River’s Edge at Manchester apartments under construction on Porter Street
In 2002, as Blackwell’s residents regrouped from the unfulfilled promises of the federal Hope VI redevelopment, the old Manchester district north of Stockton Street began to see rumblings of change, largely driven by artists — and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
In March 2001, the Manchester Residential and Commercial Historic District, bounded by East Ninth, McDonough and Stockton streets and Cowardin Avenue, was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register. The district is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Unlike the city of Richmond’s Old and Historic District neighborhoods, where the nine-member Commission of Architectural Review approves renovations down to paint colors and storm doors, the state takes a hands-off approach in neighborhoods on its register. Property owners do not have to seek permission to make changes or even demolish some buildings within Virginia Landmarks Register communities. Many people may not even realize their neighborhood has a state designation, unless they decide to purchase and renovate a property that’s 50 years or older. The major impact of state and federal historic designations, instead, is the availability of historic tax credits, which mainly benefit commercial developers and others with the resources to apply for them.
In 2002, Tom Papa of Fountainhead Development was working on projects in Shockoe Slip and Shockoe Bottom when a group of artists were about to lose their studios in the American Tobacco Building’s conversion into residential space.
“I was just trying to help them find a location,” Papa recalls. He and Fountainhead’s real estate lawyer, Rick Gregory, heard that MeadWestvaco (now WestRock) was selling its properties along Hull Street.
A building next to the railroad was perfect for the artists, with plenty of room for studios and exhibition space, in what we know today as Plant Zero on Hull Street. But MeadWestvaco didn’t want to sell properties piecemeal, Papa says. They wanted to let go of three blocks’ worth of buildings.
“We weren’t sure what we were going to do with those city blocks,” Papa says. “That was 2003. We needed a cafe and some things to normalize the neighborhood. We started building apartments. We could see the whole feeling of Manchester was changing. It was no longer this place that was gritty and viewed as dangerous.”
Around the same time, Charles Macfarlane, owner of Macfarlane Partners, made his first investment in Manchester, purchasing the Cheek-Neal Building on the corner of Brander and Hull streets, across from Plant Zero. He and fellow developers Sam McDonald and Chris Dillon teamed up with architect Joe Yates, who converted the warehouse into a 14-apartment, four-story building with office space.
In 2005, a second event made investment in Manchester more attractive to developers: the sale of 178 parcels that once belonged to Overnite Trucking magnate J. Harwood Cochrane. After first offering his 220 plots to the city, Cochrane decided in 1992 to donate the land to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ real estate foundation, which worked with the city to redevelop the area and leased part of the land to SunTrust Bank on Semmes Avenue, funding art purchases with the income. Now, the foundation was selling the land. Macfarlane and McDonald purchased 35 of the final 178 plots of land — what we now think of as the heart of Old Manchester, bounded by Semmes, Cowardin, Bainbridge and Commerce — and Robin Miller and Dan Gecker, a real-estate lawyer and former Chesterfield County supervisor, bought the rest. Miller and Gecker, known as Urban Development Associates, had begun investing in Manchester in 2002, first purchasing 1301 Porter St., a 1914 brick apartment building that was reopened to renters in 2006.
In the early 2000s, Miller says, Manchester was characterized by “a lot of vacant lots, a lot of decrepit homes and overgrown, broken sidewalks.”
Even in the mid-2000s, “It was fairly quiet,” says 3North managing principal Jay Hugo, who purchased the Corrugated Box Building in 2005. “There weren’t a lot of people on the streets.”
Miller and Gecker underwent an intensive selection process run by the VMFA Foundation to buy the Cochrane property, presenting a plan of mixed residential, retail and office spaces that remains their framework today.
Miller, who was instrumental in starting the Manchester Alliance of business owners, says he and Gecker worked together with other developers and civic associations, as well as the Hull Street Merchants Association, which started more than 60 years ago. Everyone had similar goals, they say, in revitalizing the area.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Cochrane had ordered the demolition of numerous buildings — including former residences — because he deemed them beyond repair and detrimental to property values, so much of the land was vacant. Miller and Gecker say they have run out of historic buildings to rehab in their section of Manchester.
Diners at Croaker's Spot
Miller, like Papa and Macfarlane, says he wouldn’t have considered investing in Manchester without the tax credits made available by historic designations.
Kelvin Hanson developed the Hull Street property that includes Croaker’s Spot.
Others soon followed. Hanson and Co. owner Kelvin Hanson, who began his investment business in Jackson Ward in 1995, developed Old Manchester Plaza, the Hull Street complex that also houses Croaker’s Spot, and other properties since 2007. The economic downturn in 2008 and 2009 created a pause in development, but activity picked up in 2010.
Nonprofit organizations also can benefit from tax credits. Now defunct, the Imani Intergenerational Development Corp. — the development arm of former Mayor Dwight Jones’ First Baptist Church of South Richmond — funded an apartment building on Hull Street with low-income housing tax credits. Imani ran into trouble in 2009 when the IRS placed a lien on the nonprofit for more than $27,000 in unpaid taxes. Its nonprofit status was revoked.
Richmond CARITAS is converting an old Philip Morris warehouse on Stockton Street into an office, furniture bank, women’s treatment center and sober-living apartments, set to be finished next year, with $8.7 million in historic tax credits going toward the $27.9 million total cost.
At times, historic tax credits have been abused. Development colleagues Justin French and Billy Gene Jefferson Jr., who were renovating the Tobacco Factory on Stockton Street, amid their 35 properties, also benefited from historic rehabilitation tax credits — in their cases, by illegally trumping up the value of their work. They are serving sentences in federal prison after trials in 2011 and 2014 for tax fraud.
According to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the state issued $1.2 billion in tax credits between 1997 and 2017. The department estimates that the program has stimulated $4.5 billion in private investment over the past 21 years. There have been 52 projects in the Manchester historic district, with a total investment of $31.8 million.
“Manchester was changing. It was no longer ... gritty and viewed as dangerous.” —Tom Papa, Fountainhead Development
Federal historic tax credits, governed by the U.S. National Park Service, are available only to commercial real estate developers, but state tax credits are available to anyone who owns property in a historic district. To claim the 20 percent federal and 25 percent state credits (equaling 45 percent), the developer must meet the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and have the approval of the DHR.
Recent changes in federal tax code have affected the credits. Instead of a developer taking the 20 percent federal credit all at once, they can take only 4 percent a year for five years after the building is in service.
In Richmond, more than three dozen neighborhoods — from the Fan to Shockoe Valley, Springhill to Battery Park — have been named to the state’s historic register.
Anyone, including people who don’t live in the community, can nominate a historic district, given the resources and will. That’s what happened last March in Blackwell, when Michael and Laura Hild of Church Hill Ventures filed a nomination to expand the Manchester historic district to include 625 more properties — including some of the property they own. The couple began purchasing property in the area in 2015 and made close to 30 buys in the past few months. A vote on the district was scheduled in June, but after residents complained about notification concerns, the Virginia Board of Historic Resources and the State Review Board delayed that vote until their Sept. 20 meeting in Petersburg. (Update: the Sept. 20 meeting has been postponed to Oct. 10 at 1 p.m. at New Life Deliverance Tabernacle, 900 Decatur St., in the Blackwell neighborhood.)
Macfarlane recalls a situation he encountered about a decade ago after purchasing the former Manchester Post Office, which later served as a police precinct that closed in 1999. He and his partners bought the building from the city, saying they’d restore it to the original 1911 design for a residential and office multi-use space. Some Manchester and Blackwell residents, though, objected because they wanted the police precinct to return, Macfarlane says: “I was called a number of names. I was criticized, I was insulted.” In the end, the renovated building was finished and has two apartments.
Macfarlane recognizes parallels between his project and the Hilds’ plans.
“I know Michael and Laura, and I think their heart is in the right place,” Macfarlane says. The Hilds “are not developers, per se, although they’re doing a fair amount of developing. He’s also an entrepreneur.”
When Michael Hild got “[verbally] attacked” at a Blackwell Civic Association meeting in June, the first meeting the couple had attended since the historic district nomination, “I think he was taken aback. I think it’s a new experience for him.”
