Architecture and politics. To anyone acquainted with Charlottesville’s history, it’s a familiar combination. In 1996, Maurice Cox joined the ranks of those who wed the two disciplines in the name of the greater good. That’s the year Cox, an architect and UVA professor, was first elected to City Council. Last July, Cox, who is now 43, added the title Mayor to his accomplishments, chosen by his peers on the five-member Council to the two-year position.
Cox and his family moved to Charlottesville in 1993, fatefully taking up residence on Ridge Street in the onetime home of the former president of the NAACP (something Cox did not know when he purchased the house). Like others on Council, Cox’s journey to elected office began in volunteer activism with his neighborhood association, which he says these days is stable and optimistically anticipating the development of the first middle-income housing to go up around Ridge Street in more than a decade.
Although he lives and leads in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson, it was The Duomo, not Monticello, that shaped Cox’s understanding of civic life. Born and educated in New York City, he spent 10 formative years in Florence, Italy, where, Cox says, he worked and learned among architects who “had taken over the planning of cities” and exemplified for him the “perfect marriage of using your discipline to create a better physical environment.”
“Quite frankly, coming back to the States,” he says, “I found there was a contrast to that reality. I thought that if I was going to have some influence and effect some change here, I was going to have to be engaged in the political arena to do it.”
Cox, a devoted bicyclist who is often spotted on West Main Street on his way to or from the University, announced in July that transportation would be at the top of his mayoral agenda. While he has neither veered from that priority nor from his opposition to the Meadowcreek Parkway, he and Council have been busy on other fronts, too, including housing and long-term urban planning. A recent trip to Burlington, Vermont, for instance, has re-energized Council’s plans to replenish Charlottesville’s low- and moderate-income housing stock.
C-VILLE Weekly Editor Cathryn Harding recently talked with Mayor Cox about his agenda for 2003, including his top priorities and how to effectively communicate them to a sometimes-skeptical public. And he pinned down several results that Charlottesvillians can expect to see this year. An edited transcript of that interview follows.
Cathryn Harding: Urbanism has been a defining element in your work as an architect and you say it influences the work you do as an elected official. Would you define urbanism in the Charlottesville context? And how does it inform your policy agenda?
Maurice Cox: I’m glad you recognize that there’s a local context for urbanism, that urbanism in Washington, D.C., for instance, would be different than urbanism in Charlottesville. Our Downtown district has a wide variety of scales of architecture and uses, but it’s all somehow anchored by a typical street grid that’s very much in the scale of our City. The typical Charlottesville Downtown block is 200 feet x 200 feet, and that has accommodated everything from a single high-rise building to a library, to shops, to houses. This grid has been around for hundreds of years. The social mix of everything that happens is based on the scale of that grid and the mix of uses that you have there. So we’re very fortunate that we have an ideal example of an urbanism for Charlottesville that works. It’s based on retail on the ground floor, offices and residential above, and tends to vary in height from three stories to nine and 10 stories. The important thing is that it is something that, despite the fact that the grid was picked hundreds of years ago, has been able to change and evolve to the point where it’s the eclectic mix that we enjoy today. The Mall is really an elongated plaza or a square and it sets a different aesthetic that probably cuts back to times when the car was not so predominant in our lives. I think that’s the model that we should try to emulate for new development. Quite frankly, that’s the model that others in the region, like Albemarle County, are trying to emulate as well.
You have talked about your growing awareness during your time in Italy of the intersection of public and political life. How do you get from buildings that are constructed on a grid to political citizenship?
It has to do with that space between the facade of one building and the facade of another building across the street and the social interaction that is created there. In a very simple way, how many times will you walk down the Mall and encounter someone and stop and talk and effectively do business? That’s the way that a physical environment can actually affect the number of times you will encounter someone. Or the fact that there’s an environment that is so tranquil at moments and then so dynamic that in your people watching you want to sit outside and have your meal instead of sit inside.
It’s also incredibly democratic in its basic idea that anyone from somebody who’s got time on their hands all day to sit on a bench to someone who’s there doing a business lunch are mixing in the same place. You just contrast that to the way that a shopping center works. Chance encounters? No way.
You’ve also talked about how, as Mayor, you would put transportation at the top of your agenda. Is that still true, six months into the job?
Yes, the big story in 2003 will be Charlottesville embracing two alternatives that will allow our bus system to run more rapidly and to be a lot more interesting to ride. We’ve been looking for a way to decongest our core in the same way that paving the Downtown Mall decongested Main Street for pedestrians. Now we’re looking at bus rapid transit, which is a concept that has buses operating more like rail transit. They have a very intriguing technology that uses a magnetic force field that guides buses along a designated track. I’m talking about an entirely different fleet that would look more like a fixed rail fleet, but on wheels. Eugene, Oregon is experimenting with this system and they have a similar size population to Charlottesville. The wonderful thing about it is you can implement at a fraction of the cost of rail and yet it sets up the infrastructure so that if, 15 or 20 years from now, you have the population density, you can translate the system easily to rail. It has some of the same appeal that a trolley does.
For better or worse, choice riders want to ride on something that’s a little more novel. So you can get people to ride on the trolley, but you can’t get them to ride on the bus. You can get them to ride on a bus that looks like the rail car, but you can’t get them to ride on the bus. We have to acknowledge that and respond to it.
The transportation piece goes hand in hand with population growth. You’ve got to have levels of density of people living in a place in order to transport them, and then you’ve got to have a place where they shop close enough that they can get there by a quick ride using transit.
Where will the money for this come from?
It’s going to have to be a mix of State and Federal grants. We have a system to renew our transit fleet where the City pays a fraction of the cost. It’s going to take a fair amount of lobbying by our State legislators to look at Charlottesville and Albemarle County as a pilot for this type of alternative transit. It’s not something that we can pay for ourselves.
I think there are positive signs. The governor is advocating the greater use of rail and other transit alternatives.
The first thing, however, is there has to be a public will to say if you are going to grow more densely. In the next 20 years, do you really envision that everyone is going to be moving around in the same way they’re moving today? If the answer is “No,” then we have to make that commitment now for something that may come to fruition five or 10 years down the line.
In your vision of what the Mayor of Charlottesville does, is he a strong force to shape that public will?
There’s something interesting about the shortness of our political terms and the length of time it actually takes to get anything done. They are not consistent. So either you become a slave to trying to have some immediate success or you simply realize that most of the things that you envision for your community are not going to happen for years to come and all you can do is set the infrastructure in place for it to happen. In order to do that, you can’t make small plans. Nobody gets excited about them; no one gets upset about them. You have to make big plans. In order for the plan to be so compelling that a Council or a community sticks to it for decades, the idea has to be extraordinary.
Often, you’re pointing to things that people can’t see. As a result there’s a lot of misunderstanding and inevitably that turns into controversy. I expect our vision to be controversial, and I expect to work that much harder to persuade people.
And how do you do that?
It’s tough in a community where the players change so frequently, where the citizens change so frequently. The forums change. I think we have a stable appointment with the public every two weeks. Then there is e-mail. You’d be amazed by how many people bring concerns to us electronically. We are determined to get people who are technology savvy to use our website as a way to access information. At this point, you can get everything from minutes going back to the 1980s to the latest economic development plan. It’s an incredible array of information.
I grew up in New York, too, and for me the definition of a mayor, for better or worse, will always be Ed Koch. He might not have been everybody’s cup of tea, but you always knew what he thought about everything. Is it possible in a place like Charlottesville, where we don’t even elect the mayor, to expect that kind of charismatic leadership?
In the model of governance we have, mine is one of five votes. So you have to operate as a member of a team, and it’s very different than someone who has an absolute mandate from the public as an individual.
But we still inevitably have to deal with the fact that there’s a public expectation that the mayor leads. There is a conflict between the public perception of a mayor as the leader and the reality of the mayor as a part of a collaborative team that is trying to build consensus to move forward, always checking if you have the votes.
I understand the benefits of the continuity and stability of the local governance, but, hey, yeah, it’s nerve-wracking for people who need to have a specific spokesperson who can say, “Yes” or “No.”
But on the subject of speaking in a loud, clear voice, these are insecure times, even in Charlottesville. Gun crimes. Unfunded mandates from the State. An understaffed police force. An overflowing jail. A sluggish economy. The collaborative model you describe starts to feel a little weak in that context.
Charlottesville is one of these little pockets of America where the unemployment is low, there are no peaks and valleys and when a recession happens we kind of hum along the middle. With UVA as a main employer, the City is stable in many ways. Even when we have the worse drought in a century, what do the people of Charlottesville do? They roll up their sleeves and cut water consumption. On the brink of disaster, the citizens made it less painful.
You almost have to artificially induce the fact that we have to have a goal and we have to do it in a context where there doesn’t appear to be a big threat. We’re talking about the hard times in the State, but you know what? Charlottesville will be all right. Once again, it’s because of the stability of our economy, the stability of the government here, our Triple-A bond rating, which just talks about how financially sound the place is. I hear what you’re saying about the strong leader, but if you think about when strong leaders come into being they’re around moments of incredible crisis. It may simply be that this environment is not conducive to that kind of leadership because there’s not that kind of panic in the air.
But for some people who can’t afford housing, for instance, or who have crime in their neighborhoods, the idea that Charlottesville is a “World Class City” is just an empty slogan.
We are constantly working and working on this. Part of the attraction of working in a public position in a community of this size is that inevitably no problem appears to be an insolvable crisis. All of them are manageable to the point where you actually believe when you wake up in the morning that you can get out there and solve it.
I have to walk by subsidized housing everyday, and I have to see the guys who are chronically unemployed everyday. That’s my reality check every morning. That problem is staring me in the face, and in my position I have to do something about it. That translates into our support of a social safety net in this community that is extraordinary given that we’re in a conservative state like Virginia. That concern translates into investment to help stabilize subsidized housing. When Charlottesville invested $500,000 in the local acquisition of Garrett Square to make that community stable for the people who live there and who will continue to live there, when we go in and work on neighborhoods like 10th and Page by helping non-profits to buy up rental units and flip those to increase affordable home ownership, we are improving the quality of life in those neighborhoods.
I believe fundamentally the kind of mixed-use, mixed-income, higher density housing that I’m envisioning is going to create a more equitable community. One reason we’re creating this housing task force, of course, is we’d like to figure out how do you create an ownership opportunity for someone who, for example, makes $35,000 a year? I know a lot of people who make less who would love to buy their apartment. That would be an investment that they’re making and they would be paying real estate taxes—yet another way of contributing to the community.
Only recently have we been hearing that you can’t find a house for less than $150,000 in Charlottesville. So it gives me the impression that we are not too late, and particularly when we’re getting ready to do this rezoning effort that is going to build greater capacity to accommodate our needs.
All of these paths can appear quite overwhelming but the reality is, with the scale of Charlottesville and the amount of social contact that you have with the people who are out there working on these projects, you can’t help but be optimistic. I’ve talked about this kind of civic vibe—a place that creates a climate where people actually think they can get out there and change the world. Charlottesville’s got it.
The issues that you raise regarding the people who are affected by crime, those are the very people who often live in public housing, who we’re looking at ways to elevate their quality of life. The City’s reaction isn’t, “Well, we need 10 more police officers there.” Our reaction is to weed out the social ills that they have to face, and I think that’s a more empowering response.
Other touchpoints for the City are UVA and Albemarle County. What we can expect in terms of the City’s relationship and cooperation with each of those two entities in 2003? Certainly 2002 was not a banner year, for instance, for UVA/City relations, and relations with the County around questions of development always seem strained.
With regard to UVA, I would agree that 2002 was quite a learning experience for all parties. Talk about the challenge of communication! Part of the task I’ve taken on is to try and bridge these two communities. That was one of my initial desires when I ran for Council. I come from a perspective where I actually think the University is of great value to this community. The question is always, How do you acknowledge your interdependence in a way that is supportive of each other? I’m interested in the bricks-and-mortar kind of collaboration, a physical mix of town and gown. There’s no real place where that happens. The Corner is a University enclave and then you’ve got Downtown. I’ve often said that if those two places were in closer proximity, I think some of the collaborations would happen naturally.
Do you envision something concrete going on in 2003?
I do. I think there is a convergence of needs that is going to reach a crescendo in 2003. The City is interested in looking at West Main Street as a smart-growth corridor, with a new mix of uses. A place where the University’s program needs co-mingle with the City’s mixed-use residential and retail needs.
The City has hired Wallace, Robert & Todd, an urban design firm that is going to try to envision the space where the social interaction is going to happen. In the case of West Main Street, they know that the players are going to involve the University and Health Sciences communities, West Main Street and the larger Charlottesville community. The firm will try to create the public spaces where all of those people can mingle and easily get back and forth on public transportation. Making such a space is a prerequisite to creating good relations with UVA
When can we expect to have a proposal?
In the summertime, we will actually start to see images of how the designers think this can happen. So that’s a really exciting initiative. Another idea that I think is equally exciting is creating an environment where people naturally mix on our transit system. We’re going to put a proposal out there for how to merge the CTS and the University bus systems.
Tackling West Main Street, an area that is so close to the University cannot help but sponsor a kind of co-mingling. I think it’s going to challenge how development happens. I believe the anchor to this plan is going to be residential. Currently there is no critical mass of residential living on West Main Street, let alone Preston Avenue or Cherry Avenue.
Obviously not all these developments will take place in 2003.
No. The reality is, any plan that’s worth the public’s attention is going to have to inspire. But in order to get it built beyond this year, it’s going to have to be built in small increments.
When people see these plans and they see how much developable land there really is on West Main Street, they’ll be shocked because they’ve never seen this potential there before.
How about the City/County relationship in 2003?
That is a really tough relationship and will remain interesting because the County has determined that is going to grow more densely along the edges of the City by millions of square feet. Yet they still don’t have the infrastructure to support it appropriately. Nor does the State seem to acknowledge the County is not all rural and needs the tools to build urban-style roads and communities with sidewalks. This presents barriers to the County to doing the kind of development that Charlottesville actually does quite well.
All things being equal, I would rather Albemarle County declare Charlottesville its growth area and simply say they are not going to grow as rapidly. That would be a real innovation. You’d see the residential concentration shifting toward areas that actually can sustain the transportation piece and all of the the urban agenda that goes with it. Charlottesville in turn would have to be willing to accept its fair share of the population growth in this area. Right now our growth is flat. We’ve got something that they don’t: We’ve already got the urban infrastructure in place, we’ve got the physical proximity of things to each other, all our sidewalks in place, our area is easily served by all public transportation. I don’t see the County’s development direction as misguided, but I simply don’t see them having the tools that are needed to guide that kind of development.
Aside from aesthetic disagreements, how will this stance from the County create more conflict with the City?
Many of the negative impacts of development, none of the tax base.
Primarily what some City residents object to is having a fairly affluent tax base surrounding and using the City as its core and then going right back out. My attitude is, well, why don’t we just invite those people in to live in our City and share in providing the tax base for the services that we want? I think it’s too easy to locate high density on the fringe of the City for people who would like to benefit from being in an urban environment but then can go back out and pay a lesser tax rate.
I don’t feel that it is the City taxpayer’s role to subsidize suburban sprawl.
Do you have fruitful discussions with your County counterparts?
We certainly do on many levels and I sympathize with their development pressures. They often appear overrun with developers who want to build. They’re constantly besieged by this demand to do the wrong thing while they are busy trying to do the right thing. I respect them for trying to slow it all down, and I certainly don’t envy them. But I also am concerned about our overall quality of life in this region. I have a different take on whether I can solve the problems of the day when I start to look at the County side.
What will be the top three things that you expect Council to be able to effect in 2003?
Well there’s been a whole sector that’s probably more imminent than most: the renovation to the East end of the Mall. This year, as the project will start, it will be representative of the things that we think Downtown should be: a state-of-the-art transit facility, an amphitheater that is really going to appeal to national acts and a physical extension of the pedestrian realm in that entire area. I think that’s going to be a cornerstone project for 2003.
Also, housing is going to be one of the stories. With transportation, you’re going to see the kind of commitment that the public needs to make early on to a state-of-the-art transit system that builds on moving people rapidly. And I think you’re going to see an unprecedented level of cooperation between the University interests and the City, and that will converge on West Main Street.
Finally, what has been the most surprising thing so far about being Mayor?
I have a new respect for how tough the job is. It’s a challenge but it’s a challenge that you feel compelled to meet.