The Richmond Times-Dispatch building at 300 E. Franklin St., where the city’s social services department will be moving in. (Image courtesy JLL)
A plan to relocate and consolidate Richmond’s Department of Social Services is slated to fill up a prominent but largely unused downtown office building.
The city is moving its DSS offices from 900 E. Marshall St. and a location at Southside Plaza to the Richmond Times-Dispatch building at 300 E. Franklin St., where the department would fill the first three floors of the four-story building that still houses the newspaper offices on the top floor.
City Council on Monday approved a 15-year lease with building owner 300 Franklin LLC, an entity tied to Shamin Hotels that purchased the building and adjoining parking deck in 2019.
The hotelier, which moved its headquarters there from Chester, will move out of the building later this year. CEO Neil Amin said the company is considering options but has not decided on a relocation plan.
The LLC continues to lease the top floor to the newspaper, while the rest of the building and parts of the basement will be filled by DSS. The city’s lease is for 113,000 of the 166,000 square feet of office space in the building.
The triangular-shaped Marshall Plaza building at 900 E. Marshall St. (City documents)
The move would consolidate DSS offices that are split between the Marshall Plaza building and the Southside Plaza office at 4100 Hull St. The department plans to maintain a customer-facing presence at Southside Plaza, but the bulk of its staff would be based at the Franklin Street building.
The relocation also frees up the Marshall Plaza building for a planned replacement of the John Marshall Courts Building across Ninth Street. Redevelopment of both properties is recommended in the City Center area plan that council adopted in 2022.
In addition to the office space, the Franklin Street lease includes over 300 spaces in the adjoining parking deck for DSS staff and clients. DSS Director Shunda Giles said parking for the Marshall Plaza office is spread across four lots.
“We are at a place where we have the opportunity to reduce the city’s municipal footprint,” Giles said last week in a presentation to council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation Standing Committee. “This space allows us to all be in one location.”
The annual rental rate under the lease would start at about $4.3 million, with gradual increases through the rest of the lease term. The cost to the city would be significantly less, as reimbursements from the Virginia Department of Social Services would cover nearly 85% of the rent, putting the cost to the city at about $687,000 for the initial lease year.
That cost will be further offset by a rent reduction from the Southside Plaza location of about $563,000 annually, according to city documents.
The Times-Dispatch building has been largely vacant since the newspaper consolidated operations to the top floor. (BizSense file)
The lease follows a yearslong search for a new home for DSS that at one time involved the unsuccessful Navy Hill plan, which had called for replacing the Marshall Plaza building with apartments, parking and retail or office uses. DSS would have moved elsewhere downtown and at one point considered a move to South Richmond.
Keeping DSS centrally located while also maintaining a Southside presence was a goal that the Franklin Street plan achieves, Giles told the committee.
“We have toured spaces all over this city,” she said. “This has been a long time coming, for us to get to this space.”
Noting that DSS offices were located along Franklin Street in the 1970s and ’80s, Giles added, “We’re moving back to Franklin Street.”
Since purchasing the building five years ago, Shamin has renovated the third floor and made other improvements that Amin said were attractive to the city. JLL’s Gareth Jones and Jimmy Appich had been marketing the available space for the company.
Neil Amin
“We always had the goal of leasing up the balance of the building and making it a very vibrant place for everyone. We also have 699 parking spaces, which is a great amenity for tenants as well as the community,” Amin said.
“We weren’t really sure what their needs would be in terms of square-footage, so JLL continued to engage with them and it just morphed into this idea that they’re actually going to need the whole building.”
Amin said his company had planned to stay in the building, having renovated the third floor for its use. But he said that renovated space was appealing to the city and led to the discussions about filling the rest of the building.
“Our space was designed with a hospitality look and feel, and I think that was something that was appealing to them as well,” he said.
As for where Shamin will be headed, options could include a new headquarters at Chesterfield’s Springline at District 60 development or a renovation of an existing building elsewhere in the county, according to a recently amended agreement with Chesterfield. Amin said Monday that no decisions have been made.
“We’re exploring a few options. We have nothing definite at this point,” he said.
DSS’s pending move comes after the headquarters for Richmond Fire and Emergency Services was relocated from 201 E. Franklin St., two blocks west of the Times-Dispatch building. That department is now based at 1904 N. Hamilton St., where it has similarly consolidated support services and logistics storage for nine stations in the city.
Do you think RTD will notice the grift and scandal once it’s literally right under their nose?
They just go along to get along which is why I cancelled the paper after having grown up with it. It seems to me, they mostly parrot the NYT and WP too often including their articles. Some of RTD writers are way out in leftfield trying to coerce their readers to their way of thinking instead of just presenting the facts.