Zoning Code Refresh

A Nightmare For Our Communities?

Perhaps once in a lifetime are the citizens of any city faced with an existential threat similar to Richmond’s imminent Code Refresh.

The Fabric of Community.

Code Refresh threatens to tear apart the fabric of our communities by damaging both their appearance, cohesiveness, desirability, and market value.

Affordable Housing?

Code Refresh is promoted by generally well intended folks including our Mayor under the guise of affordable housing. It is our studied opinion and that of many experts that the Code Refresh plan as proposed will drive up prices and offer housing at almost exclusively market rates.

Why Market Rental/Sale Rates?

Because builders and developers must currently pay full market prices for lumber and materials, are profit centric, and because limited housing grants are available in most cases, it is as inevitable as surely the “sun will rise tomorrow” that Code Refresh will generate development at full market rates.

Sunlight

Addressing natural sunlight specifically, Code Refresh would allow new houses or additions to be built close to property lines at extreme 3 story heights in many cases. This provision threatens the availability of natural sunlight on adjoining residences, and can cast the neighbor’s house and yard in darkness or shadows. We are not downtown Manhattan, where blocking of the sun is routine. We cannot allow this draconian provision to become law.

Gentrification

Code Refresh officially promises to not displace lower income black and brown residents, however the plan is almost guaranteed to create widespread dislocations of vulnerable populations.

This is the very same factor which has already forced out tens of thousands of low income residents from Church Hill, Highland Park and other areas. There is no debate here.

Flawed Concept

Code Refresh is flawed due to the planned, forced citywide rezoning which will result in across-the-board high density residential building, highly unattractive box designs, a torn, tattered, and fragmented housing appearance, and the gentrification and displacement of the very citizens

that proponents are attempting to assist.

Unlimited Rooming Houses

Adding insult to injury, Code Refresh unbelievably seeks to allow rooming houses in every neighborhood, permitting an unlimited number of unrelated persons to occupy any house in the city.

Picture, if you will 12 persons living in a 12 room house in your neighborhood, all with padlocks on their bedroom doors and sharing a bathroom.

The rooming house provision is reminiscent of W. Grace Street Richmond in the 1960s and 70s. Those properties shredded all aspects of community. Crime increased dramatically, and the community was lost to blight for an extended period. Compounding this, the RPD currently is not enforcing our noise ordinance. So under Code Refresh, how is a conscientious neighbor going to get help to quiet a noisy rooming house at 2 am in neighborhoods like Windsor Farms or others?

Our View

Richmond Civic League feels that the rooming house provision is blatantly inimical to the values of the citizens of Richmond, and would materially and irreparably harm our city if enacted.

Overview

Beyond family and personal safety, many citizens see neighborhood as a paramount value. It seems inconceivable that any one measure could cause more damage to our neighborhood fabric than the proposed Code Refresh.

Solutions

Richmond Civic League plans in a conciliatory approach, to engage City leadership, Council members, neighborhood leaders, citizens, and the media in order to insure that Code Refresh version two is materially modified or canceled.

We must make sure that the imminent threat of this plan in its current format is not implemented. In the interest of all Richmonders and at a minimum, we will take whatever steps are necessary to help guarantee that deep modifications are made.

Hon. Marty Jewell

Nov. 25, 2025