In an attempt to address the region’s housing shortage, local leaders have trotted out a series of incremental solutions. They’ve required developers to build more affordable housing. They’ve extracted money from Amazon. They’ve put more tax dollars toward housing construction, one budget cycle at a time.

But now, two young legislators are proposing a more drastic solution, one that would reshape the look and feel of suburbs across Maryland and Virginia. They want to eliminate zoning for single-family homes.

The legislation comes from Ibraheem Samirah and Vaughn Stewart, Democratic state delegates on the precipice of their second terms in Richmond and Annapolis, respectively.

Samirah’s bill calls for all single-family neighborhoods in Virginia to be opened to housing that accommodates two families, such as duplexes. The goal is to encourage landowners to build for multiple families on one lot, which could put cheaper homes on the market, reduce sprawl and make the suburbs more accessible to working people and young families struggling with high housing costs.

Stewart’s legislation favors a lighter touch—his zoning bill would allow more density only in certain “high-opportunity” areas, not the entire state. But he’s also calling for Maryland to finance a robust government housing program, modeled after the largely successful mixed-income “social housing” found across Western Europe.

Their proposals are far bolder than the housing legislation that’s typical to either statehouse. Consequently, the bills’ futures are uncertain, at best—a previous version of Stewart’s social housing legislation was practically laughed out of committee. Despite this, they’ve made a mark: Days before either state’s legislatures are set to convene for the new year, both proposals have already prompted reactions ranging from elation to outrage.

And curiously, the bills have divided progressives, many of whom vehemently disagree over how to fix the region’s housing shortage. In the process, odd political alliances have begun to emerge, with some Democrats finding themselves in rare agreement with supporters of President Donald Trump.

‘The Weird Politics Of The American Left’

At first glance, both Samirah and Stewart’s bills seem like slam dunks for progressives who oppose socioeconomic segregation and embrace “smart growth” policies.

“The housing crisis is so acute that you can’t begin to solve it with just one solution. You have to really throw the whole kitchen sink at it,” says Maryland Democrat Vaughn Stewart.

Samirah, a 28-year-old dentist who represents the Herndon area, says he was driven by recent decisions in Minneapolis and Oregon that made it easier to build denser housing types in neighborhoods long dominated by single-family homes. Those homes—the most expensive type of housing per capita, and also the most land-intensive—have become increasingly out-of-reach for young families and working people as land prices soar in urban areas nationwide.

“It’s a topic of national discussion right now,” Samirah says. “I thought to myself, what a wonderful solution. One that comes at it from a market perspective … and offers a massive solution for the affordable housing crisis.”

In Maryland, Stewart’s “Homes for All” package is a legislative triple-whammy that he believes attacks the housing crisis on multiple fronts. The package includes the “Modest Home Choices Act,” which would open transit-adjacent, jobs-rich neighborhoods to small-scale multifamily housing, like townhomes and clusters of cottages. It also includes the ambitious “Social Housing Act,” which would harness millions of state dollars to create an estimated 2,000 units of government-owned, mixed-income housing annually. Finally, there’s a broad renters’ rights bill that would make it easier for tenants to break leases due to unsafe living conditions, among other provisions.

Stewart, who represents a swath of deeply blue Montgomery County, says he wants to bridge what’s become a profound divide over housing policy within his own party.

The 31-year-old’s core supporters are Democratic Socialists, who tend to favor government-funded housing over regulatory options like upzoning, because they believe opening neighborhoods to more development would only supercharge gentrification and produce minimal affordable homes. But Stewart also wants to court the capitalist-leaning, typically Democratic “YIMBYs” (an acronym for “yes, in my backyard”) who argue that allowing denser development is an efficient way to boost housing supply and potentially bring down prices over the long term, without spending millions of public dollars.

Those two approaches, Stewart says, work better together than they do in isolation.

“The [housing] crisis is so deep and so acute that you can’t begin to solve it with just one solution. You have to really throw the whole kitchen sink at it,” Stewart says. “The only reason we think of [these approaches] as separate or as different is because of the weird politics of the American left.”

Unexpected Alliances

Those politics are on full display among Democratic-leaning civic groups like Arlingtonians For Our Sustainable Future, which opposes Samirah’s upzoning proposal in Virginia. One of the group’s founders is Peter Rousselot, former chair of the Arlington County Democratic Committee.

“When we saw Samirah’s bill, we saw that it was the ultimate, complete wipe-out of single-family zoning,” Rousselot says. “We thought that was a bad idea.”

Arlington hasn’t shown that it’s ready for more housing, Rousselot says, and upzoning should be put off until the county presents a concrete plan for how to manage the population growth that’s already expected.

“We’d like to see those plans before we do any significant changes to enable even more people to move here,” Rousselot says.

Arlingtonians For Our Sustainable Future has found an unusual ally in Tim Hannigan, chair of Fairfax County’s Republican Committee and a supporter of President Donald Trump.

“There very well may be the need for housing around some urban areas, to include the Washington D.C. area here,” Hannigan says, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you crowd out single-family housing areas.”

The committee chair says upzoning is unlikely to win broad support in Richmond, despite Democrats’ newly won majority in the General Assembly.

Hannigan has compared Samirah’s bill to an “assault” on the suburbs, echoing rhetoric heard often from neighborhood groups in largely Democratic jurisdictions in Northern Virginia and Maryland.

But resistance from Democrats comes as a surprise to Samirah, a political newcomer who won his first term to Virginia’s General Assembly in a special election last year.

“I think we have to revise and understand what their [Democratic] principles are,” Samirah says. “If a Democrat is a representative of a party that wants to include everybody, then there needs to be a recognition that single-family zoning has caused exclusionary development to occur in our neighborhoods.”

Tempered Expectations

Samirah says his bill offers something for both Democrats and Republicans. Upzoning is essentially about giving property owners more freedom over how to use their land, he says, which Republicans theoretically support. And one among several selling points for Democrats, he says, is that concentrating housing could reduce sprawl and take cars off the road—both pluses for the environment.

“I view myself as somebody who finds solutions across party lines,” Samirah says.

But Stewart acknowledges that his “Homes For All” package could face an uphill battle in Annapolis.

When Stewart introduced the first version of his social housing bill last session, both Democrats and Republicans in the House’s Environment and Transportation Committee spent part of the hearing scoffing at its grand ambitions. The poison pill, it seemed, was how Stewart proposed to fund all that government housing: through a whopping $2.5 billion government bond—and the reinstatement of Maryland’s millionaire’s tax.

“In some way, I was deliberately trying to be incendiary,” Stewart admits. He wanted to “move the Overton window,” or expand the scope of ideas up for consideration in Annapolis.

He’s become more pragmatic since then.

The latest version of Stewart’s Social Housing Act proposes a different revenue source—this time, the money would come from increasing certain real estate transaction fees. He still doesn’t expect the bill to pass easily, if it passes at all. But he’s been encouraged by what he’s heard from members of his committee since that first hearing.

“[They] expressed what to me seemed like genuine interest in the topic. And that I was not expecting,” Stewart says. “Now that the bill has been tweaked, I think it’s really taken a step forward from an idea designed to move the Overton window to an idea that could actually pass the Maryland General Assembly.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.