Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Great Inversion Update: CarMax Expands Downtown

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by

James A. Bacon
in ,

lady_byrd_hat

CarMax Inc., the retailer of used (er, make that “pre-owned”) cars, was a national leader in 2005 when it built a LEED-certified headquarters building in the West Creek office park in Goochland County west of Richmond. Now, a decade later, the company is leasing space in the historic Lady Byrd Hat building downtown.

The 26,000-foot facility will house between 80 and 120 employees working in the digital, marketing and information-technology departments. “Team members have the opportunity to work in a unique environment similar to a startup, but backed by the support of a large, established company,” said Shamim Mohammad, CarMax chief information officer. “We are looking for a variety of experience levels to develop best-in-class platforms and advance our website, mobile apps and associate platforms.”

Why downtown? It’s where the young IT workers want to be. The company hopes that exposed brick, hardwood floors and location on the Canal Walk of the Lady Byrd Hat building will be cool enough to attract the techies, spokesperson Catherine Gryp told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

CarMax is hardly turning its back on its suburban campus. In expansion mode, the company is hiring another 80 positions at its headquarters location as well. But the expansion to downtown a sure sign that the many suburban-based businesses in the Richmond region no longer defer automatically to the suburban option. Downtown Richmond is more competitive than it has been in decades, and the same probably holds true for other traditional downtowns across Virginia.

–JAB 

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10 responses to “Great Inversion Update: CarMax Expands Downtown”

  1. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    Oh, if only folks had supported State Sen. Sydnor back in the day when he opposed the Downtown Expressway’s plowing under of the old Canal Basin and the tidewater locks down to that pretty “canal walk” remnant you feature in your photo of the Lady Byrd Hat building. Think how much more “canal walk” we’d have today, all the way from Tredegar through the Basin area downtown and beyond nearly to Rocketts. A quote from the TD Style Weekly of 01/01/80:

    “Sydnor was among those who decades ago opposed construction of the Downtown Expressway in its eventual form. “We called it ‘The Ditch,’ which would separate the waterfront from the rest of the downtown area,” he says. “At most I didn’t want it to come beyond Ninth or Seventh Street.”

    Sydnor says that instead of aiding Richmond, the expressway has been a net negative, exacerbating white flight to the suburbs and stymieing development along the canals.

    “We just stuck our heads in the sand and it got to be a sewer,” he says of the area around the current Canal Walk. “Now I think it’s going to flower and be something that’s very good for Richmond.”

  2. CrazyJD Avatar
    CrazyJD

    Until it comes time for their kids to go to school… That’s when the rubber meets the road. Maybe by that time, the body politic will have figured out that if you want vibrant center cities, you will have to free the school system from its current torpor, namely, you have to end the confusion between a public school and publicly provided schooling.

  3. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    yes indeed a return to publically funded private christian schools is the way out of the problem for sure….

    😉

    you know the most amazing thing about Carmax?

    they charge an arm and a leg for high mileage used cars – !!!

    you can actually get a NEW car for not a whole lot more than many of the cars they sell with 60K or more on the odometer.. but judging from the number of cars with Carmax decals on the trunk – wow!

    ” American schools are ‘more segregated than they were in the 1960s,’ says Hillary Clinton”

    TRUE!

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/25/hillary-clinton/american-schools-are-more-segregated-they-were-196/

    and you do not need Clinton to tell you!!

    ” U.S. public schools are more racially segregated now than they were in the 1970s. More than one-third of all black and Latino students attend schools that are more than 90 percent non-white, according to the Century Foundation. For white students, the image is flipped: more than one-third attend schools that are nearly all white.”

    Washington Post – February 9 at 12:01 AM

    the basic problem is not rocket science. poor folks can’t afford to live in better subdivisions…

    1. James A. Bacon Avatar
      James A. Bacon

      “American schools are ‘more segregated than they were in the 1960s,’ says Hillary Clinton.”

      Now that’s a ringing endorsement of American urban and anti-poverty programs over the past 50 years. Clearly, what we need is more of the same!

      1. Acbar Avatar
        Acbar

        You are correct, Hillary actually said “more segregated than they were in the 1960s” — but the Post’s fact-checker review [thanks, Larry, for the citation] says it would have been more accurate if Hillary had said “than the 1970s-80s” which was the period of maximum diversity in U.S. schools post Brown and Civil Rights Act.

        But what, pray tell, is the relevance of school diversity to CarMax locating its new headquarters expansion in downtown Richmond?

        1. LarrytheG Avatar
          LarrytheG

          ” Until it comes time for their kids to go to school… That’s when the rubber meets the road. Maybe by that time, the body politic will have figured out that if you want vibrant center cities, you will have to free the school system from its current torpor, namely, you have to end the confusion between a public school and publicly provided schooling.”

        2. LarrytheG Avatar
          LarrytheG

          oh and for that matter: ….. ” … Oh, if only folks had supported State Sen. Sydnor back in the day when he opposed the Downtown Expressway’s plowing under of the old Canal Basin and the tidewater locks down to that pretty “canal walk”

          and I’m okay with that

          😉

      2. LarrytheG Avatar
        LarrytheG

        well yeah.. how did we get so many Black Virginians with such crummy educations… had to be the Fed poverty programs fault, eh?

        I’m going start calling you Mr. Ostrich… if you continue to insist the forest is as far as you can see to identify trees…

  4. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    clearly when people with BAD educations cannot earn what it takes to pay for subdivisions in Henrico – it’s their fault AND their kids fault also.

    eh?

    the real question is WHO provided the anti-poverty money AND – HOW did it get spent?

    remember -the Feds don’t end up spending that money – they give it to the States to spend.

    so what happened? how did all that money “not work” and black folks STILL did not get educations?

    you might ask – how that “worked” in Virginia during Massive Resistance, eh?

    and it might be a similar answer to how the Feds provide money for expanding MedicAid and the State don’t want nor need it, eh?

    Lord. Lord. Where in the name of dooda did all of these poor rural folks without health care come from?

    no matter. It’s the Feds anti-poverty programs fault.

  5. Cville Resident Avatar
    Cville Resident

    Good post. Glad to see this announcement as well as the tech announcement last week for the Richmond area.

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