Mayor Danny Avula wants to see new rules for how Richmond will grow in the future.

“It isn’t because we are looking to grow,” he says. “The reason is because growth is already coming to us.”

Under Avula’s watch, Richmond is in the process of updating all of its neighborhood zoning codes — the rules of engagement for what can be built in the city and how. “These changes are a core part of how we actually address the housing crisis in our community,” he says.

Code Refresh, according to the city website, is “an overhaul of an outdated zoning code to meet the needs of Richmonders today, tomorrow, and for the next generation… this means remapping every single parcel in the city and devising new zoning categories and strategies which will advance our goals for thriving neighborhoods and thriving communities.”

Here is an updated link to the Code Refresh overview.

This isn’t just cosmetic surgery, the mayor says. “Richmond’s codes haven’t been updated since the mid-1970s, and aren’t aligned with the Richmond 300 Master Plan.”

Richmond’s freshness date has expired, echoes Kevin Vonck, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development Review. “We are operating under a set of rules that was largely constructed 50 years ago. We really need a code that reflects the reality of today, our social and economic realities, our physical climate realities.”

But three years after it was first initiated under former Mayor Levar Stoney, Richmond residents — the ones paying attention to the public process guiding this massive overhaul — are anxious about Code Refresh. The deadline to offer input into draft two of the plan approaches this Sunday, March 1.

Annika Schunn is one of many who thinks the initiative is vital to the city’s future.

“The status quo just isn’t going to cut it anymore,” says the housing policy advocate at the nonprofit organization, HOME (Housing Opportunities Made Equal), one of a dozen groups to bond together under an umbrella coalition called Homes for All Our Neighbors. This pro-Code Refresh cohort includes, among others, the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, Better Housing Coalition, Southside Releaf, the Partnership for Housing Affordability, and Virginia Community Voice.

Richmond has had a housing crisis for years, Schunn points out. “What that really looks like is that a very high percentage of Richmonders, renters and homeowners alike, are cost burdened, meaning that they pay more than 30% of their income towards their housing costs. Some pay more than 50%.”

She argues for new zoning rules that would encourage and foster more affordable housing, The problem, she says, is that current zoning laws limit the possibility of a diversity of housing types and a range of affordability options. “Because somebody who may not be able to afford to purchase a single family home in a particular neighborhood could instead afford to purchase maybe a duplex or a condo.”

Concerns from the community

Preservationists, environmentalists and neighborhood associations are keeping a cautious, sometimes critical eye on Code Refresh.

“The goal of establishing more affordable housing is noble and needed,” says Logan Parham, Preservation Field Services manager at Preservation Virginia. “But we’re concerned about policies that displace the communities they’re intended to help and the widespread demolition of historic buildings.”

“Richmond absolutely needs more affordable housing,” Ernie Brown says. “But the city’s approach to doing it has been wrong from the start… this plan gives carte blanche to builders and developers to build on every square inch of Richmond.”

“We support duplexes and ADUs [Accessory Dwelling Units] by right across the city,” says Maria Düster, Climate Justice policy manager for the Community Climate Collaborative (C3), a nonprofit that works to advance climate initiatives on the local level. C3 is one of the Homes For All Our Neighbors organizations. “But we care a lot about the equity part of this conversation, too.”

“If we’re gonna increase density everywhere, we wanna be aware of which areas might be more vulnerable to development pressure, and make sure that those folks don’t face displacement. We also need to make sure that some of the neighborhoods that have long benefited from segregatory zoning in Richmond’s history, that they also kind of bear some of the increase in density.”

“Greater density is an essential and appealing feature of urbanity,” Jonathan Marcus, past president of the West Grace Street Association, wrote in a December Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial criticising the city’s zoning approach. “But chief among the false assumptions that subvert Code Refresh is ‘density creates affordability.’ If this were true, New York would be the cheapest city in the country, and The Fan would be the cheapest neighborhood in Richmond… unfortunately, [Code Refresh] is a deeply flawed rezoning process and unworthy of what Richmond has become.”

“Richmond absolutely needs more affordable housing,” Ernie Brown says. “But the city’s approach to doing it has been wrong from the start… this plan gives carte blanche to builders and developers to build on every square inch of Richmond.”

Brown is, along with former 5th District Councilman Marty Jewell, one of the co-founders of the Richmond Civic League, a citizen’s advocacy group that has started a public campaign against Code Refresh, The organization has purchased newspaper ads and rented more than a dozen billboards across the city chastising proposed changes. “It’s top down, corporate driven, not in the interest of neighborhoods, not in the interest of citizens,” he says. “It’s all about making some rich guys richer.”

Critics argue, among other things, that Code Refresh’s public process has been exclusionary, that there’s no set infrastructure funding to implement any proposed changes, and that the plan, as it stands, makes unrealistic assumptions about how it will affect home affordability. But the chief criticism seems to be that the Zoning Advisory Committee, like the Planning Commission itself, is too developer-heavy. “Why are we allowing the wolves to design the sheep pen?” Valerie L’Herrou asks.

L’Herrou, the president of the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association, says that it makes sense for the city to revamp its zoning and even to revisit it with a racial equity lens. When she lived on the West End, she wondered why the streets weren’t contiguous, why you couldn’t ride a bike from one end of Grace Street to another.  “I get it now. They didn’t want people from the inner city of Richmond coming out to the West End. It was the product of decades-old, Jim Crow-type zoning.”

But the city hasn’t figured out how to engage the general public in the change process, she laments. “At neighborhood meetings, people complain that the city’s interactive website of maps and zoning designations is hard to follow. We have older people who aren’t tech-savvy, and we have people who only have phones. I mean, it’s one thing to look at a map of the city on a computer, but it’s another thing to look at it on a three-inch wide screen.”

(Code Refresh webinar – August 2025):

Another concern is Code Refresh is all too much at once.

“In a word, it’s too big,” says Brown. “The notion of rezoning 77,000 parcels at once is not only unnecessary, it’s way over the top. Some incremental zoning, some rezoning around heavy traffic streets, that would have been perfectly logical. That’s what you would expect.”

Debate on lot width and single family dwellings

With all of the proposed zoning changes, which will affect everything from our aging infrastructure to the sunlight on your street, one big debate centers on the current restrictions on lot width and single family dwellings. Current code causes most duplex proposals to go through a lengthy — and often costly — special use permit process that requires extra review and public hearings before the Planning Commission and City Council.

The Homes For All Our Neighbors coalition is keen on reducing the number of special use permits, and seeing the city’s new zoning allow duplexes by right in residential zones. “Duplexes are an important solution for affordability, but also equity,” Schunn says. “There are many parts of the city, you know, that are exclusionary, meaning that the zoning is very strict about what you can build there. Those areas of the city tend to be more wealthy, more affluent and less diverse.”

Susan Rebillot wonders if this kind of “upzoning” will actually lead to affordability or equity. “I think it’s a mistake to think that developers are gonna come into Ginter Park, where the housing values are fairly high, and they’re gonna buy up property and they’re gonna build affordable housing. That is just not what’s gonna happen.”

Rebillot, communications chair of the Ginter Park Residents Association, and a past member of its Planning and Zoning Committee, has been following Code Refresh since the process started. Last November, she authored a petition that called for the city to slow down the process, listen more to neighborhoods, and find a better way to get citizen input. The Change.org petition, which currently has nearly 700 signatures, calls for a “focus on neighborhood-specific workshops for collaborative discussions and feedback, not open houses, panel discussions, or interactive maps.”

Rebillot thinks that Code Refresh is repeating failures seen in other cities, such as Charlottesville, which had its recent code overhaul challenged in court. “In virtually every city where zoning reform has happened in the last 20 years, they have ended up with many more market rate and luxury builds and very little in the way of affordability.”

Her refresh to Code Refresh would start with rebalancing the Zoning Advisory Council, which advises the Planning Commission. “I think to have it so loaded with developers and their lobbyists and their lawyers from the get-go was a really foolish thing to do.” Reacting to criticism such as this, the city added five community members to the ZAC late last year. “But they haven’t remedied the problem,” she says. “They’ve just added five new members.”

These complaints baffle Mayor Avula, who inherited the Code Refresh initiative when he was sworn in at the beginning of last year.

“I don’t know why people seem to be so focused on the Planning Commission and the Zoning Advisory Committee. The rules aren’t being dictated by [them]. The rules are being dictated by the city and its planning department because we’re the ones responsible for the roadmap of how we want the future of our city to develop.”

(Code Refresh Zoning Advisory Council meeting, 01/14/2026)

“Developers are involved in the process, but they’re not driving the process,” echoes Vonck. “The reason I make that distinction is that, at the end of the day, the zoning code sets the table for you to be able to build things. Well, who builds things? The city itself isn’t actually building things. It’s developers, it’s homeowners, it’s private parties that are the ones constructing things. So I think it’s important to hear their voices and understand what works and what doesn’t work in terms of driving housing production or different types of development.”

Marty Jewell at the Richmond Civic League doesn’t buy it.

“[This] is promoted by generally well-intended folks including our Mayor, under the guise of affordable housing,” he writes in a press statement, echoing the texts found on the League’s anti-Code Refresh billboards. “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.”

Ernie Brown is sure Code Refresh is going to be met with resistance.

“This is even worse than Navy Hill. I think you’re gonna end up with a majority of Richmond citizens opposed to it. I think they’re not opposed to it today because 95% of them don’t know the words, ‘Code Refresh.'”

Much of that opposition will no doubt be centered around special use permits.

“It’s a public process with community input,” says Schunn of HOME, “but it often results in projects that have to go through an expensive process that, in many cases, make those projects unfeasible… it can just completely tank projects to build affordable homes.”

L’Herrou, at the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association, has another view.

“Generally in our neighborhood, we feel that the SUP process has actually worked out pretty well. If a developer wants to build something on a vacant lot, and it’s different from what would ordinarily be zoned there, they have to come to the neighborhood and negotiate.” A majority of those negotiated projects have been greenlit, she adds. “This back-and-forth has led to facades and houses that are a better fit within the neighborhood. Yes, you can tell the ones that are new, they don’t exactly match the historic homes, but they aren’t jarring either.”

Another teensy-weensy detail is how much all of this will cost taxpayers — currently there is no dedicated fund to implement Code Refresh changes, whatever they are and how much they may cost. Costs for sidewalks, road and bridge repairs and other renovations would come out of the city budget, says Public Information Officer Michael Hinkle, adding that this is a future concern. Can our current infrastructure bear the changes, especially our beleaguered water system? “The Department of Public Works and Department of Public Utilities say it can,” says Hinkle.

But to critics like Marcus, “the failure to provide infrastructure plans and funding is reason alone to pause this process until the fundamentals are in place.”

Change is coming (get involved)

Planning director Kevin Vonck says that many of the criticisms he’s heard about Code Refresh are simply wrong — no, locked door boarding houses are not being proposed, for example, and developers will not be able to claim they are a church in order to build anything and everything.

He says other concerns misrepresent a work in progress — some sort of special use process will still be in place for neighborhood builds, just narrowed so as not to be so onerous to the city and commission, who have to administer each and every SUP. Draft two, what we see today, isn’t the final document, he stresses. There will be a third draft that incorporates feedback, ideas, criticisms and concerns. And, who knows, there may be a fourth or fifth revision before Code Refresh actually reaches a point when leaders would OK it. “I hope it happens in my lifetime,” he laughs.

Vonck also says that burdensome interactive maps aren’t the only way that citizens have given their two cents.

“One of the things we’ve been doing as part of our engagement is attending the district meetings of city council members. Citizens are there, the council members are there, and they ask questions.” He says that the Planning Department has met with council members in every district to talk through the process and its details. “It’s complicated,” he says. “All nine districts are very different, but the zoning code has to apply across the city.”

Sean Crippen, Board President of Virginia Community Voice, implores people to get involved in the process. “The change is coming. You can’t stop the change from happening. We’re helping as an organization to get the voice out for our area. But it would be better if we had more numbers of the citizens coming out and doing it themselves.”

For Crippen and VCV, a South Side neighborhood advocacy group, the promise of Code Refresh is that it will address some real community needs.

“We live in a food desert here in this part of South Side,” he says. “The potential benefits are real for us. I want it to make it easier for us to bring in those kinds of [mixed use] buildings you see in Carytown, where you have a restaurant with living above it.” He says that he and his neighbors currently have to travel several miles to get to a grocery store or pharmacy. “As long as we’re getting in businesses that can provide a service that we can really use over here in South Side, I’m OK with it.”

Richmond doesn’t like change, and Crippen has heard the grousing.

“A lot of people have greeted this with hate,” Crippen says. “What they’re concerned about is that when development comes through, we may get pushed out of our homes, taxed out of our homes. And that things will be built that aren’t gonna meet their needs. A big thing we’re looking for is affordable housing for Black and brown people.”

How the new code will spur affordable housing is an unsettled question. Even proponents, like Danny Avula, aren’t making big promises.

“I’m not arguing that changing the zoning code will make it more likely or possible for developers to come in and build affordable housing,” the mayor says. “Affordable housing is simply a function of, like, the math. But even developers building more market rate housing ultimately help the issue that we’re trying to solve, which is the rapid rate of increase on rental costs and home ownership prices that our city has experienced in the last seven or eight years.”

He says that the code changes are but one plank in the Affordable Housing Plan he unveiled in December that also includes investments in the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund and the increased use of Affordable Housing Performance Grants.

(Mayor Avula announces the Comprehensive Affordable Housing Plan below)

Vonck, pointing to recent studies from the Pew Charitable Trust, the National Bureau of Economic Research and others, says that even adding market rate or higher-end housing helps the overall housing market “by acting as a sponge for new people coming in from other places… it’s not just adding supply for supply’s sake.”

Why not implement Code Refresh incrementally? Why all at once?

“We’ve been doing some incremental work over time,” Vonck says. “We’ve created a few new zoning districts, like the Transit-Oriented Development district (TOD), which was to accommodate the first great bus rapid transit line in the city.”

If you want to see the city’s preference for future zoning, he says, study the TOD district. “From a development perspective, it’s the most accommodating towards what we wanna see today, and that’s really good mixed use… some commercial on the first floor, residential above.”

Additionally, Vonck says, city planners have updated the downtown area, changed parking requirements, allowed for more accessory dwelling units citywide, and made changes to short-term rental laws.  But that’s just the nips and the tucks, he says with a sigh. Code Refresh is the whole makeover.

“It’s gotten to a point where we’ve kind of taken some of those things as far as we can go.”

For more information on Code Refresh, and to directly access interactive maps and other resources, go to https://rva.gov/planning-development-review/code-refresh

You can also email comments on the plan to richmond300@rva.gov