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According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area has increased by about 10% — 130,000 people — since 2010, rising to 1.3 million. The area comprises 17 counties and the cities of Richmond, Petersburg, Hopewell and Colonial Heights.
Chesterfield County saw the largest population increase in the area, jumping to 364,548 people in 2020 from 316,236 in 2010.
But Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, says growth in the region was slower than in the previous decade.
“Most of the population in the city of Richmond grew more slowly than the metro area did during the 2000s,” he says. “The slower growth in Richmond’s urban core is in line with what we saw from census numbers all over Virginia, and to a certain extent nationally. Virginia had a really big slowdown in the population growth during the 2010s.”
Even so, Richmond showed an increase in its population growth in the second half of the 2010s. Lombard attributes some of the growth in the city early in the 2010s to the conversion of many historic buildings into apartments, which provided additional housing. Richmond’s population grew from 204,214 people in 2010 to 226,610 in 2020.
Census data shows a 27% increase in the number of white residents in the Richmond metro area. In the city of Richmond, Lombard says many made their homes in costlier apartments in areas such as Scott’s Addition. He says the trend is also due to historically Black populations declining and aging, with fewer children now living in Richmond’s North Church Hill and North Side neighborhoods.
“You have a lot more Black families living further out,” Lombard says. “If you look at Chesterfield, the Black population went up 25%. Hanover went up by 13.5%. So you have more growth in the Black population in some areas further out and then less in the city of Richmond and some of the older suburbs of Henrico as well.”
Henrico County’s population increased from 306,935 in 2010 to 334,389 in 2020. In Hanover County, the population increased to 109,979 in 2020 from 99,863 in 2010.
The region is also becoming more diverse. In the city of Richmond, there was a notable jump in the Asian population — almost a 50% increase over the past decade.
A growth in the region’s foreign-born population reflects a nationwide trend. “You see a lot of high-skilled immigrants coming from India and to an extent from China,” Lombard says. “The population born in India in the Richmond metro area nearly doubled in the last 10 years.”
Census data shows that the makeup of people coming here from Latin America has changed. “Previously, we had a lot of growth in the population born in Mexico,” Lombard says. “Migration has shifted now, and you see more growth in the population coming from Central America. There’s also been a fairly substantial amount of immigration coming from Africa and the Caribbean, which is somewhat of a new trend, though not the same scale as Central America and India.”
Also, many of those who identify as Hispanic in Richmond were born in the United States and are not immigrants. “That’s where the growth is coming from,” Lombard says. “It’s about a third or so born in Virginia or born in the U.S.”
Another notable trend is the growth in the population of people who check multiple racial and ethnic boxes on census forms, such as those who identify as white Hispanic or Black and white. In Virginia, the number of people who identify as American Indian more than doubled during the past decade. Virginia census numbers show a 171% increase in people who say they are American Indian and Alaskan Native in combination with another race. Lombard says the majority of those people identify as Black and American Indian.
Housing Priorities
Sebastian Shetty, policy coordinator with the Partnership for Smarter Growth, says if population growth is not managed properly, it can exacerbate inequality. Shetty’s organization is particularly concerned about the region’s shortage of affordable housing and high eviction rates. “The increase of housing prices and the degree of competition that we’re seeing around new houses points to a need for dramatically increased housing construction, which is happening,” Shetty says, “but it needs to be happening faster, and targeted toward people with lower incomes.”
He points to Jackson Ward and Church Hill as examples of neighborhoods that are being transformed — some might say gentrified — as more people want to live in the city.
“It’s important to be aware of displacement, so that we can accommodate the growth that the city is experiencing without pushing the people out who have been here for a long time, and without creating conditions that lead to them feeling alienated from a community in which they may have been living in for generations,” Shetty says.
“There are people that are elderly, who have lived there for a very long time, who, because of the property value increase, can’t afford their property taxes and are on the receiving end of lots of phone calls on a daily basis from people seeking to purchase their housing,” he says. “It’s economic, it’s cultural, it’s social, it’s very complex, but these are the kinds of issues that we are thinking about when we’re participating in public processes around development and redevelopment."
Transportation Plans
A growth in population can mean an increase in traffic. The city’s Richmond Connects multimodal transportation plan aims to improve mobility in equitable ways, broadening options beyond the dominance of private automobiles.
“Traditionally, a lot of these regional boards will invest in creating new roads, widening roads and upgrading roads on the fringes of the region in order to enable outward growth and land speculation,” Shetty says. “[The Richmond Connects Path to Equity plan] is really a large-scale effort to shift the entire redevelopment growth paradigm from growing outwards at the edges to reinvesting in our core and in our neighborhoods and making these places where all kinds of people can live and are well connected to each other.”
Shetty says if those involved in the planning execute the proposals correctly, they’ll be able to create a cycle in which there’s investment “in our strongest assets, and by doing so [they’ll] lift up and empower all the members of our community while simultaneously making the city and the region a more attractive place for future growth and investments.”
