When an investment firm purchased the former Cavalier Crossing apartment complex on Fifth Street Extended last year, affordable housing advocates were horrified that the intent was to convert the 144 existing units to market rate. Now Bonaventure has filed plans with Albemarle to rezone the property to allow construction of 165 new units and comply […]
When an investment firm purchased the former Cavalier Crossing apartment complex on Fifth Street Extended last year, affordable housing advocates were horrified that the intent was to convert the 144 existing units to market rate. Now Bonaventure has filed plans with Albemarle to rezone the property to allow construction of 165 new units and comply […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
One purpose of urban planning is to determine appropriate places for people to live, but in many localities, elected officials have the final say. For instance, the Town of Scottsville Comprehensive Plan calls for around 1,000 people to reside in that community by 2040. “Growth of small towns more often occurs in periodic jumps, with […]
Unlike in some communities, there is no one entity responsible for building and maintaining trails in the Charlottesville area. The Rivanna Trails Foundation has a mission to “promote, create, and protect pathways, trails, and greenways in the Rivanna River Watershed that connect communities and people to one another and nature,” but it is a volunteer […]
The University of Virginia is moving ahead with an initiative to house more students on Grounds, and one component has shifted slightly this month. A subcommittee of the Board of Visitors is scheduled to hold a special meeting February 19 to approve the schematic design for a $160 million project to build hundreds of bedrooms […]