About the General Plan

Every city and county in California must create a General Plan to guide its future development. A General Plan is a long-range policy document that expresses a city’s development goals, policies, and objectives relative to the distribution of future land uses, both public and private, as well as a number of other topics.

There are seven mandatory topics that must be covered in every General Plan:

1. Land Use and Urban Design: the general location and intensity of housing, business, industry, open space, education, public buildings and grounds, and other land uses in Richmond.
2. Circulation and Mobility: the planned road systems in our community, as well as other ways that people and goods move around Richmond—by foot, by bicycle, by ship, and by rail.
3. Housing: strategies for providing adequate housing to meet the current and future housing needs of everyone in our community.
4. Conservation: policies for conserving natural resources in Richmond such as water and soils. (In our plan, we will combine this element with parks, recreation, and open space.)
5. Parks, Recreation, and Open Space: how the City will preserve open space for future generations and enhance our community’s health today by providing space for outdoor recreation.
6. Noise: a description of existing and future noise sources and the City’s standards for protecting residents from excessive noise.
7. Public Safety: the City’s policies and programs for keeping our community safe from both manmade and natural hazards like earthquakes and floods.

To better shape our new 100 years, we are also including topics of great importance to Richmond. Our community’s General Plan will also include the following elements:

• Economic Development, which will set the course for future business development.
• Education, which will identify ways for the City, school district, libraries, and others to work together to expand and enhance learning opportunities for all.
• Public Facilities and Infrastructure, which will outline the existing public facilities in our community and describe the new infrastructure planned in the coming years.
• Arts, Culture, and Historic Resources, which will describe the cultural and historic resources our community has and how the City will enhance and preserve these.