After three years of planning and negotiations, city officials say that it’s going to take a bit more time for its planned redevelopment of the Richmond Coliseum area.
“I wish we could have a contract in place for the demolition of the Coliseum by the end of the year, ” says Sharon Ebert, the city’s Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Planning and Economic Development. “But it depends on a lot of factors.”
The details behind the demolition are among many still to be ironed out in a final agreement with developers of the proposed new City Center project, to be built in and around the Coliseum site. Along with retail, office and housing components, an urban park and an extension of East Clay Street, the 9.4-acre City Center, which planners insist would be mostly privately financed, would contain a large anchor hotel to service the Richmond Convention Center.
The project is a priority for Mayor Danny Avula’s new administration, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen quickly.
“It’s hard to commit to a timeline at this point,” the mayor says. “But it is something that our economic development folks are working on every day. The goal is for the Coliseum to be demolished and for there to be a convention center hotel. We’ve lost out on over $200 million of convention center revenue over the last few years because we can’t support large conventions because we don’t have enough hotel beds that are walkable to the center.”
An uncertain economy
The city originally issued a request of interest to developing interests in late 2022, in a joint solicitation with the Greater Richmond Convention Center Authority. Five developers were chosen to submit proposals, and the selection process eventually narrowed down to Capstone Development of Bethesda, Maryland — which is also developing the Diamond District project.
Sharon Ebert says the process has taken so long because of a variety of factors, such as the amending of the Richmond 300 Master Plan and a rezoning of the city-owned parcels that are at play. There were also stalls in the ongoing negotiations with Capstone. And now there’s a newer uncertainty, she says: The current, unpredictable national economy.
“The city’s in the same place that most households are: you don’t want to move forward with something in an unstable economy. Even though interest rates have improved slightly since 2023, if you’re going to build a 30-story hotel building, you need to know where the steel is coming from and how much that steel might have tariffs on it. It makes a big difference in cost.”
Ebert has been with the city’s EDA since 2019, the same year that the 13,000-seat Coliseum was closed due to structural damage. People have long wondered: Why doesn’t the city just renovate the Coliseum instead of spending $3 million-plus to tear it down?
She says that, during the preparations for Mayor Levar Stoney’s Navy Hill plan — a proposed $1.5 billion downtown revitalization project that involved a significant public-private partnership — managers did an investigation into whether the Coliseum could be renovated and enlarged. “No, they said, it was too expensive to try and renovate it, given its structure. The plan [briefly] was to tear it down and build a new one that would accommodate larger crowds, something around 15-17,000 seats, to make it profitable. But that wasn’t feasible.”
Another question often asked is: What’s the difference between the new City Center and the rejected Navy Hill plan? After all, the larger 10-block Navy Hill also included a new hotel. “That’s a good question, and the answer is: community input,” she says.
When Navy Hill was voted down by city council in 2020, the administration used a public process to ask the community, and the stakeholders surrounding the Coliseum area: “What should we do with this land?”
“The public at that point in time said, we don’t want an arena downtown. We don’t need it. But what we really need to reactivate this space is a hotel. An arena, if you had one, would probably only be active for 100 days during the year.”
“The city’s in the same place that most households are: you don’t want to move forward with something in an unstable economy … if you’re going to build a 30-story hotel building, you need to know where the steel is coming from and how much that steel might have tariffs on it.”
Downtown voices weigh in
Besides hotel advocates, there were other voices to consider.
“A lot of the people said we needed an open green space or park, because there was no place for the city to have downtown events. Then the biotech community said, hey, what we really need is more wet lab space and space for people who are doing research downtown to live.”
She adds that affordable housing options are a City Center priority — the EDA has asked for them in 20% of any new residences.
“VCU and VCU Health at the time said they also needed more residential apartments, downtown condos, because the nurses and doctors who work at the medical center would prefer to live close by as well. And then we had our own needs… the judges were looking for a new courthouse, and the fire department was looking for a new downtown fire station.”
The point is that City Center isn’t a top-down initiative, like Navy Hill, Ebert stresses. “There were a number of stakeholders who basically were the main drivers in creating this plan.”
Capstone, according to their proposal, envisions “an integrated, mixed use development project, the components of which include: hotels, residences, retail space, lab/office space and the adaptive reuse of the historic Blues Armory. The proposed project features new streets reconnecting the site to the surrounding neighborhoods and a vibrant, walkable public realm including ample open green spaces.”
Talks stalled
Talks between the developer and the city became stalled at the beginning of the year, Ebert says. The two sides have been at odds on everything from who would administer the nearly 500 additional parking spaces needed to how the $100 million from the city to fund new public infrastructure would be paid.
“The city does not have the ability to fund that,” Ebert says. “We started looking at just the revenues that would have been generated from the private investment [of City Center], and those revenues, whether it was real estate taxes, property taxes, meals tax, sales tax, admissions tax, none of that was enough to support the debt service on $100 million.” (Norman Jenkins, the CEO of Capstone, did not respond to interview requests by presstime.)
Mayor Avula admits that City Center, an initiative which began under his predecessor Levar Stoney, will need a significant investment in public infrastructure.
“As we think about that street grid north and east of the convention center and west of the hospital, we want to reconnect some of those streets, bring back real pedestrian and bike connectivity, and we’ve got to do some infrastructure work under the ground to help support all of that.”
Former city manager assisting
Interestingly, the city has engaged the Robert Bobb Group to assist the EDA in a project management role for City Center. Former Richmond City manager Bobb was at the helm from 1986-1997 when the city was flush with major capital construction projects, some successful (the Shockoe flood wall) and some not (6th Street Marketplace).
Bobb’s D.C-based firm is, Ebert says, “one of a few companies that have on-call contracts with the city to perform project management and other related services.” Among other things, the Bobb consulting group recently assisted Mayor Avula in the hiring of Odie Donald II as the city’s new Chief Administrative Officer.
“It’s the private sector that’s doing the bulk of the investment here,” Ebert says, adding that, in a perfect world, the public expenditure needed to fund City Center would be zero. But it could also be as much as $20 million. The devil is in the details.
“I think the overall vision has not changed. We want what every other vibrant city has, which is a great downtown city center that everybody feels comfortable and safe being in and going to.”
For more on City Center, go to https://www.rva.gov/citycenterÂ
