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Sprouting Suffolk
This once-sleepy
city is the growth champ of Hampton Roads
by Peter Galuszka
Virginia Business
May 2003
Since its founding in 1742,
what is now known as the City of Suffolk coasted for
years as a languid place where watermen pulled oysters
from the Nansemond River and an Italian immigrant named
Amedeo Obici had the marketing vision to found Planters
Peanuts. Then in 1974 the city merged with Nansemond
County, giving the municipality a huge land expanse
and a shot at a new identity. At the time, the land
supported mostly farms, small stores and pleasant Tidewater
estates on the fringe of a bustling Hampton Roads metropolis.
But when researchers at
the University of Virginia pored over recent census
data, they confirmed some hunches that had been around
for a decade or more. In Hampton Roads, the fastest-growing
area is now the once-sleepy city of Suffolk. By contrast,
growth in Virginia Beach — the state’s most
populous city and for decades an emblem of Sunbelt sprawl
— had slowed to a crawl.
While Virginia Beach grew
less than 1 percent in the past two years, Suffolk had
grown by 8.7 percent. The next-fastest-growing area
in the region was James City County at 7.7 percent.
Inner cities such as Norfolk and Portsmouth lost population.
“My view is only impressionistic,” says Julia
A. Martin of U. Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center for
Public Serv-ice, “but as a suburb like Vir-ginia
Beach gets older, it increasingly urbanizes. While it
used to be quite rural, its housing costs have gone
up and transportation is another factor.”
Suffolk, by contrast, seems
to be in the position that Virginia Beach enjoyed back
in the 1970s. Land is relatively cheap and plentiful.
Roads are generally unclogged and not subject to the
tunnel tie-ups endured by residents of other nearby
cities. And, says Cynthia S. Taylor, Suffolk’s
assistant planning director, “We already have a
downtown and that’s something that Chesapeake and
Virginia Beach lack.”
What really put Suffolk’s
growth accelerator to the floor, city officials say,
was the completion in the mid-1990s of Interstate 664
and the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge linking Newport News
with northern Suffolk. Suddenly, remote Suffolk was
a 30-minute drive from most of Hampton Roads. Avoiding
the usually crammed Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel on Interstate
64, along with the tunnels underneath the Elizabeth
River between Portsmouth and Norfolk, Suffolk residents
could suddenly commute to many more job sites than before.
For the rest of Hampton
Roads, though, the congestion isn’t going to get
better anytime soon because of the failure last fall
of a referendum to increase sales taxes and build more
highways and bridges. “There’s just no serious
money out there,” says Harry Lester, an official
of Commonwealth Transportation who campaigned for the
referendum’s passage.
As efforts to address road
congestion seem stymied elsewhere, current dynamics
seem to favor Suffolk’s continued growth. Employment
is expected to increase at a 91.3 percent growth rate
by 2020, while the population will grow by 45 percent.
That’s the fastest in Hampton Roads, albeit from
a smaller population base of about 64,000 people. At
the moment, the city is concentrating growth in two
specific areas — one in the northeastern part of
the city near Interstate 664 and another around the
downtown area.
In former soybean and cotton
fields off state Route 627, for example, houses in the
$150,000 to $300,000 range are sprouting up — prices
generally cheaper than in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake
for similar sized houses. Real estate assessments for
residences are rising faster than any other city in
the region — about 9 percent. In this northern
growth area, about 10,000 more units can be added with
no changes in zoning, says Thomas A. O’Grady, director
of Suffolk’s Department of Economic Development.
Virginia Beach, by contrast, used to build 6,000 new
houses each year but now adds only about 1,500 new units
a year.
Downtown, construction workers
are busy renovating older buildings. On Main Street,
the gray Professional Building is being gutted for offices
of the city school system in a $4 million investment
that will include a restaurant. Just north of downtown
on brackish Nansemond River, a new, 150-room Hilton
Garden Inn and Conference Center will soon take shape.
The $22 million project will include slips for 36 boats,
a 7,500-square-foot conference center and a 30-acre
nature preserve next door. And, in a field heavy with
historical attractions, Suffolk is actively promoting
tourism, says Lynette W. Brugeman, Suffolk’s director
of tourism. The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife
Refuge nearby shelters diverse plant and animal life
that have drawn more than 50,000 eco-tourists in the
past decade.
Ample land has made Suffolk
a preferred locus for retail chain distribution centers,
whose growth in Virginia in the past decade has changed
the dynamics of the port of Hampton Roads (see story,
page 24). In June, Target will open a 1.5 million-square-foot,
$65 million warehouse center near U.S. 58 that will
supply all of its stores east of the Mississippi River
with imported consumer goods. Cysco Food Service will
open a 320,000-square-foot center that will service
restaurants and institutions from the Outer Banks to
Richmond.
One big question for Suffolk
is that while it seems to be a budding Virginia Beach,
could it end up with the same problems as that sprawling
city? O’Grady says no. “We’re positioning
ourselves as a smart-growth area by identifying areas
for growth and ones where growth will be deterred,”
he says. For now, its location on the fringe and its
small-town feel are big draws. “They should be
very proud of what they’ve got in Suffolk,”
says Thomas C. Pauls, Virginia Beach’s comprehensive
planning coordinator. There’s a lot more there
these days than just peanuts.
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