Housing 2020

Over the past five years, our housing markets in Virginia and throughout the nation have suffered through their worst decline in decades. New home construction and the sales of existing homes plunged. Home prices dropped as the market bubble burst. Virginia saw more than 100,000 homeowners lose their homes through foreclosure and billions of dollars of home equity were lost. With that backdrop, it’s not surprising that most of our attention for the short term is on recovery. We are closely watching for upticks in sales, builder confidence, housing starts, and home prices – finally, we are starting to see it all happen. Our housing market is showing signs of life again and that is a very good thing.

But if short-term recovery is all we are watching, we are missing an even bigger story. There are major shifts underway that will re-shape housing during this decade. In Housing 2020, we look at the future of housing in Virginia through four lenses – Demographics, Economics, Finance and the Greening of our Housing Stock. In each of these areas we worked with an expert to identify and communicate what these changes are and what we need to understand about these trends. The clips have been edited  into a variety of different formats and presentations.