Two streets. One city. One alive, one dead. Why?

Take a walk down Colonial Avenue in Ghent. Beautiful houses. Mature trees. Short blocks. Sidewalks wide enough for two people to pass comfortably. It has every physical feature of a neighborhood street that should be teeming with life. At 7pm on a Friday, it is quiet. Not peaceful quiet — empty quiet. The lights are on inside the houses and the sidewalk belongs to no one.

Now drive five minutes to Colley Avenue. Same city. Same era of construction. Same dense residential neighborhood surrounding a commercial corridor. Colley on a Friday evening is a different world: restaurants full, bars lit up, people sitting outside, foot traffic, the low-grade noise of a place that is actually being used.

The buildings didn't make this difference. The people didn't make this difference. The zoning code made this difference. And once you understand that, you understand that it can be changed.

What does Colley have that Colonial doesn't?

Colley Avenue has a Pedestrian Commercial Overlay — a PCO. It's an addition to the base zoning that says: on this street, ground-floor commercial uses are permitted by right. You want to open a café? Open a café. A wine bar? A wine bar. A bookstore? A bookstore. No special permission required. You find a space, you sign a lease, you open.

Colonial Avenue is in HC-G2. There is no PCO. Ground-floor commercial uses require a Conditional Use Permit. A CUP means a $1,080 city application fee plus legal and planning consultants — typically $3,000–$8,000 in total process costs — a six-month review, a public hearing, and a vote by the full City Council. If one council member has a bad day or a neighbor objects, it can be denied.

That's the whole difference. Not the architecture. Not the people. Not the neighborhood character. A three-letter designation in a table in the city code.

But didn't the PCO change Colley's character?

Drive down Colley and look at it. The Craftsman bungalows behind the storefronts are still there. The tree canopy is still there. The front porches, the corner houses, the neighborhood feel — all of it is intact. Nobody tore down Victorian houses to build a strip mall because the PCO was adopted.

What changed is that the ground floors of buildings along the commercial corridor were activated. The storefronts that were previously vacant or used for storage became restaurants and shops. The parking lots didn't multiply. The traffic didn't transform. The neighborhood absorbed its commercial life the way dense neighborhoods are supposed to: quietly, at human scale, one business at a time.

That's exactly what would happen on Colonial. Not a transformation — an activation. The bones are there. The foot traffic potential is there. The residents who want to walk somewhere are there. The only missing piece is legal permission.

What about the historic designation? Doesn't that protect Ghent from commercial overdevelopment?

HC-G2 has real architectural protections that are not touched by this proposal. The Architectural Review Board reviews any exterior change to a building — paint colors, window replacements, additions, signage, awnings. Those standards stay. Any business that opens on Colonial will still need ARB approval for anything that alters the building's appearance.

What the proposal changes is the use classification — whether a business can operate inside an existing building without physically altering it. A coffee shop in an existing ground-floor space changes nothing about the historic fabric. The ARB governs what things look like. This is about what things are allowed to be.

This is not a theoretical claim. Historic districts across Virginia and nationally demonstrate that architectural protection and active ground-floor commercial life are compatible: the ARB governs what buildings look like, and zoning governs what they're allowed to be. Keeping those questions separate is what allows both to be answered well.

Does street activation make things safer for everyone — including the most vulnerable people?

The evidence consistently shows that active streets — with foot traffic, business hours, and people coming and going — are safer environments for everyone on them, including people without stable housing. Vacant commercial frontage with no eyes on the street is more dangerous than an active one, for the same reasons Jane Jacobs identified in the 1960s: informal surveillance, social presence, and natural foot traffic reduce the risk of harm.

This proposal doesn't address the need for housing and services for people experiencing homelessness — those are real needs that require their own policy responses. What it does address is the design of the street: a street with a coffee shop and a bookstore and regular foot traffic is a safer and more connected environment than a blank residential wall, for everyone who uses it.

So what are we asking the city to do?

We're asking the City of Norfolk to amend Table 3.6.11 of the Zoning Ordinance — the table that governs what's permitted in HC-G2 — to allow neighborhood-scale retail uses by right on ground floors of parcels with street frontage. Not a new overlay, not a new district. A change to a table in a document that already exists.

The language already exists in the PCO sections of the code. The process — ARB recommendation, Planning Commission hearing, City Council vote — is the normal text amendment process. We are not asking for anything extraordinary. We are asking Norfolk to apply to Colonial Avenue what it already applies to Colley Avenue.

That's it. One table. One change. One street that finally works the way it was designed to.