Some parts of Virginia are seeing a housing boom while other areas are seeing a decline.
New Kent County in Tidewater Virginia is experiencing a housing boom. Census numbers posted to the Virginia Public Access Project show that since 2020, housing in New Kent County has grown by more than 20%. Mel Jones is associate director of the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech, and she says it's important to consider scale.
"If you only have, you know, 500 homes in a community, and then you add 100, right? That's a huge percentage growth, that's 20%," Jones says. "And so, sometimes you'll see these great fluctuations in rural places because only a few homes make a big percentage change. So, it's important to look at both the numbers and the percentage.”
On the other end of the spectrum are places that are actually losing housing – places like Henry and Tazewell Counties in the western part of the state. Terry Clower at George Mason University says negative housing growth can be a positive trend.
"In areas where you have population decline, sooner or later, you want to actually see a negative growth in the housing stock because that just means that you have fewer vacant and increasingly derelict properties sitting around," Clower says.
He says Loudoun County in Northern Virginia was experiencing a housing boom until the local government stepped in and imposed impact fees to limit the pace of development.
