Zine No. 1
Why Is Your Street Dead?
A plain-language guide to why Ghent feels like a ghost town — and what zoning has to do with it.
Ghent Streets · Norfolk, Virginia · HC-G2
You live in one of the most beautiful, walkable neighborhoods in Virginia. So why can't you walk to get a cup of coffee?
Ghent was built in the 1890s as Norfolk's first planned neighborhood. The people who designed it assumed you would walk. The streets are narrow and tree-lined. The blocks are short. The houses sit close to the sidewalk. Everything about the physical design says: this is a place for people on foot.
But the coffee shop you want is not there. The corner bookstore is not there. The little wine bar is not there. The dry cleaner, the neighborhood market, the hole-in-the-wall lunch spot — not there, not there, not there.
You go out at 8pm on a Tuesday and the sidewalk is empty. Not because Ghent doesn't have people. It has plenty of people. It's because the zoning code forbids the businesses that would bring those people outside.
What is zoning and why does it control your street?
Zoning is a city law that says what kinds of things can happen on a given piece of land. It divides the city into zones — residential, commercial, industrial, and so on — and lists what's allowed in each zone.
Ghent is in a zone called HC-G2. The HC stands for "Historic and Cultural Conservation." The G2 refers to the Ghent neighborhood specifically. It's a real zoning designation with a real code section: Article 3, Section 3.6 of the Norfolk Zoning Ordinance, Table 3.6.11.
In that table, uses are marked with three symbols. P means permitted — you can do it, no special permission needed. C means conditional — you can apply, but there's a whole expensive process and someone can still say no. A blank cell means prohibited. You cannot do it. Full stop.
For retail stores, cafés, restaurants, and personal services in HC-G2? Those cells are blank or conditional. Commercial street life in Ghent is either prohibited or buried under a process so expensive and slow that almost no one attempts it.
But isn't the historic protection the whole point?
The historic designation is supposed to protect the physical character of the neighborhood — the architecture, the scale, the street pattern, the materials. The beautiful stuff. That's worth protecting.
But here's the thing: a coffee shop in an existing ground-floor space doesn't change any of that. The building looks exactly the same. The street looks exactly the same. The only thing that changes is that there's a light on inside and a person behind the counter and someone at the window seat and a reason to walk past.
The zoning code has confused use with appearance. The Architectural Review Board — the body that actually protects how buildings look — still reviews any exterior changes. This proposal doesn't touch that. What it does is stop treating the word "retail" as a threat to historic preservation when there is no architectural threat at all.
Other Norfolk streets are alive. What do they have that Ghent doesn't?
Walk down Colley Avenue. Walk down 21st Street. Those streets have life. Restaurants, shops, salons, cafes. People on the sidewalk in the evening. They are in dense residential neighborhoods too — and their underlying zoning is actually quite similar to HC-G2.
The difference is an overlay called a PCO — a Pedestrian Commercial Overlay. The city added that designation to those streets specifically to permit ground-floor commercial uses. It worked exactly as intended.
Ghent doesn't have a PCO. Nobody ever asked for one, or the political moment never came. The result is that HC-G2 — denser and more walkable than some of those corridors — sits empty while the city's commercial life happens elsewhere.
Are active streets actually safer? What does the evidence say?
Urban planners and public health researchers consistently find that streets with active commercial frontage — cafés, shops, offices with regular foot traffic — are safer for everyone on them. This goes back to Jane Jacobs's work in the 1960s: "eyes on the street" from windows, doors, and sidewalk activity create informal surveillance and social presence that passive residential walls don't provide.
Dead streets are not neutral. The absence of foot traffic doesn't mean nothing happens — it means what does happen happens without witnesses, without community presence, without the informal accountability that commercial life generates. Active streets aren't safer because they displace anyone. They're safer because more people use them, and more people using them means more people looking out for each other.
Zoning made these streets empty. Zoning can change that.
What do we want?
We want Norfolk to amend Table 3.6.11 of the Zoning Ordinance to permit small-scale, neighborhood-serving commercial uses by right on ground floors in HC-G2. Specifically:
We are not asking for big-box retail. We are not asking to remove the ARB. We are not asking to change what buildings look like. We are asking for the right to put a light on in the front window and open a business.
What can you do right now?
You do not need to be a policy expert or an activist to help. Here is what matters:
For the full policy argument, the proposed amendment language, and campaign updates: read the Policy Brief at this site.