This story was reported and written by David Holtzman, with design by Jelena Schulz.
For nearly a century, factories dominated the shores of Richmond, Virginia's James River, spewing filthy waste into its waters and blocking access to its islands. The riverfront looks quite different these days.
The mills and factories that once lined the river are gone, though trains still carry coal on an elevated bridge parallel to the water's edge. Commercial and residential development have largely replaced the factories, and recreational activities highlight the river’s distinctive character. In addition to people getting on the water to experience the river's rapids, pedestrians and cyclists enjoy trails along its shores and islands.
The area known as the riverfront, a roughly 12-block stretch on the north side of the James, is a hot spot for commercial development right now. An amphitheater is set to open this summer that's expected to draw major-label musicians, a new CoStar office tower is under construction that will be the city’s tallest, and the conversion of a former hydroelectric power plant into an indoor/outdoor sports facility is underway. Restaurants, cafes and bars are beginning to pop up, too.
Meanwhile, the city has plans to overhaul Brown’s Island, a public park used for summertime concerts and festivals and a destination for residents and tourists traveling along the river or the adjacent Canal Walk, to make it more inviting. Today, visitors to the island encounter signs that explain how a coal-fired power plant here generated electricity for the city's streetcars from 1894 to 1901, and Albemarle Paper Co. made kraft paper on the property from 1919 to 1967.
Other recent improvements such as a pedestrian bridge connecting the river’s north and south sides help residents and visitors to appreciate the riverfront’s industrial history while indulging in contemporary pursuits. Patrick Griffin started his raft trip outfitting company, RVA Paddlesports, in 2014 in a bet on the river's popularity. The city recently rebuilt a ramp where the water is calm enough for him and other boating enthusiasts to easily get in and out of the river.
“When I started my business I said, ‘How can we create more opportunities for people to get closer to the river,’” Griffin said in an interview. “When we paddle in that flat pool and we get to see the skyline, we always brag that this is the best view in the city. Being able to share that with people has been really special.”
By the numbers
The Urban Land Institute named Richmond as the top-rated “boutique market” in the United States in its 2025 Emerging Trends in Real Estate report. These markets are smaller cities “with lively downtowns” and outdoor amenities, ULI said. Markets like Richmond have stable economic bases that withstood the COVID-19 downturn better than many cities and have lower costs of living and doing business, according to the research and education nonprofit group.
The median price of a single-family house sold in Richmond was $395,000 in 2024, CoStar data shows. That compares to $419,200 for the U.S. as a whole in the last three months of the year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Richmond apartment rents averaged $1,537 last year, less than the national average of $1,736, according to CoStar data.
Rents in Richmond have remained steady since the start of 2023, largely due to growing supply. The city’s estimated population of 229,247 in 2023 was up from 227,000 in 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. Another 800,000 people live in the three suburban counties of Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover.
"We definitely saw a lot of growth since the pandemic. A lot of that is people coming from the Northeast looking for affordability, job growth and better weather," said Alvin Abston, CoStar's senior market analyst for Richmond.
Construction started on about 7,000 apartments a year ago, and another 4,500 units are underway this year, according to CoStar data. In terms of commercial space, 4.3 million square feet of industrial space, 1 million square feet of office space and 300,000 square feet of retail space are in the construction stage.
Young people moving downtown or to Manchester, a fast-growing neighborhood just across the river, are driving growth in restaurants, bars and other amenities, Abston said. Those in their late 30s and early 40s who have chosen not to purchase a home make up much of the local market for apartments in or near the city, he said, while recent new single-family-home growth has been in New Kent County, an outlying suburb.
Richmond and the surrounding region have a diversified industrial base, according to the Greater Richmond Partnership, a local economic development agency. The group lists advanced manufacturing, data centers, food and beverage, finance, information technology, life sciences and logistics as target industries.
Reclaiming the water
The T. Tyler Potterfield Memorial Bridge opened in 2016 on top of a dam formerly used by the local power company. It provided for the first time an easy way for people to walk and bike back and forth from the Manchester neighborhood on the river’s south side to downtown. The bridge has an average of 600,000 crossings annually, according to Lisa Sims, chief executive officer of Venture Richmond, a nonprofit group that works to improve the vitality of the city’s downtown. All those trips begin or end on Brown’s Island. From there, people can walk across short bridges to commercial properties on Tredegar Street.
The bridge honors Potterfield, a former historic preservation planner for the city government who advocated linking the city to its green spaces. His 2009 book “Nonesuch Place” chronicles changes over time in Richmond’s landscape, including the rise of industry along the river in the 19th century. Tredegar Iron Works, parts of which are used today to house the American Civil War Museum, was an important source of supplies for the Confederate Army and continued making products from iron until 1957. On Brown’s Island, a paper mill operated until the late 1960s.
For decades, these and other nearby factories and the city’s sewer system dumped untreated waste into the river.
“It was the workshop of Richmond, where everyone and everything was hard at work,” Potterfield wrote.
The water quality is much better nowadays, said Griffin with RVA Paddlesports, but ongoing challenges with the city’s wastewater treatment mean he still has to battle customers’ perceptions that the river is dirty. His business was shut down for a day last June after a sewage leak from a pipe downstream from the riverfront.
“Not to excuse the problems we have, but it’s far better than it was back in the 1980s,” he said. “I have friends who paddled back then, and the river was almost toxic.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin proposed in his 2025-2026 budget to spend an additional $50 million to help the city prevent overflows from its sewer system during heavy rains, beyond an equivalent amount that was already approved, the nonprofit James River Association said on its website.
Besides the river, the city also has canals. Venture Richmond operates canal boats during part of the year from the turning basin at the west end of the James River and Kanawha Canal connecting the riverfront area to other parts of downtown.
When the river level is too high for safe navigation, people can rent kayaks on Brown’s Island and paddle around the adjacent Haxall Canal, a body of water that's physically separated from the other canal and was built to serve nearby flour mills. At one point after the railroad made this canal obsolete, the city buried it underground. It uncovered it in the 1990s as it built the 1.25-mile Canal Walk that's used to travel between the riverfront and other parts of downtown.
Growing on shore
The Allianz Amphitheater, scheduled to open in June with a show by country star Dwight Yoakam, is designed to have room for 7,500 guests on a slope behind the Civil War museum. It’s on a 4-acre site owned by NewMarket Corp., a maker of petroleum additives that is headquartered in a Georgian-style mansion at the top of the hill. A predecessor firm operated the Brown’s Island paper mill.
On the next block, CoStar Group, the publisher of CoStar News, is building a 21-story office tower to complement its existing nine-story building. With these and a third new building to stand six stories, the company will have 3,500 seats with room to grow, said Nadia O’Dea, CoStar's senior director of corporate real estate. The expansion will let the company bring together employees currently located in two nearby buildings, one of which CoStar leases.
The 21-story, 546,000-square-foot tower will feature a glass facade with programmable LED technology, O’Dea said. The company plans to use it to display public art and to connect the community during events on Brown’s Island like the Richmond Folk Festival and Riverrock, a sports and music gathering. The adjacent six-story, 194,000-square-foot building will have up to five restaurants, cafes or bars open to the public.
“We think this building is going to attract a lot of attention,” O’Dea said of the 21-story structure.
CoStar, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., chose to expand to Richmond in 2016. The city’s proximity to the nation’s capital was a factor, O’Dea said, but so was the attraction of the city’s lively arts scene and the riverside location.
Quality of life is increasingly a prime consideration for companies considering a move to Richmond, said Jennifer Wakefield, president and CEO of Greater Richmond Partnership. Her group helps bring businesses like CoStar to the area.
“What we have seen is the emphasis for companies on quality of life and the vibrancy of downtown has significantly increased over the last 10 years, but especially since the pandemic,” Wakefield said. “For a city like Richmond that has a beautiful riverfront and all these amenities right next to your building, these are all things that show off the community.”
The city’s downtown also drew the attention of Alex and Sam Nordheimer, two brothers who worked with Thalhimer Realty Partners to acquire the former hydroelectric plant at the other end of the Haxall Canal and South 12th Street. The facility had sat vacant for 55 years, its one sign of life in recent years being a set of colorful murals painted on the exterior by local artists.
The Nordheimers just opened Padel Plant, where visitors can reserve a court to play padel, a variation of tennis, pickleball and squash. The courts have high glass walls that a player can lob a ball against to hopefully have it ricochet into their opponent’s side of the net. While the courts are inside, there are plans to add others outdoors that will be visible to people passing by on the Canal Walk.
If they aren’t in the mood to play, visitors will have access to a coffee shop and a restaurant. The brothers are promoting their business as a “third place” outside of home and work where people can connect with others in the community.
“It’s such a cool building in a great area with amazing history, but for some reason it never found quite the right use” before, said Alex Nordheimer. “It will be an active social hub that will encourage people to live downtown where things are happening.”
The project hasn't been without criticism. Some of the artists who painted murals when the building was vacant are unhappy that the glass walls around the outdoor padel courts will partially obscure views of their creations. Organizers of the RVA Street Art Festival, which took place at the hydroelectric plant twice in recent years, said in a statement last August that they were not opposed to the Padel Plant but disapproved of how the outdoor section will be used.
"It’s such a cool building in a great area with amazing history, but for some reason it never found quite the right use" before —Alex Nordheimer, co-founder of the Padel Plant
Nordheimer said two of the muralists are painting a new artwork inside the athletic facility to replace one that had to be removed to make way for the coffee shop.
As interest grew in living downtown, developers opened 463 apartments in The Locks and Locks Tower buildings along East Byrd and South 11th streets between 2012 and 2019. These residences added to the Vistas on the James, a condo development built in 2003 just to the east, and Riverside on the James, which was built in 2005 and includes 122 condos directly behind Padel Plant
Challenges and opportunities
The next major development on the riverfront will be the revamp of Brown’s Island, which will be closed from November through October 2026, according to Sims with Venture Richmond. The group is working with the city government to add a variety of amenities. One of the most prominent will be removing invasive trees from the shore and installing terrace seating, opening up new views of the river.
Among numerous other features planned are a new boat ramp, a splash pad for children, improved access for people with disabilities and opening up a currently inaccessible part of the island underneath the 14th Street overpass.
The city is providing half of the $30 million needed for the project with the rest coming from the private sector, Sims said.
One challenge is that the Haxall Canal, figuring prominently in the Brown’s Island plans, tends to get clogged with sediment during certain parts of the year. The problem is due to material carried by the river that piles up near the canal’s western entrance, according to Griffin, as well as low water levels in the river. Sims said her group is working with city leaders to find a solution.
Another potential issue as the riverfront continues to grow is access to parking, though Sims downplayed this concern. There are a number of surface and garage parking lots within walking distance of area destinations, she said. The city has also recently enhanced bicycle lanes that connect to other parts of downtown.
Maintaining easy access to bike and pedestrian trails along the river amid new commercial development is a priority for Brian Beard, who provides tours to residents and visitors through his business, Discover Richmond Tours. Among his offerings is a “hiking tour” that passes through the riverfront area.
“One of the things I think about is making sure that access to the James River park system is not diminished, not when there’s a concert but when everyone is trying to get to work on a random weekday morning,” Beard said. Many people park in the area and walk or bike on trails on nearby Belle Isle and along the north and south sides of the river.
Sims recalled that aside from the opening of the Potterfield pedestrian bridge over the river, one other catalyst for the riverfront’s renewal was the launch of the folk festival 20 years ago. City leaders wanted to have a signature event that would draw attention to the area, and it worked. Half a million people attend events on Brown’s Island in a typical year, including the folk festival, Riverrock and the Friday Cheers concert series.
“The folk festival transformed how people view the river, which is one of the most beautiful in the country if you ask me,” Sims said. “The riverfront was kind of sleepy 20 years ago, and it’s about to be one of the most robust and dynamic neighborhoods in downtown.”