The Felon Who Built Scott’s Addition

by R. Anthony Harris

Before the beer taps and condos, before the buzzwords about ‘revitalization,’ Scott’s Addition’s future passed through the hands of a single man: Justin Glynn French. A convicted felon whose empire collapsed in scandal, he set the stage, even if unintentionally, for the neighborhood we know today.

Scott’s Addition is now one of the crown jewels of Richmond, home to breweries, cideries, restaurants, and rooftop apartments that regularly make national ‘best of’ lists. But every success story has a prologue, and there’s a cultural layer that often gets left out. It’s a story largely forgotten, but one that comes back to me every time I drive through the neighborhood.

And before I go any further, plenty of people had their own run-ins with Justin French. This isn’t about relitigating his past; he has served his sentence and is free. This is simply my story. If you’re good with that, keep reading.

Justin French mugshot 2011

The Poster Boy of a Desperate City

Justin French came to Richmond in 1996 after a stint in federal prison for cocaine and illegal weapons. He was a stranger then living in the basement of his grandfather’s house, checking bags at the Jefferson Hotel, trying to rebuild a life. He had filed for bankruptcy, carried debts to credit card companies and music clubs, and looked every bit like someone starting from the bottom.

But by the mid-2000s, he had remade himself. French slipped into the city’s business and social circles with ease. He bought buildings no one else wanted, talked about green renovations, and courted young creatives. He dressed the part, tailored suits, expensive cars, and pitched himself as the developer who saw potential where others saw blight.

The Freeman mansion sealed the image. In 2003, French and his wife, Tanya, paid nearly $1.8 million for the Douglas Southall Freeman home, a symbol of old Richmond power. He glammed it up with a sculpture garden and a sleek black pool with arcs of water, then opened it to fundraisers for the symphony and the Faison School. The couple hosted artists, executives, and nonprofit leaders, presenting themselves as enlightened patrons of the arts.

As Richmond Magazine reported in 2011, he was celebrated as a symbol of urban revitalization, even while his business practices went largely unquestioned. Backed by Markel Corp., he turned up in glossy magazine spreads, credited with transforming neglected properties into “green urban spaces.” He supported nonprofits like Craig Dodson’s Pro Cycling team, put money into creative new restaurants, and handed out free offices to groups that couldn’t otherwise afford them.

And he wasn’t working alone. 

French bought into City & Guilds, a local contracting and development firm, pushing its revenue from under a million to more than $10 million in a few years by funneling his projects through them. He courted Cityspace Solar, another start-up in need of cash. He landed loans from a string of banks, Union First Market, Gateway, Paragon, Virginia Business Bank, the Bank of Richmond, and lined up investors who saw him as a young visionary.

French charmed even Richmond’s most cautious operators. He had as many as 100 properties under his control at one point, including warehouses in Scott’s Addition and residential buildings in Church Hill. In a city where supporting creativity was almost a requirement of wealth, he fit the role perfectly: the ex-con turned visionary, the man who could save neighborhoods and make money while doing it.

The irony is that the red flags were always there. French’s past convictions were public record, his lifestyle was outsized, and his reputation offstage was rakish, a late-night partier who mixed country club dinners with strip club outings. But Richmond was hungry. The city was full of abandoned warehouses, crumbling homes, and half-empty apartment buildings. Officials, bankers, and investors were desperate for anyone to come along and make something happen.

And French stepped neatly into that void.

On paper, he was renovating neighborhoods. In practice, he was strip-mining them for cash. He inflated construction costs, scammed state and federal historic tax credit programs, and sold those credits to more than 100 investors cheating them out of at least $11 million. The money went not into long-term development, but into French’s lifestyle: private jets, luxury cars, and bodyguards.

Behind the slick image and the city’s hopes, French was stealing on a scale Richmond hadn’t seen before.

A Call About Murals

My introduction to French came through an old friend and longtime collaborator of the magazine. After the 2008 economic collapse, he was bartending part-time and living above Republic, the bar at Broad and Allison where French was a silent partner. That’s where they met. French liked his writing and, at the time, thought having him and his hip, party-scene girlfriend around gave him ‘cool points.’”

French offered him one of his Scott’s Addition warehouses, not to live in, but to turn into a pop-up graffiti gallery. He spent big: $80,000 on spray paint and primed panels, hired other friends to do the framing, and paid my friend to manage the space and invite artists in from all over. He even had the alley behind the warehouse paved to set up a drive-through gallery.

Around that time, French asked if I could help bring murals to his buildings. My friend and I drove around Scott’s Addition, and his idea was simple: cover the long walls of his one-story warehouses with murals so the neighborhood itself became a kind of drive-through gallery. It was bold and unusual for Richmond then. Back in those days, the mural scene was basically one man, Ed Trask. Graffiti had been criminalized, and street art lived in a gray area, so murals weren’t really part of the city’s identity yet.

But globally, the scene was shifting. 

Instagram had just exploded onto the culture, and it became the perfect medium to connect street artists and audiences worldwide in real time. At the same time, the Wynwood District in Miami, fueled by Art Basel, had become the case study: proof that large-scale murals could not only revitalize neighborhoods but also drive real estate values through the roof.

That was our thinking too, that Richmond could take a forgotten industrial district and use art as the spark for something bigger. I knew we needed someone plugged into that movement. I’d been covering the street art world in Washington, D.C., where Shane Pomajambo of Art Whino was curating those same kinds of projects, transforming rundown areas with international artists. 

So I brought Shane down to see the warehouse. Standing in that strange mix of ambition and excess, the idea for something bigger clicked, and he drew up a plan for a small-scale mural festival with a modest $10,000 budget.

Inside the Republic

I went alone to the meeting, hoping to finalize the deal. Republic, a bar that’s long gone now, had a smoking side and a non-smoking side, and in the back of the smoking room was a raised platform. That’s where French sat, holding court.

Before I even got to him, his bodyguard, one of the largest men I’d ever met, stepped forward and shook my hand. My hand looked like a child’s inside his catcher’s mitt. Why did this guy even need a bodyguard? I wondered.

French, dressed in a suit, looked every bit the developer he wanted people to believe he was. Over a whiskey, he said he wanted murals, but then floated something bigger, almost offhand, investing $20,000 into RVA Magazine. 

For us, with the economy in free fall, even that kind of modest money was a lifeline. 

On paper, it was tempting. But something about him didn’t sit right, the way he carried himself, the way he talked. I left thinking I didn’t want RVA Mag tied to whatever he was really up to. Still, I’ll admit, it was tempting. His lifestyle didn’t make sense to me. I’d grown up poor, and part of me wondered if maybe I just wasn’t rich enough to get it but then again, even the super rich can be pretty dumb. 

In the end, I told him I’d get back to him.

The Collapse

While French was making pitches to people like me, regulators were already circling. At the Department of Historic Resources, Elizabeth Tune and Kathleen Kilpatrick had begun to spot a pattern of inflated invoices and phantom costs in his tax credit applications. Roofing jobs that cost three times what they should, electrical work that didn’t match photos, paperwork that never quite added up. Out of 36 projects he submitted, 22 were denied outright.

On August 5, 2010, the FBI raided his Cary Street office. Agents in bulletproof vests hauled out computers and boxes of records. A week later, on August 13, he was arrested at Richmond International Airport with $10,000 in cash and a one-way ticket in his pocket.

The raid froze everything, including the warehouse gallery project. The art, the primed panels, even the freshly paved alley for the drive-through show were padlocked overnight. My friend, who had spent months preparing, lost his paycheck and his project in one sweep. He told me later it broke his spirit for a while.

For me, it was the real-time sensation of having dodged a bullet. That mural deal was dead, but the blueprint survived. A few years later, Shane and I would launch what would become the Richmond Mural Project.

In the fallout, the regret spread quickly. Alan Kirshner, CEO of Markel, admitted the firm hadn’t vetted French carefully enough, calling their involvement a mistake: “He seemed to show a lot of promise.” Kilpatrick, who had flagged French’s suspicious invoices early on, chastised the banks that kept lending him money: “They didn’t do the kind of due diligence that we would expect.”

Even insiders at those banks were left shaking their heads. One top executive, speaking anonymously, put it bluntly: “When I first heard of French, the story scared me to death. Here’s a person who came from nowhere, and all of a sudden he’s the biggest player in Richmond real estate. The real question should have been, where did he get all his money? I’m not sure that’s ever been answered.”

Richmond in Limbo

It’s worth remembering where the city was at this moment. The Great Recession had left whole blocks in limbo. The Fan and Church Hill were still cheap enough for artists and students to live in. Manchester was weeds and warehouses with Plant Zero being the only significant investment in the area. Broad Street was not the best place to be at night, with only the thin energy of First Fridays keeping it alive after dark.

Richmond felt stalled. Everyone knew change was coming, but nobody had the money to make it happen. French’s indictment in 2010 felt like the end of an era of make-believe prosperity. When he pled guilty in 2011 to wire fraud and unlawful monetary transactions, the courts gave him sixteen years, a signal that the city’s golden boy had been a fraud all along.

But in the ashes, something else happened. His warehouses went to foreclosure and auction, right as Virginia lawmakers passed SB 604 (2012), which allowed breweries to open tasting rooms without running restaurants.

Hardywood and the Second Wave of Vibrancy

When Hardywood Park Craft Brewery opened just off Meadow in 2011, they showed what was possible: a brewery as a cultural hub rather than just a production site. The following year, Governor McDonnell signed SB 604 at Hardywood, cementing the tasting-room model and changing the rules of the game for Virginia breweries. Suddenly, the law allowed them to pour pints without running full-service restaurants and the demand for big, flexible warehouse spaces skyrocketed.

That timing collided with the fallout of Justin French’s collapse. The very warehouses he had used to inflate tax-credit values were sold off at foreclosure auctions in 2012. Two of them were redeveloped into 1 Scott’s Addition, a 132-unit loft complex at Summit Avenue and Norfolk Street with Urban Farmhouse Market & Café opening on the ground floor. It was proof-of-concept: people would not only live in Scott’s Addition, they’d build their lives there.

From there, the momentum snowballed. By 2013, Isley Brewing was pouring beer in Scott’s Addition proper. By 2014 and 2015, breweries like Ardent, Buskey, and The Veil were staking claims, while restaurants, coffee shops, and co-working spaces filled in around them. On the residential side, projects like The Preserve (194 units on Roseneath) and Scott’s Edge (94 units in a rehabbed bag factory) added to the more than 1,200 apartments either open or under construction by mid-2015.

As the Richmond Times-Dispatch described in a 2015 feature, the neighborhood’s transformation had become impossible to ignore. 

“Developers have swooped into Scott’s Addition, bringing a second wave of vibrancy to this once-sleepy section of Richmond. Most people didn’t know much about this industrial area until the machinations of developer Justin French came to light in 2010… For all his misguided actions, the crook was on to something. Scott’s Addition was on the verge of a renaissance.”

Even longtime business owners admitted they were surprised. “We’re seeing a second wave of businesses and entrepreneurs,” said Roger Bouchard of the Scott’s Addition Boulevard Association. “We’re starting to become a well-rounded neighborhood.” Developers pointed to the power of historic tax credits and the city’s real estate abatement program as the real drivers of this rebirth. “They have created enormous subsidies to facilitate development of those properties,” said H. Louis Salomonsky of Historic Housing.

What We Remember

By the mid-2010s, Scott’s Addition was no longer a forgotten industrial pocket. It had become a destination alive with breweries, lofts, and investment dollars, a neighborhood on every “best of” list. And as much as the city might prefer to skip over the messy prologue, the truth is this: it took the downfall of a felon to clear the way.

We didn’t take his money. Two weeks later, he was in handcuffs. But I remember that moment, because it shaped what came next in a profound way for Richmond. Drive through the neighborhood today, or look toward the Diamond District rising beside it, and you see the same pattern: one thing leads to another.

Somewhere, Justin French can take solace in knowing he was right about Scott’s Addition, though it grew into what he imagined only after he was gone from the picture. That’s the irony. The neighborhood that cemented Richmond’s reputation as a craft beer hub, that drew developers and young residents in droves, exists partly because of the very collapse he caused.

It’s a reminder that cities don’t always rise from careful planning or noble intentions. Sometimes the spark comes from failure, from scandal, from someone chasing the wrong kind of glory. Scott’s Addition proves that out and it’s a lesson worth remembering as Richmond lines up its next big transformation.

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Additional sources: The Fall of the French Empire by Nancy Nusser, Chris Dovi for Richmond Magazine April 28th, 2011

Richmond’s Hottest Spot: Scott’s Addition by Carol Hazard for the Richmond Times-Dispatch June 22nd, 2015 

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