Their restaurant may be out in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn’t faze Darrin Witten or his wife, Julie. With the money they saved managing restaurants for others, the Wittens in February opened the Manakin Grill, an upscale-casual joint amid western Henrico County’s pine thickets and hardwoods. A few miles away sits West Creek, the Richmond region’s largest and, for now, emptiest business park.

But the Wittens know that time — and suburban sprawl — is on their side. West Creek will sprout next spring with one of the largest commercial developments that Richmond, and in fact Virginia, has ever seen. As part of the largest corporate expansion in state history, Falls Church-based Capital One is building a 1.5-million square-foot office campus to accommodate up to 8,600 employees.

West Creek is driving the Richmond region's transportation and land-use decisions. Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch

While it may be good news for the Manakin Grill, West Creek could put the Richmond region to the test. Between Capital One and other tenants, West Creek is destined to become one of the three largest employment centers in the Richmond region, matched only by downtown Richmond and the Innsbrook office complex. Rather than accommodating this growth by zoning for residential development nearby, however, local governments are restricting the number of new houses that can be built. Workers will be forced to drive greater distances, placing a strain on the transportation system. Optimists say that Richmond localities are up to the challenge of dealing with steady but moderate growth. Pessimists warn the region could be headed for Northern Virginia-style headaches.

Richmond’s seven suburban counties survived the 1990s in good shape. In contrast to Sunbelt boomtowns like Charlotte and Atlanta, traffic remained tolerable, housing stayed affordable and local governments kept pace with population growth without sacrificing infrastructure investment or public services. The Richmond area won recognition as one of the most liveable medium-sized cities in the U.S.

But the 2000s could be tougher, experts warn. Local growth-management strategies are pushing development farther out, raising costs and increasing reliance on a few key roads. On the plus side, political leaders have been willing to fund new highway construction by imposing tolls, never popular with the electorate. On the other hand, completion of Richmond’s beltway in 2003 will give sprawl what it has so far lacked – easy access to the entire region. Says Dr. Gary Johnson, chairman of urban studies and planning at Virginia Commonwealth University: "The future quality of life of the region is going to be dependent on how we address this issue."

To many observers, the Richmond area’s economic performance has been ideal: not too hot, not too cold. The economy has been healthy, but corporate expansions haven’t caused the same kind of development pressures as experienced in Northern Virginia. Only one commercial complex, Innsbrook, has emerged as a rival to the old central business district. Because most of Innsbrook’s growth occurred within a single political jurisdiction, Henrico County, the local government could do a good job of planning for the development. But West Creek changes the dynamic. Perched at the edge of sparsely populated Goochland County, the megaproject will require cooperation from Henrico, Hanover, Chesterfield and Powhatan.

Construction began at the Capital One site last month, and hiring has started. When the credit-card company fills its West Creek facility, more than twice as many Richmonders will work for it than for any other company. West Creek will host 6,000 of Capital One’s 7,000 new workers in the area, and they begin arriving next spring. "In the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve been able to acclimate very well to the growth that we’ve had," says William H. Goodwin, who purchased West Creek from the original developers. He’s confident that local governments will prove responsive as his development fills up, citing a recent water-sewer agreement that Goochland recently negotiated with Capital One. "I know that Cap One is happy," he says.

Not everyone is so confident. "Clearly we’re on the verge of explosive population growth," Johnson says. "We’re at virtually full employment in the Richmond region and a lot of these new jobs are going to be filled by in-migrants." At 13 percent, the region’s population growth in the ‘90s was about midway between the 6 percent rise in Hampton Roads and the 19 percent increase in Northern Virginia. But tally the region’s counties apart from the city, which lost population, and you find they grew 20 percent. This decade the region’s population is projected to grow even faster, approaching one million by 2010, almost entirely in the counties. While Richmond has grown, it has been blessed with a relatively large amount of easily developed land on which to spread that growth and good roads to handle it, says Goodwin. Unlike Northern Virginia, blocked to the north by Maryland, and Hampton Roads, hemmed in by water and swamp, Richmond can grow unimpeded in all directions. The metro area is served by interstates radiating east, west, north and south, and by a largely untapped interstate running around half the metro area’s circumference. The transportation system also includes the Downtown Expressway and Powhite Parkway, both supported by tolls, and Route 288, which will complete the beltway loop, also to be financed largely through tolls. "We have an excellent roadway network for a city our size," VCU’s Johnson says. "That’s made an enormous difference."

Even so, the highways are feeling pinched. With development spilling into rural counties like New Kent, Goochland and Powhatan, Richmonders are driving farther and more frequently. The Virginia Department of Transportation estimates that Richmond-area households now average 11 vehicle trips per day, a number that will keep growing. By 2018 the average length of a trip will increase from 21.5 to 27.5 minutes. Even with new and wider roads, the number of spots with serious traffic congestion is expected to more than double by 2018. Finishing Richmond’s beltway will not reverse this troublesome trend.

To see what’s driving the traffic projections, look to the Capital One deal – an example writ large of what’s been happening throughout the region. While Capital One estimates that more than half of its current employees in the region live within five miles of the completed and under-construction portions of the highway, firm spokesman Hamilton Holloway says it also will have to tap into labor pools elsewhere. To help clinch the Capital One deal, the state approved funding in January for a fast-track finish of Route 288, a highway that in 2003 will link I-64 west of Richmond with I-95 south of the city. The project has been proposed for years as a way to accommodate growth in Richmond’s far southern and western suburbs.

Only a few of Capital One’s new workers will live in Goochland, the county that hosts West Creek. There has been little residential or retail development within miles of the office park. County supervisors are determined to preserve its rural, horse-country quality of life. Like neighboring Powhatan, Goochland has established "rural preservation districts" that permit only limited development such as single-family homes, recreation areas and low-density businesses such as golf courses and bed and breakfasts. Residential lots must be at least an acre each, and up to half of the development must be left as open space. The zoning restrictions should limit growth due to Capital One to only 194 households by 2004.

Goochland also recently began to accept cash proffers from developers to cover the increased costs of county services for new homes and residents, a traditional sign of larger lots, decreased density and higher housing costs to come. Meanwhile, Chesterfield County has bumped up its proffer to $7,800 per lot, while Hanover charges proffers and water-sewer connection fees of nearly $16,000. Henrico, the most developed county in the region, does not demand proffers, but it is restricting growth by requiring developers to build on larger lots.

In the 1990s, Richmond had worked its way through an inventory of cheaper lots that had been zoned in the 1980s and early 1990s, says Susan Sprigg, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Richmond. The National Association of Home Builders ranks the metro area 47th out of 177 metro areas for affordability. But that favorable ranking will change, she predicts. "Not too many years ago, you could build a house for under $100,000," says Sprigg. "Now you can’t do anything for under $150,000."

Clearly, the metro area is moving towards a land-intensive development model. According to U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service figures cited by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in the 10-year period ending in 1992, 58,300 acres were developed. In the five-year period ending in 1997, 58,000 acres were developed – twice the rate of land consumption. Not only is density declining, but zoning increasingly separates residential, retail and commercial districts, virtually forcing people to drive everywhere they go. There are no significant development projects in the works based on the neighborhood-community model of people living near where they work, shop and play, notes Paul Silver, president and CEO of Morton G. Thalhimer Inc. "Sprawl is a regional issue. It’s curable only through municipalities … working together to solve it."

Can the Richmond area come together, or will the counties keep acting in their own narrow interests? "It’s probably my background, because I spent 20 years in Northern Virginia, but I think Richmond does have a great deal of regional cooperation," says Hanover County Director of Economic Development Marc Weiss. Regionalism certainly gets good lip service here. Ask around for examples of successful regional planning and you’ll hear several expressed with conviction, such as the expansion of Richmond International Airport and the creation of the Greater Richmond Partnership, the region’s economic development agency. Weiss says the Richmond Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce also have made strides in getting the region to think and act like one. But: "That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better." Weiss acknowledges that the counties also are busy developing their own airport industrial parks and competing fiercely with one other, often wielding incentives, to land new employers.

Collaborative use planning isn’t on the agenda either. Sprawl just isn’t high on the list of civic concerns. In September, for example, the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce gathered more than 500 people from throughout the region to set priorities for the coming decade. Building a regional transportation system of roads, air, rail and mass transit ranked first, while developing a regional growth strategy ranked ninth. "We need much more effective regional planning," VCU’s Johnson says. "But land-use decisions seem to be sacred turf."

Return to Virginia Business - March 2001