The Albemarle Board of Supervisors will adopt a new budget on May 7 that is based on increases in the tax rate for real property and personal property. On April 29, Republican Scott Smith rode his bike to the steps of the county office building and compared himself to Paul Revere with a warning. “Right […]
The Albemarle Board of Supervisors will adopt a new budget on May 7 that is based on increases in the tax rate for real property and personal property. On April 29, Republican Scott Smith rode his bike to the steps of the county office building and compared himself to Paul Revere with a warning. “Right […]
When City Council adopted a new zoning code in late 2023, the action granted property owners the ability to build many more houses and apartments than under the old rules. Charlottesville’s housing program manager said that has made property more valuable. “We have occurrences of rising land costs [and] speculative development that may happen within […]
One of the areas Albemarle Board of Supervisors has identified for industrial development is along Broadway Street in a land-locked section of the county only accessible via roads through Charlottesville. The future happens one application at a time and the Board will soon consider whether it wants to allow the owners of a project called […]
Over the last few years, analysis from the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors has captured a trend of fewer homes being sold in the region, while the average purchase price continues to climb. There were 1,287 homes sold in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to 879 sold in the last three months of 2024. […]
A major feature of Charlottesville’s relatively new zoning code is that developers can build more places to live without seeking additional permission from local elected officials. There has been an active lawsuit since January 2024 that claims the city did not follow Virginia’s regulations to study the impact more people would have on area roadways. […]
There are many ways to make it more affordable for an individual or family to own a home. One of them is to separate the cost of land from the cost of the structure itself. That’s the business model of the Piedmont Community Land Trust, an entity created in 2008 by the Thomas Jefferson Planning […]
The arrival of spring brings the end of the season for PACEM, a network of churches that provides overnight shelter for hundreds of unhoused individuals in the Charlottesville area each year. Since 2004, the group, officially known as People and Congregations Engaged in Ministry, has since 2004 operated cold-weather shelters across a rotating set of […]
Virginia Housing, a state agency, has published a list of applications from developers seeking tax credits to cover the cost of building apartments guaranteed to be rented to people with lower incomes than the area median. The Internal Revenue Service allots a limited number of federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits for each state, and Virginia […]
A plan to build a 50-unit mobile home park on a portion of 50 acres in southern Albemarle County is dead after the Board of Supervisors deadlocked 3-3 on rezoning. They did so after a three-hour discussion and a public hearing during which housing advocates urged the county to move past decades of rural area […]
Albemarle County has several rules intended to limit commercial development in the vast majority of its 726 square miles, including large stretches of highway. For instance, you can’t have a country store that’s more than 4,000 square feet in total size. In 2024, the owners of Greenwood Grocery on Rockfish Gap Turnpike learned that the […]