| Stuck
in first
Will growth destroy
Charlottesville area’s top-ranked quality of life?
by
Robert Burke
Virginia Business
December
2004
Frank
Cox ought to be on top of the world. His hometown, Charlottesville,
is the best place to live in the country, at least according
to Cities Ranked and Rated, a Frommer’s travel
book published in March. The ranking is good timing
for Cox, whose urban design firm is in the midst of
marketing the region’s premier development —
Albemarle Place, a 1.9 million-square-foot, mixed-use
project on 80 acres at the city limits.
Yet Cox still grumbles. Only 36 square miles of Albemarle
County, which surrounds the city of Charlottesville,
is earmarked for urban-style development. Cox says that
isn’t nearly enough in a place that has grown
more than 10 percent since 2000 to more than 88,000
people. He compares the development pressure on such
restricted space to an overinflated balloon and frets
about political fallout if county residents become frustrated.
“That balloon is going to pop, and people are
going to be elected who may not give a hoot about the
ambience of Albemarle County,” he says.
Then
there is Jack Marshall, a retired family-planning expert
for the World Health Organization and leader of a fledgling
group called Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population,
or ASAP. Marshall formed the group two years ago and
today it has about 200 dues-paying members. They also
think Albemarle is heading for trouble, but think people
like Cox are to blame. “What ASAP is starting
to do is question the predominance of pro-growth forces
by challenging some of the things they’re saying,”
says Marshall. “And when people say, ‘You
can’t stop growth,’ what we’re saying
is, essentially, … You can stop growth.’”
Maybe all the angst is a byproduct of those great-place-to-live
rankings, which make some residents here worry that
there’s no place to go but down. A community survey
commissioned by the county last year showed residents
largely satisfied with the region’s quality of
life, but also hinted at a growing dissatisfaction.
Residents gave the county lower marks compared to a
2002 survey in areas such as managing growth, affordable
housing and preserving open space.
It’s not that county planners have been ignoring
those issues. Last year they finished the “Neighborhood
Model” zoning ordinance to encourage urban-style
development in designated growth areas, mostly around
the city. The county is reworking its rural-area plan
and will soon focus on the crowded U.S. 29 corridor.
And the county’s effort to steer the location
of new development is having success. Last year 72 percent
of all new housing units went into designated development
areas. Wayne Cilimberg, the county’s senior planner,
admits officials are trying to retrofit an urban style
in areas already developed. “In a sense the horse
is already out of the barn here,” he says. “But
if we’re successful in getting that kind of pattern
more in place, then people here will see it differently.”
But they still might not like it. Crozet — a community
west of Charlottesville dotted with horse farms and
wineries — has about 3,000 people now. But the
population will likely reach 12,000 residents under
a master plan the county just completed, which includes
several development projects. To residents who opposed
that kind of growth the message was, tough luck. “We
more or less had to say that in the Crozet plan process,”
Cilimberg says. “Because very honestly there are
a lot of people there that do not want to see that.”
Marshall and his supporters argue that there are many
residents in greater Albemarle who feel the same way.
“Growth is the problem, not the solution,”
says one of the group’s bumper stickers. Its first
goal is to educate area residents and to begin a debate
about population growth. How many people can the region
absorb before its quality of life and environment start
to suffer? Even the tenets of Smart Growth aren’t
enough, the group argues. “ASAP doesn’t
pretend to have all the answers,” Marshall says.
“Our focus at this point is to get people to ask
the questions.”
ASAP joins a handful of other community groups worried
about the region’s future. It’s still small
but has substantial cache among its leaders. The ASAP
board of directors includes Francis Fife, a former Charlottesville
mayor; Al Weed, the recent Democratic candidate for
Congress for the 5th District; and Rich Collins, a professor
of urban and environmental planning for the University
of Virginia’s School of Architecture and founder
of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation.
Collins points out that even if the group can broaden
its support it still has to deal with development plans
already approved or close to it. Besides Cox’s
Albemarle Place project, there is North Pointe, a $250
million proposed residential and shopping complex on
269 acres next to U.S. 29. Already under construction
is the 165-acre Hollymead Town Center, a mixed-use project
on U.S. 29.
Also on the drawing board in the Crozet area are a number
of development projects approved or in the planning
stage. “Right now we’re stuck with so much
development that we can’t undo,” Collins
says. “The whole process of filling the pipeline
up with proffers and approvals that go for 10 or 15
years into the future is essentially a contract against
democracy. What they’re doing is tying [up] the
future, which will be on our side, so that we can’t
act when we get there.”
Proponents of economic development, though, say the
ones getting stuck are middle and lower-income residents.
Robert DeMauri, executive director of the Thomas Jefferson
Partnership for Economic Development, says Albemarle
has always kept development at a distance. This rural
county of rolling hills and multimillion dollar country
estates isn’t part of DeMauri’s group and
doesn’t actively recruit companies.
The region has attracted people with higher incomes
who can choose where they want to live. That’s
one downside of the national rankings, DeMauri says.
“They move here, they have money and they don’t
need the jobs that might be created locally,”
he says. “It’s great for the county and
the image, but for a wide cross section of folks…
who have to depend on this economy, they’re finding
it more difficult.” In addition, he says, while
the cost of living in Charlottesville is higher than
in Richmond, Roanoke and Norfolk, average annual wages
in 2002 were lower than in Richmond.
The University of Virginia is the region’s de
facto economic development arm, DeMauri says, particularly
the U.Va. Foundation, created in 1993. It controls the
mostly undeveloped 562-acre University of Virginia Research
Park, located eight miles north of Charlottesville on
U.S. 29. The park is a mixed-use development that the
foundation wants to fill with companies spun off from
university research.
One uncertainty is the university’s pitch to become
a chartered university, free to raise its enrollment
numbers and drive the region’s population even
higher. U.Va., Virginia Tech and the College of William
and Mary are pushing the status change in the General
Assembly. U.Va. has 19,643 students this year; Cox thinks
it would add thousands more if it could.
DeMauri considers the university a blessing and a curse.
It defines the region and is largely responsible for
driving the local economy, but it creates a false sense
of security, he says. So do those great-place-to-live
rankings. “Part of the problem is that when things
are going in most people’s minds pretty darn good,
and you’re considered the best place in the country
to live, well why do anything to change it?”
The region’s charm and the commercial projects
already under way are going to bring change —
all sides agree on that much. And they agree with DeMauri
on this: “This is one of the few communities that
I’ve seen that if it could get its act together
and pool its resources, this is one community that could
be whatever it wants to be.” Now if they can just
figure out what that is.
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