In 1987, 73 year old Roy Jackson Baltimore introduced himself to me. Explained that I was living in his uncle John Baltimore’s house. The explaining started then and continued for decades.
Roy had much to share. He loved his neighborhood. (1516 E Market visible in the background)
Parks and Recreation is doing a master plan. Consider participating..
Parks and Recreation Dept <ParkandRec@charlottesville.gov>
Dear Charlottesville Parks & Recreation Stakeholder,
This is a reminder email to respond to the invite below for the Parks & Recreation Master Plan Focus Group Meetings. If you have already responded, please ignore. Thank you.
Planning is underway to develop a Comprehensive Parks and Recreation Master Plan for the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department. This document will guide future planning, policy, and development of Charlottesville Parks and Recreation programs and facilities for many years. The goal of the Parks and Recreation Comprehensive Master Plan is to provide a concise and user-friendly roadmap that will incorporate the community’s values to assist the City with decision-making regarding key issues.
We know you are passionate about parks and recreation and we are respectfully requesting your valuable input at an upcoming Focus Group Meeting so that the collective park and recreation vision of the community in Charlottesville can be developed.
The City of Charlottesville has contracted with PROS Consulting to conduct and develop this study and they will be in town the week of February 5th to conduct focus group meetings in-person. Our consultant, Mike Svetz, is copied on this email to assist with scheduling. We are very excited to have PROS on board as they did a fantastic job with our 2005 Master Plan. Once we hear back from the majority of you all, Mike will email to you a calendar invite for the meeting. The focus groups will be conducted IN-PERSON and will last approximately 50 minutes.
Monday February 5th:
10-10:50am, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
11-11:50am, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
1-1:50pm, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
2-2:50pm, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
6-6:50pm, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
Wednesday February 7th:
9-9:50am, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
10-10:50am, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
11-11:50am, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
1-1:50pm, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
2-2:50pm, Parks & Recreation Admin Office, 501 East Main Street
If you are unable to attend a focus group meeting, we hope you will provide feedback on Charlottesville Parks and Recreation on the project website Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Master Plan | EngagePros (mysocialpinpoint.com).
Thank you for your interest in Charlottesville Parks and Recreation and we look forward to hearing from you one way or the other by Monday January 22nd.
Once we receive responses from most people, we will send out meeting invites to confirm your date and time no later than Wednesday January 24th.
We are looking forward to hearing back from you all.
Rivanna River
septage hauler
Tomorrow night, City Council is expected to officially refer the new “Development Code” to the City Council.
Local journalist Sean Tubbs is interested in receiving community responses to a line in the staff report which accompanies the Development Code, it reads:
“There has been extensive community engagement over the entire time period of the Cville Plans Together process as well as specifically in relation to the Zoning Ordinance,”
Please let Mr. Tubbs know what you think.
Since the city and consultants first introduced the Future Land Use Map in 2021, right up until the most recent pop-ups held by consultants and NDS on the Draft Zoning Ordinance (DZO), residents have asked for visualizations of what actual Charlottesville streetscapes could look like under the new regulations. Neither the city nor its consultants have obliged. We believe that while visualizations do not function as arguments for or against the DZO, they are an indispensable tool for residents trying to form an opinion on various aspects of the proposal. We have therefore prepared several simulated visualization of specific blocks in Charlottesville — both to provide the tools that residents asked for and didn’t get and to show that there was no difficulty involved in preparing visualizations that could have reasonably prevented a competent consultant or NDS department from providing them. You can find the videos below. We anticipate the we will add more over time. If you have an area for which you’d like to see a visualization, please reach out to us via email. Please bear in mind that the purpose of the videos is to help give viewers a concrete sense of height, massing and coverage. These are not architectural renderings or surveys and are necessarily approximate. We do not suggest that the generic 3D models we used are predictive of the architectural styles developers would use or that the blocks we simulate are more likely than others to be redeveloped.–A Nonymous
The houses on Meade and Chesapeake that are to be loaded with R-B and R-C zoning are and have traditionally been the houses of working people. They are peoples homes.
The affordable housing between Meade Avenue and Fairway on Chesapeake Street. Here are some ideas from the planners about what will look good in the place of your modest house.
Franklin Street is the City County boundary.
Many plans, one community, an aspirational name for a government program, Charlottesville and Albemarle syncing the development of their Comprehensive Plans. The request for comment form from a meeting in April 2011. Much remains to be fixed.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – The Charlottesville Department of Utilities is excited to add the Arbor Day Foundation’s Energy-Saving Trees Program to its lineup of energy conservation initiatives. This partnership provides 200 free trees to Utilities customers within the City of Charlottesville, encouraging them to conserve energy and reduce energy bills through strategic tree planting.
The strategic planting of trees provides a variety of benefits for individual households, as well as the broader community. Properly planted trees can reduce the amount of energy a home requires to remain comfortable by providing a barrier to cold winter winds and delivering shade in the summer. When planted properly, a single tree that grows over time can save a homeowner up to 20% on energy costs. Trees also provide a number of benefits for the entire community, such as increasing capacity for carbon sequestration, improving air quality, and providing more effective stormwater filtration and runoff reduction to help keep pollutants out of water supplies.
With guidance from the Charlottesville Tree Commission, available tree varieties include Southern Red Oak, Serviceberry, Sycamore, Willow Oak, and Black Gum. Tree reservations are limited to one tree per service address and made on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Monday, March 14th. Reservations can be accessed through Utilities’ interactive tree portal provided by the Arbor Day foundation at www.arborday.org/charlottesville. This user-friendly portal provides simple step-by-step instructions that focus on homeowner education, and maximizing environmental impact, to calculate where to specifically and strategically plant trees for the greatest energy- and money-saving benefit.
Safety is essential to a successful landscaping project, and this program serves as a great opportunity to reinforce safe digging practices with the community – especially with the outdoor project season almost here. Prior to planting a tree, customers are expected to follow the law, and contact Virginia 811 at least three working days before planting to have the location of buried utility lines on their property marked by a professional. Knowing the location of buried utilities helps prevent their damage, and a potentially hazardous situation. The service is free, and allows customers to dig safely while planting their tree.
For more information about the Energy-Saving Trees Program and the Arbor Day Foundation contact Utilities Outreach at utilitiesoutreach@charlottesville.gov.
This is a tale about the 22 houses on the left. The 1300 block of Chesapeake Street.
The lots are long and skinny, they are zoned R1s, they are intended for residential use.
The crow’s eye view.
1300 Chesapeake
The houses’ average age is 75 years old, half of them were built by the end of World War II, the other half were finished at the end of the Korean War.
1302 Chesapeake Street
The homes were built by blue-collar people.
1304 Chesapeake
To this day, not one of them features a garage or a swimming pool.
1306 Chesapeake
Nine of the houses are rented, thirteen are owner occupied
1308 Chesapeake
The houses don’t tend to flip, the average last date of sale was twenty-two years ago.
1310 Chesapeake
Over the years I’ve made the acquaintance of a handful of the residents while walking by.
1314 Chesapeake
I’ve met a librarian, a plumber, a teacher, a postal worker, a United States Marine
1316 Chesapeake
a boat captain, students, an X-ray tech, a museum worker and an IT person.
1318 Chesapeake
These houses average 1100 square feet finished living area.
1320 Chesapeake
The average lot the houses sit on is 0.18 acres, that is five dwelling units per acre (DUA).
1322 Chesapeake
Their average assessment is 290 thousand dollars.
1324 Chesapeake
The 22 homes, are stable, they are occupied, they are the refuge of families who moved to the neighborhood and planned to stay.
1326 Chesapeake
I believe that painting this block with a medium intensity residential (MIR) land use designation is not acceptable planning.
1328 Chesapeake
The MIR designation is unfair to the residents
1330 Chesapeake
The designation will target their houses for demolition, it is an economic bulldozer.
.
1332 Chesapeake
The Woolen Mills neighborhood requested a small area plan from the City in 1988.
1334 Chesapeake
If the City had provided a framework for public and private investment decisions to the Woolen Mills by means of a small area planning process decades ago the current action could make sense.
1336 Chesapeake
But there has been no small area plan.
1338 Chesapeake
I encourage Council to get scientific, to use the tools of Archimedes and Galileo, math and maps.
Pick some baselines to trigger small area plans in neighborhoods with significant proposed up-zoning.
1340 Chesapeake
For example, if a rezoning will potentially displace 50% of the area’s existing residents, perform a Small Area Plan.
If a rezoning will increase DUA by more than 10X, perform a Small Area Plan.
1342 Chesapeake
Effective city planning is done by having comprehensive neighborhood plans that share the benefits and burdens required to keep the City humming along in an equitable, healthy fashion.
1344 Chesapeake
The 2021 Comprehensive Plan is intended to guide the coordinated harmonious development of the territory within the City to promote the health, safety, order, convenience, prosperity and general welfare of the city’s inhabitants.
The 22 are in the beige, outlined in red.
City Council will decide on the fate of these 22 houses in the next few weeks when they vote on the Future Land Use Map, a part of the not yet approved Comprehensive Plan. Currently, the map shows these humble houses being “redesignated” to a much more intense use known as “medium intensity residential”.
About the medium intensity residential (MIR) the urban planners say:
Medium Intensity Residential: Increase opportunities for housing development including affordable housing, along neighborhoods corridors, near community amenities, employment centers, and in neighborhoods that are traditionally less affordable.
In the case of the 22. These houses, on the spectrum of CHO housing, are affordable. To me, they don’t seem to fit the planners’ criteria. These houses are on a neighborhood street not a “corridor”. The houses aren’t near employment centers.
The MIR designation will potentially result in the demolition of these residences.
What could replace one of these houses once it was demolished? The planners say:
Form + Use:
Allow up to 12 residential units (depending on site characteristics and context, to be further defined in the zoning ordinance; many areas may be limited based on lot size and other factors)Allow structures up to 4 stories (depending on site characteristics and context, to be further defined in the zoning ordinance; many areas may be limited based on lot size and other factors)
draft Land Use Plan
All the neighborhoods in beige are similarly threatened.
Bye-bye.
(I would encourage all concerned to write to City Councilors and to participate at the Council meeting on this subject November 15, 2021. Details of how to participate are available here) https://cvilleplanstogether.com/
Medium-Intensity Residential: Maximum-Intensity Pain
Medium-Intensity Residential needs to be scaled back in both scope and intensity. It is too much to ask people who bought in R-1 neighborhoods (over 60% of the parcels designated for Medium-Intensity Residential) to accept 12-unit (and possibly larger) buildings and 4+ stories, and it is not necessary for making our housing market more flexible, given other changes under the FLUM. The areas designated – changing up the last minute — do not make sense. MIR areas actually have a lower average Walkscore than General Residential. They lack critical infrastructure and some are so far below required density to support commercial amenities that their ultimate arrival is highly uncertain. There is no precedent for buildings above 3.5 stories in most of these areas. High-Intensity residential, on the other hand, shows clear differences — high walkability, transit access, existing infrastructure and height. With MIR, we could end up with a “worst-of-all-worlds” situation of having a scattering of MFH buildings isolated from amenities. And folks living in MIR feel targeted, because there is no compelling explanation of why their blocks should face a much more extreme transformation than nearly identical blocks nearby. If you need the MIR category to exist, scale it back to a few areas already adjacent to amenities, existing density and infrastructure.–CFRP
The Comprehensive Plan can go forward without a finalized land use map. Move head with the CP, move ahead with the many non-map aspects of the Affordable Housing Plan. But the map ought to be done in conjunction with plot-by-plot zoning. This is how planning usually works.–CFRP
Wednesday June 2 the Albemarle Board of Supervisors will receive an update on a project to extend the Old Mills Trail along the Rivanna River. “Implementation of the Old Mills Trail Extension between Pantops and Milton will require the acquisition of easements across multiple properties,” reads the report. “This easement acquisition process is partially complete. The remaining properties where greenway easements must be obtained are now all owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) following their recent acquisition of the last remaining privately-owned riverfront parcel in this planned greenway corridor.”
The above from local independent journalist reporter Sean Tubbs. Sean thoroughly covers local events. Subscribe and support his efforts!
