What happens when you build a pair of apartment buildings with hundreds of residents each on the busiest highway in the Charlottesville area? The community will find out in a couple of years if two proposed developments make their way through the process.
On July 16, the Albemarle Planning Commission held a public hearing on a rezoning for up to 165 units and two retail buildings at 1193 Seminole Trail. The site is currently home to the C’ville Oriental grocery store and two former automotive repair businesses that have recently closed.
Meanwhile, Charlottesville planners continue to review a proposal to redevelop 1185 Seminole Trail, the site of Hibachi Grill & Supreme Buffet. Keane Enterprises of Ashburn, Virginia, has submitted a site plan for 250 apartment units on a four-acre lot.
The projects’ proximity provides a unique test of the cooperation called for in the Comprehensive Plans for both jurisdictions. It is not often two parcels across the border redevelop simultaneously.
“The City and County coordinate on planning efforts, both at the staff level and through decision-making bodies,” reads the city’s plan.
Yet the Albemarle and Charlottesville planning commissions have not held a joint meeting for more than five years, a period in which both localities have been updating their respective development rules.
Albemarle Supervisors last updated their plan in 2015, and it makes several references to cooperation with the city, such as “affordable housing that is connected to community amenities, parks, trails, and services in the City,” as reads one strategy in the document.
Both projects are proceeding under older requirements to restrict rents for a certain percentage of units to make sure they are affordable to households with lower incomes. Thesis Living, the developer of the Albemarle parcel, filed their plans before Albemarle increased the number of units from 15 percent to 20 percent.
The Keane site plan was turned in to Charlottesville’s Department of Neighborhood Services before the effective date of the city’s new zoning. Those rules require 10 percent of units to be made available to households with less than 60 percent of the area median income.
The two buildings would be four stories-tall and would be sited on either side of the border between the two localities, with driveways extending onto a 10-lane section of U.S. 29. Neither application acknowledges the role the other might play in addressing mutual issues such as transportation or stormwater management.
Children living in the Thesis Living complex would go to Albemarle schools and those in the Keane property would go to city schools, requiring two different sets of buses. Residents of 1185 Seminole Trail would be amid an island of commercial uses but might soon have new neighbors if one anticipated major redevelopment happens. Great Eastern Management Company, a local company with residential complexes such as Barclay Place and commercial shopping centers, has filed a site plan to redevelop the vacant Giant grocery store in Seminole Square Shopping Center with 350 units.
In one sign of the benefits of mutual planning, a pedestrian bridge across U.S. 29 at Zan Road will be finished in fall of 2025. This was one of several projects called for in a joint master plan for the overall area.