Richmond Is Putting Two Surplus Sites Out for Housing: What the Q Street and Chamberlayne Solicitations Mean for Church Hill and Northside

Two one-acre pieces of city-owned land, on opposite sides of Richmond, are about to be offered to developers for housing. Neither is large. Together they tell you something fairly specific about where the city is pushing and what that means if you are shopping either neighborhood.

Jonathan Spiers reported for Richmond BizSense on 15 September that the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development was preparing a request for qualifications for 2503 Q Street, the former First Precinct police building at Q and 25th, with a request for proposals to follow in October alongside a separate solicitation for 4929 Chamberlayne Avenue at Azalea. Both are intended for mixed-use projects including lower-income housing. The filing detail below is his reporting; the read on it is ours.

What is actually proposed

Per that reporting, the Q Street site was declared surplus two years ago and approved for disposition last year, once the First Precinct moved to a new facility on Oliver Hill Way. The Chamberlayne parcel had been earmarked for a clinic that was subsequently scrapped. A June presentation to City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee, by housing director Merrick Malone and project development manager Cindy Kong, showed renderings of a three-story building at Q Street and a five-story building at Chamberlayne, both with apartments over street-fronting commercial space. Malone described the goal as creating “more mixed-income housing” while returning the land to the tax rolls, potentially through a ground lease rather than an outright sale.

The city assesses Chamberlayne at over $1.35 million and Q Street at $1.26 million. Consultants HR&A Advisors are running community outreach, and the East End meeting on the Q Street site was held with the New Visions Civic League of East End.

Two very different corners

This is where the story gets more useful than the headline. Q and 25th sits in the middle of Church Hill, a submarket that has been absorbing infill for fifteen years and where a three-story mixed-use building on a former institutional site is unremarkable. The interesting question there is not whether it fits, it is what happens to the blocks between the site and the Shockoe Bottom edge, where the city is simultaneously selecting a developer for 212 N. 18th Street.

Chamberlayne and Azalea is a different animal. That is Northside, on a corridor of large detached houses and mature street trees, and a five-story building is a genuine change of scale for the immediate blocks. Worth noting for anyone looking there: the site sits just south of The Crossings at Mulberry, a 160-unit StyleCraft townhome development already under construction across the city line in Henrico, which is set to include 25 lower-priced homes through Henrico’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The density on that corner is arriving from both sides of a jurisdictional line, which is the sort of thing a buyer looking at one side only will miss entirely.

The part worth reading twice

At the same June session, Sixth District council member Ellen Robertson pushed for a wider inventory of vacant property to be brought forward, not just the parcels the city happens to own, pointing to long-vacant lots in Randolph, Fulton and Blackwell including land held by the housing authority.

And the programme has already produced one null result: a solicitation for 911-913 Hull Street, a quarter-acre city parking lot in Manchester, attracted no bids. That is the honest counterweight to the optimism. Putting land out to the market is not the same as getting a building, and small urban parcels with affordability requirements are difficult to make pencil.

What a buyer should do with this

Almost nothing, today, and that is the point. A request for qualifications is the earliest formal step in the process. What it usefully does is mark the direction of travel on two named corners, which matters if you are choosing between two streets rather than two cities. If you are looking within a few blocks of either site, walk it, look at what is already under construction nearby, and ask what the parcel behind your candidate house is zoned for. The same discipline we recommend for suburban buyers in what to ask a builder about the rest of the subdivision applies just as well to an urban block, and how land use approvals actually work explains the sequence these things follow.

The city publishes its programme through the Department of Housing and Community Development, and the broader policy context sits in the city’s affordable housing plan. Both are worth a bookmark if you own anything in the city.

What people are asking about these two sites