Sounds good! If you don't have strava, feel free to give me a list of neighborhoods and I can send you zoomed in pictures of the heatmap from those areas to show you how often people run on it. If you drive by at a certain time it may seem like there's no traffic but it's actually constantly busy or something (or vice versa).

As a caveat, the only places there that are safe for runners is Westover Hills to Woodland Heights

Good questions!

As a couple (who are also runners) we spent all of 2022 house hunting and it was about what you'd expect. The closer in to the city you get, it's less space, more money, and more people which (generally) means more crime. That's just any city. And yes, the taxes are higher than Henrico. https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/va/richmond/crime and https://spotcrime.com/VA/Richmond give good representations of that, but just like any city, you can feel super safe on one street and super sketch 3 streets over. Take those maps with a grain of salt. It says University of Richmond has a higher crime rate than Church Hill, but at U of R you're more likely to get run over by a 60 year old retiree in an audi than get mugged. In most of the city, just keep your car locked and don't leave valuables sitting out and you'll be fine.

The runner and dog bit is way harder. The farther you go out from the city, the larger yard you'll have, but the less safe the roads are going to be as a runner, so it's a balance. Are you light runners? Or are you talking about 5, 10, 15 miles, marathon training, etc? If you want "I can run a half mile loop around my suburban neighborhood" then there's a lot of options all over the area. If you want "I have almost an infinite number of places where I can run" and easy access to other running groups, then in our experience this year there's basically a box of good options, south of I-64, east of Parham Rd, north of the river, and west of Montrose. If you don't have strava premium, here's the heatmap for richmond: https://imgur.com/a/5OauHDA (south of the river it's really only runnable east of Westover Hills Blvd and north of Forest Hill Ave).

There are tons of neighborhoods to run in, as you can see, but a lot of them are either not safe because of traffic or because of crime. The #1 recommendation I would give is if you can, visit for a weekend and drive around some of these neighborhoods. Feel free to send a DM as my wife and I just spent way too long in this process and am glad to share more details.

(edit: obvi there's some neighborhoods outside of my recommendations but I was trying to give a general idea)

Richmond Road Runners Club and Sportsbackers is a great resource for races specifically. If you’re looking for group runs, City Stadium Runners, One for the Road RVA and RVA Monthly Trail Run on Facebook are good places to start. There’s more groups depending on where you live, feel free to DM.