Albemarle County entered into a public-private partnership with Home Depot in 2022. The home improvement hub plans to turn the former Sears at Fashion Square Mall into a new store and garden center.
Image via MG2.
Shortly after the signalized intersection at Rio Road and U.S. 29 was converted to an underpass in July 2016, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors adopted a small area plan to encourage redevelopment of the immediate area to be more dense to meet the needs of the 21st century.
“The plan identifies the Rio Road/29 intersection as the heart of urban Albemarle County and it designated the four quadrants as critical for the commercial corridor’s future,” says Emily Kilroy, Albemarle’s interim economic development director. “It envisions a dense, walkable, bikeable transit-connected environment.”
Nearly six years later, the county entered into a public-private partnership with Home Depot to redevelop the former Sears at Fashion Square Mall into a new store and garden center. The Atlanta-based retailer purchased the site, as well as dozens of individual retail spaces inside the mall, in September 2022.
County officials have approved plans for the new store, but Home Depot’s development costs have increased.
“It was primarily associated with the demolition of the former Sears and the Sears Auto Center, which had a requirement for asbestos abatement as well as brownfield remediation,” said J.T. Newberry, deputy director of the Albemarle Office of Economic Development.
Newberry told the board of supervisors on August 21 that the higher costs may have been a barrier to Home Depot proceeding. The county and its Economic Development Authority negotiated terms for a tax increment financing agreement under the codename Project Julius to grant up to $750,000 in real property tax rebates over 10 years.
In exchange, Home Depot has to be open by December 24, 2025. The company will also dedicate land for a future realignment of Hillsdale Drive, called for in the Rio Road plan.
“They will help actively market the former Red Lobster site, which is currently vacant,” Newberry said.
In addition to more property taxes to be generated from the site, Newberry said Albemarle expects the new store to produce between $400,000 and $500,000 a year in local sales taxes. He said the store is expected to create 100 jobs.
Kilroy says Fashion Square Mall is ripe for a public-private partnership to try to implement that vision. She presented the Board of Supervisors with a slide depicting the decline in value from around $70 million in 2014 to just below $20 million this year.
“Redevelopment of this parcel will correct what has been a stark decline in property value for this area,” Kilroy says, adding that the county’s investment will support the first major private reinvestment since the Rio Road plan was adopted.
Belk Stores of Virginia continues to own its store, and developer Richard Hewitt owns the former JCPenney. Albemarle County now rents a portion of that property for a public safety fleet operations center.
Other investments in the area have not had a public component. Earlier this year, the Carter Machinery Company purchased a 4.67-acre property to the east of the Northside Library for $3.53 million. It has since opened a rental store for construction and lawn equipment, eliminating parking spaces that had been rented for library patrons.
Completion of The Flats at West Village 10 years ago marked a new era for the West Main Street corridor—one that included students and paved the way for more residential units in the area. Staff photo.
With the University of Virginia back in session next week, students are returning to Charlottesville—including the several hundred who live at 852 W. Main St. The first residents of the building known as The Flats at West Village moved in 10 years ago, beginning a trend of students moving into an area where they had not previously lived.
Riverbend Development and an out-of-town group took the project through the approval process in December 2012, during which City Council voted 4-1 on a special use permit to allow the building to be eight stories high and to have up to 595 bedrooms. Councilor Dede Smith voted against the permit that night, arguing that the project would have negative impacts on surrounding neighborhoods.
“Charlottesville was told that a large student complex on West Main would moderate rents across town, stimulate a vibrant mixed-use community, and reintegrate Westhaven and Fifeville into Main Street,” Smith says. “Unfortunately, few, if any, of these benefits have occurred.”
The current owner is an entity called Madison Loft LLC that purchased the property in November 2016 for $77.5 million. Previous structures on the property were automotive in nature, reflecting the role West Main Street played in the 20th century.
Since people began living at the Flats, the city has collected $6.35 million in taxes, with a bill this year of $821,143.96. The property is now managed by Asset Living, one of the largest property maintenance firms in the United States.
The Flats was followed by what’s now called The Lark on West Main and The Standard at Charlottesville, adding more students and millions more in tax revenue.
Previous zoning on the property required the ground floors to be commercial, but that has not been a total success. The Flats opened with a restaurant called World of Beer that folded before the pandemic, and the space was vacant for many years until Mejicali recently opened. The convenience store next door has been the only permanent fixture, but another retail space on the ground floor has never had an occupant.
The same is true across the street at the Standard, where two retail spaces sit vacant. The retail space at the Lark is currently occupied by Devil’s Backbone Backyard after two similar businesses failed at the location.
Other buildings constructed to the east include the former Quirk Hotel (now The Doyle Hotel), the Marriott Residence Inn, and the apartment complex at 600 W. Main St. that preserved Blue Moon Diner. That project also has a retail space that has proved difficult to keep rented.
More buildings constructed on West Main will not need approval from the city council because the new zoning code allows taller heights without special permission. Residential density is unlimited, but the new rules require 10 percent of units to be affordable to households or individuals whose incomes are 60 percent below the area median income.
Meanwhile, UVA is moving ahead with plans to build new residence halls for second-year students as part of an initiative to house more people on Grounds. This spring, the Office of Facilities Management asked firms to submit qualifications to build up to 2,000 new bedrooms either on Ivy Road or Emmet Street. The bid documents state that UVA would like those units to be in place by the fall of 2027.
The entrance to Willoughby Place would be 350' from the intersection of Fifth Street SW and Harris Road along a winding road. Image via Shimp Engineering.
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.
The building at the corner of East Market Street and Fifth Street NW, which for more than 40 years has housed the Chamber of Commerce, is for sale. Photo via Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer.
For more than four decades, the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce has operated at the corner of East Market Street and Fifth Street NW just down the hill from the former Monticello Hotel.
Now that property is on the market as the chamber continues a search for a new place to advance its mission in a community where economic growth is happening across many geographic locations.
“They are still in the building but will be planning to move after the sale to something that better accommodates their current staff and allows them to serve the community more flexibly,” says Jenny Stoner, a senior vice president with Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer, the listing agent that was awarded an exclusive sales assignment.
The chamber held an open house in July, and the open house invitation stated that putting the building on the market reflects a strategic direction as the second quarter of the century approaches.
“This decision reflects a common practice amongst Chambers nationwide to reposition assets in response to the evolving needs of members and the broader business community,” reads the invitation.
The organization doesn’t plan to go very far as it seeks new office space.
“We haven’t selected a new location yet, but we plan to continue operating near downtown Charlottesville,” says Ann Marie Hohenberger, the chamber’s director of community engagement. “It is the geographic center of our service area.”
Hohenberger says the chamber’s Board of Directors is still working on the development of a strategic vision for the future.
The building at 415 E. Market St. was constructed in 1911 and offers 3,000 square feet on two floors. The Market Street Parking Garage is a block away. The footprint is 0.3 acres and the land is now zoned Downtown Mixed Use. Any demolitions or alterations would have to go through the Board of Architectural Review.
The chamber itself dates back to 1913 and now has more than 675 members in business across the region. They bought the property in 1981 for $128,500, and the 2024 assessment is $885,400. The asking price is listed as negotiable.
In recent years, the chamber has put a focus on the role the defense sector plays. They commissioned a study that in May 2023 estimated the industry has an annual economic impact of $1.2 billion. That same month, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors agreed to spend $58 million to purchase 462 acres around the Rivanna Station military base.
In 2018, the chamber sought real estate expertise in finding a new headquarters in a place that could be seen as the “center of activities” in the region. Their request for proposals wanted double the space in a location with cheaper parking, but the initiative to move didn’t happen on the watch of Elizabeth Cromwell, who served as president from August 2018 to February 2023.
The chamber is currently without a permanent president following the brief tenure of Natalie Masri, who served for seven months. Since January, former Board Chair Rebecca Ivins has been serving as interim president while a search is conducted. Chief Operating Officer Andrea Copeland served as interim president immediately after Cromwell’s departure and continues to run day-to-day operations. Realtor Sasha Tripp became the new chair of the Board.
Hohenberger says the chamber is planning to launch a new search for a chief executive officer and a public announcement will be made when the time comes.
Tomas Rahal, who favored an underpass instead of a bridge, took over the former Spudnuts building in 2017 after the donut shop shuttered in 2016. Photo by Eze Amos.
Both Project Gait-Way and the Belmont Vortex created ways for planners to dream up ideas for the urban landscape around Avon Street. Since 2011, there have been many transformations while the new bridge and street layout awaited construction.
In December 2014, what had previously been used as a hair salon and then a small grocery store became one of the area’s most sought-after restaurants: Lampo Neapolitan Pizzeria. The previous June, the owners of Lampo had used a crane to lower a three-ton oven from Naples into their space at 205 Monticello Rd.
At least one exhibition on potential options was held next door in the space formerly occupied by the Bridge Performing Arts Initiative. The creative center moved to the Downtown Mall last year after Lightning Properties, the real estate umbrella of Lampo and Bar Baleno, bought both properties for $800,000 in April 2022 to allow for expansion.
Lampo reopened after the pandemic in August 2022 while construction of the bridge was underway.
“Finally feels like things are back to normal,” says Lampo co-owner Loren Mendosa. “The bridge was certainly a pain, but now that it’s done we’ve noticed a bit of an uptick.”
In 2016, Charlottesville said goodbye to Spudnuts, a beloved purveyor of potato-flour donuts at 309 Avon St. that had been in business since 1969. Tomas Rahal, a former chef at Mas Tapas, took over the space in 2017 with Quality Pie. During construction of the bridge, Rahal took the city to task for not doing enough to support local businesses in the face of the disruption. He preferred the underpass option.
“The roadway, not a bridge at all, serves as a visual scar across our viewscape, instead of healing the rift between north Downtown and Belmont,” Rahal says. “They have cleaned up most of their mess, [but] the damage to us was deep, persistent, long-lasting.”
Located one block to the north at 403 Avon St., Fox’s Cafe closed during the pandemic, and the building and two adjacent lots were purchased for $1.4 million in February 2023. There are currently no plans filed to redevelop the site except for an application for a building permit for a new alcove. Daddy Mack’s Grub Shack food truck currently operates from the site.
Across the street at 405 Avon St. and 405 Levy Ave., the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority continues to operate its maintenance division on 1.1 acres now owned by the City of Charlottesville. The CRHA adopted a master plan in the summer of 2010 that called for the former auto service station to become a new apartment building with affordable units. That never happened—in part because of opposition from Belmont residents. The nonprofit Community Bikes occupied the site for many years before the CRHA began to use the property.
Earlier this year, several Belmont residents also opposed the notion of the city purchasing the property for a potential homeless shelter, while others welcomed that possibility. In January, City Manager Sam Sanders recommended that $4 million in leftover federal COVID-relief funds be used to buy the land and to allow CRHA to remain as a tenant while determining the property’s potential future. Afton Schneider, the city’s communications director, said there are no plans that can be shared with the public at this time.
There are also no redevelopment plans filed for 310 Avon St., a property under the single ownership of Avon Court LLC, which formerly housed the original location of Better Living and an old lumber supply warehouse. That building was demolished in late 2009, leaving other commercial properties on the site. One of them was the original home of Champion Brewing Company, which opened in the fall of 2012 and closed at the end of June 2023.
The construction of the bridge created new ways to get to 100 and 110 Avon St. just to the south of Lampo. The building at 100 Avon St. changed hands in December 2020 for $4.5 million, and the new owner renovated the existing structure to add several apartments. A site plan for an additional four-story building has been approved, but the units have not yet been built.
On a warm morning in late June, City Manager Sam Sanders presided over the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Belmont Bridge, a $38 million project that for a time served as another chapter in Charlottesville’s resistance to infrastructure for motorized vehicles.
“There are many who didn’t believe that this would actually happen,” Sanders said to a crowd assembled at the top of a new staircase that leads from bridge-level to Water Street. The western side of the bridge features the city’s first protected bike lane and the new bridge is much shorter at 236 linear feet.
None of those features would likely be present if not for pushback from those in the community who felt Charlottesville deserved more than just a standard replacement.
“We tend to get stuck on things and I want to get unstuck on things,” Sanders said.
Now that vehicles are rolling across the bridge and people are able to use sidewalks on both sides, reviews are mixed for the project, which still has remaining items waiting to be completed.
“It’s a vast improvement, but for all the time, angst, and money that went into getting it built, it’s a bit of a let-down,” says Carl Schwarz, a city planning commissioner who was on the Board of Architectural Review when that body approved the bridge design.
The story of the Belmont Bridge is one of what might happen when public expectations are raised much higher than what the constraints of a local government can provide.
Almost 21 years and several city managers before the ribbon was cut, the Charlottesville City Council learned of the need for $1.6 million in repairs to a 440-foot-long bridge built in 1962 that carried Virginia Route 20 across the railroad tracks. This section of the roadway, also known as Avon Street, is considered a primary road by the Virginia Department of Transportation.
The minutes of the September 15, 2003, council meeting indicate the direction the city would eventually take. The mayor at the time was Maurice Cox, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and a vehement opponent of what became known as the John W. Warner Parkway.
“Mr. Cox said the Belmont Bridge is not very friendly and the best solution may not be just to replace what is there,” reads the official record of the meeting. “He asked if there is a margin to make it more attractive and pedestrian friendly.”
Cox’s desire for a replacement did not immediately take hold, and Council held a public hearing in May 2005 for an appropriation of $1.46 million in funds for bridge repairs. Jim Tolbert, Charlottesville’s planning director at the time, said VDOT asked the city to consider a replacement due to quickly deteriorating conditions, but the official plan was still to repair.
A year later, crews installed plywood underneath the bridge deck to prevent concrete chunks from falling on vehicles in the city-owned parking lots below.
In April 2009, Tolbert told Council that VDOT estimated a replacement would cost $9.2 million and construction would not happen until 2014 at the earliest. The now-shuttered architecture and design firm MMM Design was selected to develop construction documents in part because of its work in overseeing the controversial reconstruction of the Downtown Mall that was underway that year.
To pay for the replacement project, the city set aside a portion of funding received each year from VDOT and had $4.4 million reserved by May 2010. Unless the city decided to use more of its own funding, construction of the replacement wouldn’t begin until 2018.
MMM Design formally kicked off the public phase of the project in November 2010 with a presentation in CitySpace, and by this time, the city had saved up $5.3 million. Around the same time, the city had closed the eastern sidewalk to foot traffic due to a deteriorating sidewalk.
The presentation was intended to gather feedback from the community about what it wanted to see in a bridge design. Joe Schinstock, MMM’s project manager, even suggested there might be room for a pocket park on the bridge itself.
Two months later, the city was forced to transfer some of the funding it had saved up for the Belmont Bridge to replace another deteriorating railroad bridge that carried Jefferson Park Avenue Extended over a different set of railroad tracks.
Council voted 3-2 in April 2011 to spend $14,000 on permanent fencing on the Belmont Bridge’s eastern sidewalk, with two councilors asking for repairs to open the walkway to pedestrians as soon as possible. Those repairs were not made and the black fence stood until the eastern span of the bridge was replaced.
Over the course of 2011, MMM Design held many meetings with various stakeholders. The now-defunct Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville wanted an easy way for people from Belmont to access the Downtown Mall and prioritized pedestrian connectivity over bike lanes. The cyclists and walkability activists wanted vehicular activity to be secondary to non-motorized transport.
An initial design shown to Council in September 2011 showed sidewalks on both sides of the bridge, three lanes for vehicular traffic, and bike lanes on each side.
At the same time, VDOT’s cost estimate for the bridge replacement went up again from $9.2 million to $14.5 million due to a variety of inflationary factors. All estimates assumed the city would stay within the footprint of the existing bridge to avoid purchasing additional land. Studying the environmental effects on more rights of way could result in further delay.
Before the design process was over, several Belmont residents approached the Board of Architectural Review in September to critique the process. That included filmmaker Brian Wimer, who launched a contest outside official channels that challenged the very need to build a bridge at all. Wimer described this process as “creative protest.”
“Community members aren’t just waiting for results,” reads a press release from Wimer in late November 2011. “They hope to get the results themselves, even if it means finding a new design team. The solution: Project Gait-Way—an unsanctioned $1,000 design competition for the Belmont Bridge to create ‘an iconic, pedestrian-centric, bike & auto friendly gateway bringing Charlottesville into the next era of world-class cities and communities.’”
Such design contests were not unheard of during this era. In 2006, City Council funded a competition to reimagine two surface parking lots on Water Street. Both remain undeveloped with no plans on the horizon.
Court of public opinion
In January 2012, Wimer asked Council for $2,000 for the contest he was launching—Project Gait-Way—that would prioritize how the bridge improved the experience for humans rather than vehicles. Wimer’s advocacy led to the project being put on hold, and Council agreed to pay Wimer the funds to help cover the cash prize.
“Ultimately, we didn’t get an artful or very imaginative bridge,” says Wimer, who now splits his time between Charlottesville and Costa Rica. “But I think we nudged the process to try harder.”
UVA’s School of Architecture got involved in February 2012, with 29 teams of students entering the Project Gait-Way contest in what became known as the “Belmont Vortex.” In front of a crowd of students assembled in Culbreth Theatre, Wimer suggested the railway tracks would no longer be necessary as the country moved away from coal.
Those tracks are now owned by the Virginia Passenger Railway Authority and are seen as part of a future east-west service between Richmond and Charlottesville.
A design called “Belmont Unabridged” swept the competition. It envisioned no bridge at all in favor of an at-grade railway crossing. One of the team’s faculty advisors was Daniel Bluestone, a former architecture professor at UVA, who urged students to push back on automotive culture.
By this time, Cox had left Charlottesville to work as design director for the National Endowment for the Arts. He suggested to Council that the city apply for a $150,000 grant from a program he helped create called “Our Town.” The funding would pay for a study of how a new connection tied to arts and culture could transform the surrounding area.
The new Belmont Bridge features a staircase that leads from bridge-level to Water Street, as well as the city’s first protected bike lane on the western side of the structure. The replacement is also much shorter at 236 linear feet.
A divided Council rejected the idea in part due to timing and the unlikelihood of either VDOT or CSX Transportation accepting the idea of no bridge. Instead, the idea was floated to spend $150,000 on further planning of the area around the bridge, while MMM continued to work on a new design with input from the contests. That funding would end up being used for a different project known as the Strategic Investment Area. (Despite winning an award from the Congress for New Urbanism in 2018, none of the SIA’s signature ideas would be implemented.)
Mo’ money, mo’ problems
By May 2012, Sean Connaughton, Virginia’s secretary of transportation, had arranged to fully fund the $14.5 million price tag for the bridge alongside funding for the Western Bypass, another controversial road project that would ultimately remain unbuilt. The Commonwealth Transportation Board approved the funding for the Belmont Bridge, but Council remained divided about how to proceed.
By that summer, Siteworks Studios had been hired as a subcontractor who would work on its own set of designs parallel to MMM. In December, the Siteworks team, including architect Jim Rounsevell, unveiled a proposal for Avon Street to go 25′ under the railroad tracks in an underpass rather than a bridge in order to allow the surrounding area to be developed. Siteworks hired a construction firm to produce a cost estimate of $17.3 million—higher than the $14.5 million the city had reserved for a bridge replacement.
In January 2013, the now-defunct Place Design Task Force, which had been created to provide advice to Council on how to proceed with urban infrastructure, recommended the underpass option, though they also acknowledged it would be prone to flooding and may be unwelcoming to pedestrians. In a memo, they also declared what kind of a bridge they wanted.
“Attention to appropriate lighting, pedestrian walkway design, railings, and bike travel lanes will ensure that the bridge scheme serves the community as safely and appropriately as possible,” reads the memo.
In September 2013, a firm hired by the city put the cost estimate for the bridge at just under $15 million and the estimate for the underpass at $27.3 million. That same month, Council directed staff to pursue an “enhanced bridge” but did not eliminate the option of an underpass. Rounsevell launched a crowd-funding campaign to further develop the concept, which he said would build “on the success of the Downtown Mall.”
“We are hoping to also develop a market study of the immediate area similar to what was done for the [High Line] in New York,” reads the campaign’s description. “We suspect that removing a 34-foot high bridge is a superior economic alternative.”
Reviews for the completed $38 million Belmont Bridge project, which still has remaining items waiting to be finished.
Three bridge options developed by MMM Design were shown side-by-side with Rounsevell’s underpass at meetings in the spring of 2014. Finally, on July 21, 2014, Council voted 4-1 to proceed with the “enhanced” option presented by MMM. Council member and architect Kathy Galvin voted against the motion and said instead the city should hire a new firm from scratch.
Three months later, Galvin would get her way when MMM Design went out of business and could not complete their work. By this time, Bob Fenwick had been elected to Council after running a campaign in which he insisted the bridge could be repaired rather than replaced. Fenwick said he was not interested in any of the amenities associated with the enhanced bridge and tried to get Council to follow along.
Tolbert left city government and Charlottesville in February 2015 before finalizing the process to begin the bridge design all over again. That would fall to his successor, Alex Ikefuna. By the time a request for proposals was issued, the bridge’s sufficiency rating as measured by the Federal Highway Administration had dropped to 40.8 in 2015 from 47.6 out of 100 in 2012.
At that time, VDOT’s cost estimate for the bridge remained at $14.5 million but would soon increase to $23 million due to inflation. To fill the gap, Council voted to seek revenue-sharing funds from VDOT that required a dollar-to-dollar match from the city government.
The firm Kimley-Horn was hired for $1.98 million in late 2016 to resume the design work after a long period of negotiations. Its task was to complete construction documents by March 2018, which would include a plan for how to redesign the street network around the bridge. Design specifications included one lane of vehicular traffic in each direction and a 25 mile per hour speed limit.
Meanwhile, the western sidewalk was closed in early 2017 after it, too, had deteriorated. One of the existing southbound lanes was converted for bike and pedestrian use.
When Kimley-Horn took over, project manager Sal Musarra said the process would build off of what had come before but would not seek to build consensus.
To pay for their share, Council began setting aside local money in the capital improvement program, beginning with an allocation of $4.5 million in Fiscal Year 2018. There was another $5 million in FY21, even with the budget uncertainties introduced by the pandemic that year. Another $2.5 million was set aside in FY22. These allocations totaled $12 million in local funds toward the project—almost a third of its projected cost.
By the time Council approved a design in July 2018, the cost estimate had risen to $24.8 million. Council held a final public hearing on spending money on the project in August 2020; the cost estimate had grown to $31.1 million. The amount would rise slightly due to supply-chain issues that increased the cost of materials.
Caton Construction won the award to build the bridge, which contains many of the elements of the enhanced design from MMM. At the ribbon-cutting, Steven Hicks, the city’s public works director, said the final product accomplished many of the city’s goals.
“We created an innovative and architectural design and the bridge has separated pedestrian, vehicle, and bicycle lanes,” said Hicks. “Two 11-foot travel lanes, one in each direction. Seven-foot bike lanes and 10-foot pedestrian lanes. And we preserved the views to the mountains and of the railroad tracks.”
Former Councilor Galvin says she felt the process and design overseen by Kimley-Horn were good and said the work of the Belmont Vortex introduced ideas that would never have been considered otherwise.
“Some of the ideas were just too expensive and not practical from an engineering standpoint,” Galvin says, adding she is glad the project was completed, unlike a new streetscape on West Main Street that Council canceled in 2022 to free up money for the expansion of Buford Middle School.
As this is Charlottesville, the Belmont Bridge and so many others will continue to be debated.
Wimer calls the creative protest from a dozen years ago “future-bending” in that it helped create a “slight improvement” over what he had seen.
“For what it’s worth, I still favor an at-grade solution,” Wimer says. “The ‘no-bridge’ design that won the juried and the public vote.”
Schwarz said the design concept was executed in a poor manner, but he admits the bridge is now safer for pedestrians.
“But is it the gateway to downtown that we should be proud of? Let’s give it a few years and see how it ages.”
A 3D rendering of the latest version of a redevelopment project at 1193 Seminole Trail in Albemarle County. The Hibachi Grill property is within city limits and is slated for a four-story building with a proposed 250 units.
Image via WSG Architecture.
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.
The four lots for sale form part of a triangle of undeveloped land along Fifth Street, a four-lane highway in between I-64 and downtown Charlottesville.
Photo via Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors.
Charlottesville’s new zoning code, which went into effect in February, opens up potential for a much more urban landscape with higher buildings and increased residential density. The updated rules provide a new lens to speculate what might happen with some of the last undeveloped parcels across the city.
Earlier this month, signs were placed at the edge of several wooded plots of land on Fifth Street in Charlottesville just to the north of the Beacon on North residential community.
“This prime piece of real estate offers convenient access to public water and sewer, making it an ideal choice for your dream home or investment project,” reads the listing offered by Sherri White of the Hogan Group.
In all, White represents four lots, with three owned by the same family. The parcels were the property of Ammon and Shirley Brown since at least 1994. Both have since died and the land is now split between six of their surviving children.
Two of the Brown lots measure 0.33 acres and a third is 0.23 acres. Each is listed at $180,000. Carroll Gibson, the owner of the fourth lot, decided to sell at the same time.
“I think their hope for these properties [is for them] to be purchased at the same time,” White says. “This could actually provide the city with a great opportunity to provide more affordable housing.”
The topography of the land illustrates some of the real-world obstacles that perhaps explain why the land is not yet developed. For instance, there is a 25-foot decline from Fifth Street to a relatively flat portion on which structures could be built.
However, whatever land is available to be developed is in the new Residential Mixed Use 5 district which allows unlimited density. The old zoning would have limited the parcel to a certain number of units before the City Council would need to grant a special use permit.
The new rules converted all legislative approvals to technical ones, which now would require a developer to work with the city to develop a way to get in and out of the site.
Another consideration is Lodge Creek, a tributary of Moores Creek. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality considers the waterway impaired for bacterial health, but property owners along its run have added buffers to help prevent sedimentation.
“The zoning doesn’t have anything on small streams,” says James Freas, Deputy City Manager for Operations. “Depending on the specifics of a given site, other state and local laws might apply.”
Elsewhere on Fifth Street, there are other undeveloped parcels which may one day yield more apartments or businesses. One of them is a 5.89-acre property owned by an entity called Renaissance Place between the multifamily Blue Ridge Commons community and the highway.
The City of Charlottesville and the Virginia Department of Transportation are also in the early stages of identifying projects to solve safety issues on Fifth Street. Council agreed to lower the speed limit on the road to 40 miles per hour in 2021 after a series of well-publicized fatal crashes.
Albemarle County has spent the last two and a half years updating its Comprehensive Plan, a document required by state law for each locality to guide “adjusted and harmonious growth of the territory.”
For four and a half decades, Albemarle has used that plan to designate the vast majority of land in the county to be rural areas where intense development is discouraged and generally not allowed. As of the last plan update in 2015, growth is to be concentrated in the urban ring, U.S. 29 North, and Crozet. That’s about five percent of the county’s 726 square miles.
The current update goes by the name AC44 and had been expected to be completed by this fall. Two of four phases have been completed so far with input from hundreds of county residents, the Planning Commission, and elected officials.
“We processed this feedback and took the time to develop a structure to improve the clarity of the resulting document,” says Abbey Stumpf, the county’s manager of communications and public engagement.
This now results in a timeline that will see a public hearing and approval next year after another round of community engagement in the fall. But first, the PC was asked on July 9 whether they support what staff calls “refinements” to the process. Among these are a transition away from chapters for “plan elements” as well as fewer goals and objectives.
The number and clarity of objectives concern the Piedmont Environmental Council, an advocacy group that has worked to keep growth area boundaries intact since they were formed.
“It is not clear how the previously prepared draft goals will be revised into a single goal and whether or not some goals have been eliminated and new ones proposed,” says Rob McGinnis, Senior Land Use Field Representative for PEC.
McGinnis says PEC is also concerned that there has been no direct engagement with the public over the summer while the staff has been working on a draft plan.
The head of a pro-business group with much experience watching planning in Albemarle said he welcomes the new timeline. Neil Williamson of the Free Enterprise Forum says he hopes the refinements will lead to a more focused document with less room for interpretation of what the county wants the future to be.
“In the past, the comp plan was an amalgamation of all public comment received rather than a statement of direction from the elected body,” Williamson says. “We may not agree with all of the goals, objectives, and actions planned, but [we do] applaud making the hard choices that show direction rather than making everyone happy and saying nothing.”
Localities are not required to make major changes in their Comprehensive Plan. After some years of review, Fluvanna County has opted to re-adopt their 2015 plan with a few modifications. Greene County took a similar approach whereas Nelson County hired the Berkley Group to write a new document.
However, Albemarle has experienced much more change than those localities. Since 1980, the county’s population has more than doubled from 55,783 to an estimated 116,148 in 2023 as calculated by the Weldon Cooper Center at UVA.
Work on Albemarle County’s Comprehensive Plan update had been expected to wrap up this year, but staff has taken extra time to finalize plan goals. Community input will begin in the fall with possible adoption by next spring or summer.
The zoning map adopted by Council in December 2023 sets up a future with more housing, but the plaintiffs in the case (three of whom are on Rugby Road or Rugby Avenue) argue the city should have done more study on the impacts of the additional density.
Image via City of Charlottesville.
Will opponents of Charlottesville’s new zoning code get a court trial to argue against recent rules?
That answer will not be known for at least several months following a 90-minute hearing last week on a motion from the city for Circuit Court Judge Worrell to dismiss the case.
Charlottesville City Council adopted a Development Code last December that allows more homes to be built on all properties within city limits. At the lowest level, parcels that used to be restricted to one unit can now have at least three.
On January 16, a group of residents filed a suit arguing their property values would be harmed by the additional density and alleging that the city did not perform a rigorous study of its effects on transportation infrastructure as required by Virginia law.
“The city failed to do what the General Assembly told them to do,” said Michael Derdeyn, a Flora Pettit attorney hired by the group, at the hearing. “The process was flawed.”
Derdeyn says a court trial would allow evidence to be submitted to prove the city did not send enough information to the Virginia Department of Transportation on the impacts that additional density might have.
The city responded that the opponents sought to use the courts to achieve what they could not do through the legislative process.
“The new zoning ordinance (NZO) identified a significant problem, which was a lack of affordable housing,” said Greg Haley of the law firm representing the city, Gentry Locke.
Haley said the new zoning was adopted as part of the Cville Plans Together process, which includes Council’s adoption of an affordable housing plan in March 2021 as well as a new Comprehensive Plan in November 2021. He said the zoning puts into practice values the council sought to adopt.
“It allows multifamily units in all zoning districts,” Haley said.
A major priority for Council was to distribute housing production across the city, but the study showed that the actual process would be “inherently incremental” and not rapid, Haley said. An inclusionary zoning analysis in the summer of 2023 estimated that 1,300 new units could be built over three years.
“You have conclusions from staff that the infrastructure is sufficient,” Haley said.
A trial would not be warranted because the legislative body offered multiple forums for disagreements to be aired.
Derdeyn said the city’s rate of change analysis only looked at residential neighborhoods and did not study the potential impact on existing mixed-use corridors, where residential density is now unlimited with no maximum cap.
“They didn’t analyze the other parcels,” Derdeyn said. “They looked at part of the puzzle. They didn’t even look at the whole city.”
This is the second time Worrell has presided over a hearing involving these same issues. In August 2022, he dismissed three of four counts in a previous suit to overturn the Comprehensive Plan. At the time, he ruled the plaintiffs could not bring the case forward because they could not demonstrate any harm had been done to them through adoption of the plan.
Derdeyn said that harm is now demonstrated and the case should go to trial.
“Your honor said we had to wait until the zoning,” Derdeyn said. “The ordinance passed and now we are here.”
After a 90-minute hearing, Worrell made no decision and invited both attorneys to submit closing arguments. He plans to follow up with a written opinion.
“Suffice it to say, it’s an interesting argument,” Judge Worrell said.
