The Greek Festival's Parking Lot Just Sold. The City Can't Make the Buyer Keep It.

Every year in late May, Malvern Avenue turns into the busiest street in the Near West End. Cars line both sides for blocks. The overflow spills onto the grass and gravel of a squat brick building next door to Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral, where volunteers spend the preceding days curing thousands of shish kebabs and rolling out trays of baklava for the Richmond Greek Festival. This year's festival, held over four days in late May, marked the 48th one, and it drew a bigger crowd than usual thanks to a hometown guest: Debbie Matenopoulos, the former co-host of The View who grew up in Richmond's Greek Orthodox community, signed copies of her cookbook Greekish over the weekend.

Nobody who parks on that brick building's lot every May thinks of it as borrowed space. It has functioned that way for so long that it might as well be part of the festival grounds. It isn't. The lot belongs to Seventh Street Christian Church, and the church just agreed to sell it.

The lot next door was never the festival's to promise

Seventh Street Christian Church has occupied the corner of Grove and Malvern since 1950, though the congregation itself dates back to the 1830s, when it started as Sycamore Christian Church near East Grace and Seventh streets downtown. For nearly 75 years, the Grove Avenue building was home. It is not anymore. Rising costs made that impossible.

Reverend Hollie Woodruff has said the congregation, which numbers around 70 people, was spending more than a third of its roughly $250,000 annual budget just keeping the 20,000-square-foot building standing, before accounting for the deferred maintenance still piling up. The church quietly relocated its services, first to Virginia Repertory Theatre's Northside facility, then to the School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community building on North Hamilton Street, where Woodruff expects the congregation to stay until the Grove Avenue sale closes.

In 2024, the church put out a call for development proposals rather than listing the 1.8-acre property with a broker. More than 30 developers responded. The church picked Charles Macfarlane, a Richmond developer known locally for adaptive-reuse projects like the Lucky Strike building on Tobacco Row and the Manchester Post Office, along with new construction like Main 2525 in Shockoe Bottom. Price mattered in that decision, Woodruff has said, but Macfarlane's group was not the highest bidder and did not propose the tallest building. What tipped it was a plan that, in the church's read, fit the neighborhood.

What was proposed, and what changed in six months

Macfarlane's first version of that plan, unveiled last fall, called for 24 townhomes and a four-story, 48-unit condominium building on the site, with a portion of the church's sanctuary preserved as commercial or amenity space. Neighbors pushed back hard enough on density, height, parking, and traffic that Macfarlane returned this past spring with something smaller.

The condos disappeared entirely. In their place, Macfarlane added 11 more townhomes and gave each one a second garage bay, a longer setback from Malvern Avenue, and slightly more square footage. He commissioned a traffic study from DRW Consultants that found the project's impact on surrounding streets would be minor. The special-use permit request, which the property needs because it currently sits zoned for single-family use, had not yet been scheduled for a Richmond Planning Commission hearing as of the April update on the project.

The one thing nobody is actually negotiating for

Here is the detail that gets lost in conversations about unit counts and building height. The lot that hundreds of festival-goers park on every spring was never something the city, the cathedral, or anyone else had a legal claim to. It was a courtesy.

First District Councilmember Andrew Breton has been direct about this. He has acknowledged that Seventh Street Christian Church graciously allowed its lot to be used for Greek Festival overflow parking for years, and just as directly that the city cannot require the property to remain available for that purpose going forward. The permit review will weigh traffic, congestion, and the historic character of the corner. It will not weigh whether next May's festival has anywhere for cars to go.

Resident Victoria DeRoche, a longtime festivalgoer, put the neighborhood's actual worry into words when she said she isn't opposed to housing on the site, only that whatever gets built should support the neighborhood and the church next door rather than crowd them out. That is a request, not a condition anyone can enforce through the permit process.

What replaces the asphalt, and what doesn't

The revised plan does add something back to the corner. At the southwest intersection of Grove and Malvern, Macfarlane is proposing a small public park with benches and garden features, along with a marker commemorating the church that stood there for three-quarters of a century. He has also offered to build a shelter for the GRTC bus stop at that corner, a small nod to the transit route that already runs along Grove.

None of that replaces parking. Do the simple math on the current plan: 35 townhomes, each with a two-car garage, put a floor of 70 resident vehicles onto a corner that never had dedicated parking to begin with. That is before counting visitors, deliveries, or the one week a year when the neighborhood's population effectively doubles for a festival that has never had a designated lot of its own, relying instead on whatever street parking festivalgoers can find around the cathedral grounds.

The same story is playing out a few blocks away

Grove Avenue has been having this argument in more than one spot. A few blocks west of the church site, Center Creek Homes went through a nearly identical arc with Lafayette Green, a townhome infill project at 3923 Grove Ave. that sits behind a centuries-old house facing the street. That proposal started at 16 townhomes, drew neighborhood opposition over scale, and eventually scaled down to 10 before winning city approval.

Two projects, two rounds of community pushback, two developers landing on a smaller number than they started with. The pattern suggests the Near West End's real estate conversation right now is less about whether Grove Avenue will get denser and more about how much density the street absorbs before something else, like festival parking or the tree canopy along Malvern, gets treated as negotiable.

What actually changes next May

The honest answer, based on where things stood as of this past spring, is that nobody knows yet. As of that April update, the special-use permit had not been placed on a Planning Commission agenda, with the church's leadership still working through city agency reviews. Whatever the commission eventually decides about height, unit count, or street access, it will not include a requirement that the new owner set aside parking for a festival the property has no legal obligation to.

If you have lived near Grove and Malvern long enough to park on that lot without a second thought, this is the year to start paying attention to where the city posts its hearing notices. The festival will figure out something. It always does. What it parks on next year is simply no longer guaranteed by an old handshake between neighbors, because the neighbor who could offer that handshake is selling.

If you're watching how these Grove Avenue projects reshape the Near West End and wondering what it means for a home you already own or one you're eyeing nearby, Kelly Blanchard Real Estate has spent years reading exactly this kind of local shift for Richmond buyers and sellers. Reach out when you want a straight answer about what it means for you.