DEVELOPERS

In a construction and real estate market that’s finally kicking again, one stretch of city streetscape sticks out. Over the past two years, West Main Street, the long-neglected corridor that has been the subject of so much hand-wringing from city planners and officials, has been nibbled away at from either end, its vacant lots and rundown buildings giving way to new construction and sleek renovations.

The three parties largely responsible, unsurprisingly, occupy the top three positions below. Their independent efforts to take advantage of West Main’s potential, viewed collectively, have meant that one of the city’s most underutilized commercial stretches has gradually taken on a much-anticipated new identity. As a result, the long-hoped-for connection between UVA and Downtown has started to look awfully real.

Coran Capshaw
Always high on any list of Charlottesville emperors of industry, Red Light Management founder and local restaurant king Coran Capshaw has had a particularly big year—and we’re not just talking about his secret January 2 wedding at his Greenwood estate (mazel tov!).

Capshaw’s local development company, Riverbend Management, is behind multiple high-profile commercial and residential construction projects in the planning or building stages in Charlottesville-Albemarle, including big-box shopping center 5th Street Station just south of the city, the eight-story student housing complex known as the Plaza on West Main Street, and City Walk, the 301-unit apartment complex at the site of the old coal tower that could transform the neighborhoods east of the city’s Downtown. In terms of total new square feet in the city, it’s easy to see where the power lies.

Gabe Silverman
Most of what Capshaw doesn’t own along Charlottesville’s West Main Street is in the hands of local architect and developer Gabe Silverman and his West-Coast business partner, Allan Cadgene. The 72-year-old Silverman, while not exactly humble about his work, has a tendency to downplay his influence on the cityscape. While Capshaw is a 600-pound gorilla, he has told C-VILLE, “I’m just a chimpanzee.”

But it’s Silverman’s string of projects along West Main that have become the anchors of the revitalized corridor, helping transform several blocks of derelict garages on either side of the street into a thriving stretch of shops and restaurants. He’s quick to criticize a city he says throws up too many roadblocks to redevelopment and is too wedded to preserving historic character. Spend some time in his garage-like studio on Market Street and he’ll tell you, between cigarettes, that Charlottesville is too slow and too square to have a smart, beautiful urban landscape. But despite his curmudgeonly outlook, he’s done more than just about anybody to create one here, to a large extent because he treats each of his mixed use developments with tender loving care and an eye for detail.

UVA
At any given moment, there are often hundreds of millions of dollars worth of construction projects underway at UVA, and the last year has been no exception. From the Rotunda renovation to the new Battle Building at the Children’s Hospital, the University has overseen some high-profile, big-budget builds in the last year.

But there’s another good reason to consider UVA’s weight and influence in the world of development: students. As the University expands enrollment, local developers are seeing the writing on the wall. The fact that three big apartment complexes are under construction in Charlottesville that will cater exclusively to the rising number of students pouring into town each fall—the Plaza on West Main, the Pavilion at North Grounds near Barracks Road, and a new addition at 1029 Wertland Street—is evidence enough that UVA’s influence on local development goes far beyond its own projects on Grounds.

Dan Rosensweig
In a city brimming with nonprofits, Habitat for Humanity is, at the moment, the golden child. The group successfully turned one city trailer park into a resident-owned condo community, and it’s working toward similar ends in the county’s largely poor, Latino Southwood neighborhood. Executive director Dan Rosensweig—former founder and director of Soccer Organization of Charlottesville-Albemarle—also happens to have a hand in the approval of zoning changes and special use permits as chair of the Charlottesville Planning Commission. His organization has successfully lobbied to have a chunk of the city’s affordable housing fund steered toward some of its projects, and it’s helping to build a mixed-income development on a former city dump sold off for $10. As the city grapples with how to confront its lack of affordable homes and shrinking federal support for public housing, Rosensweig is well-poised to be an influential player.

Wendell Wood
Wendell Wood is one of the area’s biggest landowners—a 2009 C-VILLE tally totalled his property at just under 2,000 acres, with a worth of about $122 million—with many of his holdings clustered along busy Route 29 North, including the big retail draw that is the Hollymead Town Center. His activity has slowed some since the start of the recession, but there have been indications in the last year that Wood may be back in the news in the coming months.

This time last year, he hinted to The Daily Progress that he’s eyeing the possibility of retail and residential development on the south side of town (he owns a large tract along Route 20 that he tried unsuccessfully to get added to the growth area in 2011), and he told the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors early this year that the local commercial market had made a sudden and noticeable turnaround. And he scored a victory a few months back, when the county’s Board of Architectural Review approved final exterior plans for a Gander Mountain outdoor store on a 29 North lot Wood has been trying to develop for years.

Where did he go?
This time last year, we were expecting to start seeing a lot more of John Dewberry, the Atlanta developer who had then just purchased the long-stalled Landmark Hotel at auction for $6.25 million. While he said at the time that he hoped to get construction underway on the Hotel Dewberry within a year, there have been no signs of life at the blighted steel skeleton on the Downtown Mall. Ditto on another retrofit hotel project in Charleston the company had planned to complete before moving on to its new Charlottesville acquisition. So what gives? His company, Dewberry Capital, insists that the local project is still in the works, though they won’t offer any details on a new timeline. And a city that just watched Halsey Minor, the initial champion of the idea of a boutique hotel on the Mall, spiral into personal bankruptcy, has to wonder if maybe the southeast corner of Third and Main is cursed.