This past Wednesday evening, City of Richmond Planning Director Mark Olinger and planner Maritiza Pechin did a Zoom presentation for Oregon Hill residents. It was primarily a discussion of Oregon Hill’s proposed future land use in accordance with the Richmond300 planning.

What needs to be understood by everyone is that land designation is used to justify future zoning. Objective #1 of the Richmond 300 plan is change zoning to match the future land use designations. Any SUP will be recommended for approval by planning if it matches the future land use designation. Oregon Hill neighbors worked hard for our appropriate R-7 zoning and we need a future land use that matches it!

What Olinger kept coming back to during the Zoom meeting is that he and other planners would like to see ‘old storefronts’ brought back to commercial use and that is why they are insisting on giving Oregon Hill “neighborhood mixed use” land designation despite repeated demands by the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association and many residents that would like for Oregon Hill’s land designation to remain ‘residential’.

This is not to say that OHNA and neighbors are against ‘old storefronts’ returning to commercial use. The overall record (voting included) makes it very clear that Oregon Hill has encouraged more small commercial return to the ‘old storefronts’. The reality is the storefronts that are currently not operating as businesses are homes and people are living in them. If they wanted to run a business, they simply have to ask for a special use permit, and they would most likely get it. The proposed change in land use designation is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s not just nomenclature though. The proposed change in land designation also opens the door to knocking down houses and building apartments and commercial spaces for taller buildings. Olinger suggests that the Planning Department, government, and neighbors would still have some say and control over replacement structures. But Oregon Hill neighbors know from the recent ‘805 W. Cary’ development that that simply is NOT TRUE! If anything, the decks were stacked strongly against any neighborhood say or control.

The city zoning code defines a story as 15 feet in height. The appropriate, current R-7 zoning has a height limit of 35 feet, which matches our historic two-story streetscape. Four stories mixed use would allow a height limit of 60 feet, almost double the current zoning!

Oregon Hill neighbors know that we cannot have our R-7 zoning undermined by this mixed-use future land use designation that allows multi-family projects 4-6 stories. This will be a green light for developers to buy up Oregon Hill to build ad hoc dormitories (and may explain recent 70% increases in land values on property assessments). If this happens, its pretty clear that the historic Oregon Hill neighborhood that residents and visitors love and cherish will be lost within a decade or two.

OHNA and individual neighbors have repeatedly asked Richmond300 planners for Oregon Hill to keep its hard-won ‘residential’ land use designation. Thankfully, Councilperson Lynch has indicated that she supports this. She was successful in establishing the residential future land use designation for most of the Randolph neighborhood in the Richmond300 plan.

Also, Oregon Hill is not the only neighborhood to question who the Planning department is really working for. Many residents in the Fan are now concerned about a recent proposal to raise the height limit on Broad Street to twenty stories after previously having an agreement for a twelve story limit. For this to happen during a pandemic with limited public interaction is outrageous.

It’s understandable that Olinger was originally hired as the City’s planning director in order to bring more density to the City of Richmond, especially along the Pulse corridor of Broad Street. But at this point, many Richmond citizens are questioning if he is the right person for the job.