Planning Commission Work Session Meeting   5/24/2022

And we're recording too.

Yes, we are.

Okay, great.

Welcome to the work session for May 24th of the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

Yes.

Mr. Bailey?

Present.

Mr. Missel?

Here.

Ms.

Firehock?

Here.

Mr. Bivins?

Mr. Carrazana and Mr. Clayborne are not here.

That's correct.

Thank you very much.

We have a quorum, so we'll proceed on with our work session.

We're going to have a staff report on the Comprehensive Plan Land Use Buildout Analysis, labeled as CPA 2021, many zeros two.

Good afternoon.

I'm Rachel Falkenstein.

I'm planning manager of long range planning.

I'm joined this afternoon by Tori Kanalopoulos and we are joined virtually by Jessica Rossi, who is from Kinley-Horn Associates, and she is a part of a consultant team that we worked with to complete this analysis.

Okay, our agenda for this afternoon will be first an overview of the build out analysis.

We'll talk about how the study will be used, talk about the methodology and a summary of the findings.

Then we'll share some constraints and considerations and the conclusion and a question for the commission to consider before the next steps.

Sorry, we're having some wireless mouse issues.

Okay, so the purpose of our analysis is, as I mentioned, to support the comprehensive plan update process.

We're calling that process AC44.

And the first phase is plan for growth, where we are evaluating the current growth management policy.

And we're using the theoretical maximum build out of the county's development areas based on the current land use plan from our 2015 plan.

to determine what the maximum buildout could be of those development areas.

And we want to consider if that maximum buildout would be sufficient to accommodate the projected 20-year population growth of the county and the associated needs for housing and businesses.

In addition to evaluation of the current growth management policy, the findings of this analysis can be used in a variety of other ways.

There are economic development ways we could use this information, and we've been collaborating with the Economic Development Office as part of this effort.

We'll also receive a dynamic data set at the conclusion of this analysis that can be designed to test future scenarios as we go along the process if we want to make changes

to land use designations, we could plug those numbers in and see what the output would be of the build out of our development areas.

And we could also update this data set in the future if we want to do this analysis again.

As you all know, we've been doing it about every two years in the past.

There are some limitations of this analysis that I want to point out.

The forecasting in the analysis is based on assumptions that use historic development patterns and existing market conditions.

As we know, things can change quickly and that's not entirely reliable, but it does give us a picture of how things have grown historically.

Also, the assumptions in this analysis were applied to the whole county.

This was not a parcel by parcel investigation, and so factors that cannot be accurately predicted, such as environmental constraints on a property, economic constraints, property owner or developer preferences, such as whether or not to develop or how to develop the property can't be predicted.

So this was countywide.

We applied a set of assumptions, but we didn't dive down into a parcel by parcel study.

And the last thing I'll mention, some of you were on the commission in 2019, which was the last time we completed an analysis.

I want to point out a couple of differences.

In 2019, we did this study in-house and we used a different set of assumptions based on the GIS model.

This time we

contracted out with consultants from Kimley-Horn who applied a different set of assumptions.

So it's not the exact same way we did it before.

I'll also point out that this time around, we have looked at non-residential uses.

In 2019, we only looked at residential.

So this study includes information about commercial retail, office, industrial and hotel, as well as residential.

Thank you.

Can everybody hear me OK?

Yes, I am OK.

Great, thank you.

I am going to share my screen.

And pick up in the presentation from where we left off so.

I'm going to kind of lay out our methodology for the build-out analysis component of this project.

It was a four-step process, and it was applied and intended to be applied kind of holistically across all the development areas.

I liked how this was teed up earlier.

This was not a parcel by parcel assessment, and so the whole process was really designed

to be holistically applied.

It may not be perfect on every single property, but the assumptions were identified and laid out in a way that we felt very confident in the overall build out of the county.

Sorry about that.

That's okay.

Can you find this again?

Okay, I may just leave it on this view, because I wonder if when I switched it to full screen mode, it may be flipped over.

So I apologize for the edges here.

So anyway, sorry, methodology, our first step was to identify parcels that may have development or redevelopment potential.

And so the way that we did this is we looked at, at a very high level, the value of land,

and the value of improvement.

And so if the value of the land value of a parcel was greater than the improvement value of the parcel, we identified that as something that had development or redevelopment opportunity.

And if the inverse was the case, so the improvement value, and those would be any structures, the infrastructure that's on the property was greater than the value of the land, that was when we identified that there was no development opportunity.

But what we realized when we looked at that, reviewing the results of the first step, it became clear that the assumptions that required some additional refinement to, I'm going to say, ground truth the properties identified for future development opportunities.

So what we did is we added in additional refinements based on property location, parcel size, ownership, environmental constraints,

and current and future land use to better refine the model and really identify and hone in on those properties that were what we kind of referred to as ripe to receive future growth.

Our next step was incorporating that residential pipeline project component that Rachel mentioned.

So what we did in this case is we removed properties that were either approved or under review from our model

and inputted what we know the yields of those projects, the maximum build out yield of those projects are to one, avoid double counting of those projects, but to use the total build outs that we know have been approved.

And then our next step was to create a standardized set of assumptions

that resulted in a maximum theoretical build-out of the development areas.

These assumptions were based off of the comprehensive plan, so the current comprehensive plan's future land use designation.

We reduced buildable acreage to account for environmental constraints, infrastructure requirements, and open space preservation.

We identified reasonable land use mixes as described by the separate future land use designation.

And then we also applied density and intensity assumptions that were described by the future land use classification.

I would say too that when a range was provided, our study used maximum numbers for density and height.

Again, we were seeking to theoretically build out the county at its maximum amount.

At the same time that we were building out, creating the build-out model, we also created market demand forecasts for housing, commercial retail, office industrial, and hotel uses over a 20-year period.

These forecasts took into consideration, as Rachel was mentioning, the past 10 years of development activity, so the pace and momentum of growth that has been historically demonstrated,

and combined that with recent real estate performance, including vacancy rates and sales data, price points, and also incorporated some population projections that we put together.

It's important to note that the demand in our forecast is not necessarily constrained, but this is something that definitely can happen.

And the factors that may lead to constraint in demand could be availability of lands,

the cost to develop access to infrastructure and environmental factors.

And Rachel or Tori actually is going to dig into this a little bit more later.

Additionally, the amount of developable land could continue to further constrain future growth potential, especially as the easier to develop sites have become less and less common.

So we wanted to start quickly with the population forecasts that were prepared for this.

Our forecast utilized three sources to create an Albemarle County population projections for both 2030 and 2040.

It's important to note, though, although 2040 was our horizon year, and the reason that that is the case is that we were preparing 20-year forecasts and we wanted to start with the 2020 census results because it gave us a great baseline of information.

These forecasts can be extrapolated to further project to 2044 to better align with the planning horizon for AC44.

So one thing to note is, as you can see in this chart, the three sources that we utilized for forecasting were relatively consistent in the end result.

When we look at the 2040 numbers, the total population for Albemarle County ranged anywhere from 138 to 110 people

to 140 to 702.

So these were not really wide ranging.

All of the three sources that we looked at were really quite consistent with each other.

From a pipeline perspective, I just wanted to quickly review what we included in the model.

So for approved projects, we focused explicitly on the remaining approved lots.

So of the entire build out of

the approved projects, we only focused on those units that could still be built that were not, that had, we excluded the ones that had already been built.

We then also looked at the maximum units under review, which totaled 5,500 across all the development areas.

And that led to a total buildable unit in the pipeline of over 14,800.

I think the other thing that's really interesting from this graph is that every development area is not created equal.

There's a great amount of variability in the development pipeline.

It can go as low as neighborhood 6, which had nothing in the pipeline, up to Hollymeade, which had over 6,300 units in the pipeline comprising 42.6% of the total.

One other thing to note is that the development areas really do range in the amount of acreage, so their size is varied as well as the recommended future land uses in there.

So what I'm going to go through really quickly now is stepping through the 20-year demand forecast by each real estate sector.

From a residential standpoint, the forecast looked at historic deliveries,

residential sales, closing prices.

It looked at multifamily leasing rates and occupancy.

The population forecasts that I previously shared were also used to gauge how new population growth would generate demand for housing units.

Each of these slides are gonna look relatively similar.

The graphic on the left is indicating kind of long-term trends.

So when we look across the development areas,

Residential closings have generally been up.

The closing price, so that sales price, has generally increased.

It's not year over year perfectly, but we have seen a general increase.

Monthly rental rates have increased, and residential occupancy rates have also increased.

So these factors together really have indicated that

The general trajectory for housing has been very positive and there is strong demand moving forward.

One other thing to note is that housing costs are rising quickly, which could certainly impact affordability.

From a historic trend perspective, the average since 2010 is about 650 units delivered or completed each year.

but in recent years that number has often been higher.

It's been 665 in 2019, over 1100 new units in 2020 and 960 units last year.

The other thing I see in this graph is that multifamily completions have been more prominent in recent years.

So our demand forecasts when looking at a 20 year horizon ranged from 11,500 units to 13,500 units.

So our theoretical maximum buildout for the residential units incorporates both the known development pipeline as well as the theoretical land use buildout.

When you put these two numbers together, that total exceeds 24,000 residential units.

And if you think back to the previous slide, our 20-year demand forecast is ranging from 11,500 units to 13,500 units.

So in theory, the theoretical maximum build out of the county's development areas is greater than the 20-year residential demand.

The one other note that we would have is that while the rural areas were not a focus of our analysis, some limited additional residential growth should also be included there.

From a commercial retail standpoint,

Retail completions have been very inconsistent over time, ranging from 350,000 square feet added in 2016 to several years when completions were very, very low.

This averaged just under 70,000 square feet built per year since 2010.

Over the last decade or so, retail space completions have generally been on the decline,

Retail occupancy rates have also been on the decline, and however, retail lease rates have increased slightly.

And so our 20-year forecast for demand in the commercial retail sector is between 1 and 1.3 million square feet over 20 years.

We see some similarities in office findings.

The year-over-year completion, while it's averaged just under 40,000 square feet per year, has been very inconsistent with periods of very high deliveries, coupled with periods of very low deliveries.

Overall, the long-term trajectory has shown a decline in office space completion.

Office occupancy rates have also been on the decline.

Part of this is likely a function of COVID and shifting office dynamics with where people live

and where they work and how they can have the ability now to telecommute.

However, similar to retail, office lease rates have been on the rise.

And so our 20-year demand forecast for office space is between 750,000 and 1 million square feet of new space.

Industrial is also a very interesting case.

When you look over a longer period of time, completions have been slightly less than they were in the past

However, industrial occupancy rates are really, really high.

There's not a lot of available space out there today.

Industrial lease rates have also been on the rise.

And so this analysis identified between 950,000 and 1.1 million square feet of demand for new industrial space over the next 20 years.

And finally, on the hotel front,

Hotel completions actually have been on the rise.

Hotel occupancy rates are down from long-term historic trends and the daily rates, so what you would pay for a hotel room per day, is also down.

These last two figures are largely a function of continued recovery from the COVID pandemic.

The other thing I'll note on this slide is that we pulled this data back in February.

Hotel of all the sectors is incredibly

sensitive to the time of year.

And we've seen the occupancy and daily rate numbers improve even more from where they were in February in the last one to two months.

So based on these findings, we forecasted a 20-year demand for 700 to 900 new hotel rooms.

So just a really quick summary of the non-residential findings.

I won't read these out to you.

But for all non-residential categories, the theoretical maximum build-out exceeds the 20-year market demand forecast.

So our build-outs range from about 1.7 million square feet of retail up to 5.5 million square feet of industrial space, in addition just under 2,000 hotel rooms.

This slide here compares the 20-year demand forecast

on the low and the high for each non-residential sector with the maximum buildout, which further demonstrates that generally the 20-year demand forecast is lower than the maximum buildout estimate.

This is a similar slide on the residential side showing the 20-year demand forecast of between 11,500 units and 13,500 units

compared to the total theoretical maximum buildout, which includes the pipeline and the land use buildout from the model at just over 24,000 units.

And this last slide here is a lot of numbers on one slide, but we did want to demonstrate a summary of all of the findings by each individual development area.

Kind of like the pipeline,

The distribution of non-residential uses varies very much by development area.

For example, some development areas appear to have no capacity for industrial hotel and some of them have no capacity for office as well.

And so now we're going to transition into thinking about constraining variables and other considerations from a build-out perspective.

As I previously mentioned, our build-out analysis was really very much unconstrained.

We took into consideration how we needed to net out some land that needed to be available for infrastructure construction, environmental constraints, and open space, but both our market demand forecast and our build-out analysis really were weighted more on the non-constrained side.

So to start to tee up this conversation, and then I will turn it over to Tori, the land use build out analysis really is based on a theoretical maximum, focusing very much on vacant and underdeveloped land and the current comprehensive plan future land use designation.

While there's been some additional factors taken into consideration, like I had mentioned with infrastructure and environmental open space,

There's a lot of other variables and constraints that will affect the actual build out.

And a few of these could be misalignment between existing zoning and future land use, the rezoning process and final build out decisions, site location, access to infrastructure, physical site constraints, so slope or stream wetland floodplain that could make a property difficult to develop, local and state ordinance requirements, and cost of land.

Thank you, Jessica.

So I'm just going to go through some of these constraining variables in a bit more detail.

So the theoretical maximum build out is focused on future land use designations, meaning that rezonings would be needed.

Thanks.

for most properties to meet that potential maximum.

As with the 2019 analysis, the estimated residential build-out by current by-right zoning compared to future land use designations is much lower.

The zoning build-out estimate uses the parcels identified as development opportunity in the land use build-out analysis and then applies assumptions based on each parcel's current zoning district, and this estimate does not include the pipeline.

So as shown on the right hand side of the screen, an estimated 2,505 to 4,361 units could be built in the development areas on properties with potential for development or redevelopment that are not in the pipeline and based on current zoning compared with about 9,265 units based on future land use designation.

Across the development areas, future land use designations and existing zoning districts do not always align.

For example, this section of Hollymeade has over 160 acres designated as light industrial for future land use.

However, the land is currently zoned rural area and would need to be rezoned to allow for industrial development.

The rezoning process is uncertain and can be time consuming, with some rezonings taking over two years from initial submittal to approval.

Proposed and approved densities are often lower than maximum densities recommended in the comp plan.

Looking at rezonings approved from 2016 through 2021, the total density approved was approximately 58% of the maximum density recommended per future land use designations.

Even when projects are approved at higher densities, sites often do not build out to the maximum approved density.

So for example, the Rio point rezoning in neighborhood two was approved for 328 units, while the comp plan recommended a maximum of 624 units and the previous by right zoning allowed up to 110 units.

This rezoning took about two and a half years from initial submittal to approval.

The Old Trail Village development in Crozet was approved for a minimum of 1,600 units and a maximum of 2,200 units in 2005.

In 2015, the applicant requested a reduction of the minimum required units down to 1,000 units.

And the expected final build out of the development is 1,200 units, which is 1,000 units less than the approved maximum.

And it should be noted that in the development pipeline that was included with this report, all of the approved and under review projects are currently unadjusted

meaning that developments that are expected to build out lower than their maximum approvals are still fully counted.

Where a parcel is located and what it is surrounded by can affect potential build out.

For example, adjacent residential uses may be helpful for certain businesses, such as restaurants, but less desirable for others, such as heavy industrial uses.

Some businesses need access to major highways, which limits where they can locate, and availability of public infrastructure and the ability to connect to it are important factors as well.

While assumptions for environmental constraints were applied across the development areas, each parcel will vary individually.

Two parcels may have designated steep slopes.

However, one parcel may be more difficult to develop than the other due to the location of the slopes on the site.

Generally, the easier to develop sites are developed first, meaning that remaining sites may become increasingly challenging and more expensive to develop.

Local and state ordinance requirements regulate how a property can be developed.

The county zoning ordinance is an especially important set of regulations and zoning requirements affect the form and density of development.

Zoning requirements include minimum lot sizes, setbacks, building height, and requirements for parking, landscaping, and open space.

Resoning to plan districts generally allows more flexibility compared with developing by right under general residential or commercial districts.

However, rezoning adds more time to the development process.

Kimberly Horn also gathered feedback from local stakeholders and found that the cost of land in the county has increased rapidly in recent years.

The sales price per acre of vacant properties increased about 38% from 2018 to 2021.

Increased land costs are usually passed on to homebuyers and renters for residential developments.

And for non residential uses, it's more difficult to absorb these costs, especially for industrial uses.

The high cost of housing in this area reflects the cost of land among other factors, including supply and demand and the cost of materials and labor.

Compared to Charlottesville and surrounding counties, Albemarle County had the highest median for sale home price in the last quarter of 2021.

The high cost of housing could also constrain the ability of local employers to find employees who may be priced out of Albemarle County.

So based on the

Draft land use build-out analysis.

There appears to be sufficient land available for residential and non-residential growth in the development areas.

However, that is predicated on a number of assumptions, including development at the higher end of recommended ranges based on future land use, significant redevelopment and infill, updates to zoning to match future land use, incentives for affordable housing and economic development.

The lower ends of recommended densities and uses are not sufficient to accommodate future growth.

and development under current by right zoning may not be sufficient to accommodate future growth.

So we have one question for the Planning Commission to consider, which is does our current growth management policy provide opportunities to meet housing and non residential needs for growth over the next 20 years?

And we're happy to take questions and comments and feedback from the commission as well.

And thank you very much, staff, and to our consultants, Kimberly Horn.

So we do have a request from a member of the public to offer a comment.

So what I'd like to do is have us ask staff questions at this point.

Then we'll take a comment, even though work session is not technically a public hearing, why not?

We'll be kind and listen to our stakeholders, and then we'll bring it back to the commission for the discussion part.

So what I'd like to do is have questions now, public comment, and then discussion.

So questions for staff on any of the methodologies or assumptions or anything else in the presentation.

Okay, I'll go.

Yeah, I've got lots of questions.

First of all, thank you both, and thank you to Kimley Horn, who's in the space somewhere.

Appreciate all this great work.

In my humble opinion, this area of

Obviously, land use and planning for growth is one of the most important considerations.

I'm glad it's kind of the starting point because it'll be built upon right, I guess, as you go forward.

So I really appreciated the project phase slide as well.

That was a helpful resource.

And I know a lot of this is crystal balling and using kind of your best logic.

So I just had a few questions.

I did thank you.

You think I have figured this out by 2022?

Our open space assumptions were guided by the future land use categories, and so we very much read through the intent of those categories.

Generally, the reduction for open space.

So and when I say reduction,

The reduction in buildable acres for open space generally ranged anywhere from 10 to 15 to 20%, again, depending on future land use category.

There were some categories that we elevated that reduction even further.

Of course, anything that had to do specifically with green space was very, very high.

There were also some kind of institutional uses that we elevated the open space because from a campus perspective there would be more than in a traditional development.

I think the short answer is no.

Got it.

I didn't know if it was... So to clarify that the places that are already identified in the future land use plan as green space were kept as green space.

That's what you're saying?

Yes.

Okay.

Got it.

Thank you.

In terms of infrastructure, you mentioned the need to be aware that their infrastructure needs and capacities and

We did not get into that level of detail yet.

The infrastructure kind of reduction of area that was applied was just sort of the general things you would need on the site like parking and roads and the space for that.

Okay, great.

Thanks.

Almost done.

So in terms of the development impacts, especially under office and hotel, for example, did you take into consideration any of the city's growth plans?

I would say our numbers

Yeah, yeah, I would say our numbers are very much focused on the county.

For any of our historic deliveries or completions year over year, that was solely for Albemarle County.

And so both our historic trends and our current performance metrics, we're looking specifically at what was happening in the county, and even more specifically, what was happening in the development areas of the county.

And so

I think that that's a really astute question because the reality is that there will be demand that's captured in the city and in the county.

I mean, demand doesn't stop at a municipal boundary.

Got it.

Thank you.

Can I tag on to that?

Let me tag on to the question that Fred just asked.

For instance, before a bit of clarification, we know in Crozet there's an anticipation of a hotel going on the downtown square.

No, and I would say that that's probably one piece of the analysis that would be a really interesting next step is we had wonderful pipeline information for residential uses, the different developments, how much has been built, what was remaining, what was being approved or under review right now.

We did not have the same depth of information for non-residential

Tag on just one clarification.

We talked about Charlottesville.

Was there any look at the boundary effects with the surrounding counties?

There's a lot of transport in from like Green and Lake Montrell area and there's been development up 29 and around Augusta.

Was any of that kind of, maybe not the whole county, but the boundary effects

right on that kind of, like you said, not municipality.

I would say not specifically, but what we did do is look at for a lot of our different figures, whether that be population growth that has occurred or the understanding of land costs or how different real estate sectors have performed

I'd like to tag on to this.

And then you can have your question back in.

But I guess, you know, you were talking about you didn't have as good data set or source or whatever for the non-residential.

And I remember years ago, Steve Allshouse with the county did an analysis of retail that we were overbuilding

And we run the risk of the shiny new mall makes the older mall not so sexy.

And therefore everyone runs to that one.

But it's sort of like a series of boom and bust with the mall situation and retail.

And so I guess I think it would be important to not just sort of take past demand and just project it out, but to get a better sense of

And Steve certainly had the chops to do that work of how much retail do we really need?

And are we overbuilding it?

Because I think there are then projections on county revenues based on that tax base from commercial retail that may not be true.

I know that's somewhat difficult but I would I know I would appreciate it because we have places that are you know have C for commercial center or center and you know do we need those centers are they are they you know are they in the right place even so that's going a bit of field but I just think getting a better hand on that retail and commercial piece is really important.

I think I would add, and now I can tag on to that.

Retail, commercial and office.

Yeah, and I think, I guess this is a question in terms of the trends I think you mentioned for office 750,000 to a million over is the demand over 20 year period.

You know, we've seen obviously a huge decrease in office space.

We don't know what the trend is going to be if it's partly because of COVID or what we're looking at.

Did you change any of your assumptions based on COVID or did you just sort of normalize it across a longer period, maybe sort of flat line, you know, kind of flat lining across the COVID dip?

How did you approach that?

That's a really good.

Yeah, and I mean, if I had a great perfect answer for that, I would be.

in a different profession and much, much wealthier.

But great question.

We certainly did take COVID into consideration.

We can very clearly see in the performance numbers the impact that COVID has had on office.

Whether that is truly a long-term trend, that's the million-dollar question,

Right now.

And so, you know, to some extent, we did kind of normalize what we've seen over the last, you know, 10 to 15, 20 years, assuming that there will be kind of continued recovery.

But there's certainly office and retail are two sectors that the pandemic really has either, you know, instantly changed or has accelerated changes that were already taking place.

And so to the extent that we could, we tried to take those kind of performance metrics and build them into the demand forecast.

Good to know.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I just want to note that since we began the meeting 15 minutes late, I'd like us to go to 515.

I know it's only an hour work session, but I don't want to be unfair to the discussion or the people who still want to comment.

Just a quick question.

How do you account for a large property or did you account for a large property owner adding density through rezoning?

When you looked at sort of the remaining approved lots within a parcel, I guess you had to sort of pick a time in history, right?

That's higher than let's say you have a property that says it's 500 acres.

And let's say it's a million square feet that's currently allowed, entitled.

And, you know, two, three, four or five years from now, that same developer comes back and says we want to add 2 million square feet to that.

Yeah, gotcha.

Okay, that's it.

Okay.

I just wanted to come back to what was the last piece that you presented about the theoretical and some of these versus the actual, just so we can get, so if I understand, there's a lot of numbers flying around, so I'll try to keep up.

It sounded like about 60%,

was what we were seeing.

So when we... I'm trying to figure out, it wasn't really packaged in this, but remaining approved units versus max units, was that 60% related to the approved units or the max units that you're going out there?

Like in old trail, you said it was approved for 2200, we were really only 1200.

and another one, it was like 638 for the Rio and it's 328 units.

And so just trying to get a sense of where that, the historical view of the 60% is what we were actually seeing, not the numbers in here.

Yeah, and we haven't applied it yet, but what we did is we looked at rezonings just internally looked that were approved

from 2016 through 2021 and looked at based on the comp plan like what was the absolute maximum density that was recommended on that property or those properties and then what did it get approved at.

and then added them all up and calculated the difference.

So it was about 58% and some of them had still been approved over the recommended density, but that was the result.

So it was more of the maximum density for the comp plan

How to Adjustment.

Thanks.

So that's, I guess I'll just clarify.

So on slide 14, where we have remaining approved units and max units under review, those numbers, is there any adjustment factor we should be thinking about for those numbers?

And I think we could consider that, but we haven't applied that yet.

So all of the under review pipeline units is based on what the applicants are requesting in their application.

So if there's a rezoning that's asking for 350 units, then for those properties, we use 350 and didn't go into, you know, whatever the comp plan is recommending, since there is an active application, they're asking for a certain number.

And so when we

So when you come back to the two units then that are the actuals, can you just help connect those dots between slide 14 and what you presented and did those applicants ask for the maximum units there and then actually build less?

Yeah, I think we'd have to look into it further, but it's kind of a big mix.

We've had rezonings come in where they asked for maybe not the maximum, but a higher amount.

And then through the public hearings and resubmittals, it went down over time.

We've had ones that just started asking for a certain number and just kept it the whole time.

And that's what was approved.

And then some that have asked for more units, which seems especially common on smaller sites as well, where

Thanks.

Yeah, just trying to see if there's a pattern that we should be thinking about.

And I can I can understand why an applicant given the length of time it takes to apply would ask for the max units because it means there's more flexibility for them without reapplying.

But just wondering how that squares with what we're actually seeing.

Appreciate it.

I mean, I would say that not having that explicit data, but when you follow up on site review, you know, the site review emails we get, it often looks like they're going to the site review with fewer units than what they came through us for, if they had to come through us.

I mean, sometimes they don't have to come through us.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

But sometimes, I mean, sometimes in the notation, it will look as if it's

It's not that.

It looks more like it's been a market decision or a development decision to say we're going to reduce the capacity that we're going to go forward with, which is what I think you're getting an option.

So someone, why don't you just ask us for that?

Because that would have been a lot easier for us to deal with.

But that's SX post.

OK.

That's it.

What I'd like to do is just open it up briefly for public comments so that we can get people a chance to say something if they'd like to.

So I'm just going to open a public hearing or comment from the public.

Carolyn, is there someone online who wanted to comment or?

Okay.

You can't see it.

Sorry, not for this item.

Is there anyone from the gallery who would like to make a comment?

My name is Hunter Wood.

I'm with United Land Corporation here in Charlottesville.

Address 135 Somerset Farm Drive.

I guess biggest thing is cost.

I've personally been in the land development business in Albemarle County for 35 years.

My father's been doing it for 60 plus.

Costs have gone through the roof.

A lot of that cost is two years of rezonings to go through the county.

To start off at 500 units and you get beaten, come in here and get whipped and beaten, you walk out with 250.

Infill sites get done.

There are infill sites for a reason because they were not economical 10, 15, 20 years ago.

And it's hard to make them economical now.

I did like some of the slides I saw up there today showing Hollymeade.

If I can get 6,000 units, I think one thing I saw up there, I'd be happy.

I don't think y'all are going to approve 6,000 units.

but I would be willing to work with you all with this Albemarle County 44 to try to solve some stuff.

I personally, probably a little biased, think the growth area needs to be expanded.

I have some property that water and sewer is 100 feet away from me, yet I have a road that is a boundary that nobody wants to cross.

So it's just, I think we need to open our minds a little bit more to try to get costs down.

We need affordable housing in this community.

We do not have affordable housing, but I would love if Rachel or anybody that's working on this would invite me to come in and talk to you.

I'd be willing to give my input on it.

and try to move forward because we, United Land, are a pretty big stakeholder in Hollymeade, and I saw the numbers up on there.

And I would like to try to see if we can't find some common area to get something done.

Thank you very much.

And we are just at the beginning of this process.

We're not making any big decisions this evening.

Good afternoon.

Neil Williamson with the Free Enterprise Forum.

I love math.

This report is a great report.

There's a lot of data in here.

And the last part, the constraints part, is the part that I think is the most telling.

One of the reasons I love math is you find a couple of ways to get to the same number.

We took the density denied report that we did last year.

We did three case studies.

I probably placed the blame for density reductions elsewhere than the applicant coming forward with doing less.

Those three case studies proposed lower than the comp plan, 439 units.

Those three case studies got 191 units approved and lost 248 units.

So the loss was actually 56.5%.

That's a small, I mean, that's a small case studies, three case studies, but all of the stuff that this report calls for is looking at rezonings.

The question for you is what is your comp plan going to do?

If you use the 56.5 density loss number, you are 1,000 units short on the short end of the demand in 44.

You're 3,000 short on the long end.

Should your comp plan be this aspirational document that doesn't recognize in order to get rezonings approved, someone has to stand here and get four votes, or should it recognize reality

that you lose 56.5% of your density every time you come forward for a rezoning.

And the staff came up with 58%.

Those are pretty close numbers for me.

And I think that's a good number to work with.

And I encourage you to use this density lost formula in calculating the carrying capacity for your development area.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else who wish to speak from the public?

All right, so I'll just end the public comment period of this work session.

As I said, we'll go to at least 5.15 because we didn't get to have our discussion really yet.

We haven't answered your big question, although maybe we partially answered it.

I'd just like to lead off with sort of a really...

You don't have to answer this, but I guess my chief concern with the report is that when I look to the point that was just made about why we reduce densities or even why we deny rezoning requests, a lot of times it has to do with schools and traffic.

You know, I really cannot answer this question without knowing what kind of traffic demand would that put on our roads?

How many schools would be needed to realize X number?

So for example, and I haven't done any math at all on this, but let's just say for argument's sake that the numbers required the building of six to 10 new schools.

And that came in at a price tag of $1 billion.

I have no idea what that.

The point is,

In order to say what's reasonable, the county has to come to a reckoning with what it's actually willing to fund because we don't have enough schools and we don't necessarily have the right transportation infrastructure that comes with a price tag.

So, you know, to me, and I'm looking at the staff, they're not charged to make these decisions and neither is anyone on this dais because we don't control the purse strings of the county.

I'm not asking for that.

but I cannot really weigh in on this without knowing whether that any of this is sustainable and to um to hearken to some comments that Tom Olivier sent in by email because he has a conflict and he would would have liked to speak this evening and he talked about sustainability and you sort of alluded to that Mr Missel when you talked about green space and you know are we are we

going to have those spaces in mind.

And one of the other type of analyses that I'm not necessarily saying that Kenley Horn should do, but

You know, we're depending on these rezonings.

The reason the county has this method, instead of doing what Charlottesville did, it just rezone to what you want.

We want everyone to come in and ask for a rezoning.

And so we're hoping by doing that, that we get proffers of parks and whatnot.

But what I tend to see us getting is tot lots that are private to the development.

And even when a new development comes in, the development next door is like, by the way, I hope they know that they can't come over to our park and our development.

That's our private park.

So, you know, there's a huge investment that the county needs to make in parks and roads and buses.

And here we talked about bus stops in the Rio Plan this coming up this evening, you know, unshaded bus stops.

We don't even have a good

Service, a good transportation service for our county for public transportation yet.

So, I guess that's not necessarily the answer that was desired, but that's my take on this is that we need that other piece.

I can't really just look at units and say, yeah, great.

The other thing is that the comment that was just made about how long it takes to get through a rezoning process.

And so what we do see, we have seen, and again, I don't have the numbers to make a chart out of this comment, but people look at that rezoning process and how long it takes.

And they say, oh, forget it.

I'll just go with what I can do by right.

And so we want the density, but are we making it too hard to get to it?

So that's kind of where I come down on this.

And so sorry for the extra philosophy that maybe wasn't helpful, but I just don't see how I can answer your question.

So having thrown that down, what comments or concerns or reactions do you all have?

I like this character.

I don't have a problem answering the question.

And the answer is no.

OK, but that's not enough.

You want me to go farther than that.

So the answer is no.

And I will sort of expend a little bit about what the chair said.

So I think sort of aligned with this is a demographic analysis of what does that growth look like.

Because if that growth continues to look like senior citizens, we have enough of everything.

What we probably don't have is enough sort of ways to get people around that aren't car-centric.

But I would then, I'm going to make a whole bunch of people mad now.

We don't need any more bike pads.

because seniors don't ride bikes unless they're in the villages.

Now we can become the villages of the blue ridge and that's fine, I don't have a problem with that.

But if that's what we're going, if that's the direction we're going in, then all of these accessories and all of these amenities that people come and talk to us about, we don't need them.

because we really are turning into an aging population.

And the reason I was gonna go back that up, the reason I said is if you tell me that we don't have enough retail space, which I have a cavity on that, I don't think we need to look at cavity.

I think we need to, on the retail space, I think we should be aware of the market decisions that were made in a place like the place that's almost closed.

the Fashion Square Mall.

Fashion Square Mall pivoted from families to teens and the young college people.

That was a market decision.

And they paid a price for that.

The new thing was happening at Barracks Road and was happening at Stonefield.

They've actually have stores there that are a little bit older for older consumers.

Okay, not teens and not young and not sort of pre-college and if you look at if you can get their numbers, their numbers look pretty good.

Okay, the numbers look pretty good.

So basically some of that is about the mix of what we have of retailing that we have and we can't, we can't control it.

That's not our issue.

Okay.

So I want to be really careful about that.

What I will say is that if we're talking with economic development, which I know you're going to do, this is a deep connection to economic development, and with the supervisors, what kind of community are we trying to establish here?

Every single time that we've had anything with any kind of creative density to it, we get hammered.

Everybody comes out and talks about they don't want to walk their dog next to those people or they don't want to get run over when they go across that street or they don't want to do it.

So the whole idea is that the community has got to get better with density.

If that doesn't happen, then we have all we need.

If we can pretend and have active discussions that density is not the third head of devils, then we can in fact go someplace that I think we would like us to go, coming down to office space.

If we continue to have, I would like our industry and office space to go to something that's like a mixed research space.

It can be either or.

because I think the days of us having heavy industry here are over.

We're no longer gonna have an ACME visible and we're not visible files.

We're no longer gonna have an avionics place that was over there by the airport, but we're gonna have labs and places that people come and build things with their intellectual property that either comes here or that comes from other places.

And for that, you do need space that can be both office and what I would say like research.

You just don't do it.

It doesn't happen that way.

And so thinking about what we are as a community and how we're going to evolve as a community, then that sort of will let us know what our demographics, what do the demographics look like 10 and 20 years later from now.

And then here's the wrinkle that I rarely hear us talking about.

Most of us are aware that we went through this last census and then we went through the redistricting, that

because of the population shifts, certain places that view themselves as being more rural actually had to accumulate more landmass.

Not because they needed landmass, because they needed bodies.

Because the Commonwealth's constitution says that all the districts have to have within some, I don't know, two or 3%, the same number of people.

That's only going to become more intense in this kind of little growth or no growth environment.

So you're going to start seeing the more rural parts of our community who claim that the rural lifestyle is the lifestyle for me, is going to have to become a bit more engaged with being dense.

because we have hard boundaries.

We have hard rural and development boundaries.

So that land mass is going to shift over.

And when that happens, we by default have softer boundaries.

Yeah and because you realize and I'll probably say this a little bit later tonight we really have this I like I messed up it's like a rural suburban so some it's like a rural rural suburban um neighborhoods that were that we will look at one of the things before us that it's a rural thing but if you look around it there's probably a good thousand two thousand houses around this sitting in the rural part of our county that really is not

where the rural life is for me anymore.

This is really just people with five or six acres or seven or eight acres around their houses, but those acres happen to be in the rural part of our county.

So I will say again, as I said, let me just put a pin in this.

The thing that came to us three weeks ago about increasing the setbacks in the development area.

It's the antithesis of it.

But here's what I'm saying.

You can't come to us and say, not you, because you go here, but it can't be presented to us and say, oh, we want to make the setbacks 50 feet, 40 feet, 30 feet like this, and also make the

and make the step backs like this and tell me that you're interested in growth.

That doesn't work.

That just doesn't work.

You can't have, I mean, you can have, or we can have, but I can't support that because I don't know how to reconcile that in my mind.

So you can take that to the person who said that, that Bivins, to Julian, so he brought that little piece up again.

Because you're telling me I have to have houses, smaller houses on bigger lots.

and I can't do the taller things, we had a perfect situation.

The Royal Road property, everybody, the people across the streets just came and beat the hell out of us.

Sorry.

That was a perfect place that could have had some height on it.

It could have been sitting in a place and nobody could see it.

It easily could have been a five or six story building.

But because people came and they were so against people who were gonna be paying $2,000 a month in rent.

which is not workforce housing, I mean it is, is workforce perhaps in their business.

Well, some of that has to do with people's perception of density.

But they wouldn't even see it.

You have some good examples of good density around here, but you know, like other places have done it better.

And so, you know, I think that there's going to be a lot of education in terms of, because density is not a four letter word.

It's not a four letter word.

But in some people's minds, they haven't seen it done well.

I'll say one more thing and then I'll be fine.

Sure, because we're going to wrap this.

But the one piece that, remember Rachel did that wonderful work on looking at the two corners on the east side of Royal Road.

I hope if that ever does get developed that we are a bit more free in what we allow to happen there.

And maybe that's where you're form-based.

Because that's the place where we could get the kind of, I think, hallmark development that would allow people to see that density is not a four-letter word, which is what it is.

It's a sheep killing dog.

I'll be brief.

I have a hard time trying to understand this because as we alluded to, or say yes or no to this too, because as we alluded to, we look at growth, and we've looked at growth, but what we, the boundary effects, I mean we know, I've had, I've employed many

employees that live in Lake Long Hill and drive in and would love to live in Charlottesville, but it's too expensive to live here and would love to live here.

And so I don't know how we get to that understanding, but what we, but it's hard to understand is like, how might those numbers change if they could, if there was availability and, and, and cost.

I know, and those things are tied and it's a confounder, but

You know, would they not be?

And so if we're looking at the boundary effects, that would be helpful to understand what we're foregoing by pushing people to the surrounding counties and other areas where they can get the economics and everything and how that is related to our growth management policy that might be, you know, promoting that effect over how many years and what has that growth been in the last 10 years?

Could we have grown higher than the numbers presented, but we pushed it to

I think that's a really excellent point, especially because it talks in this presentation about the cost of housing going way up.

And yes, it's happening across the country, but it's happening really fast here.

I just gave the chair.

I went on the CARS website and looked at the 2022 quarter one.

Yeah, so I mean that is the question.

And then that relates to people being willing to come here and employ people.

Because if you can't find housing for your people,

At a certain point, your office becomes undesirable because everyone has an hour commute.

Well, then you might as well live in DC if you have to do that, right?

Anyway, so let's- And I said the last thing that you can't, we really can't, we don't know.

And Jessica put it out as the

I don't think we've figured out what's going to be the long-term effects of COVID and the biggest feeder of people that I know that have moved to Charlottesville and would love to move to Charlottesville would be coming from Northern Virginia where they're used to higher prices if they could keep their Northern Virginia salary and all that.

One of the questions that we don't know yet to say is the government might be going back to work, the associated people might.

I know that a lot of other high-tech people and others in the space are not being returned to work, so we don't know yet

what the impact and how that might change the growth projections that it could go on the uptake if we can become a bedroom community for the Northern Virginia because COVID allows more remote and the world changes and does more remote.

So, and that would also impact our office space consideration.

And final thing, there has been a ton of office space come online in Charlottesville.

And I don't know how, as we already established that hasn't been factored into this to know what our office space projections should be revised perhaps.

So I'm sorry we didn't necessarily answer your question directly.

You answered no.

He said no.

I think no as well.

So I think

Would you like to weigh in on yes or no?

I think we'll need to have another work session on this very topic.

We can't put it to bed, and I don't think that was staff's intention.

This is really impressive.

So I was asked to be on the AC44 First Committee, and I will say two things, that the two individuals over there to my left

did a fantastic job on that opening meeting.

So Rachel and Tory did a really brilliant job.

So you should know that.

Yes, I understand that.

And smiled as they were doing it.

And I heard people appreciate that.

Now, I'm sure they'll continue to ask the question, but I should just tell you that that message was given.

All right.

Well, I'm going to go ahead and close this meeting.

Yes.