Stand at the corner of Pouncey Tract Road and Liesfeld Farm Drive on a Saturday morning, and you’ll see the collision point of two Henrico Counties. To your east, families stream into Striker Park with soccer cleats and folding chairs. To your west, dozers have already cleared the first phase of what will become yet another pocket of rooftops pressing against the tree line.
Now the developer behind Bacova Village wants to fill another gap. A proposal for 74 condominiums on wooded acreage just south of the existing Bacova subdivision landed before Henrico planners this month, positioning more density directly across from both Pouncey Tract Park and Striker Park — two of the county’s most heavily used recreational spaces.
The timing is notable. Just last year, the same development group secured approval for nearly three dozen townhomes on a parcel at Liesfeld Farm Drive, barely a quarter-mile from this latest site. Taken together, the two projects would add more than 100 new housing units to a corridor already straining under rush-hour traffic that backs up past the Whole Foods and onto the Interstate 295 ramps.
For Henrico’s planning department, the proposal presents a familiar calculation. The county needs housing — desperately, by most measures. Vacancy rates in the Short Pump submarket hover near historic lows, and median home prices have climbed past $475,000 in the immediate area. Condos, in theory, offer a more accessible entry point than the single-family homes that dominate Bacova proper.
But the math that works on a spreadsheet doesn’t always survive contact with Pouncey Tract Road at 5:30 p.m. The corridor was designed decades ago for a different density, and every new rooftop adds cars to an infrastructure system that VDOT has repeatedly flagged for capacity concerns. The planned widening of Pouncey Tract remains years away, its funding timeline perpetually slipping.
Neighbors in Bacova Village have started circulating concerns through HOA channels, though formal opposition hasn’t yet materialized at the planning commission level. Their objections track the usual suburban anxieties — traffic, school capacity, the creeping sense that the woods they bought next to won’t stay woods for long.
The developer has not yet released architectural renderings or pricing details for the proposed condos. A formal public hearing is expected later this spring.
What’s clear is the trajectory. The green buffers that once separated Short Pump’s subdivisions are filling in, project by project, approval by approval. Each one makes sense in isolation. Whether they make sense together is a question Henrico keeps answering with its stamp of approval.
- 74 condominiums proposed on wooded land south of Bacova Village subdivision
- Same developer won approval last year for nearly three dozen townhomes at nearby Liesfeld Farm Drive
- Site sits directly across Pouncey Tract Road from two heavily used county parks