Henrico County breaks ground on new affordable housing development
- Center Creek Homes
- Sep 15
- 3 min read
VPM | By Lyndon German
Published September 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM EDT
US Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) attended amid efforts to pass federal housing laws.
US Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.), touted Henrico County’s affordable housing trust fund last year as a model that could help address housing shortages nationwide. On Monday, Warner was back in Henrico to attend a groundbreaking for Pemberton Row, a new 20-unit development funded by the program.
“Your county is doing as innovative a project as anything I’ve seen, not only in Virginia, but in the country,” Warner said Monday during remarks at the groundbreaking.“People in the housing industry across the nation are looking at you.”
Warner also delivered the keynote address at a housing summit hosted by his office and a group of partners including the Virginia Housing Alliance and Citi.
Since its launch last summer, Henrico’s affordable housing trust fund — administered by the local nonprofit Partnership for Housing Affordability — has helped to fund over five developments and bring over 100 new homes to the county.
County supervisors invested $60 million in tax revenue generated from the county’s growing data center industry into the fund in its first year. The fund is used to offer developers incentives like permanent fee waivers and expedited planning reviews in order to reach the county’s goal of reducing the price of 150 new homes each year.
Construction on Pemberton Row will begin later this month, and units are set to be available for qualifying first-time homebuyers by summer 2026.
Dan Magder, CEO of Pemberton Row developer Center Creek Homes, said Monday that while there is no “silver bullet” to solve Virginia’s affordable housing shortage, he hopes this project shows what’s possible when developers and communities work towards a common goal.
“We all know too well, rising home prices and interest rates have pushed the dream of home ownership out of reach for many families,” Magder said Monday. “Partnering with the Affordable Housing Trust Fund can ensure families at a range of incomes can access a good home and the good schools in this area.”
Tuckahoe Supervisor Jody K. Rogish noted in his remarks that the median price of a home in the district reached almost $500,000 last summer. Pemberton Row homes will be priced well below that mark, at around $350,000.
“Reducing the cost of home ownership for some of our hardworking residents — childcare workers, forklift operators, firefighters — they can build equity,” Rogish said Monday.
Roughly 1 in 3 Virginia households are cost-burdened, which means they spend over 30% of their income on housing, according to a 2021 report by JLARC, the General Assembly’s nonpartisan research group. The report found 1 in 7 households are severely cost-burdened, which means they spend more than 50% of their income on housing.
Legislators also commissioned a 2022 report that found Virginia needs more than 300,000 new affordable apartments in order to eliminate cost burden among low-income renters.
“Everybody's got the same problems,” Brian Koziol, executive director of the Virginia Housing Alliance, told VPM News. “There's no jurisdiction in the commonwealth that I'm aware of that has enough affordable housing.”
Warner said housing market issues affect all parts of Virginia and the country. He hopes to see communities come up with more creative ways to fund projects like what Henrico has done.
“There's nothing partisan about this issue,” Warner said. “Supply, supply, supply, supply, supply is what we got to have.”
Comments