At the corner of Grove, Ninth and King streets, following the winding Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, sits a vacant piece of land that is seldom walked on by Fifeville residents. Yet, its proximity to the UVA Medical Center makes the lot a prime piece of real estate.
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The King and Grove project is located in a transition zoning area in the Fifeville neighborhood just south of the UVA Medical Center. “We really want to call it SoHo, like in ‘South of the Hospital,’” says architect Bill Atwood. |
Around 1999, Plaza South Main, LLC, a profit-making subsidiary of Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), a regional nonprofit organization that creates housing and economic opportunities for local low-income residents, purchased four city parcels that make up the lot. In 2000, the few buildings and a house that populated the site were demolished.
“[The site] has gone through several iterations through the years with different designers coming up with proposals,” says Mark Watson, PHA’s Project Development Manager. “We finally reached a point where we are ready to do the development.”
PHA’s pending project will be the first one in the city to be built in the transition zoning, approved in 2003 for the Cherry Avenue Corridor to increase economic development in the area.
On June 17, the City of Charlottesville staff and engineers and a architect for the project will hold a meeting to discuss the preliminary site plan that was submitted in late May.
“We really want to call it SoHo, like in ‘South of the Hospital,’” says local architect Bill Atwood, whose firm, Atwood Architects, was chosen to design the project. Like many of Atwood’s current projects in the city—Waterhouse on Water Street and Sycamore Ten Point Five on West Main—this one, too, will have his signature feature. “It obviously has got a water catchment in it,” he says. “I think it’s a one-of-a-kind project for Charlottesville, because it will feature affordable housing, workforce housing, but also market housing all in one building.”
In its current state, the site plan calls for a four-story, mixed-used building with three commercial units for a total of 4,800 square feet, and 30 dwelling units—10 one-bedroom units, 11 two-bedrooms and nine three-bedroom units. “The idea behind the initial purchase of the building was that we would replace the number of units that had been on that block initially,” says Watson. The present site plan includes about nine affordable units. “We are increasing it so it will generally be about a third affordable to be able to be subsidized by PHA funding and other sources.” In the end, he says, there will be a three-tiered pricing structure.
The affordable units will be priced according to a criteria set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to Watson, the price will be connected to PHA’s clients whose income is no higher than 80 percent of the area’s median income.
“It will be a front street design,” says Atwood. “The building will be centered on a big street, and we are excited about the look.”
In addition to the water element, Watson says the building will follow the strictest rule for an environmentally conscious structure. “That has been first and foremost in my mind,” he says. “We want to try to make every unit we build better than the last one and so we are committed to doing as much green building, energy efficiency, durability, healthy construction as possible on the site.”
And a green building is not cheap. Preliminary estimates put the project in the $7 or $8 million range.
Watson expects the ground breaking sometime in 2010.
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