“I never would have thought that I would be the minority in my neighborhood,” said Sandra Bowman, a Black resident of Richmond’s East End. She told an interviewer last year that the recent arrival of white neighbors has led to changes. That shift has also brought frustration.
“If a brick comes up in their sidewalk,” she said of newer, white residents, “city workers are not going to replace that brick—they’re going to replace that whole sidewalk.”
Hardworking employees at the Department of Public Works might disagree or add nuance. But Sandra’s sentiments are shared by many longtime Black residents of Richmond. Often, those with deep roots feel undervalued and pushed out.
Last year we collaborated on a report that featured Sandra and documented double-digit displacement of Black residents from neighborhoods across Richmond. These losses are key to why Richmond is no longer a majority Black city, a distinction it held from 1970 until 2020. Growing numbers of our Black neighbors find that an influx of white residents with higher incomes has driven up property values, pushing their own real estate taxes to unaffordable levels. In response, many leave, not by choice.
The two of us tackle these problems from different angles—as a member of City Council and as an executive director of a nonprofit working to ensure equal access to housing opportunities. But we share a commitment to housing justice. We believe housing is a human right. And we are determined to foster vibrant communities where everyone has a chance to live and thrive.
Richmond’s Code Refresh makes these concerns timely. Maybe you’ve heard? For the first time since 1976, before most of today’s residents were born, the city will overhaul its zoning codes—the rules that decide what can get built, and where.
Zoning codes also answer a thorny question: Who do we want to be our neighbors?
We should face a reality too-little discussed. Richmond’s zoning codes encourage segregation. They concentrate wealth. They hoard opportunity. And they’re ripe for change.
Today in Richmond, 57% of the land is zoned for only single-family homes. In other words, it is illegal to build apartments in most places in this city. Yet more than half of Richmonders are renters, so most of our neighbors compete for housing in narrow zones. Black and Brown Richmonders are in the minority today, but they are the majority of renters. Zoning limits where our neighbors of color can live.
It shouldn’t matter where we live. People everywhere deserve thriving communities that they choose to call “home.” But we all know that where we live does matter. Our addresses shape access to good jobs, chosen schools, transit connections, healthy food, shade, safety, and so much more.
Zoning divides us along these lines, limiting opportunity, concentrating struggle, denying wealth.
Indeed, even as zoning codes unfairly limit rental construction, homeownership remains out of reach for most. The median home sale price in Richmond today is $415,000. For a household to spend no more than 30% of its income on housing—the limit widely recommended by economists—its annual income would need to be roughly $93,000. But the median household income in Richmond is just over $65,000.
You know this, you feel this—without seeing these numbers. But the numbers make clear a need that current zoning codes fail to address: our city needs more homes, of all shapes and sizes, to house workers and families struggling to get by as the cost of living spirals upward.
Meanwhile, our City budget takes a big hit from our outdated zoning laws. Limits on new construction prevent people of all walks of life from moving here, lowering our potential income from real estate taxes—the largest source of City revenue. When you hear Council members or our Mayor talk about the difficulty of paying for everything the City needs, you should think about zoning. Today’s zoning codes limit our ability to fund everything from new initiatives to filling potholes.
But as Sandra and others remind us, new neighbors aren’t a cure-all. The Partnership for Housing Affordability, a local nonprofit, notes that the Richmond region needs 39,000 more rental units just to meet current needs. And trends may be moving in the wrong direction. An economist at the Richmond Fed has forecasted declining construction of new rental units, a projection that arrived before the economic turmoil of recent months. Loosening tight zoning codes will help. But our severe housing shortage is likely to endure for some time. And as long as there are too few homes, the wealthy will always outbid. More longtime Black residents, our neighbors whose ancestors built this city, will move away.
Code Refresh offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address displacement and affordability at the same time. The two of us don’t pretend to have all the answers. But elsewhere in Virginia and across the country where other cities are tackling these same problems, we see ideas worth considering.
In Charlottesville, for example, the resident-led effort C’ville Plans Together overhauled zoning to remove barriers on construction while building guardrails against displacement. The Charlottesville plan largely eliminated single-family zoning; but in “sensitive communities,” where residents are most vulnerable to displacement, the new codes permit only “soft density.” This vision has echoes in the calls of advocates elsewhere for upzoning only to the next increment of development—from a single-family home to a duplex, from a duplex to a triplex. In both cases, the goal is to ensure that neighborhood change happens at a human scale and avoids overwhelming aging public utilities.
As we engage in Code Refresh, we will encourage ideas like these—solutions that honor our longtime residents, support their efforts to remain, and create newly affordable housing options. We hope you will join us. This effort will only serve city residents if it is built by city residents. We need you.
We are also well-aware that zoning reform alone will not address other key challenges to quality of life. Richmond needs more rapid transit to accommodate the elimination of parking minimums on new construction. We need more tree cover to shade neighborhoods still suffering from generations of discriminatory real estate practices like redlining. Zoning is a powerful tool, and one with limits.
But if we overhaul our zoning codes with fairness, we will make Richmond not only a great place to live. We will make this city a place to stay.
signed,
Councilmember Ellen Robertson and Thomas Okuda Fitzpatrick, the executive director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia
Photo by Skylar Gerald
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