The Village Overlay: The Rules That Replaced Midlothian's Design District

If you have plans for a building in the Village of Midlothian, the rules you were working from changed on January 1, 2026. The change is not a small one and it has gone largely unremarked, so here it is in plain language.

The short version: you can build taller, and you have more freedom about where the building sits on the lot. Almost everything about how it has to look stayed.

This is the part most often misunderstood, so it is worth stating before anything else.

Section 11.4 of the Comprehensive Plan, the Midlothian Community Special Area Plan, is exactly as the Board of Supervisors adopted it on December 11, 2019. Its vision, its Village Core, its land use map, its recommendations on height and frontage and the Turnpike are all still there and still guide every rezoning case that comes forward.

A plan and an overlay are a pair, and they do different jobs. The plan says what the village should become. The overlay is the enforceable half that applies that intent to a specific parcel when somebody builds. The Village Overlay is now the regulatory partner to Section 11.4, in the role the design district used to fill. One half of the pair was rewritten. The other was not.

The height line is the one that matters most. A 34-foot cap allows three stories. Seventy feet allows five or six. That is a different development economics for the same piece of land, and it is the single biggest practical consequence of the rewrite for anyone who owns commercial property in the village.

The 45-foot band within 100 feet of an arterial or of single-family property is what keeps that height off the Turnpike frontage and away from neighborhoods. In practice, taller buildings belong toward the middle of a site rather than at its edges.

A good deal of the design district survived in recognizable form, which is why the village should not look materially different:

The overlay also still names specific Midlothian streets for the sidewalks and bike facilities each is to receive: Midlothian Turnpike, Woolridge Road, Charter Colony Parkway, Coalfield Road, Winterfield Road and Westfield Road.

A countywide overlay covering six villages sounds like it must have redrawn each village's boundary to fit a common template. Midlothian's was not redrawn. It was copied.

Chesterfield publishes its planning layers through a public mapping service, and it still carries the repealed design district alongside the new overlay, which makes the two directly comparable. As published, the two polygons measure:

The areas differ by 4.6 parts in 7.68 million. Converted to real-world distance, the two perimeters differ by about three and a half millimetres on a boundary roughly 11 kilometres long, and all four edges of the bounding box sit within a metre of each other. These are not two boundaries that resemble one another. This is the same line, copied across.

The county did not do it this way in every village. Chester's Village Overlay polygon matches the combined area of the four Chester polygons on the county's separate Villages layer to within about one part in three million — Chester's overlay was traced from the village map. Midlothian's is 2.3 times the combined area of the three Midlothian polygons on that same layer, and matches the design district instead. Two villages, two source maps, in one ordinance.

One village gained rather than kept. Rockwood is in the Village Overlay and has no design district behind it — it appears on none of the 25 design-district areas the county maps. Midlothian, by contrast, appears twice: the Special Design District, and a separate Post Development Design District along Midlothian Turnpike that reaches further east.

Some scale, since the county publishes none. Converted from the published figures, the Midlothian village boundary covers roughly 1,195 acres, about 1.87 square miles — the same before and after. The Midlothian Community Special Area Plan covers about 7.94 square miles. The enforceable half of the pair has always reached just under a quarter of the planning area.

This is the practical consequence, and it follows from the two facts above sitting side by side. The boundary is unchanged. But the overlay reaches only Neighborhood Business, Corridor Commercial and Employment Center land inside it, and Chapter 19.2 has thirteen districts.

So being inside the Midlothian village boundary is no longer sufficient. We checked the Turnpike frontage and two village-core streets against the county's address layer, which carries a zoning value on every address point. Across 263 addresses:

The pattern runs opposite to intuition. The commercial corridor came through the rewrite as Corridor Commercial on nearly every block we checked, and it keeps the overlay's standards. The addresses that fall outside the overlay's reach are concentrated in the village core — on the two core streets we sampled, 37 of 43 addresses sit in districts the overlay cannot touch.

Sycamore Square is the sharpest example. Thirty of its thirty-three addresses are zoned Transition Residential. Only 1100 Sycamore Square, which is Corridor Commercial, and 1201 and 1210, which are Neighborhood Business, sit in districts the overlay reaches. The village-scale shopping center at the heart of Midlothian is inside the Village Overlay boundary and largely outside its coverage.

Two cautions before anyone acts on that. First, whether a given parcel was covered by the design district before 2026 depends on its pre-2026 zoning — the district applied to office and commercially zoned property, and we have not traced the old zoning parcel by parcel, so this is a statement about what applies now rather than about what was lost. Second, an address point is not a parcel. Sycamore Square is itself the proof: one shopping center spanning three zoning districts.

None of this means anything can be built on the land the overlay does not reach. Each of those districts carries its own standards, and Section 11.4 still describes what the village should become, so a rezoning in the village core is still judged against the plan. What it means is narrower and worth knowing: parcel-level design control under the overlay follows the zoning district, not the village boundary.

The rewrite, known throughout as ZOMod, ran for several years of drafting and public work sessions. The Board of Supervisors adopted Chapter 19.2 and the accompanying zoning map on September 17, 2025, on a motion by Ms. Schneider seconded by Mr. Holland, with three floor amendments.

Ayes: Ingle, Miller, Schneider, Holland and Carroll. Nays: none.

The district that Chapter 19.2 repealed had gone through the same two stages four years earlier, as case 20PJ0121. The Planning Commission closed its public hearing on May 18, 2021 and recommended approval 4 to 0 on June 15, 2021, on a motion by Mr. Petroski seconded by Mr. Sloan, with Dr. Hylton absent. The Board of Supervisors held its hearing on August 25, 2021, deferred for 30 days on a motion by Ms. Haley, and adopted the district 5 to 0 on September 22, 2021, effective the same day. Four years and three months later it was gone.

The ordinance took effect on January 1, 2026.

Two things are parcel-specific and cannot be answered in an article.

First, which district your property converted to. The old ordinance used Office, Commercial and Industrial districts. Chapter 19.2 uses Neighborhood Business, Corridor Commercial, Employment Center, Mixed-Use Center and others. The county has said negotiated conditions transfer and parcels move to their nearest equivalent district, but the mapping is parcel by parcel and it is on the adopted zoning map, not in the text.

Second, whether your property is inside the Village Overlay boundary. The overlay is mapped, and it reaches only Neighborhood Business, Corridor Commercial and Employment Center land within it. Along Route 60 there is also a separate Urban Corridor Overlay covering the Route 1, 10, 60 and 360 corridors, with a lighter set of standards. Where one ends and the other begins is a map question.

If you are weighing a project, those two answers change everything downstream, and they are worth a call to Chesterfield Planning before an architect starts drawing.

For a property owner in the village, a higher ceiling and fewer dimensional constraints mean more ways to make a project work on a given site. The village has a number of aging single-story commercial buildings on generous lots, and a 34-foot cap made redevelopment of several of them difficult to finance. A 70-foot ceiling changes that arithmetic.

The maximum setback that has gone was doing a specific job. Requiring 60 percent of a building wall to sit within 35 feet of the Turnpike is what pulled new buildings up to the street and put their parking behind them. What remains is the rule that parking cannot sit closer to the road than the building face, which achieves part of the same result.

Both effects will show up case by case, as projects come forward and are measured against Section 11.4.

The boundary comparison, the polygon measurements and every zoning classification in this post are from Chesterfield County’s public planning and address mapping services, queried directly. The acreage and perimeter figures are our own conversion of the published polygon values and are approximate; the county publishes no acreage for either district. Zoning values are read from the county’s address points, which are not parcels, so a single property can span more than one district. The mapping service carries no effective dates, so the design district polygon’s continued presence in it is not evidence that the district is still in force; the repeal is established by Sec. 19.2-86(A). The overlay’s applicability and the standards in the comparison tables are from Sec. 19.2-22 as read in September 2026, which we were unable to re-read for this update because the county’s ordinance host blocks automated access. Vote tallies and adoption dates are from Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors minutes. Anyone making a decision about a specific parcel should confirm it with Chesterfield Planning rather than rely on this post.

The Midlothian Business Alliance’s community affairs contributors include volunteers who serve in county appointed positions, including on the Chesterfield County Planning Commission, which recommended the Midlothian Special Design District discussed here. This post reports the public record and takes no position.

Last updated September 18, 2026, to add the boundary comparison, the zoning coverage analysis and the 2021 adoption record.