Norfolk has about 53 square miles of land and 43 of water, and almost every driveway in the city is shaped by that ratio. Rivers and creeks run into most neighbourhoods, the ground is low, and the city's rules for aprons and shoreline paving are more detailed than most. Here is what we know about working here.
All of the city: Ghent and the Hague, Freemason, Colonial Place, Larchmont and Edgewater, Lafayette Shores, North Shore, Fairmount Park, Ocean View, East Beach and Willoughby Spit, Berkley across the Elizabeth, and everywhere between. Business lots, churches and apartment properties anywhere in the city as well.
Norfolk's recorded elevation is 6.9 feet. The land is slowly subsiding, and the federal tide gauge at Sewells Point has measured the water rising against it by about 1.9 inches a decade since 1927. The U.S. Geological Survey puts subsidence in the southern Chesapeake Bay region at roughly 1 to 5 millimetres a year, more than half of it from the ground compacting as groundwater is pumped out. Some streets already flood at ordinary high tides.
For a driveway that means two things. The stone under the asphalt spends more of its life damp than it would inland, so soft spots and sagging are the common failure, not frost. And water that floods over a drive, from the tide or a storm, soaks the base and leaves grit and salt behind. A seal coat keeps rain out of the surface. It cannot lift a drive above a tide, and where the drive is lower than the street we will say so plainly.
Ghent and the Hague. The Ghent Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1980, is Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival houses around the Hague, the creek the developers renamed from Smith's Creek. Where houses here have a drive at all, it is short and tight to the house, which makes it hand work.
Colonial Place and Larchmont. Colonial Place is surrounded on three sides by the Lafayette River and was largely built between 1903 and 1941. Larchmont and Edgewater, between the Lafayette and the Elizabeth, began in 1906 on what had been Norfolk County farmland. Mature trees, older asphalt and water on more than one side are the pattern.
Ocean View and East Beach. Bayfront streets annexed into the city in 1923, where the East Beach redevelopment replaced more than 1,600 older buildings with new houses. Wind carries sand onto every drive near the beach, and it has to be cleaned off completely before any sealer will bond.
Norfolk's pages do not describe sealing or resurfacing an existing driveway as permit work, and we will not tell you it is exempt when the city has not said so. Any job that reaches the apron is quoted with the permit named and the fee as it stands.
A large share of Norfolk falls in its Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area overlay. On a new lot in a Resource Protection Area, structures and hard surfaces have to sit outside the buffer along the water. Where hard surface does encroach into the 100 foot buffer, the city requires the buffer to be replanted, one planting unit for every 400 square feet, and site surveys have to stake out proposed driveways. So a waterfront owner who wants a longer or wider drive should expect a conversation with the city's environmental staff before a paver arrives. Replacing and sealing what is already there is a different and simpler question.
Norfolk also bills stormwater by the equivalent residential unit, $15.12 a month from 1 July 2026. Every house pays one unit. Other properties are billed on their measured impervious area, and the city counts driveways in it.
Over the 1991 to 2020 record, Norfolk International averaged about 41 nights a year at or below freezing and about 36 days at 90 degrees or more. Hurricane Isabel in 2003 destroyed Harrison's Pier in Ocean View. The asphalt here takes more sun and more water than frost, which is why cracks get filled and the coat renewed before summer storm season rather than before winter.
One flood rarely strips a sound coat. Rinse the salt and sand off once it drains, let the drive dry, then look for soft or sunken spots. Those are the real damage.
That is a right-of-way permit on top of the zoning certificate, built to the city's apron standard. It goes on the quote as its own line.
Possibly, but not without the city. In the Bay Act overlay, new hard surface near the shoreline is restricted, so we check before quoting.
Neighbouring cities: Virginia Beach to the east, Chesapeake to the south, Portsmouth across the Elizabeth.
