associate degree pathways.

Virginia’s community colleges charge a fraction of what four-year universities charge. But too often, students who complete an associate degree have to fight course by course to have those credits recognized when they transfer to a four-year institution. Strengthening Virginia’s automatic transfer and articulation agreements, so that community college credits stack seamlessly toward a bachelor’s degree, means a student can complete their first two years at community college rates and finish their degree at a four-year school. That cuts the cost of a bachelor’s degree nearly in half. It is one of the most powerful affordability tools available, and it requires no new spending.

19. Streamline occupational licensing.

Virginia requires licenses for dozens of occupations that other states regulate far less heavily or not at all. Every unnecessary licensing requirement is a barrier that keeps willing workers out of jobs and keeps prices high for consumers. A systematic review with a presumption toward eliminating licenses that don’t serve a genuine public safety purpose would expand workforce participation, reduce costs, and make Virginia more economically dynamic. This is not deregulation for its own sake. It is a recognition that the government should protect people, not protect incumbents.

FISCAL STRUCTURE

20. Create a Virginia Sovereign Wealth Fund and enshrine it in the Constitution.

This one is different from the rest. It is not about lowering a specific cost today. It is about building the long-term fiscal foundation that allows Virginia to lower costs and make pro-affordability investments for decades to come.

Here is the problem. When Virginia runs a budget surplus, that money tends to get fought over and spent on one-time giveaways, a tax rebate here, a line item there, with no lasting impact. It is the fiscal equivalent of spending a windfall instead of investing it. Other countries have done something smarter: they have created sovereign wealth funds that invest surplus revenue in the market, build wealth over time, and use the returns to fund public priorities without raising taxes.

Virginia should do the same. The mechanism is simple. Every surplus dollar goes first to fully topping off Virginia’s rainy day fund, already one of the best-managed in the country. Every dollar beyond that flows automatically into a new Virginia Sovereign Wealth Fund, invested in diversified index funds managed by an independent board modeled on the Virginia Retirement System. The fund never flows backward; it only receives, never pays out during downturns. That is what the rainy day fund is for.

Over time, the profits from this fund can be used to finance tax reductions and pro-affordability investments, without raising taxes or cutting services to pay for them.

Both the waterfall mechanism and the withdrawal restrictions should be enshrined in the Virginia Constitution, protected from any future legislature tempted to raid it for short-term political gain.

For too long, Virginia surpluses have been blown on one-time giveaways rather than long-term investments. It is time to change that, structurally and permanently.

Virginia Democrats came to Richmond this year with the most power they have had in a generation. They have already begun using it. But the mandate voters gave them in November was bigger than one session, bigger than one signing ceremony, bigger than any single bill.

The policies above represent a generational opportunity — to make Virginia the most affordable, most economically dynamic state on the East Coast. Not by accident. Not incrementally. But by design, with intention, and with the courage to go further than anyone has gone before.

The work has started. Now it needs to continue.