20 Ways Virginia Democrats Can Deliver on Affordability
It's time to deliver...
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.
This is a great list. I’d like to suggest an addition to your list for Virginia to adopt a bill Montana has introduced to challenge Citizens United restricting corporate and big money donors.
A good plan. Though Virginia Dems need to pass the redistricting referendum to keep their momentum going.