Albemarle hopes to build over 10,000 units by the year 2040, and civil engineer Justin Shimp has an idea for how the county can reach its goal.
“Within the last 15 years, four manufactured home parks in the Charlottesville/Albemarle area have been sold and redeveloped,” Shimp wrote in an application for a rezoning of 50 acres south of Esmont, in order to build a manufactured home park with 50 lots.
An LLC associated with Shimp purchased the land off of Chestnut Grove Road on November 17 for $312,000. Last year, the civil engineer was successful in persuading the Board of Supervisors to expand the number of units at the Park Road Mobile Home Community in Crozet. He points to data that says they are a much more affordable option.
“The replicability, modularity, reduced labor, and decreased construction time all contribute to a more affordable product, enabling lower-income households to own or rent a single unit,” Shimp continued.
Albemarle’s growth management strategy designates 95 percent of the county’s 726 square miles as rural area, and the land has the default Rural Area zoning. Shimp seeks a rezoning to R-4 so he can then file for a special use permit to build the manufactured home park. The units would be clustered in order to preserve land for open space.
“Conditions of the special use permit would no longer permit certain by-right and special uses of the R-4 zone to ensure that the rural character of this area of Albemarle County is maintained,” Shimp’s application states.
Conditions would require a third of the units to be rented or sold to households at less than 50 percent of the area median income, another third at 80 percent and the rest at 100 percent.
Shimp also notes that since 1971, the development area has been reduced from 48,000 acres to the current 23,800 acres.
“Certain zoning restrictions, decreasing development land, failure to meet housing demand, and stagnating household income has resulted in high need for affordable housing in Albemarle County,” Shimp writes.
In recent years, residents of the Ridgewood Mobile Home Community in Hollymead were displaced by the sale of their land to out-of-town developer RST. That company managed to rezone the land for a development that had been intended to have as many 190 affordable units. However, RST moved on after the financing to build those units fell through, and Riverbend Development is now seeking a rezoning to allow for a smaller project.
Shimp’s application to build new mobile homes will likely face opposition as Albemarle’s Comprehensive Plan discourages residential density in rural areas in order to limit the need for services the county has to provide, and to limit the amount of land used to provide septic fields.
Shimp argues that the additional housing would meet the county’s stated need for more housing and would be preferable to subdividing the 50 acres to create six residential lots.