Richmond Times Dispatch
Saturday, November 18, 2006

A Henrico County developer wants to spend almost a half-billion dollars to build a new community midway between downtown Richmond and fast-growing Short Pump. The community, called Staples Mill Centre, would include more than 2,000 homes, condominiums and apartments on 80 acres between Libbie Avenue and Staples Mill Road.

The project also would include more than 100,000 square feet of stores -- but no "big box" retail chains -- and 60,000 square feet of offices that would be blended with homes in a traditional town setting.

The proposed development would be built on the former site of the Suburban Apartments, a sprawling apartment complex built after World War II that had become a hub for the Richmond area's growing immigrant community. The developer, Gumenick Properties, calls the $434 million project the largest revitalization proposal in Henrico history.

"Basically, we're recycling the site," said Wayne A. Chasen, pres- ident and chief executive officer of Gumenick, which plans to move its corporate offices to the development from Brookfield Office Park.

The property lies just west of Richmond near Interstate 64, a location that Gumenick considers prime for a new kind of midtown community. Anthem has built a new corporate headquarters on the other side of Staples Mill, while one of the region's oldest shopping centers, The Shops at Willow Lawn, is undergoing another face lift on Broad Street.

"It isn't a suburban area and it's not quite the city," Chasen said.

Most of the land has been vacant since Gumenick demolished the deteriorating Suburban dwellings more than four years ago. However, the developer is proposing to demolish 225 apartments along Crestwood Avenue and Yorkshire Drive, as well as about 20 homes on land it owns along Libbie Avenue and Bethlehem Road.

"The people who live there always have known [the apartments] are going to be taken down," said Edward R. Crews, whose company is marketing the project for Gumenick.

Gumenick is giving residents about 19 months to find new lodgings and promising financial aid to help them move. The developer delivered a letter to residents Thursday that was written in English and Spanish. Still, one resident of Crestwood Apartments said he didn't see the Spanish version.

"I can't read it," said Carlos Villatoro, who is paying $585 a month for a two-bedroom apartment that he occupies with his wife and 2-year-old son.

Villatoro said the current apartments are bug-infested and need work, so he's confident he can find something better at close to the same rent.

This is the second time in five years that Gumenick has requested rezoning of the property. The new plan calls for a type of urban mixed-use zoning that wasn't available in Henrico in 2001, when the developer proposed to build a more conventional community of apartments and retail space. The old plan would have built 1,041 apartments, about the same number as proposed this week.

However, the new plan also attempts to meet Henrico's goal of encouraging home ownership, rather than renting, by proposing two 15-story condominium towers next to a lake in the center of the property. It's also proposing some free-standing homes and almost 400 townhouses, including some that would be two-story dwellings stacked on top of two-story dwellings in an urban-style building.

Staples Mill Centre is being designed with many of the goals of the "smart growth" movement, which discourages suburban isolation in favor of a town setting that mixes homes, offices and shops that are reached by foot instead of automobile. The project's architectural designs take their inspiration from 19th and early 20th-century models.

Gumenick has enlarged the proposed development by including the former site of a church along Staples Mill Road and a row of single-family homes along Bethlehem.

It also would demolish three homes and a small business on Libbie to create a parkway that would carry traffic from Libbie to a new stoplight at Staples Mill to avoid overloading neighboring streets.

"The applicaton has just been filed, but what has been shared with us, we are positive about," said Randy Silber, Henrico's director of planning. He stressed that the project would redevelop an area of old rental buildings into wthat would be high-quality mixed-use residential.

The proposed Libbie connector would be built in the first of the project's five phases, which are expected to take about 10 years to complete. Gumenick estimates the project will create 1,000 construction jobs and 900 jobs long-term, and generate about $120,000 a year in direct and indirect revenue.

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