Area officials are giving up on plans for a 64/Sunset Avenue interchange, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The traffic flow south of the city is awkward (moving between 20 S, Avon, and 5th isn’t particularly easy), and the city, county, and UVa were angling for improving things by way of a new interchange. But at $50-100M it’s just too expensive. Instead, they’re looking to connect Sunset and Fontaine, but as with just about all road construction, even that’s unlikely to happen. (The state is hurtling towards 2018, the date at which the spiraling cost of maintaining our roads will eat up 100% of the state transportation budget. With each year that goes by, we can build less and less roads.) The need for this is going to come from the massive Biscuit Run development, just south of town. But with the developers offering a paltry $1.2M towards the road, there’s no reason to think that we’ll end up with anything but more traffic.
Archive for the 'Development' Category
It’s been a rough week for the Meadowcreek Parkway. First the school board deferred a decision on giving up some of their land to build the road, Barney Breen-Portnoy wrote in the Progress on Saturday. And now city council has declined to endorse any of the interchange options, Seth Rosen writes today. Now, the school board signing off is really just a formality — and they’re quite likely to do so, anyhow — but the interchange is a bigger problem. Sen. John Warner secured $25M in federal funding for the road almost three years ago, but then the interchange committee went and recommended a design $5M+ over budget.
Councilor Julian Taliaferro thinks that interchange, at seven acres, is just too big. And Mayor Dave Norris just doesn’t see how the city is going to pay for it. Council will hold a work session in a month or two to figure out what to do.
The school board is willing to give up the required 8.5 acres, but they’ve got some conditions. They want a 25mph speed limit near school property (thus reducing the benefit of this dedicated route), a pedestrian bridge, a prohibition on trucks, a guarantee that the fifty replacement acres of parkland would forever be parkland*, and for CHS teams to get first dibs on the promised replacement sports field in McIntire Park.
* The same promise that the city made in order to accept the money from Paul Goodeloe McIntire to establish the park in the first place. Clearly, promises are no obstacle for the city.
Dave McNair writes in The Hook:
The Blue Moon Fund is getting ready to demolish a 13-year-old apartment building on its property at 222 South Street to make way for a new 6,800-square-foot conference center. But an adjoining property owner wonders why the philanthropic organization dedicated to “new economic, cultural, and environmental approaches to resource use, energy use, and urban development” didn’t take him up on his proposal to save landfill space by simply letting him move the building next door.
Tearing down a structure to build an environmentally friendly one is like…uh…help me out here. Pushing your poodle out of a moving car to save a mutt from the SPCA? Selling your child to organ thieves to foster another one? Hacking off a limb to replace it with a less calorically-demanding carbon fiber prosthetic?
The Planning Commission shot down the proposed Pantops sports complex yesterday, saying it’s just too big given the parcel’s rural designation. The plot would have to to have its zoning designation changed, which would flout the whole idea of growth areas. They like the concept, just not the location for it.
All of these concerns came up here when this was proposed last month, so it’s hard to say that this was unexpected. It’s tough to argue with commissioner Linda Porterfield, who says that while the lot might be designated rural, just look around at Pantops — it’s a little late.
Charlottesville Tomorrow has the full report on the commission meeting.
The Board of Supervisors has OKd a big retail development for 5th Street extended, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress. (Or, as most of us will think of it, the long-needed road connecting Avon and 5th.) It’s a standard suburban shopping center — a sea of asphalt with a few single-story big boxes — with a LEED fig leaf. We discussed it here when it was first proposed in 2006. Charlottesville Tomorrow had the details.
A study proposes that the best use of the Martha Jefferson Hospital, once vacated, would be a grocery store and a retirement home, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. They’ve got thirteen acres they’re looking to sell once they move to their Pantops location in 2012. It had been thought that the building could be appropriate for a hotel or conference center, but the study shows that those things just don’t make sense. Martha Jefferson assures people that they’re not going to sell to the highest bidder, but find a buyer whose plans are right for the area. Martha Jefferson sponsored the study.
The hospital announced the move in 2001, but has taken pains to make sure that their departure doesn’t make the neighborhood hate them. The whole area grew up around the hospital since its 1903 founding, so this transition is going to be tricky.
Comedian Brian Regan has a bit in his routine that I particularly like:
You see weird things driving… I’ve never understood log trucks. Sometimes you’ll be out on the highway, you see two big giant trucks loaded up with logs, and they pass each other on the highway… I don’t understand that. I mean, if they need logs over there… and they need ‘em over there, you’d think a phone call would save ‘em a whole lot of trouble.
In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence explores a similar scenario: dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and using the soil to extend the CHO runway. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money to have the dredged silt hauled away and put somewhere, and the airport is looking at spending $15M to buy the soil to extend their runway. Supporters of increasing our water supply by dredging the reservoir (as opposed to the planned Ragged Mountain/South Fork pipeline approach) figure this is something well worth looking at doing to save money all around. I’m not equipped to say whether or not this is a good idea, but I certainly love this kind of thinking.
Steve Ashby writes:
The Forest Lakes Neighborhood Association has placed NO TRESPASSING signs at two extremes of the walking trails behind Baker-Butler Elementary School in Proffit. These trails provide access to the school from four subdivisions (Jefferson Village, Chesterfield, Langford Hills, Forest Lakes North) and Proffit Road. The signs prevent legal pedestrian access to Forest Lakes and force non Forest Lakes middle school students from healthy bicycle/foot access to Sutherland Middle School onto buses. The option to bike on Proffit Road and U.S. 29 is just too dangerous for our kids. The streets in Forest Lakes are state-maintained, public rights-of-way. All this seems down right unneighborly.
I have made a short and silly VodCast, “Noise in the Wood“, about this development-developement.
In an effort to worsen traffic on Pantops (one assumes), a Pennsylvania businessman has proposed building an indoor sports complex there. Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress about the $9M, 125k ft.2 soccer, tennis and basketball facility, which would be built on land that the guy already owns. He’s looking to work with the guy who owns the land adjacent, too, for an even larger project.
Pantops is probably an appropriate place for this sort of a thing, but without doing something radically different with the transportation network there, things are only going to get worse.
Jeremy Borden wrote about objections folks are raising to the planned reservoir enlargement last week, and the organization that’s opposing it. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan are against the $142M plan to embiggen the Ragged Mountain Reservoir by 180 acres and fill it with a pipeline from the Rivanna Reservoir. Their proposal is to, instead, dredge the South Fork of the Rivanna Reservoir. But dredging was considered and rejected as an option by the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, who didn’t like its unpredictable cost ($127M-$145M) and questionable results.
All of this is a result of the nasty 2002 drought, which everybody would like to avoid. An undercurrent of the reservoir discussions is growth — population growth puts significantly more pressure on our limited water resources, and some folks figure that we if we just don’t expand the reservoir, that’ll prevent the population from expanding much more. On the other side there are people whose livelihoods depend on uninterrupted growth, who want to see the reservoirs expanded to make it possible for new construction to continue. I don’t mean to say that many people fall into these camps, only that this is an unspoken part of this debate that color the views of some opinion makers.
Legislation before the General Assembly would force us taxpayers to pay for new developments, Scott Weaver explains in C-Ville Weekly. SB768, proposed by Sen. John Watkins (R-Midlothian), would eliminate proffers entirely, replacing them with straight-up impact fees. Under this system, the $41M in proffers for Biscuit Run would have been just $25M, leaving Albemarle citizens holding even more of the bag than we are now. (If I may mangle a metaphor.) Incidentally, Sen. Watkins has received more contributions from developers than any other business sector, $155k and counting. The bill has passed committee, and is likely to pass the Senate shortly, from which it will pass over to the House for approval.
Incidentally, a pair of those links are to Richmond Sunlight, a site that I run about the General Assembly. Since the legislature is in session right now, as they will be for the next month, every bit of my spare time is spent on Richmond Sunlight. If y’all are feeling ignored here lately, that’s why.
A hundred and twenty five people showed up to lobby City Council to deal with the shortage of affordable housing, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. They were asking the city to set aside $1.7M annually for affordable housing. As WCAV reports, council didn’t go for it, instead simply passing a resolution that they intend to increase spending on affordable housing next year. Three fifths of council wasn’t willing to support locking in an annual rate of funding. The hope is that, instead, the General Assembly will pass legislation that would allow the city to allow developers to build more densely than zoning would otherwise permit in exchange for making contributions to an affordable housing fund.
The population of the Charlottesville area grew by 11.4% since 2000, adding 20,000 residents, the Progress reports. The area included in this is Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene and Nelson. Urban areas in the state have been growing the fastest, while rural areas have seen population declines. (The Progress inexplicably labels Danville and Petersburg as “rural,” despite Danville having a larger population and size than Charlottesville, and Petersburg having nearly the same size population and being twice the size of C’ville.)
In this week’s C-Ville Weekly, Will Goldsmith surveys Charlottesville’s not-yet-historic buildings from around town. It’s prompted by the city’s plan to track down individual historic properties around town and designate them as such. The list includes Kmart, Fry’s Spring Service Station, the old JNB at Barracks Road and the old Coke bottling plant, along with a mess of others. Bonus: great pictures by local photoblogger Eric Kelley.
The Albemarle Planning Commission has recommended that the county stop paving rural roads, Jeremy Borden writes in today’s Progress. The planning commission is trying to support the county policy of building in the urban ring, and just can’t see spending the money on paving back roads. The Board of Supervisors will be discussing their priorities over the next month, and one of the things they’ll have to consider is whether they want to move towards paving the county’s two hundred miles of dirt and gravel roads.
Borden interviews Allison Mitchell, who lives on Gilbert Station Road (just off 20N, in Stony Point), who complains that her road should be paved, and it’s just not safe. Thing is, Mitchell isn’t from Stony Point. So she moved to Gilbert Station knowing full well that it’s not paved, and she ought to know by now that most people who live on Gilbert Station don’t want it paved. I live on an unpaved road near Gilbert Station, and I’d actively oppose any efforts to pave my street. People move out to the country and then complain that they have no urban amenities. Suck it up or go away.
01/10 Update: Lonnie provided some enormously useful information on this topic on his blog last month.
It’s official: council voted last night to let the Young Men’s Christian Association establish a private fitness center on several acres of McIntire Park, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. In exchange for a forty year lease on $2M in parkland and $1.25M in cash to build a lap pool, CHS’ swim team will be given priority in the swim lanes. The vote was 3-2, with Kendra Hamilton and Julian Taliaferro voting against it.
In today’s Progress, Seth Rosen describes a dispute over what to do with a big chunk of undeveloped land on the corner of Cherry and Ridge. It’s in private hands, owned by developers, who want to acquire a couple of small city-owned parcels next to it, but the neighborhood is opposed. Rosen does something in this article that’s so rarely done in the Progress, which is to present a brief, factual overview of the heart of the story, rather than merely dancing around it:
Yet in the coming weeks the developer likely will press councilors to make a final decision. If councilors acquiesce to a land deal, they risk alienating many outspoken residents. If they rebuff the offer, they could kill a development that would bring tax dollars and help revitalize the Cherry Avenue corridor.
Land owner Southern Development says the project can go ahead with the land that they have, they just figure it’d be better with the city’s land, too.
Albemarle supervisors have asked our legislators to let them assess developers with proper impact fees, Bob Gibson and Jeremy Borden write in today’s Daily Progress. Right now the county has a tough time getting developers to pay for the enormous cost of upgrading public infrastructure to support new developments, which is why we lose money on every new resident. Though similar legislation passed the General Assembly last year, but it’s not all it was promoted as, and so no localities in the state have bothered with it. The next General Assembly session starts in January.
The gravy train is coming to a halt. Jeremy Borden writes in today’s Daily Progress that Albemarle County expects property tax reassessments to be flat next year, or perhaps even down. Assessments climbed sharply in 2003, 2005, and 2007, but that’s over now. Since inflation naturally increases the cost of goods and services purchased by the county, this leaves the county needing to cut expenses, a task it hasn’t faced in quite some time. And with the approval of two enormous new subdivisions, our costs are only going to be climbing. All of this just in time for the new Democratic majority to be left holding the bag.
Molly Lazard, of Blue Ridge Cohousing, writes:
Blue Ridge Cohousing, a group of residents forming a community in Crozet, was approved for rezoning yesterday on a property off Parkview.
Cohousing neighborhoods attempt to be both green and social, creating a community where neighbors know and care for one another. To that end, cars are relegated to the periphery and only pedestrian paths lead to clustered homes. The homes are all privately owned, but there is extensive common land and a shared community building with extensive resources.
Blue Ridge Cohousing is partnered with a nonprofit developer, Community Housing Partners, and will be building 26 homes, 4 of which will be designated affordable housing.
I ignore press releases (my mail client auto-erases any e-mail that contains the words “for immediate release), but this is too interesting to pass up. We learned about cohousing in my urban planning class some years ago and, while it’s not for me, I think it’s a brilliant idea. I’ll be interested to see how things work out with this project.
Being told that your building plans are too ugly for Pantops is like being too drunk to fish: sure, it’s plausible in the abstract, but it’s not gonna happen. Or so you’d think. But the Montessori Community School’s building plans have been rejected by the Architectural Review Board for that very reason, Will Goldsmith reported in last week’s C-Ville Weekly. The LEED-compliant structure is designed to be low-energy and sustainable, employing such touches as passive solar heating and a rainwater-collecting gray water system. The ARB is put off by the shed roof, which is necessary to collect rainwater. One ARB member, apparently unfamiliar with passive solar design, suggests facing the building in the opposite direction, a hint akin to telling a farmer he should try harvesting his corn in February. As things stand, the school will have to substantially strip the structure of its sustainable features in order to more closely hew to the design standards of…uh…Giant.
Jeremy Borden notes a curious new political tactic among some Albemarle sprawl supporters: deny that growth is taking place in Albemarle. Rivanna Supervisor Ken Boyd says that the annual addition of ~1,000 new residents is so little as to be irrelevant, while Albemarle Republican Party vice chair Christian Schoenewald (you remember him for his proposal to remove all growth restrictions in order to preserve the rural character of Albemarle) echoes the sentiments, saying that our growth simply isn’t preventing a problem. CAAR CEO David Phillips picked up on this same theme a few days ago, fretting that we’re not growing fast enough. Did a memo go out?
For several years now there’s been an honest discussion taking place: growth opponents argue that quality of life and infrastructure problems trump some private property rights, while growth supporters argue the opposite. This new message from these candidates is, apparently, that we’re all just hallucinating. Remember when we ran out of water in 2002? Didn’t happen. You know how rough it is to drive up Emmett between 5pm-6pm? It’s not. Did you think that our rescue squad is the busiest in the nation? Myth. Though we needed $19M to expand the sewer capacity along 29? Think again.
We’ve had some really productive, informative discussions about growth here on cvillenews.com in the past few years. We’ve even had one today. I’m glad we can stick to an honest dialog, even if our candidates can’t.
Jim Duncan noted the other day that Albemarle Place’s website is gone. And a commenter on his site noted that the development’s signs have disappeared. Tasha Kates looked into this for the Progress today, and found Albemarle Place’s developers won’t comment and Whole Foods says they’ve bailed on the thing and are building their own place on the site of the Terrace Triple. Whole Foods first announced the move two years ago.
Rumors of trouble at Albemarle Place began back in April, when a commenter said she’d heard that funding had fallen through. That was about when its developers had finally got around to noticing that the sewage system couldn’t handle the ginormous new development, which presented a significant problem to them. (Or, more accurately, to the rest of us, since the $19M upgrade would come out of our pockets, not theirs.)
It remains to be seen whether Albemarle Place has actually been reduced to a shriveled pair of striped stockings under Dorothy’s house. But I’ll bet that we can sing soon enough.
It looks like a grocery store is coming downtown, Seth Rosen writes in the Daily Progress. Developer Gabe Silverman has long wanted to bring a grocery store downtown, and now the BAR has approved some changes to his 2,400 sq. ft. space on the corner of 5th and Main that would allow him to do just that. There’s no word as to what chain, if any, would be setting up shop there.
The A&N at that location closed in January of last year, despite Silverman’s best efforts to retain them. A&N is, interestingly, a Virginia business, founded in Richmond right after the Civil War.
Will Goldsmith has a breakdown of what a victory for each BoS candidate would mean in the current C-Ville. He forecasts that a win on the part of challengers Ann Mallek and Marcia Joseph would mean developers paying their fair share, rural protection ordinances would pass, and property taxes would go up. If incumbents win, presumably things will stay the same. Goldsmith is pretty frank, and it’ll annoy some people, but it makes sense.
The Albemarle Planning Commission has denied Wendell Wood’s request to add land into the growth area, Jeremy Borden writes in the Daily Progress. Wood sold the land to NGIC for what he says is $9M less than it’s worth, a result of Supervisor Ken Boyd’s claim that he received a phone call from an NGIC employee — he won’t say who it was — saying that they’d pack up and leave town if they couldn’t expand. (Boyd’s campaign now says that this was a fabrication on the part of C-Ville.) Wood says the county owes him for taking a hit, and figures that having 30 acres reclassified from rural to growth area would be fair. NGIC has the land, and they’re expanding, so that’s not a concern anymore. Of course, the BoS is forever overruling the planning commission — they wouldn’t let a little thing like a unanimous vote stand in their way.
Borden also had a pair of articles today about Boyd’s reelection bid — one about Boyd and one about his challenger, Marcia Joseph.
Predictably, the Board of Supervisors failed to pass a trio of rural protection measures along a 3-3 split, Jeremy Borden reported for the Daily Progress on Friday. Kenneth Boyd, Lindsay Dorrier and David Wyant — the three who are up for reelection this year — voted against prohibiting people from building on steep slopes, barring houses from being built within 100 feet of streams, and lengthening the two year prohibition on subdividing land that’s been split up via a family subdivision. Supervisor Sally Thomas, as a last-ditch effort, proposed that rural landowners simply provide a plan to deal with erosion resulting from building a driveway that would result in significant runoff, but that failed along the same lines. Charlottesville Tomorrow provides the audio of the debate.
Whether or not Boyd, Dorrier and Wyant’s positions are what the county wants will be determined in just a few weeks. All have challengers for their seats, with Boyd and Wyant having particularly vigorous opposition.
There were a lot of similarities between Albemarle County’s citizen survey last year and Charlottesville Tomorrow’s survey last month, but there were some differences, too. There was a lot of overlap in the questions about growth and rural protection, and that’s where some results deviated. In response to that, UVa’s Center for Survey Research, who ran the county’s survey, put together an explanation of why the results differed (PDF), which the county made public in an e-mail announcement today. It’s actually a pretty interesting read, with the differences in the questions and the survey methodologies appearing to explain the contrasts.
After seeing yet another story about how Crozet residents don’t want to be the county’s growth dumping ground, I have to ask: Why doesn’t Crozet take their destiny into their own hands and incorporate as a town? It would require an act of the General Assembly, but I suspect that Sen. Emmett Hanger or Del. Steve Landes would be willing to introduce that bill. It would be interesting to hear what the two candidates for the White Hall district — incumbent Republican David Wyant and Democratic challenger Ann Huckle Mallek — each think about Crozet taking their destiny into their own hands.
As all developments inevitably are, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved both the Biscuit Run and Hollymead developments during last night’s meeting.
Biscuit Run’s 3,100 housing units will go in just south of town, courtesy of developer Hunter Craig, bringing many thousands of new residents to the area. Accompanying the development is $41.1M in proffers, as per the county’s policies, which will not even begin to cover what we’ll all pay in taxes to cover Biscuit Run, which the county estimates will run us $222M. Had the county not rezoned the land, its developers would have been limited to less than 1,400 houses. It will be the largest housing development in county history.
And then there’s Hollymead, the expansion of the existing “Hollymead Town Center.” That’s 1,200 housing units and 278,000 square feet of commercial space. The developer wouldn’t provide a proffer for improvements to damage they’ve done to a nearby lake, but based only on the guy’s attorney saying they’d figure something out, Supervisor Dennis Rooker voted for it anyway, saying that he “take[s] him to be a man of his word.” Supervisor Lindsay Dorrier voted for it, too, despite telling Charlottesville Tomorrow earlier this week that it lacked the infrastructure necessary to make it good for the county.
Our taxes going up to pay for rich folks to move here from New Jersey in 3…2…1…
On the heels their interviews with BoS candidates, Charlottesville Tomorrow has interviews with all five candidates for City Council, focusing on the topic of growth. A timestamped list of topics addressed is provided for every interview, making it easy to find candidates’ responses on matters of your interest. Those interviews can be listened to individually (listed in order of publication): Satyendra Huja (D), Barbara Haskins (I), Holly Edwards (D), David Brown (D), and Peter Kleeman (I).
Charlottesville Tomorrow has interviewed all of the Board of Supervisors candidates, with a focus on the topics of interest to the organization: growth and related issues. The interviews are 20-50 minutes each, and may be listened to right on Charlottesville Tomorrow’s website. Those interviews can be listened to individually (listed in order of publication): Marcia Joseph, David Wyant, Denny King, Ken Boyd, Ann Mallek, Kevin Fletcher, and Lindsay Dorrier.
A friend just turned me on to the brilliant, satirical, and local Beta Carotene Show. Their brand-new installment of the old-time-style radio show is an episode entitled “Secret Agent Ken Boyd.” The show is credited to Steve Ashby, Alex Davis, Bill Davis, and Robert LaRue, who play characters including Wendell Wood, all of the BoS, and God.
I’m so happy to have a chance to use the “Satire” category. This town needs satire, and it needs it badly.
In the latest C-Ville Weekly, Will Goldsmith uncovers the existence of what sounds like an accidentally secret grant program for affordable housing, at $250k/year. The Housing Initiatives Fund has been available for organizations that need a grant, and fast, if presented with a chance to buy a property to turn it into affordable housing. It was established by Satyendra Huja during his tenure with the city. The trouble is that the existence of the fund has never been advertised, and there’s no formalized application process. So while Piedmont Housing Alliance and Habitat for Humanity knew about the program, Albemarle Housing Improvement Program had no idea. Even Virginia Land Company (Charlie Hurt’s development firm) took advantage of the program. The organizations that tapped into the money said they figured everybody knew about it. Work began immediately to formalize the process once these problems became known to the city’s housing advisory committee last month.
Charlottesville Tomorrow released a survey on Monday that shows very strong support for rural preservation in Albemarle County. Both The Daily Progress and The Hook report on it, highlighting the finding that 78% of us support the “phasing” concept, which would limit the rate of growth. Just such a proposal failed 3-3 before the BoS last year.
I just got done listening to a mighty strange discussion that took place on Coy Barefoot’s show this week. Coy had Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Brian Wheeler on for his weekly segment, to discuss growth issues, and they’d planned to have developer Wendell Wood call in for a discussion. Charlottesville Tomorrow has been looking into the unusual arrangement that Board of Supervisors member Ken Boyd brokered between Wood and the county. It was Jayson Whitehead at C-Ville Weekly who first blew this story wide open, revealing that Wood had convinced the county to rezone 30 acres of his rural-zoned land as a part of the growth area, saying that they just had to do it in order to convince NGIC to remain here, who Wood says was going to pull up stakes and leave.
Well, Wood decided not to call in for the discussion on WINA but, instead, he showed up in person and proceeded to take over the half hour discussion. Wheeler and Barefoot barely got a word in edgewise. Towards the 27 minute mark, when Wheeler finally manages to say something, Wood started getting irate at slights that only he could perceive. Wood soon accuses Wheeler of simply inventing lies about the facts of the land transfer, though admits that he’s never read a word that Wheeler has written on the topic. (He says that he “I don’t read that stuff, because every blog in the world…. I’m not into that.”) Around the 30 minute mark he starts to get confused, unable to string together a sentence, so infused is he with rage. Coy Barefoot eventually cuts off Wood and declares the show finished.
Over at Charlottesville Tomorrow’s site, Brian Wheeler provides meticulous documentation of the transaction, including a map of the land in question, links to a dozen newspaper articles on the topic, including Whitehead’s ongoing coverage of the topic.
Preston Coiner’s plans to develop his protected historic property in Woolen Mills has his neighbors upset, but it looks like Council isn’t going to step in. A typographical error on the part of the city removed the land’s Individually Protected Property designation. Coiner bought the land after that time, believing he had the right to build on it. The accidental misclassification of the property wouldn’t seem to remove the designation, but the Board of Zoning Appeals just isn’t sure what to do. City Council has heard enough about this that they considered taking it up at their last meeting, The Hook writes, but they seem to regard the situation as impenetrable as the BZA did. On the one hand, the city wants to be fair to Coiner but, on the other hand, presumably there are still-intact reasons that the Timberlake-Branham house was protected in the first place.
Video of the meeting can be watched on the city’s website.
In today’s Daily Progress, Brian McNeill looks at traffic data and finds that high housing costs are putting enormous pressure on a few roads that lead to the surrounding counties. VDOT’s numbers on travel time (516k PDF), comparing 2005 to 2001, show that traffic from the west on 250 increased by 25%, traffic from the north on 29 increased by 33%, and traffic on 53 doubled from 3,300 to 6,600 trips per day.
I’d wondered to what to attribute the “We Buy Houses” signs all around the county, planted illegally in the right of way. (The sign at right was planted by DMT Properties, one of dozens that literally litter the landscape.) They’re a scam, of course, but Commonwealth Attorney Jim Camblos has apparently chosen to turn a blind eye. Turns out there’s a reason for the flourishing signs, as Brian McNeill points out: rising adjustable mortgage rates mean that people’s homes are being foreclosed on as they fall behind on their payments. The purpose of the signs is to prey on these desperate souls, offering them false hope at a chance to escape foreclosure.
Foreclosure notes in the paper during the first quarter of this year are up 27% from the same period last year. The Piedmont Housing Alliance says they simply can’t keep up with homeowners seeking help, which has increased by five-fold since this time last year. Subprime lenders have provided mortgages to people who simply can’t afford them, and now the industry is collapsing.
I’m mystified that no local media outlet has done a story about DMT Properties and their ilk. The business is a scam, their method of promotion is unsightly and blatantly illegal, and yet nobody says boo. What gives?
05/29 Update: DMT Properties responds.
A group of business owners along 29 N. are protesting the still-under-development Places 29 plan, Jeremy Borden wrote in the Daily Progress earlier this week. The purpose of Places 29 is to figure out what the 29 corridor should look like, because the current process will leave us with sprawl clear to Culpeper and bumper-to-bumper traffic before long. The North Charlottesville Business Council has boldly proposed, instead, absolutely nothing.
Rivanna Supervisor Ken Boyd’s district includes a bunch of 29 N., and he makes clear in the article that he’s with the businesses here. That highlights the coming clash, between now and November, between Boyd and planning commission chair Marcia Joseph, the Democratic candidate running against Boyd. Surely Boyd is angling for high-dollar campaign contributions from developers who oppose any sort of restrictions, given that Joseph has made clear through her work on the planning commission that she supports smart growth. Thanks to Charlottesville Tomorrow’s collaboration with the Virginia Public Access Project, it’ll be easy for everybody to see where each candidate’s money is coming from, as with all candidates in Charlottesville and Albemarle.
Why, it seems like it was only 16.5 months ago that I forecast that Stonehaus was blowing hot air when they claimed that their “Belvedere” subdivision would be “affordable,” as the developer claimed it would be when they convinced the Board of Supervisors to approve it. Lo and behold, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress that Stonehaus has gone and swapped buzzwords on us — now they’re “green”….and single-family houses “will cost somewhere in the $400,000s or $500,000s,” which is “affordable” if you have $3,000/month to spend on your mortgage. (Assuming that you want to spend no more than 30% of your income on your mortgage, that requires an annual household income of $119,880.) Stonehaus tells the DP that their motive isn’t profit, no-no, it’s asking themselves “every day, what’s the moral course?” The 675-unit development is going in on that big chunk of land on Rio Road, on the far side of 29 — you know, the one that got bulldozed a couple of years ago.
Erika Howsare explains in C-Ville Weekly that Stonehaus is angling for new urbanist development, mixed use, and Earthcraft certification.
They’d better get building quick. A new buzzword might come along.
A Utah developer plans 450k ft2 of retail space for Zion Crossroads, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress, described as “upscale retail outlet stores.” (”Upscale” being a euphemism meaning “no poor people here,” like “high-end.” It’s synonymous with putting an extraneous “e” at the end of the name of development, like “North Pointe.”) On top of that, the proposal calls for a 150k ft2 convention center and 225k ft2 of office space. The planned name is The Merchants Walk(e) at Zion Crossroads. The 119 acre property is located between 64 and 250, and is already zoned appropriately.
Jayson Whitehead reports in the current C-Ville Weekly that the developers behind Albemarle Place (on the old Sperry Marine site) have just now bothered to check whether the sewage system can handle their added capacity and, surprise, it can’t. The sewer line running down 29 is called the Meadow Creek interceptor, and it was put in by the city in the ’50s. The guys at Albemarle Place are complaining mightily, but if they’re planning on putting up a dime in proffers to help pay for the enormous upgrade project, I haven’t heard anything about it. I fail to understand why we’re obliged to pay for all of the infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate any fool who wanders into town and tries to plop down an enormous development where it doesn’t belong, Biscuit Run-style. Look at the title of most any page on their website: “Albermarle Place.” That says it all, doesn’t it?
I moved from merely disliking Albemarle Place to hating it when I saw that they’re calling the private road that will run through the development “New Main Street.” Screw you, Albemarle Place, for trying to declare that you’ve improved on downtown by privatizing it. Plus, we’ve got a sewer and you don’t, so ha-ha.
Remember the stone house surrounded by the muck of development at Hollymead that disappeared last week? Jeremy Borden explains what happened in today’s Progress. It turns out that Wendell Wood (who you know for his sweetheart deal with NGIC) has owned the 1920s house for 35 years now, and he’s rented it out to tenants over that time. Wood found that the house couldn’t be moved, so he simply tore it down last week. He expressed surprise that people were so interested in the house (moreso than in the development), but the rumors about the house show that Charlottesvillians root for preservation in the face of development. Wendell Wood, of all people, should know that.
The Board of Supervisors’ Rio District representative David Slutzky proposed allowing rural landowners to sell their unused development rights to growth-area landowners back in October, with the caveat that localities aren’t currently permitted to authorize that under state law. That changed with HB2503, introduced by Del. David Toscano. Gov. Tim Kaine just signed that bill into law, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress, meaning that the path is now clear for transferrable development rights (TDR) in Albemarle and, in fact, throughout the state. It may not matter, though, since the BoS has thus far been entirely uninterested in the proposal.
The Planning Commission unanimously rejected Biscuit Run at last night’s meeting, Charlottesville Tomorrow reports. (Local media outlets left before the meeting ended.) Of the 27 members of the public who spoke at the meeting