Affordable housing is on the ballot in Virginia this year, as candidates in battleground districts are taking a variety of approaches.
Candidates hear it on the campaign trail all the time: The cost of housing is too high. Republican incumbent Delegate Amanda Batten of James City County says her approach to housing policy is to reduce regulations and get out of the way.
"When I talk with homebuilders in my area, they tell me that about 30, 35 percent of the cost of a home is actually due to regulatory constraints," Batten says. "And so that's what I look at. What are we doing, and is there anything we can kind of roll back?"
One program she voted to roll back was the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. That was a program that was partially used to pay for improvements to insulation and windows for low-income housing, especially in Southside Virginia. Now, the program has been zeroed out. The Democratic candidate challenging Batten in this Historic Triangle battlefield district is Jessica Anderson.
"It gave a lot of opportunity to expand funding for energy-efficient affordable housing units, so really benefiting our low-income families specifically that are struggling," Anderson says. "So, I would love the opportunity to obviously expand the House, flip the statewides [and] give us a governor who is also on board with these types of programs."
This House race in James City County and Williamsburg is one of more than a dozen districts Democrats are targeting in an effort to unseat Republican incumbents across Virginia.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
