VCU students plan vibrant Hull Street Road

A gritty gateway between Richmond and Chesterfield County could have a bright future if city and county officials work together to implement a vision laid out by VCU graduate students.

The plan to clean up a 2-mile stretch of Hull Street Road at the Richmond-Chesterfield line was the fruit of a semester's worth of labor from students in the urban commercial revitalization class in the master of urban and regional planning program.

The effort earned the group the Virginia Chapter of the American Planning Association's 2009 Student Plan.

"This is every bit as good as the level of professional consultant reports I see every day," said Bob Kuhns, a planner from Northern Virginia and chairman of the awards jury.

In its research, the class found a struggling commercial corridor with small pockets of residential areas in need of a reimagining.

Patchy shopping centers and stores offer little out of the ordinary in an area surrounded by competing commercial corridors such as Chippenham Parkway and Midlothian Turnpike.

The perception of a run-down, crime-ridden area inhibits investment in the area, students found, and abandoned businesses and buildings in disrepair do little to help its image, especially on the city side.

"Our initial impressions were that the area, and particularly businesses along the corridor, had accessibility issues, but that Hull Street Road also offered great potential," said Geoffrey Knight, a second-year student in the program.

One challenge is overcoming what the students called the "psychological barrier" of city and county residents not wanting to cross the dividing line of Chippenham Parkway. Another is the sense of apathy on the part of residents and business owners.

"A lot of people feel it is what it is and nothing is going to change," said student Craig Carver. "And right now, as a visitor, there's really not a sense of place."

To correct that, the students suggest capitalizing on the strip's location by creating a walkable community designed to attract shoppers and visitors, encouraging them to explore.

That would be a decidedly different feel for the corridor, which was designed after World War II with automobiles, not pedestrians, in mind.

"It functioned really well for many years that way, but as the economy has changed and geography has changed, people live differently now, and that's why you're seeing disinvestment," said John J. Accordino, the professor for the course.

Proposals outlined by the plan include a Hispanic business cluster with an open-air shopping mall and farmers market and an entertainment sector with a movie theater and restaurants. Other goals include office and retail clusters and business nodes. A senior living center and a business association were also suggested.

But key to large-scale improvements will be collaboration between city and county, Accordino says.

"This corridor is one of many that we've got going out of the city and into the counties where you can see a stark difference as you get from one jurisdiction to the other, and there isn't a good reason for that," he said.

"If one side chooses to invest and does it on its own, it undermines it for the other side not to be investing. To have the two communities working together is a really good thing," he added.

Tom Jacobson, Chesterfield's revitalization director, said he is meeting with citizen and business groups to gather input before deciding how to proceed.

"This is a corridor that my office is concerned about," he said. "It's one of the areas [where] we really haven't done a lot of intense work, and the students have presented some solid recommendations."

Jacobson said community involvement would be key, noting that private money and grants could help.

"Times are really tight, there's no doubt about it, but to me, this is a good time to do your homework and planning so you're ready for when the economy gets going again," he said.

Contact Wesley P. Hester at (804) 649-6976 or whester@timesdispatch.com.