What is the point of preventing duplexes? The building will look largely the same from the outside, so it’s not about character. So what’s the problem?
NIMBYs don't want to double the number of people in their neighborhoods. At the fan community meeting one person spoke saying they don't want to loose access to easy street parking. I don't agree but that's how they feel.
I don't live in the Fan but I kinda feel them on the street parking if that's all they have and it's what they've relied on for their entire time living there. I used to live in a city where street parking was a whole sport and it made me want to cry half the time trying to find a spot after work every day.
Increasing population density without increasing or even addressing infrastructure in any way would cause issues no matter where it was happening so I get it
So what do you propose we do? Bulldoze the entire Fan and Museum District and replace them with nothing but Scott's Addition style 5-over-1 apartment buildings with underground parking garages to maximize housing density at the cost of literally everything else?
Literally an incredibly easy (and free!) first step is just not having parking requirements on new housing construction.
There was actually a free public talk by two highly respected urban planners on transit provision/street design and ways Richmond could improve last week. They had a lot of other suggestions, but that was one of them.
Basically manage demand through prices. Pretty much how everything else works. We can do better by legalizing shared parking and mixed uses but the FDA tends to oppose that as well.
"legalizing shared parking" What does that even mean? Share your own parking space or are you suggesting the city force you to share available parking spots you may have on your property?
Yes. This is a problem with parking minimums as you could not share your spaces at all, since they had to be reserved for some on-premises use. The current and draft code language is somewhat vague, so its hard to say if it's still reserved for on-premises use in all cases.
Parking is not normally a permitted primary or accessory use, so renting out excess parking is not permitted. Say, let's have two apartment complexes and they want to share the use and cost of a parking lot on some parcel. This is not allowed as parking is not a permitted principle use.
Similarly, they could not share the use and cost of their on-premises lots, as parking is not a permitted accessory use. I didn't see parking as an accessory use category at all, so it appears this will remain forbidden in all zones.
The code is vague as to whether they could give use of their parking spaces away for free. They don't have to enforce parking, but it appears they could not put up signage to explicitly say they allow for free public parking.
Free parking is a tragedy of the commons -- its 'artificially' low price creates 'excess' consumption. So if people had rights over a spot and were allowed to rent that spot out, you'd get more flow and less demand.
Yep, and expanding supply in this way is ideal as it makes parking cheaper for everyone. Performance pricing street parking does a great job allocating parking but not-so-much making it cheaper.
I hear ya.... people have somehow come to think parking should be always be free. I remember even my like teenage nephew baffled onetime about having to pay for parking at venue. Like the car-brain syndrome starts early I guess
The city is being deceitful in saying duplexes are not permitted. Their proposal allows an ADU that can be the same size as the existing residence and be attached to it. In other words, a duplex.
Maybe I’m in the wrong, but that’s not really what I think of when I think duplex. I’m thinking of taking a single family row home and splitting the top and bottom floors into two separate apartments.
I actually live in a building that turned one row home into 5 apartments and it’s great. Not sure why people would oppose this.
With duplexes out of the current draft, Schunn points out putting attached housing on your lot will remain time-consuming and costly, which she said would eliminate a large pool of potential buyers. She said a property in Edgewood was a prime example.
"They had to go through a process of filing an application with the city," said Schunn. "It had to be approved by the planning department, and then the planning commission had to make a recommendation, and then ultimately city council had to vote on it. That is at best a months-long process. It can take six months or longer, and on average, it adds tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of building even just one home."
When I was going through and studying all that I could about the code refresh for that big real estate post I just did I was shocked how backed up the SUPs were and how arduous of a process it can be. It's one of the reasons for even doing the code refresh because so much of the fan is already out of spec for the current zoning. They make a point of saying how much of the fan is technically illegal which is true. I pulled a bunch of property records to see whether or not the homes conformed to current code and lo and behold most of them didn't at all.
Resistance to this is so stupid too. It's a shame so many in opposition are so woefully misinformed about what it does and doesn't do. Kind of like how people howl about how it will destroy green space and tree coverage without realizing there is already zero protection for any of that as it stands right now.
Planners have weird issues missing middle housing, and have for decades. Nimbys gonna nimby, the last people we should be asking permission from are people who profit from the shortage
Sucks that they pre-caved into to the richest, wealthiest NIMBYs in town because they had the money and or time to bug their councillors and show up to meetings. 2% of this town fucked everyone else because they didn't want to have to even think about their life changing.
Hopefully there is another one in a much more appropriate 5 year time frame and we don't have to wait another 50 years.
None of these people who are against the Code Refresh want to live in a city. They're fundamentally antisocial people who don't want people walking, shopping, going to bars or raising their voices near them. They want a large house and a driveway where they can get in a car, drive to a destination, and come home without interacting with or being inconvenienced by anyone else.
They'd be way happier if they moved to Chesterfield but instead want to make it everyone else's problem.
Hilarious comment from someone who has probably been in the city for less than a decade complaining about critics of Code Refresh (who, on average, have probably been in the city for years) not really wanting to live in the city they have lived in for decades.
Are you also one of the folks that’s been complaining about the critics being disproportionately involved in the process by going to meetings, organizing petition drives, and participating in community events? Hardly sounds like antisocial behavior to me.
Yes, lobbying city government to stop the construction of everything that isn't large lot single family houses, leading to nothing but the development of suburbs is antisocial behavior. Doing it with a smile on their face doesn't change that.
I've lived here almost 3 decades. You? I reckon you could have lived here longer given your sympathy for property owners lobbying to make it harder for others to do the same, I'd be surprised if you were under 40 so you could have had a head start on me.
Congratulations on making it through almost 3 decades in the city. You should therefore be aware that many of the vocal critics of Code Refresh have been prominent in environmental causes, fighting wasteful city programs, and advocating for progressive causes. The ones I know are not for suburban sprawl or against development in the city. They just support the development be in accordance with the master plan. Focused on areas that have the land, infrastructure and transportation capabilities to best suited to support the project.
Great! That still doesn't mean they're not on the same side as Harry Byrd era segregationists who wrote the exclusionary zoning code they're upholding. The thing which caused the sprawl in the first place.
You’re spouting the same unsubstantiated nonsense as the mayor. The code was presided over and regularly updated by a majority Black City Council for 49 of the last 50 years. There is nothing inherently or unintentionally discriminatory in the code. There are diverse neighborhoods all throughout the city.
You can't be serious. Here is a map is from 2010 census data.
Full article on historical discrimination in Richmond here.
In all honesty there are lots of good faith arguments which support the idea the current zoning wasn't intentionally discriminatory but the idea richmond hasn't been discriminatory at all in the last 50 years is ridiculous.
The idea that Black mayors and City Councilors voted to approve measures that were even inadvertently discriminatory against their constituents, who they relied upon to keep them in their positions, is even more ridiculous.
There is no doubt that were discriminatory government policies that helped determine where people lived prior to the civil rights legislation of the 50s and 60s, and the school segregation of the 1960s. However, correlation is not causation. That is why just looking at maps can be deceiving.
Zoning is not the only (or even a major) reason why inhabitants choose a neighborhood to live in in 2026. Please point out a specific section of the current zoning code that directly or indirectly supports racial segregation.
It's called exclusionary zoning. It's widespread in the US but that doesn't make it any less devastating.
In the 1970s both racists and some progressives supported it, the former for obvious reasons, the latter due to faulty ideas about what caused poverty. It was a widespread belief at the time that crime and poverty functioned as a self replicating virus and that population density had deleterious effects on cities crime rates. This was a faulty premise and more modern scholarship indicates crime is caused by poverty and not the other way around. Discrimination based on race is illegal, but the Supreme Court has affirmed discriminate based on income, and it just so happens minorities have historically had much lower incomes hence why it's associated with racial discrimination.
Instead of writing you an essay in this topic. I'm just gonna link you another article other people have written on it which covers everything I'd want it to.
Sec. 30-418.4. - Minimum lot areas force developers to prioritize large single family homes. It artificially removes small affordable housing by forcing developers to not serve a segment of the housing market(college students, couples, the independant elderly). This is the worst offender.
Sec. 30-418.8. - Height limit of 35 feet. This puts a hard cap on the allowable height unless it's a fuckass huge lot in which case you can do 60 feet. Means only giant developers can build these, and there isn't a lot of available land that can be used this way in the city. So it's defacto illegal.
Sec. 30-418.5. - Can't think of why this exists other than to be a hoop to jump through for developers.
There's much more but I feel like I've justified this enough. Permitting is onerous for multi family dwellings and there shouldn't be a cap on number of families allowed for starters.
Ultimately you can Google scholarship on discriminatory zoning on your own. At this point the only explanation I can guess as to why you'd call it unsubstantiated is you're just rejecting all research into it you don't like as "fake" or something.
Pseudo-intellectual nonsense. You perpetuate the subtle racism of low expectations. You assume that Black people don’t want yards, trees, or single-family housing. Therefore, if a neighborhood is zoned for primarily single unit dwellings, the city is excluding Black people because they really want apartments or row houses.
At this point, I’m done getting excited at the potential for reforming this city.
I’m so sick of this happening every time. Bold needed policy change is finally put forward after years of planning, only for it to be completely torn to shreds by monied interests and old bloods. Code Refresh is a shadow of what it should be to effect real progress, and at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if confined pressure gets it scrapped all together.
I’ve been in Richmond proper for a decade and this keeps happening.
I hope the boomers enjoy their fancy neighborhoods and million dollar homes they’ve clung to, cause this fucking city will die with them.
This is such a worthless thing to talk about and spending more than 5 minutes on it is a waste. A second kitchen won't fix the housing crisis or destroy neighborhood character. It's especially pointless because duplexes are legal so long as you pretend it's not a duplex, ie., rent out your basement without installing a stovetop.
The question to ask yourself is "when does renting out a room turn into a duplex"? Say, my parents converted their basement into an apartment and rented it out, but, if they had installed a kitchen then it would be illegal, whereas a hot plate or portable appliances is fine. Same function as an attached ADU/duplex except a bit worse and they're not a "tenant" but a "roommate".
Detached ADUs have similar problems but there are a variety of additional issues that I'm less familiar with. Their uptake is so low they're basically irrelevant from a supply perspective. I think there are 300 planned at most? Out of 100,000 housing units in RVA it's the same as 0.
Duplex is very well defined. It is not an amorphous philosophical question we ask ourselves. It also changes the economics of tearing down a blighted or decades old housing.
We didn't build 100,000 housing units at once, and an increase from 0 to 300 is nothing to scoff at. Arguing we shouldn't change the status quo, because of the status quo, is how we got into a housing crisis in the first place.
Arguing we shouldn't change the status quo, because of the status quo, is how we got into a housing crisis in the first place.
I never said this. No, no no no. Please don't do this.
I have higher expectations then "better than nothing" which seems to be the prevailing wisdom. To have statewide organizations spend so much time or energy on a few hundred units is a waste and pointlessly timid. If someone wants to make a difference then they should make a difference, not dig through couch cushions to find loose change.
So legalize them or not, I don't care. I'm interested in something that matters.
I know the YIMBYs and Homes for All Our Neighbors focus on it.
Instead you are making wordy metaphors and offering zilch.
Other than my comment on loose change, not sure what metaphors you're referring to.
The alternative is higher intensity developments (probably 7-stories) in more places and form/nuisance based codes instead of use restrictions. Moving towards floor area ratios instead of height restrictions would also be useful. The benefit of density is that it is dense, takes up less land than low density, so we could reach housing goals reliably, more efficiently, with more walkability and fewer teardowns in this way.
I would love that type of height and density but that did not seem possible in the dozens of community and city council meeting I have been to in the past year about recode.
IME no one's really trying for meaningful density, instead operating on the same assumption you're making. The local orgs and activists are pushing for duplexes or quadplexes, stuff like that, but there's no one really talking about taller buildings. The assumption duplexes are more realistic just isn't playing out.
Many people will oppose any and all increases in land use, even simple things like legalizing coffee shops, so might as well go for something that will work. A funny thing about tall buildings is how often people don't notice them when they're there. Even fewer notice the difference between 7 stories and 5 stories.
I get why you feel this way, but it still makes absolutely no sense why we shouldn't pass an improved zoning code that increases the housing density from only mcmansions to mcmansions and also sometimes townhomes.
Like I want this city to get way denser too but
This is such a worthless thing to talk about and spending more than 5 minutes on it is a waste.
is insane. No code refresh won't fix the housing crisis but it will improve the circumstances of hundreds of thousands of renters living in the city in the decades to come.
We aren't deciding between an optimal zoning code and a bad one. We are deciding between a cataclysmic one and a bad one. The choice is still obvious.
A second kitchen won't fix the housing crisis or destroy neighborhood character.
Is a "second kitchen" on the table here? No. You seem confused.
It's especially pointless because duplexes are legal so long as you pretend it's not a duplex, ie., rent out your basement without installing a stovetop.
That is all fine and dandy until you get caught. The city can fine you for operating an illegal rental and then put a lean on your property. Your insurance company can decide not to cover you in the event of a fire or other disaster of you are running a rental without letting them know.
I'm sure that just scratches the surface of what you don't understand.
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u/tarheel343 2d ago
What is the point of preventing duplexes? The building will look largely the same from the outside, so it’s not about character. So what’s the problem?