If you live in Glen at Scott Place, you already know the walk toward Hilliard Road. You've ordered a burger at Roy's Big Burger or grabbed a seat at HobNob on a Friday night. Maybe you've stopped into Revel Market and Bar for happy hour, or picked up something at the Lakeside Farmers' Market before the weekend gets away from you. This corridor is not a destination you drive to. It's the strip you already use.
In July, Henrico County's Planning Department released the finalized draft of a redesign for that exact stretch, the corridor running from Bryan Park to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Planners are aiming to turn what's currently a quiet, car-oriented strip into something closer to Richmond's Carytown, and the renderings that came with it have been circulating on neighborhood social media for weeks. If you've seen them, you've probably assumed the changes are either imminent or a fantasy. Neither is quite right. The plan bundles a handful of very different projects with very different odds of happening soon, and the ones getting the most attention online are not the ones most likely to show up first.
What Actually Got Finalized
The plan itself is not a construction schedule. It's a land use and design framework, one that Henrico planners have been explicit is "a recommendation rather than a mandate." That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because most of what makes the plan interesting depends on who has to act next: the county, or a private developer who may or may not build to the new zoning anytime soon.
Here's what's actually in the document:
- Lakeside Avenue would go from four travel lanes down to two, with street parking added on both sides and new bike lanes, none of which the corridor currently has.
- A public square would replace the existing CVS parking lot, anchored by a relocated Lakeside Farmers' Market plus smaller shops and civic space, designed for things like concerts and movie nights.
- A proposed two-story parking deck would go in behind either Lakeside Barbeque or the 7-Eleven on Hilliard Road, tucked out of street view.
- New zoning would allow live-work buildings, townhomes, and mixed-use buildings with ground-floor shops near Bryan Park and Hilliard Road, areas that would no longer permit single-family construction.
- A small public plaza is proposed at the corner of Hilliard Road and Lakeside Avenue to serve as a new street-facing entrance to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, with a "landmark tower" proposed separately in the garden's southern portion.
- The Hub, described in county materials as Henrico's first-ever shopping center, would stay largely as is.
That's a lot of moving pieces for one plan, and they don't all move at the same speed.
The Part Nobody's Talking About: Sequence
Here's the thing the renderings don't tell you. The lane reduction, the piece that's generated the most conversation, is also the piece facing the most resistance. Henrico planners kept it in the finalized draft despite pushback from Lakeside business owners at last year's design charrette, who raised concerns about losing car lanes in favor of wider sidewalks and bike infrastructure. That kind of friction tends to slow a project down or force compromise before a shovel goes in the ground, especially when it touches every business along a commercial strip at once.
Compare that to the farmers market square. It sits entirely on land the county effectively already controls, a parking lot, rather than land that needs to be assembled, rezoned, or negotiated away from a private owner. It doesn't require a developer to decide the market works before anyone builds it. The same logic applies to the parking deck: it's a physical, contained project on already-commercial land, not a rezoning fight.
The density changes, the live-work buildings and mixed-use construction near Bryan Park and Hilliard, are a different animal entirely. Those depend on a developer choosing to build under the new zoning once it's adopted, which means the timeline is really "however long it takes someone to decide it pencils out," not a county construction schedule at all.
Put plainly: the flashiest renderings, the landmark tower and the lane diet, are bundled with the pieces most likely to stall. The boring, contained infrastructure, a parking deck and a market square on land the county already touches, is the part with the fewest people who can say no.
What This Means for the Places You Already Go
If the parking deck moves forward, it would sit behind Lakeside Barbeque or the 7-Eleven on Hilliard, meaning more parking capacity for that end of the corridor without changing storefronts you already recognize.
The farmers market's move to a new square where the CVS lot sits now would put it closer to the center of the corridor rather than its current spot, and closer to a design that planners hope will host events like the kind you'd currently drive into the city for.
The Hub, the shopping center just south of Hilliard Road, isn't slated for major change. County materials frame it as an asset to build around rather than redevelop, pointing to the corridor's existing small businesses and small-town feel as something worth keeping intact.
Places like HobNob, Revel Market and Bar, Final Gravity Brewing Co., and SB's Lakeside Love Shack aren't named in any specific line item of the plan, which is worth sitting with for a second. Their long-term fate has more to do with whether the corridor gets more foot traffic from a public square a few blocks away than with anything being built on their block directly. A farmers market square with programming could mean more people walking past their doors on a Saturday. It's an indirect effect, but it's the kind of thing that shapes a commercial strip over years, not months.
What to Actually Watch For
None of this comes with a construction start date, and it shouldn't yet. A finalized planning document is a recommendation the county has adopted as a direction, not an appropriated budget. The next real signal will be whether Henrico puts funding behind specific pieces, likely starting with whichever project needs the least private cooperation to move.
If you want to track it yourself, the Henrico Citizen's coverage of the finalized plan lays out the full design document and is worth bookmarking, since it's the kind of story that will get updated in pieces rather than all at once. WTVR's coverage is a shorter version if you just want the headline changes without the full design language.
For now, the walk from Scott Place to Lakeside Avenue looks the same as it did last summer. The market is still on Lakeside Avenue, HobNob still has its patio, and Roy's Big Burger hasn't moved. What's different is that you now know which parts of that walk are likely to change first, and which ones are still just a drawing on a county planning document waiting for someone else to say yes.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, plan changes like this one are exactly the kind of local detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. Renee Cowan has spent 30 years reading Richmond-area neighborhoods block by block, and that's the kind of guidance worth having on your side, whether you're already living here or just starting to look.
