About 50 Richmond residents congregated Wednesday night at Dogwood Middle School to hear a panel of transit, housing and planning experts discuss the future of the city’s zoning rules.
The meeting, hosted by the city, is part of a campaign to refresh the zoning code for the first time since 1976 — a process neighboring counties are working through as well. There have been at least three “town hall”–style meetings so far this year.
Andy Boenau, who writes a Substack newsletter about urban infrastructure, moderated the panel, which included former New York City Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver; James Freas, Charlottesville’s deputy city manager for operations; and Jovan Burton, the executive director at Richmond’s Partnership for Housing Affordability.
Boenau asked panelists a series of questions about zoning-related issues that will likely steer the city’s future over the next 20 years:
- How can Richmond solve the affordable housing crunch?
- How can Richmond encourage pedestrian-friendly streets?
- How can Richmond create new mixed-use neighborhoods that allow residents to live, shop and dine in the same vicinity?
Planning director Kevin Vonck told VPM News that city planners grappled with very different questions in Central Virginia some 50 years ago.
“We employed what a lot of communities used at the time, and that’s Euclidean zoning,” Vonck said. “The focus is on separating uses.”
And while he said it makes sense to separate some uses — like keeping heavy manufacturing away from residential neighborhoods — Vonck added, “We’ve maybe over-separated things.”
That over-separation, according to Vonck, is the genesis of a common dynamic in Central Virginia that plagues many American cities: bedroom communities distant from commercial districts. Those were designed with the built-in notion that everyone would own and drive a car to get where they needed to go.
During the panel discussion, however, the concept of bedroom communities quickly veered to a subject affecting many: the lack of affordable housing.
Silver, the former New York parks commissioner, said the only difference between affordable housing and housing in the modern context is a subsidy. He also said that merely having a predictable and easy-to-understand zoning plan goes a long way toward making housing more affordable. That’s because it simplifies the building process.
“It’s very important that you have a predictable set of rules so when people come in, you find a path forward and get projects done, versus a very complicated set of rules that make housing less affordable,” he said.
Making the city more user-friendly for people who don’t or can’t drive was a pressing concern for many attendees. Christian Muttart, a Virginia Commonwealth University student, asked what could be done in Richmond about “stroads” — wider, heavily trafficked urban streets that are dangerous to cyclists and inconvenient for pedestrians.
As an example, Muttart cited the stretch of West Broad Street past Interstate 195 in downtown Richmond.
“It kind of feels like an uncomfortable area, cars just zooming by loudly,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like a good area to walk in.”
Richmond’s planning department hopes to draft the new zoning rules sometime in 2025.
