If implemented as planners hope, Charlottesville’s new development rules will provide more places for people to live by making it easier for builders to navigate the process. Less certain is what will happen when more of those homes are constructed on a road network with known areas of concern.
Perhaps one of the most dangerous intersections in Charlottesville is at Fifth Street SW and Harris Road, which has seen at least three fatalities since 2016 and many more just to the north on a stretch of roadway designed to be a highway. Thousands of vehicles pass through this junction every weekday.
To the west is the city’s Fry’s Spring neighborhood and the Willoughby Shopping Center and to the east and up a hill is the Willoughby neighborhood, which has several dozen homes with city addresses until the roadway passes into Albemarle County.
Moores Creek LLC, a company associated with Woodard Properties, has plans pending before the city to build a development called Willoughby Place with 84 two-bedroom apartments in two buildings on 4.8 acres. The driveway to this by-right development would be 350′ from the Harris Road intersection. That’s one reason the Willoughby Property Owners Association is opposed to the development.
“Line of sight expressed by [Moores Creek LLC’s] plans from Harris Road to [the Willoughby Place] entrance is two-dimensional and doesn’t take into account the hill,” reads an August 7 letter from the association to the city requesting a denial of a preliminary site plan.
The Willoughby Place plans also show a connection to a parcel in Albemarle County, but correspondence between the city and the firm Shimp Engineering indicates there are no efforts to develop that land at this time. There was an effort to do so in 2014 that did not meet with the favor of the county’s planning commission.
The plans for 610 Harris Rd. were filed under the city’s previous rules, which means that none of the units have to be rented at below-market rates to satisfy affordability requirements, known in the new code as “inclusionary zoning.” Plans filed now require 10 percent of the units to be affordable.
The northwest quadrant of the Fifth and Harris intersection is a 46-unit townhouse community built by Southern Development in the mid-2000s. The future of the southwest quadrant is wide open with a new owner.
On August 5, an entity based in Staunton called TAP Investments LLC purchased 1113 Fifth St. SW for $1.375 million, slightly above the 2024 assessment. The new zoning code is Commercial Mixed Use 8, which would allow for an eight-story building with unlimited residential density as well as many commercial possibilities.
A bank operated on the 0.9-acre property for many years and in the fall of 2022, City Council denied a special use permit allowing for Green Clean Albemarle LLC to operate a car wash on the property.
So far, there are no applications to develop the property.
No matter what gets built, the city is working to make the roadway safer with plans for a “road diet” between Harris Road and Cherry Avenue.
“We’re expecting to bring those conceptual plans to the public for review this fall,” says Afton Schneider, the city’s director of communications and public engagement.