In 1888, Richmond became the first city in the nation to introduce a system of trolleys. (Photo courtesy the Cook Collection, The Valentine)
After founding the town that he named Richmond, William Byrd II had a problem: He needed to survey the site to protect his profitable trade in tobacco, hides, furs, indentured servants and enslaved people.
Byrd’s business partner, William Mayo, and his assistant, James Wood, went to work. Their 1736-37 map is Richmond’s baby picture. They drew streets 66 feet wide (the length of a surveyor’s chain) laid out in a grid; there were no picturesque curved streets. It was a businesslike arrangement for a burgeoning company town.
For a century, the waterfront served primarily as a site for industry and workers’ housing. The owners and managers dwelt on the hills above, in what became Church Hill and Monroe Ward, often in big houses with veranda views of both the river and the industries they led.
And then the Civil War came. During the predawn hours of April 3, 1865, a self-inflicted conflagration consumed every bank and bar in town. Within the next year, Richmond’s city directory listed at least 16 breweries and beer producers (rebuilding works up a powerful thirst). These included the James River Steam Brewery, founded by David G. Yuengling Jr.; its cooling tunnels remain beneath Rocketts Landing.
Streetcars We Desired
During the mid-1880s, land developer and city streets commissioner J. Thompson Brown sought a way to conquer the ancient impediments to the city’s growth: its many ridges and ravines. He formed the Richmond Union Passenger Railway and persuaded the city to hire Frank Julian Sprague, an Annapolis-trained engineer and Thomas Edison protege, to bring his electric-powered transit ideas here.
Sprague’s small team worked out improvements to the traction motor that required a troller mounted to the car’s roof, hence “trolley.” On May 4, 1888, 21 cars, one after another in intervals, descended Church Hill, cementing Sprague’s place in transportation history.
At the outset, private companies ran the trolley lines. They collaborated with electric utility and land developers to create attractions where the lines ended, including Idlewood by Byrd Park, West-hampton, Forest Hill, Lakeside and Fair Oaks. This transit-directed development grew neighborhoods — and the first suburbs. Most were restricted to white residents. Trolley service in Jackson Ward, gerrymandered into a Black-majority community, was neither numerous nor generous.
The trolleys operated for 61 years, until a takeover by Virginia Electric and Power Co. (precursor to Dominion Energy). Then federal anti-monopoly legislation ordered utilities nationwide to divest from their transit arms. Service ended in 1949, and the bulk of Richmond’s trolleys were ceremoniously burned by the shops that had maintained them. One surviving car remains on view at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Forest Hill Park was an amusement park c. 1890-1932 and the nucleus of a "streetcar suburb" later annexed by Richmond. (Photo courtesy the Cook Collection / The Valentine)
Space Race
Over Virginia’s long history, city and county governments developed separately. As a result, the commonwealth today has 38 independent cities that are surrounded by, but separate from, the local counties. Cities are, in effect, landlocked islands in a sea of counties.
Therefore, the only way for Virginia cities to expand is either to consolidate with a neighboring county or to annex that county’s land and residents. The former is akin to a merger — as in the 1910 union of Richmond and independent Manchester — while the latter is more of a hostile takeover. Because a city must offer compensation for annexing a county’s property, it is also an expensive option.
Two of Richmond’s most significant annexations occurred in 1914, when city borders were shifted to encompass 12 square miles of Henrico and northern Chesterfield counties, and in 1942, when 17 square miles were added. Many of the annexed communities had grown from the streetcar lines, including Barton Heights, Ginter Park, Highland Park and Sherwood Park, as well as the neighborhoods of North Richmond, Forest Hill, Westover Hills and Scott’s Addition.
A 1959 consultant’s report extolled the advantages of a possible Richmond-Henrico consolidation, including “simplicity in solving service problems relating to water, sanitation and transportation.” However, voters in 1961 defeated the proposal, primarily because white proponents refused to hear of proportional representation by Black representatives on a unified City Council. A 1966 do-over didn’t make it out of the gate.
Richmond then attempted to boost its dwindling population by acquiring 23 square miles of northern Chesterfield County. The 1970 annexation added 47,000 residents, 97% of whom were white. Richmond paid Chesterfield $7.8 million for the land and assumed $19.3 million in county debt. Chesterfield laughed all the way to the bank.
The deal backfired on Richmond’s white power brokers: It not only inspired a rush of white flight out of the city but incited a Voting Rights Act legal battle. Curtis Holt, a resident of the Creighton Court housing project, took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which acknowledged the racial bias of the annexation. Further, Richmond was forced to replace its at-large electoral system with a ward arrangement. The city functioned from 1972-1977 without local elections. The new system produced Richmond’s first Black-majority council, with civil rights lawyer and legislator Henry Marsh III (1933-2025) appointed mayor.
In 1987, the Virginia legislature issued an annexation moratorium that undergoes consistent renewal; the 2023 session extended it until 2032, ensuring cities remain landlocked while the counties, with their abundant land, continue to grow.
Legacy Project
Following generational wrangling, the city in 1946 adopted an all-encompassing plan for future development. Today’s Richmond is in part a legacy of St. Louis consultant Harland Bartholomew, then considered the nation’s foremost authority in city planning.
In some respects, Bartholomew’s plan for Richmond was progressive; in others, it was contradictory and racist. His vision surrendered significant portions of the city to surface parking and misnamed parkways and expressways — necessary due to the popularity of cars and the shuttering of the electric streetcar system — that divided the city by race and class. He also advocated neighborhoods anchored by schools and parks, championed managed growth, and opposed expansion beyond Richmond’s boundaries at the time.
Bartholomew described the dislocation of the population to the far suburbs and efforts by the city to expand outward as “an extravagant waste” destined to bankrupt Richmond. Instead, the expressways were supposed to bring back businesses and shoppers, spurring a downtown revitalization. “Planners in Richmond devoted more attention to the highway issue between 1946 and 1956 than to any other element of the master plan,” observes Christopher Silver in “Twentieth-Century Richmond Planning, Politics and Race.”
Opponents to the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority, which built a section of what became Interstate 95, sought a course running north and west around the city, but this would have disrupted newer, primarily white, Henrico suburbs. Planners instead cut through older and mostly Black neighborhoods, including Shockoe and Jackson Ward.
Likewise, the Richmond Metropolitan Authority, formed in 1966 to build and operate an expressway system (ultimately comprising the Beltline Expressway, Downtown Expressway/I-195 and Powhite Parkway), cleaved through Byrd Park, Randolph, Sydney and Oregon Hill. Conservation advocates successfully saved Pony Pasture on the James for use as a public park and preserved scenic Riverside Drive.
With the city exercising eminent domain, the two road projects displaced some 10,150 people; in Jackson Ward alone, 1,000 structures were destroyed. For the expressway, some 700 residences and 150 businesses were relocated. The construction also unearthed but demolished the downtown remnants of the historic James River and Kanawha Canal.
Simultaneously, in Richmond’s other older neighborhoods, including the Fan District, Church Hill and Ginter Park, civic associations and preservationists sought to maintain their communities. Around them, however, the city stagnated due to rising poverty, violent crime and underserved schools.
Some 2,000 structures were destroyed or relocated to construct I-95 and the expressway system connecting the city and suburbs. Here, the Beltway Expressway Jan. 15, 1975. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
Head out on the Highway
Highway improvements allowed the transformation of Chesterfield's quiet countryside, seen here in 1973, into planned communities. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
Rather than allowing suburbanites expedient access to the city, the Downtown Expressway and Powhite and Chippenham parkways instead encouraged an outflow of population.
In Chesterfield, the planned community of Brandermill, begun in 1975 and inspired by Northern Virginia’s Reston, was marketed by builders as offering a resort lifestyle for the middle class. With the Swift Creek Reservoir, new roads and walking trails meandering through a woodsy environment, Brandermill attracted young professionals and families. Satellite neighborhoods such as Woodlake soon followed.
Similarly, in 1979 Innsbrook transformed a rural Henrico crossroads into an office-anchored live-work-play community. Nearby, the neighborhoods of Wyndham, Twin Hickory and Wellesley came tumbling out of each other like Russian nesting dolls.
State Route 288, a partial beltway through central Chesterfield to western Henrico, and the Powhite extension eventually caught up. Along 288, developments sprouted and Short Pump, Glen Allen and Goochland’s West Creek expanded.
Density Is Destiny
More than a half-century after white flight, the city is beginning to catch up with its suburban neighbors. Residential growth in places including Scott’s Addition, Manchester and North Side is driving new commercial and retail development, bolstering the city’s long-beleaguered tax base.
Urban living is the new standard: City-styled, walkable communities, including the riverfront, Rocketts Landing and Libbie Mill-Midtown, snuggle against Richmond’s borders. Meanwhile, the previously innovative Brandermill, Innsbrook and their ilk are updating the balance between their parklike characteristics and contemporary demands.
Within the city proper, the approximate population of 233,655 has only in recent years exceeded 1950’s total of 230,310. Growth, however, remains limited due to Richmond's landlocked status, trapped within 62 square miles with more than 20% of its real estate tax-exempt, thanks to the large presence of state government and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Mayor Danny Avula, at a summer 2025 forum, posed the question on many minds: “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?”
How to grow the city over the next decade and beyond is the next great challenge. The recent Code Refresh project, an overhaul of the city’s outdated zoning ordinances, aims to make it easier to build housing in existing communities, but it’s running into resistance. Critics of the process charge that the city’s planning commission and zoning advisory council are too cozy with developers.
Richmond 300, the master plan adopted in 2020 by state mandate, is nonbinding but still raising concerns about the impact of multifamily units and building heights, especially in older residential communities.
The city’s current resurgence, Richmond resident and developer Jonathan Marcus wrote in a guest column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in September 2025, “was kick-started not by top-down urban planners or developers, but by urban pioneers who spent a generation or more reviving the great bones of our neighborhoods and enhancing the gifts that make our city a destination.”
For City Hall, the trick is how to encourage and incentivize the development of affordable housing while growing the tax base. Avula announced a multipronged affordable housing plan in mid-January that includes $13.4 million in city funds to create 1,000 affordable homes in fiscal year 2027, bolstering the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, collaborating on public housing redevelopment and focusing on antidisplacement efforts.
“Housing is the foundation of opportunity in Richmond,” Avula said in a press release. “By making our funding more predictable, streamlining our processes and refining how our anti-displacement programs operate, we’re building a Richmond where everyone has a place to call home.”
