Construction in South Side (Photo by Jay Paul)
To address Richmond’s housing shortage and encourage economic growth, the city is planning to overhaul its nearly 50-year-old zoning code within the next year.
Preliminary plans show that about 60% of the city that’s zoned for only single-family homes and an accessory dwelling unit would be modified to allow a second residential dwelling, effectively inviting the development of duplexes and other so-called “missing middle housing.” In line with the comprehensive Richmond 300 master plan adopted in 2020, the proposals would also allow larger buildings and more mixed-use development in areas with frequent bus service.
With Richmond unable to annex land from the surrounding counties per a longstanding state moratorium, officials say increasing density in a measured way will be key for the city to avoid becoming more expensive as thousands of new people flock to the River City each year.
“How do we embrace growth as a city, making sure that we’re growing our tax base and diversity, but also protecting the things that we love about our city and that make Richmond so special?” Mayor Danny Avula said at an open housing meeting and panel discussion this summer. “Part of this engagement, this code refresh process, is trying to find the middle ground of how we embrace growth but preserve the things that are so important.”
The city has slowly implemented some of its ideas through ad hoc rezoning ordinances and special use permit cases in targeted areas such as the Broad Street and Richmond Highway corridors.
Planning Director Kevin Vonck says it’s become critical for Richmond to adopt a modern zoning code as the city continues to grow. The U.S. Census reports that Richmond’s population expanded to 233,000 people — nearly 11% — between 2010 and 2020 and has continued growing since then, up an estimated 3% between 2020 and 2024.
“We have to figure out how to support that,” Vonck says. “If we don’t find places for them to live … it’s going to continue to get more expensive.”
City leaders in 2024 directed the planning department to overhaul the zoning code to address changing conditions and improve efficiencies. While the new code wouldn’t require immediate development changes, a new and more permissive approach to zoning could make it easier for City Hall to approve developments by right.
Neil Nordheim, the owner of local homebuilder Barnstar Construction, says he’s hopeful the changes could make his development projects easier and more affordable. Focused mostly on building single-family homes on infill lots, he notes that one of his current projects has been in limbo for over a year because of the need for a special-use permit subject to approval by City Council.
“We’re talking about one single-family home. The amount of time and resources that I’ve had to put into it, it’s just mind-boggling,” he says. “It’s gotten so much worse, man. It used to take about six months, and now it’s closer to a year, depending on how much pushback you get.”
The latest zoning code drafts are based on feedback officials received after an initial set of maps and code proposals were presented to an advisory committee earlier this year.
Damian Pitt, an urban planning professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a member of the Zoning Advisory Committee, says the code proposals are largely faithful to the future land use maps envisioned in the Richmond 300 plan. Furthermore, he said they could help shrink the city’s estimated need of 35,000 more housing units.
While the plans emphasize more density along busy road corridors with improved transit, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, Pitt says there’s also a focus on upzoning many low-density communities throughout the city.
“We want to spread that out to a certain degree,” he says. “We don’t want to be in a position where certain neighborhoods are kind of given a free pass to not bear responsibility for absorbing new residents.”
While the plans remain subject to change, Vonck imagines that South Side could be where some of the most dramatic changes take place, as the zoning plans could enable developers to transform old county suburbs that Richmond acquired more than half a century ago.
“We took land from Chesterfield that was developed in a very different manner than most of the rest of the original city,” he says. “There are big sites. They’re ripe for development.”
