Virginia is looking at changing single-family zoning. Home builders are one step ahead. 

Like many places in the United States, in much of Virginia, if you have a piece of land it’s illegal to build anything but a single house on it. That could change if the state passes a new bill that would legalize duplexes, cottages, and accessory apartments across the Commonwealth, including anywhere that zoning only allows single-family homes.

State delegate Ibraheem Samirah (D-Herndon), who introduced the bill, says it’s meant to lower housing costs, tackle the region’s housing shortage, and address single-family zoning’s long legacy of racism and exclusion. Some folks are pretty upset about it, whether because it offends their politics or it challenges their idea of what suburban neighborhoods should look like.

The idea of allowing different types of houses in a neighborhood isn’t new. And no, I’m not talking about beloved historical neighborhoods like Old Town Alexandria, or the Fan in Richmond, Ghent in Norfolk, and so on. I’m talking about homebuilders, in modern-day suburbs in Virginia, messing around with the concept of “the single-family house” as we speak.

Virginia homebuilders are already building duplexes…

After the Great Recession and housing bust, high unemployment drove nearly a third of American households to “double up” by 2011, as relatives moved in together to save on housing costs - or, in the case of aging parents - medical costs. This was particularly common in immigrant and non-white families. In response, national homebuilder Lennar introduced the “NextGen home,” or as they called it, a “home within a home.”

The NextGen home looks like a typical suburban house on the outside, but inside it has a self-contained apartment, typically with a bedroom, living room, and kitchenette. The apartment has a door connecting it to the main house, as well as a discreetly hidden private entrance to the street. Lennar started building them in Virginia around 2016, and said that 55% of the people who buy them are doing it for an aging parent.

That year, a record 64 million households nationwide lived in multigenerational households, and analysts expect this to increase as Baby Boomers age. Today, there are a number of local homebuilders across Virginia that offer their own “multigenerational homes”: from Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William counties in Northern Virginia, to Henrico County outside Richmond, to Virginia Beach. Others will build you an apartment in the basement of your existing home.

…sort of.

There are a couple of caveats. These homes are typically built in the far suburbs where there’s lots of open land, but are far from transit, jobs, and other things.

As most of these homes are built in areas zoned exclusively for single-family homes, these “multigenerational homes” aren’t legally separate units. The apartments may not have a full kitchen, separate utility connections, or a unique address. They’re still dependent on the main house. A 2013 Virginian-Pilot story quotes a builder in Virginia Beach who says he doesn’t want to build multifamily rental housing: “Your intent has to be pure; you can’t be trying to skirt the law.”

That combination - new construction, in areas where homes must sit on a lot of expensive land - basically requires builders to sell very large, very pricey homes to cover their costs, even when they’re intended for families who want to share housing expenses. One custom home builder in Loudoun County offers an “Accessory Home,” which is literally a separate, two-bedroom house that is attached to the main house by a breezeway.

Townhomes in McMansions’ clothing

While new “multigenerational homes” tend to be expensive, at the other end of the market, Virginia homebuilders have disguised smaller, affordable homes as big, expensive single-family homes. You’ll find these in planned communities, one place where zoning actually allows different types of homes to mix together, but where developers may still want to create that atmosphere of uniformity.

As a result, this housing type is popular in places where homebuilders are required to provide capital-A affordable housing, where the prices are subsidized for lower-income households. Like Montgomery County in Maryland, Fairfax County requires developers to set aside some homes in a new development for lower-income households, but developers were reluctant to participate because the cheaper homes wouldn’t “fit in.”

In 2001, the county worked with a group of homebuilders to design the “Great House,” which looks like one big house but is actually a group of two to four townhomes. At the first Great House development in Tysons, the only way to pick them out is to count the additional mailboxes in front.

Again, these homes typically get built in new developments on the region’s fringe. Take this house, built in Loudoun County’s Belmont Greene neighborhood in 2003. It’s actually four two- and three-bedroom condominiums. From the outside, it looks and feels like the much larger homes around it, but the homes inside sell for half as much as nearby, $700,000 single-family homes. It would be a great fit in closer-in communities like Arlington or Alexandria, but is effectively illegal to build there.

People are already changing the meaning of “single-family” homes

Virginia follows in the footsteps of other states opening up single-family zoning, like California and Oregon. But in any place where there are single-family homes, there are people using them in ways they weren’t intended. Many (thought not all) single-family homes are big, and people often find that they either can’t afford all that space or can’t use all that space and want to share that space with people or activities that can use it, especially if they can help pay for that space.

And so, today, single-family homes are being used to house extended family members or unrelated adults or makeshift nightclubs or punk shows or the headquarters of the startup that saved Healthcare.gov. It’s no surprise that homebuilders have responded to this, whether by building houses that are explicitly designed for different uses, or by building houses that are simply smaller and cheaper but “fit in” with our preconceptions of how suburbs should look.

Delegate Samirah’s bill, or any bill that tries to legalize different kinds of houses, isn’t a radical departure from how people live. It actually looks a lot more like how people live, or how they’d like to live, than we may want to admit.