Looking Backward 2024

Advancing Housing in Virginia & Beyond

Over the past year, we worked across the Commonwealth to help communities large and small solve their housing challenges. That kept us busy, but we still found time to work through a complete strategic planning process — our first! Just this week, the HousingForward Virginia Board of Directors approved this new plan to guide our mission over the next three years.

Thanks to a $20,000 Capacity Building grant from Virginia Housing, we hired Klick Consulting to lead HFV’s first strategic planning effort. From June to December, a task force composed of HFV board members, co-directors, and Klick Consulting engaged in an in-depth process to better understand the organization and its role in Virginia’s affordable housing landscape. Over 40 partners completed a detailed survey, and more than a dozen were interviewed one-on-one to provide substantive feedback.

As part of the process, HFV also engaged Partnerships for Strategic Impact to conduct a strategic impact mapping exercise. This helped us better understand what we do, how we do it, our intended impact, and ways to measure that impact.

In early 2025, we’ll officially share our strategic plan with you, which will guide the organization through 2027.

Virginia Zoning Atlas Expands

At the beginning of 2024, HousingForward Virginia worked closely with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to complete the zoning atlas for the area covered by the Northern Virginia Regional Commission (24 jurisdictions). In support of the Mercatus Center, HFV helped with data visualization and a launch event to showcase the work.

As part of the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance’s Thomas P. Leckey Forum, HFV and Mercatus Center presented to a room of over 100 attendees on the impact of zoning on housing affordability both in NOVA and throughout Virginia. The Virginia Zoning Atlas gained further recognition following the event with WAMU and Greater Greater Washington writing articles about the Mercatus Center’s findings from the atlas.

Over the summer, HFV staff worked to complete the zoning atlas for the Greater Richmond region (9 jurisdictions). To launch the project, HFV collaborated with the Partnership for Housing Affordability and the University of Richmond to host Reading Between the Lines: Zoning, Housing, and Education in the Richmond Region.

HFV staff presented the findings of the Richmond region’s incorporation into the zoning atlas. Then, a cross-institutional team presented the findings from an update of Confronting School and Housing Segregation in the Richmond Region: Can We Learn and Live Together?, a report highlighting the intersection between housing segregation and educational outcomes. The event was attended by over 200 people, including housing advocates, practitioners, and elected officials.

STAY TUNED: We’ve got some exciting news about the Virginia Zoning Atlas coming in 2025 and can’t wait to share it with you.

Introducing Virginia to the Hottest Thing in Housing Finance

If you were at the Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference, you know that interest in the public development model for housing was bursting out the door. In an intimate discussion, a packed room of over 100 attendees learned about the public enterprise model from Paul Williams, Executive Director at the Center for Public Enterprise. Monique Johnson, PhD, Chief of Programs at Virginia Housing acted as a moderator and engaged with Paul in a conversation about the ins and outs of this emerging model of financing housing.

Out of 63 attendees surveyed, 62% said that they would apply what they learned from this session in their work. Three out of four respondents (75%) said they would likely pursue more information about the public enterprise model in the future and 76% said they would support the model in Virginia.

Delivering Experts Directly to You

We continue to bring webinars to you to better understand important housing topics and innovative new resources. We held two webinars this year, one explaining inflation and its impacts on housing affordability, and the other on the Virginia Resources Authority’s (VRA) ability to fund housing development throughout the Commonwealth.

From Up, Up, and Away: Everything Housers Need to Know About Inflation, attendees learned from Sonya Waddell from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond about what exactly inflation is and how housing plays a role in influencing it. Then they heard from Michael Urban from Virginia Housing about how they design tools to lessen the impacts of inflation on homebuyers.

In 2023, the Virginia legislature passed HB1805 which granted the Virginia Resources Authority (VRA) new powers to fund affordable housing. Traditionally VRA has supported localities in their efforts to raise revenue through bonds to fund such things as infrastructure. Now, the VRA now has an expanded role aimed at supporting the financing of affordable housing in the state. In our webinar just last week, we heard from Shawn Crumlish of the VRA to learn more about this resource in a moderated conversation with HousingForward Immediate Past Chair, A. Vaughn Poller.

We can’t be everywhere at once, but if you’d like us to talk about housing in your community, drop us a note. Let’s keep working together so we can look back on even greater achievements one year from now.