RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — While Virginia isn’t the only state facing an eviction crisis under the weight of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it has a history of being less tenant friendly with few protections for those who fail to make rent.
But a new Democratic majority, along with the state’s Democratic governor, devised a temporary fix that not only created new protections for renters, it also addressed landlords’ needs. Called the Virginia Rent and Mortgage Relief Program, it has earned rare praise from both sides of the landlord/tenant relationship locally and nationwide.
Marty Wegbreit has been defending low income Virginians in eviction hearings for decades. The director of litigation at Central Virginia Legal Aid, he has few nice things to say about landlords or how the state allows them to treat tenants.
“Virginia didn’t get to be the number one state for business by accident,” he joked in a phone interview.
Wegbreit deemed the state’s longtime pro-business affinity, including pro-property owner legislation part of the “Virginia way,” a term often used by the state’s traditionally conservative Legislature. But those same laws, he argued, led his home city of Richmond to have some of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to a 2016 Eviction Lab report.
But as the pandemic ravaged employment, it has led to changes to the state’s landlord/tenant laws that the longtime advocate called “unprecedented.”
“It's never happened for the 40 years I’ve been involved in evictions,” said Wegbreit on the package of changes, passed during a recent special legislative session, that he said flipped the state’s eviction process on its head.
The result of Covid-19 budgetary amendments approved by Governor Ralph Northam, the changes have added steps which move the filing of the eviction lawsuit and the actual removal of tenants toward the end of the process instead of at the beginning.
“Using the eviction to collect rent rather than trying to collect rent and using eviction only as a last result, that's the old way,” Wegbreit said.
Virginia, like every other state, had struggled to properly address the onslaught of evictions.
While the state’s supreme court instituted an eviction moratorium shortly after Northam issued his earliest lockdown orders, it expired over the summer. The patchwork of state and federal fixes created in its wake allowed a system Wegbreit called “chaotic and unpredictable.”
But the RMRP and other changes, which all expire in June 2021, include $50 million in CARES Act funds and another $12 million from the state available to landlords to stem the flow of evictions.
“This had bipartisan support,” said Pamela Kestner, chief deputy of the Department of Housing and Community Development, who's tasked with organizing the distribution of the wealth of funds. She was grateful when legislators worked across the aisle to develop the expansive program.
“How else are Virginians supposed to telework or learn from home if they don’t have a home,” she added.
The program is also being praised nationally. Tracey Benson, president of the National Association of Independent Landlords, said she’s been inundated with calls from both members and nonmembers nationwide who are on dire straits.
“Landlords feel like they’ve been left out in the cold,” she said, noting eviction moratoriums might keep tenants in homes but don’t address the mortgage and utility payments landlords still have to make.
When landlords can’t pay those bills, she said, both the landowner and the tenant can lose their housing. But after reviewing Virginia’s program she said few states have offered the kind of “wonderful” relief the state has created.
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