Setting Up a Sustainable Policy Future Post-COVID
By Tommy Herbert, VAMA Manager of Government Affairs
One of the more embarrassing episodes of my misspent youth was being caught by my father with my friends throwing rocks at the windows of an abandoned building across town. I tried to calmly explain that throwing rocks is fun, the building is empty, everybody wins here, and that my friends had been doing it long before me. Then he hit me with a Dad classic that probably goes back beyond recorded memory:
“Son, I don’t care what other kids do. You’re my son, I care what you do.”
I didn’t understand at the time that he was trying to nip a bad behavior in the bud, and to prevent my developing a habit that would eventually get me into trouble, whether I was right about this particular building or not. He saw a problem down the road, and he helped me avoid it.
On July 1, housing providers will return to normal operating procedures that largely resemble business from pre-COVID times. As the industry makes this transition together and joins the bulk of the retail and business community in looking to the future, we want to make sure that we are doing things right, and with an eye toward a sustainable future.
Housing providers have felt a lot of the financial pain associated with the pandemic; no other industry has been asked to forgo their sole source of revenue to act as a de facto social safety net throughout this crisis. But housing providers were, and in Virginia the rental housing industry performed admirably, going above and beyond their duty time and time again to keep folks in their homes and at less risk of the disease.
Even so, tenants’ rights activists who have seen undreamt-of political gains in the pandemic are lying in wait. When the tenant protections in Virginia’s budget, always meant to be temporary, expire, many sharp eyes will be out in the activist and media communities looking for a justification to take housing policy in Virginia back to the pandemic. Any excuse to appeal to next year’s General Assembly that 2020’s eviction prevention measures should be permanent will absolutely be taken and run with, in print and in the halls of power.
What’s more, with new district lines that no politico can predict and all 140 members of the Virginia General Assembly running for re-election in the next two years, those efforts are more viable than they have been here in decades. Both houses of the legislature are held by the slimmest margins, one vote in the Senate and two votes in the House of Delegates. It is not only possible, but depending on who you ask likely that Virginia Democrats end up in control of both chambers of the legislature, as they did in 2020 and 2021. That would mean a return to housing-averse policy.
In an environment like that, where established political interests smell a rare opportunity to advance their agenda, invariably a story will emerge from somewhere. To help protect your business from destructive policy proposals in the 2023 General Assembly, we want to make ourselves a resource in making sure that story doesn’t feature VAMA members. Many educational and question-asking opportunities will be available for members as we transition away from the Rent Relief Program and back into normal operation. Let’s take every opportunity as an industry to set ourselves up for success as we emerge from this crisis.
As always, if you have questions about any legislative or government affairs topic, please reach out to me at Tommy@vamaonline.org.