Good morning!  

I want to thank you, Ed (Solarz) and Genesis for having the vision and the patience to see this through. A six-year effort is remarkable. 

I was telling him earlier, my family lives around the corner, and so I spend every morning driving right past this intersection, picking up these three little boys and taking them to school. And so for years, I saw this empty parking lot. Sometimes there were trucks parked in it, sometimes there was a stretch of RVs parked in it, but there was never much going on. 

And so to see it now as a thriving building that has become a new community, transforming our city, is super encouraging. So thank you for helping to see that through. 

Six years is a long time, and there are lots of components and lots of complexities to getting projects like this done. Ed spoke to the creation of the capital stack here and just how complicated it is to put the money together to make things like this happen. 

Ed was talking through the amenities, the fact that this is transit-oriented development, right on the Fall Line Trail, a bus stop that's right here, bike parking to make sure that people are prioritizing biking and walking, building on a node that is part of our Master Plan development, putting solar on for more sustainability. I'm glad somebody can figure this out in the city. Super encouraging.  

But these are all of the elements of what a future-thinking, forward-thinking city has got to do, and this project is a great example of that. 

Again, I want to thank Merrick Malone, who runs the City’s Department of Housing and Community Development, for investing a million dollars of City money. 

I speak often about the fact that we cannot create affordable housing without public subsidy. And so the City has to be super thoughtful through our Affordable Housing Trust Fund, through our performance grants, through the use of ARPA funding, to help make deals like this pencil, and now we have 150 units serving households earning less than 60% of the area median income, an incredible addition to the affordable housing landscape here in Richmond. 

I think the other thing that I want to talk about is, Ed mentioned that this was a six-year effort, and a big part of that six-year effort is what happens on the front end: engaging community, getting community support: Councilmember Trammell, thank you for shepherding this through the process. 

Now, one of the things that we are embarking on as a city right now is a revision of our 50-year-old zoning code. And a huge component of that code reform process is changing zoning on corridors like this, on transit-oriented development, making it easier to build multifamily housing. 

We could have cut two years out of this process if it were appropriately zoned for the uses that the City has envisioned through our master plan. 

And so I want to hold this up as an example of why we need to see zoning code revision across the city, so that we can have more projects like this in every part of our city, on these major nodes and corridors. 

But this is an incredible example. We're so excited to see the work that you have done. We're excited to have 150 more units in our affordable housing portfolio. 

As I share often, over the last five years, the City has invested $120 million to subsidize affordable housing. That's created about 5,800 units that have either been completed or are soon to be completed. 

And that's the work that we've got to do. 

Affordability and affordable housing have been at the top of our priority list. 

When I decided to run for office, a lot of that decision was actually motivated by my experience in the East End, where for a decade I watched the housing conditions change, the market change, and lower-income families get pushed out of my community. 

And part of what I came into this job saying is that we have got to make investments on the front end so that folks don't get pushed out of communities, and so that we can continue to have communities where people across the income spectrum can live together in mixed-income neighborhoods. 

And so this is a phenomenal example of how we're going to get there as a city. 

And again, I can't thank you enough, to the Breeden Construction team, to the Johannas Design team. Just an incredible partnership to get this project off the ground. 

Well done. Thank you so much.