Perhaps once in a lifetime are the citizens of any city faced with an existential threat similar to Richmond’s imminent Code Refresh.
The Fabric of Community
Code Refresh threatens to tear apart the fabric of our communities by damaging both their appearance, cohesiveness, desirability, and market value.
Affordable Housing?
Code Refresh is promoted by generally well-intended folks including our Mayor under the guise of affordable housing. 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.
Why Market Rates?
Because builders and developers must currently pay full market prices for lumber and materials, are profit-centric, and because limited housing grants are available in most cases, it is inevitable—“as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow”—that Code Refresh will generate development at full market rates.
Sunlight
Code Refresh would allow new houses or additions to be built close to property lines at extreme 3-story heights. This threatens natural sunlight for adjacent homes, casting yards and houses in darkness or shadows. We are not downtown Manhattan. We cannot allow this draconian provision to become law.
Gentrification
Code Refresh promises not to displace lower-income Black and Brown residents, but the plan is almost guaranteed to cause widespread dislocation of vulnerable populations.
This is the same pattern that forced tens of thousands of low-income residents out of Church Hill, Highland Park, and other areas.
Flawed Concept
The plan is flawed due to citywide forced rezoning, high-density residential building, unattractive box-style designs, fragmented neighborhood appearance, and the displacement of the very residents the plan claims to help.
Unlimited Rooming Houses
Code Refresh seeks to allow rooming houses in every neighborhood, permitting an unlimited number of unrelated people to live in a single home.
Picture this: 12 people in a 12-room house, each with padlocked bedroom doors, sharing one bathroom.
Richmond has seen this movie before—W. Grace Street in the 1960s–70s. Blight, crime, and community collapse.
With RPD currently not enforcing the noise ordinance, how will a neighbor quiet a noisy rooming house at 2 AM in Windsor Farms or anywhere else?
Our View
The Richmond Civic League believes the rooming-house provision is blatantly against the values of Richmond citizens and would cause material, irreversible harm.
Overview
For many, neighborhood integrity is a core value. No single measure could damage our communities more than the proposed Code Refresh.
Solutions
The Richmond Civic League plans to work with City leadership, Council members, neighborhoods, citizens, and media to ensure Code Refresh 2.0 is significantly revised or canceled.
At minimum, we must ensure major modifications are made before anything is implemented.
Hon. Marty Jewell
Nov. 25, 2025
I hear the Code refresh was written at the direction of 18 or so developers, not citizens.
If you read the details, it is a prescription for new and expanded 3-story apartment buildings that take up 70-80% of the parcel acreage right up the neighbors’ fence lines. It’s truly horrible for the narrow properties in the Fan and Museum Districts.
Code refresh didn’t ask if I want my property rezoned. Why can’t citizens run the entire process?
Thank you so much for voicing this
I don’t like it. We own our homes and pay excessive taxes. Code Refresh homes like in Fairfax look tacky. No room for parking and no yard. People can look in other peoples yards no privacy, and no sunlight in many cases. If others build homes like those in Fairfax, here in Richmond, owners here like me will leave. Owners here are trying to keep their homes. It’s hard for us trying to live in Richmond with all costs going up like taxes,food,heat and all the things we need to live comfortably.
The proposed code rewrite is social engineering.
Urban planning presumes that building codes and property values can regulate and measure the quality of life.
In the name of the future, this plan licenses development without protecting the residents and neighborhoods that make this city unique and desirable.
City council should nuture the social fabric, not stuff it and bulldoze it without so much as a referendum.
For whom do they plan?
Who benefits now?
Can they engineer social justice?
Code refresh is not refreshing to me. Squeezing those ADU’s on properties just alleviates the city from making a commitment on building affordable housing and allows them to waste millions on themselves. There is no accountability. Rebuild in places like Gilpin court etc
The ADUs are the least of the problems. Developers already are planning to use these rules to build 3-story apartment building in the Fan and Museum districts that can extend to the fence line. Also, they are permitted to build on 70% to 80% of the parcel square footage.
Who is behind Code Refresh?
How can a duplex and an ADU in most back yards ever make sense? What about parking, lost green space, and lost tree canopy?
Then rooming houses ok in every home with no resident limit?
It’s the most bizarre proposal EVER.
Probably the single worst policy proposal in the very long history of Richmond. Obviously city planners have no idea as to so many destructive and unintended consequences.
richmond was once known as the city of homes (reference to homeownership).
with the new zoning code refresh, richmond will be know as the city of transients (renters).
mayor danny demands equity with renters in every neighborhood.
am i the only one making a comment for this topic?
Richmond is a beautiful city that I love very much. Especially dear to me is my home in the neighborhood that lies between Malvern and Staples Mill. In recent years I have seen some troubling changes that Code Refresh want s to ram down our throats. Developers and flippers have bought up property with brick homes and lovely yards, then torn down the existing home and built frame monstrosities.
We’ve attended 3 Code Refresh meetings and yes we have written 11 suggestions on the white boards. Despite what city leaders say, they listened to none of them.
This is a railroad job advancing the agenda of a dozen wealthy developers at the expense of neighborhood residents.
There’s nothing affordable about Code Refresh. If you look at new houses in Church Hill all prices, sky high!