Virginia – Acceleration Through Regulatory Harmonization Case Study
Industrialized Housing Delivery in the U.S.: Recommendations for State and Local Governments
The Commonwealth of Virginia is one of 35 states with an established industrialized building program responsible for administering and enforcing statewide standards for enclosed factorybased construction. Unique to Virginia, the industrialized building program operates within the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD). This integration of offices is fortuitous as offsite construction has become an integral strategy to addressing the rapid supply of housing across the state. While there is often a conflicting relationship between housing development and building code, in Virginia there is collaboration, proffering an accelerated approach to offsite constructed housing over the last decade through a key ingredient to code modernization — people. Integrating the industrialized building program with a statewide Department of Housing enables faster and better-integrated statewide reforms, and other states should follow suit as they consider statewide governance reforms to meet the housing moment.
Virginia became the first state to adopt new standards developed jointly by the International Code Council and Modular Building Institute (ICC/MBI 1200 and 1205 standards) that set the precedent for best practices in offsite construction policies and procedures that other states and regions can follow to navigate regulatory barriers and create regulatory pathways. Virginia’s offsite construction regulations have been harmonized with state economic and development goals to include ADUs like several other states and missing middle housing types that include single-family detached and townhouses. Under Virginia’s standards, a housing plan needs to be built only 10 times to take advantage of pre-approvals, considerably reducing housing delivery cycles. Together with MOD X, Virginia continues to explore increasingly expedited regulatory models for housing delivery through the continuous improvement of their processes and standards.