Author: will-goldsmith

This design study, a view from the Belmont Bridge, shows what a new nine-storey “green” luxury condo building at 201 Avon St. might look like—if it can win City approval.

A nine-storey luxury condo project at 201 Avon St., just south of the Downtown Mall, was deferred by the City Planning Commission at their September 13 meeting despite a “green” design and staff recommendation for approval.
    The development appeared before the Planning Commission not because of the nine storeys—zoning allows for that—but because developers want to increase density, to 116 residential units from the 50 units the code allows without special permit.
    Architect Randolph Croxton, whose firm is based in New York City, presented plans for a “mixed-use” structure that would wrap around the Beck-Cohen building and include a spa-slash-health club. He highlighted the “green” components to the structure, which would include sky gardens to filter storm water and energy efficient materials and design.
    Additionally, he talked of the improvements to the current site. “We are really out there in the frontier,” said Croxton of the location. “This is a brown field. This site has to be cleaned up. There’s a negative here that’s removed.” Croxton said that without the increased density, the developer, Washington D.C.-based Ideal Ventures, couldn’t afford to build.
“For a variety of reasons, this is an important project to support,” said Commissioner Bill Lucy, who liked the location and much of the design.
    Several commissioners, while impressed by the environmental aspects, attacked the project’s lack of “affordable” housing. But their decision hinged on fears that not enough of the development is “mixed-use.” The commissioners found the project’s designation of what was commercial and what was residential misleading, determining it fell far short of providing 25 percent of square footage to commercial use.
    “This sets a terrible example in terms of mixed-use,” said Barton. “I’m looking at Walker Square and I’m thinking it was a horrible mistake.” Many planning commissioners are still upset about Walker Square, an apartment-turned-condo development between Cherry Avenue and Main Street, which won approval as mixed-use, but instead provided only a private gym restricted to residents.
    Croxton tried to reassure the commission that he wasn’t trying to fool them. “If we need to do less residential, we’ll do it.”
    The project will be back before the commission at their October 10 meeting.

The City Planning Commission found them-selves spokesmen for the trees of Charlottesville at their September 13 meeting. First they expressed anger at a developer, David Turner, who cut down a 150-year-old beech tree he was supposed to preserve at 3 University Ave. “In my mind, this is an illegal act,” said Commissioner Craig Barton. Then the commission deferred a Habitat for Humanity project so that Habitat could alter their site plan in the interest of preserving several poplars on the property.
    Those actions reminded C-VILLE of another tree advocate: The Lorax. So with apologies to Theodore Geisel, we’ve chosen to tell the tale in Seuss-ian fashion.

We, the Commission, we speak for the trees.
We’re tired and sick of developer’s disease
That causes the loss of too many a trunk
Of great big old beeches that fall, go kerplunk
When you cut to make way for parking garages.
Don’t bring us your site plan in dark camouflages
To disguise your designs on our harmless old poplars.
Please come back again, don’t make us go “Stop-lars,”
And prevent you from building affordable housing.
Just move back those units, don’t give us no grousing.
Keep canopies stretching ’cross Hanover Street
Providing shady cool spots for teenagers to meet
And old folks to greet.

We’re mad at that guy
Who promised to save (in the end just a lie)
A sacred old tree at University Ave
One hundred fifty years that Beech we
had had.
But no more! Alas! He cut it in haste.
For now, his construction is halted in waste.
Board of Zoning Appeals for now
must decide
If developer appeal is approved or denied.
Legal action we’d take if we knew that
we could
Though no court in this land that tree can make good.

Lost forever it is—but in the future no more!
Good hardwoods will stay, not turn
into floors.
We know that the City of C’ville will grow,
But don’t cut down that tree if it must not be so.

City Planning Commissioners are sad, much like this Lorax, over the disappearance of historic city trees.

The Charlottesville Planning Commission might not have liked everything about the upcoming South Lawn Project as presented at the September 13 meeting, but they had no power to do anything but voice complaints, and some praise, to UVA officials.
    The Planning Commission used their only official opportunity to examine the project to level criticism large and small. The “three-party agreement” among City, County and University allows the City to review, but not alter, UVA’s plans.
    “At a moment in which we as a city are asking developers to think creatively about mixing uses in buildings,” said Commissioner Craig Barton, also a UVA architecture professor, “I’m disappointed this is a monoculture in some ways… It misses an opportunity to essentially take on the challenges the University has, which is to marry tradition and innovation and provide a model for development.” Barton, like many commissioners, also complained that the pedestrian network didn’t link adequately.
    The South Lawn Project takes a 350-car parking lot and turns it into a 110,000 square foot building to address what Dean of Arts and Sciences Ed Ayers calls a 300,000 square foot deficit of office and classroom space at UVA. To connect to the main campus, UVA will construct a bridge across Jefferson Park Avenue (JPA), covered with a second “Lawn” that will stretch from New Cabell Hall to the new structure.
    Commission Chair Karen Firehock requested that the design make sure to minimize the “tunnel feeling” of the JPA overpass. And commissioners asked that UVA help complete the JPA sidewalk from Emmet Street up to the project’s western edge. The cost of retaining walls needed to put in a sidewalk make the price too exorbitant for UVA to bear alone, says David Neuman, architect for the University. (UVA is, however, in the midst of a $3 billion capital campaign and has already raised $1 billion.)
    Other City officials, notably Mayor David Brown, picked up on a public comment that asked UVA to increase bridge height to 19′ in case Charlottesville ever gets a streetcar. Current plans have the bridge at the regulation height of 17’6".
    The project earned praise from some commissioners, particularly for UVA’s willingness to work with the Jefferson Park Avenue neighborhood, as well as for its goal to win Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for the building, ensuring it is energy efficient and otherwise “green.”
    City Councilor Kendra Hamilton lauded the inclusion of a monument to the Catherine “Kitty” Foster family home site and nearby burial ground, which will be the first tribute solely to African Americans on UVA’s campus. Kitty Foster was a free black woman who purchased the land in 1833, her home part of the 19th century community called “Canada.”
    According to Neuman, this phase of the South Lawn Project is on budget and ahead of schedule. Plans call for the start of construction early next year, with the hopes of completion by fall 2010.

Why aren’t most of us getting richer? Darden Professor Peter Rodriquez says globalization makes for big profits for the few in finance while slimming the demand for blue-collar workers.

Our country’s workers are becoming more valuable in their hours, with productivity rising 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005. All well and good. But, breaking the predominant trend of the last century, wages are declining—since 2003, median hourly wages have declined 2 percent, after accounting for inflation. That’s not so good.
    To help make sense of this, we turned to Peter Rodriguez, a professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business, who studies international trade.
    “Like a lot of economists, I’m surprised too,” says Rodriguez. “Productivity gains frequently go ahead of wage increases, and so we’ve been expecting those gains to show up somewhere in the statistics of wages and salaries for a while, but they really haven’t. They’ve been late.” Here’s more of what he had to say.

C-VILLE: What’s behind this growing wage and income inequality?
Peter Rodriguez: The biggest thing you see going on is globalization, and I buy that argument. The migration of jobs to China and India and immigration into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America are really the same phenomenon in a way. Globalization is about connecting jobs and people, and either you take the jobs to the people or the people come to the jobs.
    Both of those trends have had the effect of limiting wage gains, particularly in the bottom half of the income distribution. This trend has really hollowed out the core of what we used to consider premium blue-collar jobs. I don’t expect those to be promoted with any economic policy and I don’t expect those to come back.

Are corporate profits coming at the expense of workers?
Certainly upper management could share more, on average. I wouldn’t put them all in the same basket. Some are really awful at bringing along all of their workforce, some of them are quite good. But they’re not creating the types of jobs and they’re not being compelled to raise the wages in the way they have in the past.

Yet we’ve seen dramatic pay increases or earners in the 99th percentile over the past 40 years.
The argument is that we’ve seen an evolution in markets and technology that has allowed a small number of people to do a great job of serving a much larger number. So as you’ve seen these middle classes explode everywhere in the world and everything can be digitized and zapped here or there, a few people—the great stars of the moment—can capture that.
    In industry it’s true too that that scale has just gone incredibly high. If you think about a Goldman Sachs, they can rally enough capital to leverage any event in the world, and it’s a relatively small club of people who do that. They can have these enormous gains that were unassailable before. It is kind of strange. I think their average associate pay is $500,000.

People get mad about Goldman Sachs but not about Michael Jordan.
That’s true, but they’re not all that different. The markets, while not perfectly competitive, are at least as competitive as 1966. We’ve garnered a lot more tools that make it possible. It’s just like a physical example of a lever—the levers have gotten much larger. Legislation hasn’t held any of it in check, I guess is the other part of it.

UVA has recently been piling up rankings and recognitions in magazines like U.S. News and World Report (24th nationally) and Newsweek (one of 25 “New Ivies”). Now Black Enterprise gets in on the game with its September issue, ranking the University of Virginia 35th in their “50 Top Colleges for African Americans.”
In that listing, UVA is the No. 4 public university that is not historically black, behind Georgia State, Florida State and University of North Carolina. Even more impressive, UVA has far-and-away the highest African American graduation rate (87 percent) of any public school on the list. Yet for a university trying to compete against top private schools, UVA was bested in the rankings by many would-be private competitors, including Stanford, Duke and Cornell.
Where did UVA fail to measure up? Particularly low is the “social score,” which reflects a survey of students and educators about the social environment at a school—only Dartmouth and Northwestern scored worse than UVA. And while the percentage of the student body that is black—8.4 percent—is comparable to other top academic schools, it lags behind the national population percentage of 13 and the state percentage of 20.
The interim Dean of African-American Affairs, Maurice Apprey, says that, while the rankings are a testament to the work of many people at the University, “it also tells us there is more to be done, and we can’t afford to be complacent.”
“It raises some very interesting dilemmas for us,” says Apprey. “For example, how do you increase the number of entering disadvantaged students and still be able to increase these successful rankings?”
Apprey cites support structures—mentoring programs, cultural programs, and a peer advising system that garners national recognitions—as the reason for the high graduation rates.
As for the social score, Apprey is not surprised. “We can’t have these [racial] incidents and not have them reflected in scores,” says Apprey, referring to last year’s racist graffiti and reports of epithets shouted from cars. “It will take generations to have a conflict-free environment. Besides, I’m not certain you can have a conflict-free environment. In other words, it’s not possible to avoid conflict, but you have to ensure there are mechanisms for dealing with conflict so that it does not become malignant.”

In a drastic move to confront speeding, Charlottesville City Council has considered making a uniform 25 mph speed limit throughout the city, an area covering 10.4 miles. At their September 5 meeting, Council heard from a traffic consultant, Bill Wuensch, who reviewed how speed limits are set and strategies to enforce those speeds.
Wuensch first reviewed communities in Colorado and Oregon that considered—but ultimately didn’t institute—a uniform 25 mph speed limit. He then noted that it is more dangerous when motorists travel at varying speeds, as opposed to higher speeds, and that when collector and arterial roads become clogged, drivers start taking neighborhood cut-throughs.
What is to be done about speeding? Education tops the list, the Council was told, in the form of a public service campaign (a la water conservation campaigns during droughts), to let people know why speeding is bad. The consultant also brought up the possibility of raising speed limits on certain streets where speeding is constant, and that increasing fines can also work.
For the most part, Council liked the education idea. “The thing that made a difference for me was getting caught by an officer who just said to me, ‘Ma’am, if you don’t slow down, somebody is going to get hurt,’” said Councilor Kendra Hamilton. “What helped me was having somebody just make me think about what I was doing.”
Police Chief Tim Longo warned that he didn’t want to set up false expectations for citizens, and that with his current staff, he couldn’t enforce a citywide 25 mph speed limit. He said that he would be interested in increased fines. “If there is a way to take a portion of those moneys to fund additional enforcement officers,” said Longo, “we’d be happy to accept those responsibilities.”
Councilor Kevin Lynch, however, had hard words for the report. “What I hear coming back from staff is a great excuse for doing nothing,” said Lynch. “We ought to extend to the streets in the south side of the city, and elsewhere, the same consideration we already extend to the north side of the city,” where speed limits are predominately 25 mph.
Hamilton responded that policy should be driven by data, prompting the council to ask for more numbers on neighborhood roads such as Old Lynchburg.

The developers of Hollymead Town Center, otherwise known as the Target shopping center on Route 29, have failed to deliver a promised connector road, and the Albemarle County Planning Commission showed no mercy at their September 5 meeting, unanimously denying a developers’ request for a two-year extension.
In order to curry favor with planning officials, development projects applying for rezoning or special permits usually make “proffers”—pledges of cash, road construction, affordable housing or other such sweeteners to entice local governments to approve the project. Part of the trick is that proffers must be voluntary—legally, a planning commission can’t come out and demand that developers offer a certain concession.
To win Hollymead approval, developer Wendell Wood included proffers to build part of a road, now called “Meeting Street,” as well as other road segments that would provide a more extensive grid for future residential and commercial development around the shopping center. But three years and one new owner later, the Meeting Street portion, as well as part of Town Center Drive, have not been built, despite summer deadlines.
What power do governments have when developers don’t fulfill these proffers? The County last month began denying occupancy permits for new Hollymead businesses (which does not affect those already open, like Target and Harris Teeter) because of the Town Center Drive segment, though that moratorium will cease as soon as the road is bonded. In the case of Meeting Street, the County could decide not to renew the bond, and either force the road to be built or “call the bond,” taking money from Wood to build the road themselves.
At the meeting, local attorney Steven Blaine asked for two more years on behalf of Hollymead Town Center LLC, which is comprised of the Target Corporation and a Florida-based realty group. Blaine argued that his clients, who bought the property from Wood, have little control over the road’s construction, and have given Wood $400,000 for their portion of Meeting Street. Because Wood owns the land, Blaine says they can’t build the road without a drawn-out court battle.
“We are being penalized for a remedy that, as a practical matter, we cannot bring about,” said Blaine. “I think we’re being held to a standard that is not just.”
Commissioners took issue with Blaine’s characterizations.
“We did not decide to build those businesses without knowing about that road,” said Chairwoman Marcia Joseph. “You know what the requirement was.”
“I’m not trying to get out of it,” says Wood, who didn’t attend the meeting. “I have to build it, I intend to build it. If there’s a discrepancy, you know who wins that one—[the County has] my money” says Wood, referring to the bond. If the County threatened to call the bond, Wood says he’ll build the road.
“One of the problems is that the County has been one of the biggest holdups in approving the road plans, and the County has changed the design of the road about three times,” he says. The proposed road has changed from the two-lane connector Wood originally proffered to a four-lane road with a median strip.
Mark Graham, director of community development, says that the real hold-up is getting Wood to decide to go ahead and build the road.
The two-lane road originally proffered lacks only blacktop and a curb, says Wood—but he insists that it makes no sense to complete it now.
“The road today goes nowhere,” he points out. “The buildings it’s going to serve are not there.” Those buildings include 380 town homes he’s currently constructing. If he completed the road now, Wood says, the curb would only be cracked later by supply trucks for the town homes.
The Board of Supervisors will make the final determination on extending the deadline at their October 11 meeting.

The City planning commission, along with the city public, will get the chance to offer concerns and recommendations about plans for UVA’s much-anticipated South Lawn Project at their September 13 meeting. While the City staff report is generally positive, it raises issues of sidewalks on and access from Jefferson Park Avenue (JPA).
The South Lawn project, which architects started drawing in 2004, will add an 110,000 square foot College of Arts and Sciences building that contains classrooms, offices, a café and a 250-seat lecture hall. UVA will construct a bridge across JPA, and a second Lawn will stretch from New Cabell Hall to the planned Arts and Science Building.
Per order of the so-called three party agreement between Charlottesville, Albemarle and the University, UVA “voluntarily” submits preliminary project plans to the City and the County for comment and review. However, the City and County play only an advisory role—in most instances, they cannot force changes to a design.
Planning Commissioner Cheri Lewis, who at press time didn’t wish to comment on the South Lawn plans, thinks UVA had a sound process in producing the design. “They went and got support from the neighborhood, they went and got support from their alumni, and now they’re coming to us,” says Lewis. “So we’re not seeing it at the fresh new end of it. There strategy was a good one, probably.”
In the City staff report to the commissioners, they recommend that the plans include a sidewalk on the north side of JPA, and also include access to Old Cabell Hall and the Lawn from that street. Per request from the Jefferson Park Avenue Neighborhood Association, the plans call for Valley Road to be cul-de-saced in order to prevent bothersome through traffic. The neighborhood association, which currently looks onto a parking lot where the new building is planned, included a letter of support for “all the major issues involved with the project” in the staff report.
Somewhat mimicking the Thomas Jefferson-designed Lawn, the South Lawn Project has generated controversy among the architectural community, raising questions of what being “Jeffersonian” means when applied to buildings. Critics, most notably in a New York Times Magazine piece, found earlier South Lawn designs to be too imitative, rather than truly innovative.

The University of Virginia Foundation, which manages University financial and real estate holdings, would like to double the size of the Fontaine Research Park. At the most recent Planning and Coordination Council meeting between City, County and UVA officials, Leonard Sandridge discussed University of Virginia Foundation plans to seek rezoning to add 500,000 square feet of construction to the seven-building office park, which is located on Fontaine Avenue just southwest of Charlottesville.
    An eighth building, the Advanced Research and Technology Building, is already under construction. When completed, it will increase current Fontaine space to 495,000 from 410,000 square feet. The Foundation, whose vast real estate holdings include the UVA Research Park and the Boar’s Head Inn, already have a request in to the County to add 30,000 square feet as an underground annex to the new building.
    And that’s not all: Dennis Rooker, chairman of the County Board of Supervisors, says that the nearby Granger property developers (a group that includes Coran Capshaw), plan to file for zoning changes to allow 540,000 square feet of office space, 20,000 square feet of retail, and 440 residential housing units. The Granger property is located off Sunset Avenue, just west of Fry’s Spring.
    All together, current construction and future plans represent nearly 1.2 million square feet of commercial/retail space, and an additional 440 homes for the Albemarle County wedge between Fontaine, Route 29 and I-64.
    It would also mean a huge influx of cars. With this in mind, Rooker would like to see a detailed transportation study before approving any changes to the current comprehensive plan.
    “I want to make sure that whatever is planned for both those properties be examined at the same time,” says Rooker. “I think we need to understand the impacts on infrastructure and the cumulative impacts on everything that might be planned right now.”
    UVA has pledged to help with the local road situation. Sandridge said that “the University [is] supportive of the recommendations that included a new road that would lie adjacent to, and just east of, the [research] park, in the general vicinity of Stribling Avenue,” according to a statement from UVA spokesman Jeff Hanna.