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by Lee Gimpel
Virginia Business
April 2004

In its 102 years, Richmond's Main Street Station has been through a lot — floods, a ruinous fire, and the abandonment 28 years ago by Amtrak's passenger rail service. But today, with a $51.6 million renovation complete, the brick and terra-cotta-roofed building with its 19th century ambiance and distinct clock tower is back in service.

So far it's a modest revival, with just a handful of passengers boarding the few trains that began serving the station last December. Still, the revival of the city-owned station is the latest in a string of major projects designed to reshape the city's moribund downtown business district.

A few blocks to the west wrecking crews have knocked down the failed 6th Street Marketplace. A vacant Woolworth's store on Broad Street is being torn down as part of a project to convert the former Miller & Rhoads building into a hotel. Other vacant buildings are coming down to make way for a new Virginia Performing Arts Center that hopefully will bring more people back downtown. Already open and drawing outside visitors is the new $165 million Greater Richmond Convention Center on Broad. Accordingly, the 400-room Richmond Marriott next door has spiffed up its lobby and made other improvements as part of a $12 million renovation.

Things are already looking brighter a little further west down Broad, thanks to Virginia Commonwealth University. It has spent $100 million sprucing up academic and residential buildings and is proposing another expansion at its downtown campus that would cost more than $200 million. The university has served as an economic incubator for downtown with the establishment of a new engineering school and the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park. (See story on page 44 ) “We're riding a tidal wave of economic development downtown. It's staggering,” says Jack Berry, executive director of Richmond Renaissance.

All told it's quite a shift for the city and the Richmond region, which for years has seen most of the investment dollars and growth go into the surrounding counties. Chesterfield County on the city's south side, for example, saw the number of jobs rise 38 percent between 1990 and 2001 to 136,500, while its population grew 24 percent to 259,000 people. North of the city, Henrico County grew its job total by more than 40 percent to 199,700 while population rose 20 percent to 269,000 people. During the same period, Richmond actually lost 29,000 jobs, a 13 percent drop, and its population declined 2.4 percent to 197,000 residents.
The return of investment dollars to the city, led by the $66.7 million downtown redevelopment project of the Broad Street Community Redevelop-ment Authority, should give some momentum to backers of a better region-wide strategy for economic development. “The city now has something to bring to the party,” says Gregory H. Wingfield, president of the Greater Richmond Partnership.

Before leaders can sell Richmond as a region, though, with a revitalized core city surrounded by vibrant suburbs, they should consider a study last fall by the Southern Environmental Law Center that warned that the Richmond region is consuming land at a rapid rate — 59,000 acres in a recent five-year period. New roads — such as the 8.8-mile Pocahontas Parkway between Chesterfield and Henrico, and the 17.5-mile Route 288, which will complete a western loop around Richmond when completed this year — are certain to trigger more sprawling development in outer counties. “They're growing so fast that (traffic) congestion is beginning to be a problem,” says Tripp Pollard, who wrote the SELC report. “Schools are becoming crowded, and they're finding out that growth doesn't always pay for itself.”

What's more, the aging suburbs closer to the city in Henrico and Chesterfield are starting to show a drop in property values and a tick upward in poverty rates. “The problems that people associate with more urban (areas) have begun to spill over into some of those counties,” Pollard says.

Next month business groups in the region are sponsoring a “Building a Better Richmond Region” conference. “We've got to step back and realize that, at least from a business standpoint, this is one contiguous marketplace,” says James Dunn, president of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce. “Let's start to do some planning across jurisdictional lines so that 10 or 20 years from now we won't find that we've completely outgrown our infrastructure.”

They're not starting from scratch; the region's localities have worked together on other projects. The cost of the new convention center, for example, was shared by the city and the counties of Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover. The counties have also asked the General Assembly for authority to raise their hotel/motel tax, Dunn says, to help pay for the proposed performing arts center that would be built at the corner of Broad and 7th Street. It is “a breakthrough to see the counties involved in city projects,” says Berry.

Richmond City Manager Calvin Jamison says the counties “are willing to look at regional projects that make sense because we provide the entertainment and improved quality of life for the whole region.” In a sense they don't have a choice — for better or worse the city's reputation has a big influence on how the region is perceived. “When I'm selling Chesterfield, I have to sell the Richmond area,” says Jim Dunn, director of Chesterfield's Department of Economic Development. “We need the city. We need a strong core.”

While things are looking up downtown, Richmond has suffered a bumpy year. The city's murder rate ticked up during 2003, for the second year in a row. And city hall has been plagued with scandal, with one council member facing federal bribery and mail fraud related charges. Then, too, there's a controversial proposal before the General Assembly to change Richmond's form of government to allow citywide mayoral elections.

Those troublesome issues aside, Dunn and other city residents still keep their eye on the goal of bringing companies to their home turf. The state's tax structure makes localities dependent on real estate tax revenues and is a major disincentive to region-wide land-use and transportation planning. Goochland, for instance, has zoned much of its land for commercial use instead of residential, and acts as a “tax parasite” to neighboring localities, says Gary Johnson, professor of urban studies and planning at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It's ridiculous for each of the jurisdictions to be competing with each other,” he says. “As a region, I don't know if we've really determined what we want to be when we grow up.”

A glaring problem is the lack of a regional transportation plan, says Dunn of the regional chamber, which has tried to get the General Assembly to create a regional transportation authority to fund projects. The region has one of the highest patterns of cross commuting between localities of any region in the country, he says. “We need to figure out where the people are, where the jobs are and how to connect the two.” One effort to help commuters — offering a public bus run from strategic locations in Chesterfield to downtown —was been well received but is restricted now to a single bus picking up from only one location due to a lack of funding.

Even if transportation concerns are addressed, slowing sprawl will be a challenge. “This region is going to see continued sprawl for a while,” Pollard says. Dunn of the chamber, though, hopes the sight of demolition crews making way for new development downtown will give regional efforts a lift. After years of a declining and stagnant downtown, he says, the work is “now being viewed as a sign that, ‘This stuff is actually going to happen. We're going to have a new core city.'”

Senior Editor Robert Burke contributed to this story.

Return to Virginia Business - April 2004