Above photo: Duron Chavis, founder of Happily Natural Day, speaks about his urban agriculture work at the five-acre Sanfoka Community Orchard on Richmond’s South Side. Next City.
It Never Made It Through Rezoning.
A trio of Virginia nonprofits had the land, the expertise, the community support, the government funding and the vision. But they say it became clear that racial discrimination was blocking the rezoning approval they needed.
When Richmond, Virginia-based nonprofit Girls for a Change was offered a eight-acre parcel of land from a local benefactor, CEO Angela Patton knew the Black youth development organization could do something special for the neighborhood.
“We were sitting on this property for a while trying to just figure out what would it be,” says Patton, who has lived in Richmond’s Bensley suburb for nearly two decades. “Would it be a summer camp for girls? Would it be a community center for the community? Would it be a women’s wellness center?”
In 2021, Patton announced their plan to turn the vacant land into the Bensley Agrihood, a permanently affordable housing development featuring 10 affordable homes, four tiny homes, a wellness center and a 1.5-acre working community farm that would serve as an amenity for the neighborhood.
The project was developed in collaboration with two other Richmond non-profits: the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, which brought rezoning expertise, and urban farming leader Duron Chavis’ Happily Natural Day, which brought a background in urban agriculture.
“After hearing Duron speak and also supporting and attending many of his events, I realized that this was a place to not only grow a community, but grow food with the community,” Patton says. The proposed development would require a zoning change from residential to mixed-use – and at first, the nonprofit leaders say, Chesterfield County officials seemed to welcome the plan.
But after three years of community engagement and repeated adjustments to the plan based on community concerns, the groups pulled their zoning application from the Chesterfield County Planning Commission’s consideration in June, alleging racial discrimination by the county officials.
Some elected and appointed officials in the district refused to meet with the nonprofits’ Black leaders, they allege, adding that Bermuda District Planning Commissioner Gib Sloan deferred the case four times despite consistent recommendations for approval by county staff.
In the end, it became clear to the organization that the rezoning approval would not be given “due to a continuing legacy of zoning processes being used to discriminate against BIPOC land ownership,” Erica Sims, CEO of the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, said in a public statement.
“Accordingly, the project will not move forward in its current form, and the estimated $6.5M investment in affordable housing, education, job training, and community farming will be a loss for the community,” Sims wrote.
In a statement to Next City/VPM, Chesterfield County said it disagreed with the groups’ characterization of the rezoning application process. “The concerns from county officials were strictly over the impacts on the surrounding residential neighborhoods that needed to be considered, including crowd concerns related to events and commercial traffic as well as commercial use within a residential area,” the county said.
At an April 16 commission meeting prior to the application withdrawal, Planning Commissioner Sloan said that “there was a procedural issue as it relates to the advertising and a change that we had all anticipated making in the case during the public hearing process and at the advice of council… we needed to make sure the case was advertised correctly.”
Unless something unexpected came up, Sloan said, “we expect to run this one up the flagpole next month.” Two months later, the nonprofits pulled their application.
In recent weeks, county officials have begun to hear proposals to update Chesterfield’s zoning ordinances and enable mixed-use developments.
Why An Agrihood?
Central Virginia does already have a working, agrihood located a short drive from Richmond, Chickahominy Falls. The community is designed exclusively for adults aged 55 and up, offering amenities like social clubs, wellness programs and farming activities to foster an active and purposeful lifestyle for seniors. According to Bex Realty, Chickahominy Falls currently has homes listed from $515,096 to $880,680.
In contrast, Bensley Agrihood was meant to be open to residents of all ages, with an additional affordable housing component integrated into the green space.
Chavis, who manages several community gardens throughout the region, tells Next City that the Bensley Agrihood was “literally designed to center food as a resource and community.” The farm would have been a working farm that incubated emerging businesses, he says, and the wellness center was to be a classroom space.
In 2012, an analysis of census data by the nonprofit Reinvestment Fund identified Richmond as the largest food desert for an America city of its size in the United States. Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap project finds that Chesterfield County’s food insecurity rate was about 8.5% and about 13.5% in Richmond in 2022.
In 2016, a report prepared for the Richmond Food Access and Equity Task Force urged the city to tackle its food insecurity problem by reforming local zoning codes to enable urban agriculture practices.
The model also earned support from the federal and state government: The U.S. Department of Agriculture provided a $200,000 grant for the Bensley Agrihood, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration awarded the trio $700,000 after a “competitive process,” Chavis says.
Community members and county officials seemed to be on board with the vision, too, the nonprofits say, but then some troubling double standards began to emerge.
What Went Wrong?
Chavis and Patton told Next City that while the process was lengthy, most of the stakeholders seemed in favor of the proposal, from community members to the board of supervisors. Things took a turn once conditions were met to limit traffic, parking and potential noise complaints.
“It got real strange, real fast,” Chavis says. “The first thing – they came through, they were like, ‘Yo, are y’all gonna be growing marijuana on the project, on the farm?”
Chavis questioned whether Plenty, a high-profile vertical indoor farming company that recently began developing a major farming facility in the county, received the same interrogation. “As a government official, why would you ask that? It’s disrespectful,” Chavis says.
The second red flag was when the groups were asked to produce a list of crops set to be grown on the farm, he says. Chavis, who manages several community farms including Sankofa Community Orchard in Richmond’s Southside, has never heard of a farm being asked to produce such a list in advance.
Then Chavis requested a meeting with the Board of Supervisors. He was denied, with the board allegedly responding that it would only meet with the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust, as the official applicant.
“I’m on the board for Maggie Walker Community Land Trust,” Chavis says. “Why would you deny me access to the meeting?”
The Maggie Walker Community Land Trust still hopes to bring the agrihood plan to another neighborhood in Richmond in the future. Meanwhile, Girls for Change and Happily Natural Day are developing an alternative plan to use the land.
“We don’t have the luxury of giving up,” Chavis says. “We don’t have the option to say, ‘Oh well, this project is just dead in the water.’ We can’t let racism win.”