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byline: Mark D. Robertson

What’s behind Hampton Roads’ outmigration?

Young people have been leaving Hampton Roads in recent years, and area leaders say learning why is the first step toward fixing the problem.

A June survey conducted by the Hampton Roads Workforce Council, Hampton Roads Executive Roundtable and Richmond-based Fahrenheit Advisors found that 25% of 511 residents surveyed said they were unsure or thought it was unlikely they’d be living in the region in five years. Skewing younger and lacking family or military ties to the area, the cohort said reasons they might move include high cost of living, crime, lack of career opportunities and health care disparities.

According to Census data, net immigration has grown in Richmond and other areas of Virginia but declined in Hampton Roads.

“It’s really a road map for us,” says Shawn Avery, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Workforce Council. “We’ve got to do a better job as a region in telling our story of what we have here, what opportunities are available.”

Although there’s work to do, Avery says, the workforce council and local partners can use the survey to retain the young talent needed to fill jobs in the region.

Take for example Caroline Buggé, 26, an attorney at Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders who grew up in Fairfax County before heading to William & Mary. After graduating law school last spring, she joined Troutman Pepper’s Virginia Beach office.

Building a life in Hampton Roads wasn’t on her radar growing up. But after years studying at W&M, spending a summer in Norfolk and participating in Virginia Beach’s Shamrock Marathon, Buggé decided the city was a good place to start her career. She has family in Texas and Florida and considered opportunities nearer them, but Virginia Beach won out.

“I thought a lot about which tradeoffs I wanted, and I really don’t feel like I’ve settled in any way,” Buggé says. “I feel like I found a sweet spot.”

Despite that, Buggé isn’t committed to Hampton Roads as a forever home. It’s too soon to tell, she says, where personal and professional opportunities might take her.

Avery notes it will take concerted efforts to create a strategy to keep young adults like Buggé in the 757. “There’s not going to be one solution that fits everything. It’s got to be a multipronged approach.”  

Roanoke City Council approves zoning changes — again

A residential zoning do-over in the Star City is done. At least for now.

On Sept. 16, Roanoke City Council voted 6-1 to adopt zoning amendments that will allow greater housing density and eliminate single-family-only housing

City Council adopted similar zoning amendments in March, but several city homeowners, including Republican mayoral candidate David Bowers and former City Attorney Bill Hackworth, filed a lawsuit charging that city officials did not follow proper procedures prior to the vote. The suit remains pending, according to Maynard Sipe, the plaintiffs’ attorney.

Roanoke officials responded to the lawsuit by starting over and reopened discussion on the matter through the summer. In August, Roanoke’s planning commission reversed course, opting by a 3-2 vote not to recommend the changes. But City Council, which isn’t bound by the commission’s vote, adopted the proposal at its September meeting following lengthy public comment.

Several Roanoke homeowners filed a second lawsuit Oct. 16 at Roanoke City Circuit Court charging that Roanoke City officials failed to provide a sufficient summary of the zoning amendments in public notices about public hearings for this round of zoning amendment adoption and other issues.

Roanoke isn’t alone in eliminating single-family zoning, according to Alexander von Hoffman, senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

“The idea is that by allowing demand to flow freely without the constriction of the zoning regulations, you’d be able to get increased housing … [and] produce more units that are less expensive,” von Hoffman says.

In September, a circuit judge overturned changes that eliminated single-family zoning in Arlington County, citing procedural issues and other problems. A lawsuit challenging Alexandria’s move to end single-family-only zoning appears headed for court.

Roanoke’s previous single-family-only residential zones were a holdover from the city’s Jim Crow era, according to acting Assistant City Manager Chris Chittum, who announced plans to retire in October. Paired with the city’s urban renewal projects that tore down historically Black neighborhoods to make way for Interstate 581, the civic center and a post office, Roanoke became one of the most segregated cities in America. “It’s pretty insidious how well it’s worked,” Chittum says.

The rewritten zoning code makes it easier for developers to build multiunit parcels in residential neighborhoods. It also made other changes, including reducing the amount of lot area required for dwellings.

But don’t expect Roanoke to change drastically overnight. The city issued 98 residential building permits in 2023, and it expects to see fewer than 40 additional units annually following the changes.

“The way our housing market is,” he says, “every single unit that we add is helpful.”  

Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the print version. 

Home truths

The summer of 2024 brought better news for prospective homebuyers in Hampton Roads, with median home prices in the region starting to decrease and the number of homes for sale at a near four-year high.

The coastal region of Virginia has seen the same strains on the market as the rest of the country — higher interest rates and more demand than supply on the market — but trends for homebuyers in Hampton Roads bear better news. According to the region’s multiple listings service, the Real Estate Information Network, the median home-selling price in Hampton Roads reached an all-time high at $360,000 in June before falling slightly to $355,500 in July. Those figures still sat well below the June national average of $426,900 and the state’s average of $431,380.

“There is a bit of a competitive advantage there,” says Ryan Price, chief economist for Virginia Realtors, pointing to continued job growth in Hampton Roads paired with its relative affordability.

The market is especially strong in the “outer ring” of Hampton Roads, places like Suffolk and Smithfield, he adds, pointing to single-family-home permit volume for those communities.

The more populous areas in Hampton Roads also are attracting homebuyers. A Redfin survey of 2023 data showed 43% of mortgages in the region for that year went to buyers under age 35, ranking Hampton Roads eighth among the nation’s metro areas in that measure.

But data suggest the ongoing building in the region isn’t keeping up with demand, Price adds. The slower pace began with the housing crisis of 2008, he says, and has yet to catch up.

“There’s certainly an opportunity, but I think that really the key is going to be if the housing is going to be available,” he says.

First time buyers, including municipal workers, are still struggling to purchase houses in the region, several Hampton Roads mayors noted in an April panel discussion on affordable housing.

Still, Hampton Roads has some new developments on the way, including Home Associates of Virginia’s Ashburn Meadows development in Chesapeake, which is still in the planning stages. That project will add 398 housing units, 204 attached townhomes and 194 single-family homes, along with a self-storage facility and 2.5 acres reserved for commercial space.

HAV President Rob Prodan says the group plans to break ground on Ashburn Meadows in Great Bridge by the end of summer 2025, with the first homes expected to be move-in ready by the end of 2026, when he hopes conditions are better for homebuyers.

“Right now, the market is a little bit challenging with the uncertainty in politics and interest rates being as high as they are,” Prodan says. Along with the sharp interest rate increase, supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic raised construction costs 50% to 60%.

“And that’s not going away,” he says. “So, it’s going to take a little bit of time for things to settle out.”

Ashburn Meadows’ townhomes will begin in the middle to upper $400,000s, with single-family units costing up to the $800,000 range — prices that gave some residents pause at a public hearing before Chesapeake City Council approved the project in February.

Chesapeake Homes, meanwhile, will be building 1,400 housing units over the next decade at Lake Thrasher Landing in southeastern Chesapeake, replacing a landfill. That includes 265 condos, 365 townhomes and 472 apartments, a project that received unanimous approval from City Council in April, after the developers made some adjustments recommended by the city’s planning commission, which voted to deny the project.

Operations at the landfill will end by the middle of 2025, when construction can begin.  

Va. Tech Carilion med school plans new building, doubled enrollment

In 2010, the first class of students arrived at Roanoke’s new medical school, a partnership between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic. And nearly 15 years later, the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is undertaking ambitious growth plans.

The medical school is in the early stages of planning a new 100,000-square-foot facility that would allow the school to double its enrollment to around 400.

The building, which could open as soon as 2028, will be located at the corner of South Jefferson Street and Old Woods Avenue, across Jefferson from the current 150,000-square-foot facility VTCSOM shares with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, according to Dr. Lee Learman, the medical school’s dean. The new facility would also allow the biomedical research institute to expand within the current building.

Virginia Tech absorbed the medical school, which had previously operated as an independent institution, as a college in 2018. Learman joined VTCSOM the following year. “We took a really serious look back then about why to grow, about how to grow,” Learman says.

The school’s capacity is 49 medical students per class, but demand is much higher; the school receives about 6,900 qualified applications per year, according
to Virginia Tech.

Virginia’s 2023 budget dedicated $9 million for the project’s planning phase, funds spearheaded by Del. Jason Ballard, R-Giles County. The request estimates the total cost at $183.7 million, but Learman cautions that it’s a ballpark number. Virginia Tech will seek funding from the General Assembly for most of the money in the 2026 budget cycle. The school has selected Charlottesville’s VMDO Architects and Pennsylvania’s Ballinger for the initial design work.

Learman says the expansion will help Virginia solve a growing shortage of physicians — Virginia is short nearly 4,000 doctors, according to a March 2024 report from The Cicero Institute — by keeping Virginia natives here for medical school and beyond.

Carilion initially partnered in VTCSOM with a goal that the newly trained doctors would remain with the system, says Carilion Chief Physician Executive Dr. Tony Seupaul, “and we’re seeing that pay off in spades.”

He adds, “It’s wonderful to see because it means that not only are we doing things right, but we’ve fostered an environment … that people want to come back to.” 

Growth on the horizon

Patients in Hampton Roads will have another option for health care in spring 2025 with the opening of the 98,000-square-foot Bon Secours Harbour View Medical Center in Suffolk.

Construction is moving along on the $80 million facility, which will include 18 inpatient rooms and four operating rooms in the expansion of its existing health care campus, which already offers emergency care, imaging and lab services. Bon Secours currently operates three hospitals in Hampton Roads and seven more across Virginia.

Bon Secours isn’t the only health care system expanding in the region. Sentara Health received an $833,800 grant from the Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority in June to start a mobile care vehicle “dedicated to treatment and services for individuals with opioid use disorder,” according to a news release. The VOAA, which was established in 2021 by the Virginia General Assembly, provides publicly funded grants to combat the ongoing opioids crisis in the commonwealth. The mobile care vehicle will hit the road in early 2025 and will serve the cities of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Virginia Beach.

In major higher education and health care news, Old Dominion University and Eastern Virginia Medical School merged in July, creating Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at ODU, an umbrella for all health sciences programming, including the medical school. Sentara Health is involved too, and it expects to double the number of residency positions over the next six to seven years.

In addition to increasing its residency program at Norfolk General Hospital, Sentara plans to create programs at Sentara CarePlex Hospital in Hampton and Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center. Sentara committed $350 million over the next decade. It currently sponsors 240 residency positions in Norfolk and will expand that number to more than 400.

Also, ODU and EVMS are collaborating with Norfolk State University to form the Joint School of Public Health, which will award master’s and doctoral degrees in public health and health research. Li-Wu Chen, a former health sciences professor at the University of Missouri, was hired in March as its first dean.

Meanwhile, Sentara’s health insurance arm remains the focus of a three-year-plus federal civil investigation into whether it inflated premium rates for Affordable Care Act customers in Charlottesville in 2018 and 2019. Sentara has denied the allegations, saying it’s being unfairly targeted and had stepped into the market to prevent vulnerable Virginians from losing health care coverage.

Elsewhere in the region, Chesapeake Regional Healthcare announced a $3.7 million state grant to build the first psychiatric emergency program in Chesapeake. The program, which will occupy space in the hospital’s emergency department, will focus on patients suffering from behavioral health crises and is set to open in December. Chesapeake Regional also debuted its open-heart surgery program in April after a five-year quest for approval.

Riverside Health System announced an upgrade to its Leksell Gamma Knife at the Riverside Radiosurgery Center in Newport News, when it implemented Elekta Esprit technology in July. The upgrade will benefit patients undergoing treatment for brain metastases from other cancers, according to a release.

Riverside also announced leadership for the Riverside Smithfield Hospital that is set to open in early 2026; Dr. Justin Billings, a physician at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News, will serve as the Smithfield hospital’s chief medical officer, and Michelle Wooten will become the hospital’s first chief nursing officer.  

This story has been corrected since publication.

$1 billion data center campus moves forward in Pittsylvania

With more than 70% of global internet traffic flowing through Virginia data centers — mostly in Loudoun County — the commonwealth is the world’s undisputed data center capital. And Tom Gallagher’s development group wants Pittsylvania County to claim a stake in that action.

Gallagher represents Anchorstone Advisors SOVA, the developer planning to build a potential $1 billion-plus data center campus on a 946-acre tract in Ringgold. During its July 16 meeting, the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to rezone the tract for heavy industrial use to allow for the project. Construction could begin on the project’s first phase by mid-2025 to early 2026.

Currently, the only hyperscale data center campus in Southern Virginia is the 1.1-million-square-foot Microsoft data center complex in Boydton, about an hour east in Mecklenburg County.

“I think it’s a golden opportunity for [Pittsylvania] to get in on the game,” says Gallagher, who is also a principal in a $550 million mixed-use development proposed for Pittsylvania’s Axton area.

No tenant has been announced for the data center campus yet, but Pittsylvania’s economic development director, Matt Rowe, hopes Anchorstone’s project will be “the tip of the spear” for attracting more data centers southward.

“We recognize there’s tremendous opportunity for Southern Virginia when it comes to attracting hyperscale data centers,” Rowe says. “Northern Virginia is pretty much tapped out from a power standpoint [and] from a land standpoint, so we … become the next best option,” due to the region’s available land, low tax rates and proximity to subsea high-speed internet cables in Hampton Roads and QTS’s network access point in Henrico County.

“Counties like ours need the types of direct [tax] revenue that come from these projects,” says Rowe, “and we have the available land mass and space where they can do it at scale without impacting a lot of adjacent property owners.”

That said, some residents did express concerns to the county about potential increases in traffic, light and noise that might come from Anchorstone’s data center campus, which is expected to receive its data center use permit from the county Board of Zoning Appeals by year’s end.

Anchorstone has agreed to comply with county noise ordinances and to reduce light pollution, says Gallagher, noting that the campus also will have direct access to U.S. Route 58, so it won’t impact residential roads. “Most [residents] won’t even know it’s there.” 

Lead generation

Imagine the opportunity to hear Thomas Jefferson speak on today’s most important societal issues.

That’s exactly the aim of The Williamsburg Institute, a new collaborative effort between the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and William & Mary.

The nonprofit institute is aimed at providing immersive opportunities for leadership development, specifically among three demographics: business professionals and community leaders; lifelong learners; and students seeking leadership skills education. But it does so through an innovative framework — 1700s Virginia.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind venture that seeks to look at leadership today … through the lens of 18th-century leadership experience,” says The Williamsburg Institute’s executive director, Christopher Caracci, who began his tenure in September 2023.

The institute held two one-night events in its first year. Its first, staged in October 2023 in front of Colonial Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern, featured interpreters portraying U.S. Presidents James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and Williamsburg enslaved tavern worker Gowan Pamphlet, who would become the first Black ordained minister in the American colonies. The trio discussed political shifts and ideologies of the late 18th century.

The second event, held April 12, saw historic interpreters portraying Jefferson and Founding Father George Wythe engaged in a conversation entitled, “Cultivating a Legacy: Embracing Education Through the Lens of History,” in which the nation’s third president and his legal mentor answered questions about education and the importance of critical thinking to the American society they aimed to build.

“All of them talk about some facet of leadership contemporarily, and then we contrast that with how the 18th century might have reflected on that,” Caracci says. “We can utilize that history as told through primarily the interpretive staff at Colonial Williamsburg.”

The institute’s sole employee so far, Caracci worked for Walt Disney for more than 30 years, many of which were spent providing leadership training for executives as part of Disney Institute, the entertainment company’s professional development and training arm.

Caracci reports to a board of trustees chaired by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Other trustees include William & Mary Provost Peggy Agouris and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation President and CEO Cliff Fleet. The Williamsburg Institute also has an advisory board of area business leaders and educators.

The institute’s funding comes from both Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and William & Mary, but Caracci says the nonprofit’s goal is to become financially independent in the future through partnerships, fundraising and event proceeds.

The inaugural two events were free for attendees. Williamsburg resident Rick Morrison and his wife, Julie, were among those who attended the April event, and were struck by the attention to detail, from the live period strings music to the depth of the conversation between the historic interpreters playing Jefferson and Wythe.

“The thing that impressed me most about the experience … was how deeply immersed in the thoughts of those gentlemen and in their works those two reenactors were,” Rick Morrison says, “to be able to portray those characters in a realistic fashion that basically had the audience believing that they were listening to Jefferson and Wythe. … And even though it was couched in the context primarily of the 18th century, it had a lot of lessons that would benefit people today.”

Those reflections are exactly what Caracci hopes attracts people to the institute’s future events. While its first two events have been marketed toward lifelong learners, the institute’s next planned event, set for Oct. 13-16, will target business and community leaders. It will feature William & Mary faculty teaching on leadership, assisted by Colonial Williamsburg’s interpretive staff.

The Williamsburg Institute’s other target demographic — high school seniors and college students — can look forward to events in the future, he says. As the only employee of the institute thus far, he’s being very intentional about how to roll the curriculum out in order for his programming to have the most impact.

Says Caracci: “You can’t build it all in a day.”

Taubmans give $25 million for Carilion cancer center

Carilion Clinic will soon break ground on a new building for an expanded cancer program thanks to a $25 million gift from a Star City family, the largest ever made to the nonprofit health care system.

The gift from former Advance Auto Parts CEO Nicholas Taubman, also a past U.S. ambassador to Romania, and his wife, Jenny, will help establish the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center.

The seven-story facility will be located at Carilion’s Riverside Campus. It is a planned upgrade for the current Carilion cancer treatment center, which was built in 1980 and sits on South Jefferson Street.

“We wanted not just to replace the cancer center but create a new environment — a whole ecosystem for advanced clinical care, new therapies and research — with our partner Virginia Tech,” says outgoing Carilion CEO Nancy Howell Agee, who announced her retirement in July. Carilion President Steve Arner is set to succeed her as CEO on Oct. 1.

Agee, who will serve as CEO emeritus through September 2025, focusing on phil-anthropy, should have plenty to keep her busy. With the Taubmans’ gift, Carilion has raised more than $70 million of the expected $100 million cost of the cancer center, and Agee says Carilion is “actively fundraising” for the remainder.

For the Taubmans, their gift was an opportunity to drastically change the cancer treatment options for the 1 million people in Virginia and West Virginia served by Carilion. The new cancer facility will provide people in the Roanoke Valley and adjacent areas a closer option for treatments they currently travel out of the region to receive.

“People who have cancer, they have jobs, families. They have obligations. They can’t take a week to drive somewhere and get treatment,” Nicholas Taubman says. “It needs to be here.”

The Taubman family supports local health care in part because of an obligation to their former Advance Auto employees, according to Nicholas Taubman. Roanoke was the company’s headquarters from its founding in 1932 by Taubman’s father, Arthur, until 2018, when it moved to Raleigh, North Carolina.

“The people who worked for us live in this area … and all of these people need medical care,” says Nicholas Taubman, who says he no longer has a financial stake in Advance Auto.

Agee says Carilion will break ground on the new facility in October and expects doors to open in late 2026 or early 2027.  

NoVa residents feel pressure to pay high rent, mortgages

A spring survey showed more than half of residents polled in the greater Washington, D.C., area are concerned with making rent or mortgage payments in 2023, highlighting the lack of affordable housing in the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area.

Fifty-two percent of D.C., Maryland and Virginia residents polled by Gallup and the nonprofit Greater Washington Community Foundation said they were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried” last year, up from 31% in 2020. Virginians in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties and Alexandria didn’t differ much from their neighbors, checking in at 51%.

“I think it relates to the ongoing economic impact of the pandemic, and we will be dealing with that for a long time,” says Darius Graham, managing director of community investment at the Greater Washington Community Foundation.

Northern Virginia, like many metro areas, is suffering from a shortage of affordable housing. In April, Zillow reported that seven cities in Virginia had become “million-dollar” cities, where median single-family home purchases had eclipsed the $1 million mark, part of a new national trend.

And Virginians in the survey, Graham says, were less likely to want low-income housing coming to their communities. That can lead to legal disputes, depending on the circumstances.

In Arlington County, a zoning change that allowed multiunit residential buildings in formerly single-family housing neighborhoods led to a lawsuit by unhappy neighbors and a bench trial in July. (A ruling was expected in late August, after this story’s press deadline.)

Graham is focusing on how to influence that mindset. Policy changes would be the best way, experts agree. Measures like low-income property tax credits, emergency rental assistance and food assistance are ways to lift communities up.

“There isn’t just one wave-a-magic-wand solution to this,” says Ryan McLaughlin, CEO of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, adding that these challenges affect both home ownership and rental markets in the region.

But McLaughlin is also quick to point out the “silver linings” in the poll. Virginians in the survey rated availability of grocery stores, entertainment, access to health care and other quality-of-life measures higher than their neighbors in Maryland and the District.

Another boon for the commonwealth came from CNBC in July, when it ranked Virginia the No. 1 state for business for a record sixth time.

“It seems to me that Virginia has a leg up on the region,” McLaughlin says.  

Micron expects to expand Manassas facility soon

Bolstered by hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funding, semiconductor manufacturing in Northern Virginia soon will be expanding.

In May, Idaho-based Micron Technology applied for federal funding through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated more than $52 billion in subsidies for domestic companies researching and manufacturing semiconductors, to expand its Manassas plant. Micron manufactures dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips for automobiles at its Manassas facility.

The expansion will move its existing DRAM manufacturing from Taiwan to Virginia and will nearly double the workforce at the plant, which already employs 1,230 people.

That follows closely with the intended impact of the CHIPS Act. In 2021, the United States manufactured roughly 14% of semiconductors worldwide but consumed 34%, according to a White House statement. This imbalance became evident in 2020, when the pandemic interrupted supply chains, creating shortages of automobiles, household appliances and other electronics.

While Micron’s application is working its way through the process, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, who co-authored the CHIPS Act, says the federal subsidy will be significant.

“I am optimistic it will be a multi-hundred-million-dollar investment,” Warner says.

That will be on top of a yet-undisclosed amount of funding from the state government, much of which came in a repackaging of a 2018 $70 million incentive bundle. Virginia’s Major Employment Investment Project Review Commission unanimously approved the funding in a closed-door meeting in May, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

Micron plans to invest $3 billion in the expansion by 2030.

“Gov. Youngkin is working with federal partners to ensure Micron’s application is as competitive as possible to bring this project to fruition in Virginia,” says Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson for the governor. “Micron’s proposed expansion marks an unparalleled opportunity for Virginia … to demonstrate leadership in key semiconductor memory technologies.”

The state’s involvement helps Micron’s case with its CHIPS Act application, Warner says, and will prove important in keeping the burgeoning business at the forefront of Virginia’s economy.

“We’ve seen historically that if a company doesn’t continue to invest … technology will pass them by,” Warner says. “So, this CHIPS funding is extremely important.”

The timeline is not clear for when the federal review process will wrap up, nor has Micron designated a timeline for the expansion.