Tag: Rose Hill

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In brief: No pipeline, name game, and more

Activists in Buckingham have been fighting the pipeline since 2014. On Sunday, they won. PC: Friends of Buckingham

Pipeline defeated

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is history. In a surprise announcement on Sunday afternoon, Dominion Power called off the 600-mile natural gas pipeline that would have run from West Virginia to North Carolina. “VICTORY!” declared the website of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The news is a major win for a wide variety of environmental advocacy groups and grassroots activists, who have been fighting the pipeline on all fronts since the project was started in 2014. The pipeline would have required a 50-yard-wide clear-cut path through protected Appalachian forest, and also disrupted a historically black community in rural Buckingham County.

Dominion won a Supreme Court case earlier this month, but that wasn’t enough to outweigh the “increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States,” says the energy giant’s press release.

Litigation from the Southern Environmental Law Center dragged the pipeline’s construction to a halt. Gas was supposed to be flowing by 2019, but less than 6 percent of the pipe ever made it in the ground.

The ACP had the backing of the Trump administration, and U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette blamed the “obstructionist environmental lobby” for the pipeline’s demise.

“I felt like it was the best day of my life,” says Ella Rose, a Friends of Buckingham member, in a celebratory email. “I feel that all the hard work that all of us have done was finally for good. I feel like I have my life back. I can now sleep better without the worries that threatened my life for so long.”

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Quote of the week

“It is past time. As the capital city of Virginia, we have needed to turn this page for decades. And today, we will.”

—Richmond mayor Levar Stoney on the city’s removal of its Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury statues

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In brief

Loan-ly at the top

On Monday, the government released a list of companies that accepted loans through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, designed to keep workers employed during COVID’s economic slowdown. A variety of Charlottesville businesses accepted loans of $2-5 million, including Red Light Management, St. Anne’s-Belfield, and Tiger Fuel.

Renaming re-do

An advisory committee recommended last week that recently merged Murray High and Community Charter schools be renamed Rose Hill Community School, but this suggestion immediately raised eyebrows: Rose Hill was the name of a plantation that later became a neighborhood. The committee will reconvene to discuss options for a new moniker.     

City hangs back

Charlottesville is one of a handful of localities that have pushed back against Governor Ralph Northam’s order to move to Phase 3 of reopening. While some of the state has moved forward,  City Manager Tarron Richardson has decided to keep the city government’s facilities operating in accordance with Phase 2 requirements and restrictions. As stated on its website, this decision was made in order to “ensure the health and safety of staff and the public.”

Soldier shut in

Since at least the beginning of July, the gates of UVA’s Confederate cemetery, where a statue of a Confederate soldier stands, have been barricaded, reports the Cavalier Daily. A university spokesman says the school locked the cemetery because protesters elsewhere in the state have been injured by falling statues. Or maybe, as UVA professor Jalane Schmidt suggested on Twitter, “they’re tryna keep the dead from escaping.” 

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Get out of the zone: Outdated zoning in Rose Hill leaves some lots vacant

A property at 902 Forest St. in Rose Hill (above) was put up for auction in 2003, and eventually demolished. It’s now one of 18 vacant lots in the neighborhood. PC: Staff Photo

Back in 2013, Julie (who asked that we not use her last name) bought a house in Rose Hill, a small, historically African American neighborhood roughly bordered by Preston Avenue, Madison Avenue, and Harris Street. The house had gone into foreclosure during the housing market crash, and had been neglected for a while. 

After determining that bringing the house up to code would be too expensive, Julie considered demolishing it and turning it into a small brewery. But the property was zoned B-3, a type of intensive commercial zoning that would require her to provide more parking than seemed feasible for the mostly residential neighborhood, along with other requirements like making retail sales and staying open till 1am.

While a majority of Rose Hill is zoned for single-family residences, and parcels along Preston Avenue are zoned for mixed-use, others are still zoned B-3 for major commercial uses—what planning commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates calls “our worst zoning.”

Business zoning “is the least efficient…and least useful for the city,” says Solla-Yates. “It’s been thought for a long time that mixed-use is the better way to do cities. If you have housing above and businesses below, that’s more pedestrian-friendly, welcoming, [and] prettier. And it gives you housing in areas where you need housing.”

That was the intention of another owner in the neighborhood, Julie says, who originally submitted a site plan for an office space below, and residential above. “But his site was not zoned for that,” she says, “so he went back to [Neighborhood Development Services] with an office space.”

Julie ultimately decided to submit a site plan for a small warehouse, but after learning from a neighbor that the site planning process could take months to complete, she called it quits.

Lately, she’s noticed more and more houses like hers being demolished in Rose Hill—“and the lot just sits there.” There are currently 18 vacant lots in the neighborhood, six of which are zoned B3. 

“I’ve attended a couple of [site plan reviews],” she says, “and it just seems like they don’t go forward.”

Some projects run into issues with sewer and property lines, Julie says, but others, like hers, have faced restrictions with zoning. 

Since the ’90s, the city has gotten rid of “almost all of its B zoning,” Solla-Yates says. He guesses that it kept B zoning in Rose Hill because “it was small.”  

He adds that the city “hasn’t given a lot of love and attention to Rose Hill.” Like 10th and Page and Fifeville, two other historically African American neighborhoods, “there’s some pretty serious social justice issues with [Rose Hill] not getting infrastructure and services at the same level as the rest of the city for decades,” Solla-Yates says. “Which is also part of why we’re a little bit slow to think about [its zoning] seriously.” 

The city’s upcoming zoning overhaul will get rid of business zoning, as well as other out-of-date zoning practices, Solla-Yates says, and will have an “integrated look at zoning and housing.” While consultants are still in the process of reviewing the zoning, he predicts that business zoning will be replaced with mixed-use.

“Business-only zoning doesn’t have a future in Charlottesville,” Solla-Yates says. “We are not fine-tuning the existing zoning. We are replacing the zoning. We want something better, and we’ve waited long enough.” 

Read Brodhead, a zoning administrator with Neighborhood Development Services, agrees that mixed-use zoning is generally more practical, but doesn’t think the city should get rid of business zoning entirely, as “there’s traditionally been a lot of commercial uses of it.” He points out, for example, that MarieBette Café & Bakery, on Rose Hill Drive, is zoned B-3, and that the four vacant parcels across the street from it (also zoned B-3) could also be used for a business “that’s significant for the neighborhood.”

But until any type of new zoning is approved, Julie remains concerned about the future of Rose Hill. Every week, she receives phone calls and postcards from developers wanting to buy her property, and is ultimately concerned that a large developer will come in and buy up all of the vacant lots and create a large commercial business, since a developer would have “the time and resources to go through the whole approval process.”

“That would just be out of scale with the neighborhood,” she says. 

And as for the other property owners with deteriorating houses or vacant lots, “they are sitting there and wondering what other people are going to do,” she says. 

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Mapping inequality: Innovative project will track housing discrimination

This 1948 deed for a house in North Downtown restricts ownership by “persons of the negro race,” but does not prohibit having black servants on the property. Courtesy Jordy Yager

By Jonathan Haynes

“If you look at Charlottesville in-depth, you see racial disparities at every juncture,” says local freelance journalist and C-VILLE contributor Jordy Yager. “Health care disparities, disparities at police encounters, employment.” For his latest project, he will trace inequality in the Charlottesville area. “I started thinking about how people get to where they are, and dug into the history of Charlottesville,” he says.

Yager has received a $50,000 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation to construct a digital map of housing discrimination in the Charlottesville area, which he believes will illustrate the link between past institutional policy and modern-day inequities.

To complete the project, he has teamed up with local court clerks, private researchers, employees at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and professors at UVA, who have enlisted their students to analyze documents at Charlottesville courthouses.

Andrew Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at UVA whose students are assisting with Yager’s research, says segregation was written into the housing market through covenants that prohibited sales to blacks. In some cases, covenants also kept Jewish buyers from buying properties.

“In Charlottesville, racial covenants were initiated by developers and neighborhood organizations seeking to preserve the racial homogeneity of the city,” says Kahrl. “They were also pervasive across the United States.”

Yager has found that homes in Rose Hill, Belmont, Fry’s Spring, and Locust Grove had deeds with racial covenants. “This is a problem because homeownership has been the number one tool to gain wealth in America,” he says.

In the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration began to provide subsidized loans for mortgages, but only to Americans buying homes in neighborhoods that barred sales to African Americans—a process known as redlining.

These loans enabled white, middle-class Americans to make down payments on houses that would surge in value over the next few decades and lead to massive intergenerational transfers of wealth. Meanwhile, black Americans were relegated to neighborhoods with poor infrastructure, further entrenching them in poverty.

“When you purchase a home, you need certain things for property value to appreciate,” Yager says, listing indoor plumbing, water pipes, roads, and transmission lines as examples. “All these required requests to the city. White neighborhoods got them, black neighborhoods did not.”

The final project will be a 10’x10′ interactive display that will allow visitors to select a time period and compare racial demographics in property records to contemporaneous income levels and health outcomes in the area. It will be installed in a permanent exhibit in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.

Yager expects to complete the project near the end of next year.