Planning Commission Work Session   6/29/2021

Good evening and welcome to this work session.

The work session is a work session that is really going to be a feedback work session.

There will be an opportunity for commissioners to provide input to the consultants near the end of the meeting.

But the objective today is to do a lot of listening and a lot of asking of questions.

There will be no decisions or recommendations made tonight because this is a work session but what we're going to attempt to do is listen to the consultants and they're going to walk us through all the, summarize all the feedback that we've gotten over the last few months regarding the chapters in the comprehensive plan but also the future land use

And they're going to do that in the beginning of the meeting.

Once they've walked us through the chapters and the future land use map and the feedback that we've gotten, we will then open it up to the public and the public will be given an opportunity to provide their feedback.

We're asking the public to keep their comments to three minutes per individual.

Hopefully, we'll be able to get through the public comments within 45 minutes to an hour.

If it begins to run longer than 45 minutes to an hour, what we're going to do is in that section of public comments, and then invite commissioners to ask questions.

So in the beginning, commissioners will ask questions of the consultants.

And once every commissioners had a chance to go around and ask questions, we'll do the usual left to right.

Then we'll ask the commissioners to provide input to the consultants.

And again, we'll do left to right.

If there are people that still want to make comments after that, we will open it up to yet another public input session.

Once we've completed that,

We will open it up to Missy and her team and Jennifer and her team to talk about what we're going to do next, the next steps.

Okay, cool.

Great, thanks, Chair Mitchell.

Joe, if you want to bring up the slides, that would be great.

Hey, you know, I got to roll.

Oh, we do have a new commissioner.

Sure.

Hi, everyone.

My name's Karim Habab.

I'm honored to be part of the planning commission.

I moved to Charlottesville in 2011 as a UVA student, graduated from the architecture school there in 2015.

I started working with BRW Architects here in town.

Been working with them since.

And yeah, it's been six years with them.

And I'm excited to join this commission.

Yes, you are going to live in exciting times working with us.

So, Jennifer, forgive me.

Thank you.

So yeah, thanks, Joe, if you want to bring it back up.

So I was saying, I'm Jenny Koch, for those who might not be aware, and I am a member of the Seville Plants Together consultant team.

There's also several other folks from the consultant team on the phone tonight.

You saw a few of them or they might still be up.

Ron Sessoms will be joining me on the presentation a bit later.

Latoya Thomas is also here.

She's our engagement lead.

and thank you.

Lee Einsweiler is here from our zoning portion of the team and Dina Roadside is also here.

So they may be popping in to speak to you all later.

But if you go to the next slide, I'll give a brief overview of what we'll go through tonight.

So the goal for tonight's conversation, as you mentioned, Chair Mitchell, is to share some information about this third community engagement period for Seville plans together, which we just wrapped up on June 13th.

So we'll go through a summary of the different activities we completed with the community and then we'll speak about some of the preliminary themes of the input that we received related to both the draft chapters of the Comprehensive Plan and the draft Future Land Use Map.

I will probably say this several times tonight, but I want to make sure it's really clear that we appreciate all of the input we've received.

We've received a lot of input.

You'll see the numbers in a second.

We've reviewed all of the comments, but we'll be taking time to re-review everything, making sure we've really captured everything accurately, and working to respond to some of those commonly asked questions.

So I just want to note, if anyone did not see their comment reflected in the presentation tonight, I hope, just know that we'll be

You know, this represents sort of a first level of review, excuse me, review, and we'll be going through to, you know, again, review it again.

And all comments are being considered as we move forward, whether or not they're, you know, they necessarily come out as some of these strongest comments.

So that being said, if you want to continue to the next slide, Joe.

So first, I'll speak about some of, well, each of the different engagement opportunities that we had.

So on the next slide,

As I mentioned, the engagement period ended on June 13th, but this sort of time for community review and comments was originally open May 3rd to May 31st, and then it was extended to June 13th.

And during this period, we shared draft chapters of the comprehensive plan in a draft future land use map, which is a piece of one of the chapters of the plan.

And

We work to build community awareness about this opportunity for review and comment in a variety of ways.

You can see them sort of listed here on the bottom.

You can see some examples as well of the advertisements we used and the lawns or yard signs, which you may have seen around town a bit.

I want to point out before we move off of this that this was our third engagement period for Seville plans together.

But it was also, you know, we're building on earlier work completed by the Planning Commission from 2017 and 2018 with this comprehensive plan update process.

And so we do have additional slides that it's in the appendix.

For those who may not be familiar with that, I assume the Planning Commission is very familiar.

But for those who are listening, you may want to dig into those details some more.

So again, you can find that in the appendix.

On the next slide, you can see just at a high level the variety of tools we use to both share information and gather input about it.

And I just want to note, we didn't point anyone to any one of these in particular.

We know everyone has different ways they like to give feedback.

So we're not emphasizing feedback by any of these methods.

We're looking at it all sort of holistically together.

And where we can, we're also taking into account where we're hearing from, neighborhoods, who we're hearing from in terms of demographics, so we can really understand the feedback we're getting through all these methods.

And obviously we're not getting detailed demographics on all of these, but where we have it, we're trying to use it.

So I'll speak to, well, we'll tell you a bit more about what we heard from all of these on the next slides here.

So first of all, we held pop up events.

And this was something that we originally planned to do a lot of throughout this whole project.

And then we're really glad we finally got a chance to do that, to be out and speaking with people.

We held six pop up events over two weekends, mostly over

between May 14th and 16th.

We had a lot of face-to-face conversations at these events.

We gathered some comment form responses.

We had at least 133 attendees.

Those were the folks who signed in.

There may be several more who didn't get a chance to sign in or who maybe didn't want to.

But overall, we felt these were great conversations that we were able to have with people face-to-face.

On the next slide, you can see we held two webinars.

These were sort of open events to anyone held on May 10th and 25th with 76 and 179 participants, respectively.

And at these events, we gave an overview of the Seville plans together process for those who may not have been familiar.

And then we discussed these draft chapter updates and the future land use map and encouraged everyone to submit their feedback.

We did at each of these events had a Q&A session and due to the high number of comments and questions received we weren't able to respond to all the comments at the meeting but we are looking to respond to to some of those overarching you know common questions when we have the refined summary of this engagement period.

I also want to note on here in terms of sort of webinar or larger meetings, we had two other meetings, I'll note, one was a meeting with some neighborhood representatives that was on May 18th.

And that, you know, provided a chance for some of those folks to provide their comments and questions as well, sort of a similar format to the webinars.

And we also had our steering committee meeting on May 19, which I know a couple of you participated in.

And that was an opportunity for us to hear from the steering committee, but also to hear from some others in the general community as well.

On the next slide, there's an overview of the email and phone comments we got.

And we've sort of grouped these together because they're grouped together in the data analysis that you'll see on the next batch of slides.

We received, you know, over about 1130 emails.

In the table on the right,

You can see the neighborhoods that were represented in both those emails and the phone calls, which we've received about, I think it's, let's see here.

Yeah, we had about 24 sort of calling sessions.

People might've called multiple times in a row.

So we combined that into one calling session.

So when you combined those with the emails, that's what's shown here in the table.

I'll note, the table does, I realized right before this, there's something missing from the table, which is some of the other blank responses.

So if you do the math, just know that that's what needs to be filled in there.

We asked everyone, including you all and the steering committee members and others who received emails, everyone sent them to us, which was great.

So we made sure to capture everything.

But in our original number that we put out right after the community engagement period ended, that included some duplicate emails.

So that's why this number is slightly lower than you may have seen at that point.

I want to make note before we move off of this, both that this is a lot of email comments and that's great.

It's a lot more than we've received in previous phases, but it also has, you know, this is one of the things we want to go through again because some of them were very detailed and we want to make sure we didn't lose any of those comments.

But I also want to note there were a few sort of larger scale petitions or campaigns that came through that I want to make sure we mention.

The Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition had a sort of email campaign.

I think we received about 498, 500 emails directly from that campaign through June 13.

There was a group of 11 neighborhood associations that submitted a statement and a group of community members who were organized in support of that statement called the Citizens for Responsible Planning.

And they gathered signatures, I think about 400 signatures as of June 13th.

There was a petition from the Barracks Rugby neighborhood called Slow the Vote.

And we received about 237 signatures, I believe on that.

And then a smaller scale, but also a coordinated effort.

So we want to mention it was the Food Justice Network's 24 comprehensive plan recommendations.

We received, I think, nine or 10 emails in support of that.

So when we go through the analysis of email comments in a second, you'll see that where we got direct emails from these campaigns, they're reflected in the numbers.

But if we received an email with the list of names, they may not come through as strongly in the numbers, but I want to point out that we are considering that input here.

On the next slide, you can see we had an interactive map.

And if you go to this link that's shown here, you'll not be able to see all the comments that were placed on the map.

There were about 740 comments received from about 225 people.

And for each comment people placed, they would choose whether they liked what they saw, whether they had concerns about it, or whether they had other questions or ideas they wanted to share.

And then they could submit additional comments with that.

So we'll talk through a bit more of those results with Ron in a bit.

And then lastly, on the next slide, we had a feedback form or survey available and we received 430 responses to that and that includes the 28 paper copies from the pop up events.

And again, you can see the breakdown here showing sort of who we heard from in terms of neighborhoods.

We've also got, in case anyone's interested, some additional slides in the appendix with some additional demographic information if you want to dig into that.

And you can obviously download some of the data if you'd like, shown on the link here.

So just to wrap up this section a little bit, again, we really appreciate the substantial amount of comments, questions, ideas, everything that we received.

To give some insight into how we are sort of distilling this down, we've established these sort of themes that you'll see for the open-ended comments we received on the map, on the survey, as well as on emails and voicemails.

And we tagged each comment with these themes, which were developed as we walked through them.

So they reflected what we were seeing.

And so the themes, as we're calling them, that you'll see in this presentation are preliminary and are, you know, as I said, we're going to be

Continuing to review comments and make sure that when we put out the full engagement summary that it's really reflective fully of what we're hearing.

I think the themes are are accurate.

I just, you know, some of the numbers may increase slightly, for example.

But just to reiterate again, you know, if you don't see your input directly reflected in this, please know that we are continuing to consider all of those comments, even if they're not shown here.

So that's all of the activities we completed.

That's not what we heard, right?

So now we're going to jump in a bit to what we heard.

And I will start with that on the chapters on the next slide.

So actually, if you wanna go through to the next one as well, thank you.

So as you may know, if you've all looked at the chapters and I hope you have, there are seven topic specific chapters of the comprehensive plan.

In the fall, we reviewed with you and the community the draft guiding principles which apply to the entire document as well as the draft vision statements which are sort of future ideas for each of these different topics.

Then in this year in May and June, when we shared the draft chapters, we also added in the draft goals and strategies, which were aimed at achieving these different chapter visions that were outlined previously.

So when we were getting feedback on the chapters, what we were asking for was feedback on these goals and these strategies that we had put out.

If you go to the next slide, we have a few slides here with the chapters.

And on each of these in the tables, you'll see some of the main themes that we've pulled out of the survey responses.

And then on the right in the bulleted list, you'll see some of the things that came out of the email responses.

And for the most part, people who sent us emails, largely it was about the future land use map.

So that doesn't necessarily, so that's why we're not quantifying a lot of the chapter comments for the emails.

But on the survey, we asked direct questions about the chapters.

So we're able to pull those out more directly here.

But looking at these, we've pulled out just on this slide, it's just anything that had sort of above 10 was pulled out.

So if you're looking at the top chapter here, the land use, urban form, and historic and cultural preservation chapter,

The top sort of couple of comments that came out were people expressing potential concerns about the land use approach related to neighborhood or community character, conservation for historic communities or buildings, and then height and scale concerns of potential new development.

And then the second sort of highest comment that we heard was sort of general support for either the chapter or for more housing affordability and density.

So those two things aren't always directly opposed to each other, but often it does kind of work out that way.

So as you'll see throughout this, we heard comments across the spectrum of input throughout all these different mechanisms.

And I'm just going to go through the top few of each of these to not exhaust you, but we'll be happy to respond to questions about these later.

Looking at the housing chapter, as you may recall, a lot of the revisions we made in the housing chapter were focused on pulling in those recommendations from the affordable housing plan, which we've discussed previously.

So in looking at that, sort of the main theme we heard about this chapter was a general support for increasing housing density or intensity.

But then, similar to the land use piece, we also heard some concerns about what that potential increase in density or intensity would mean, particularly related to community character.

We also heard, going down to the next two on the housing chapter, we heard support for affordable housing strategies but also some concerns that the approach that we've outlined wouldn't necessarily create that affordable housing, you know, reach that goal that we've set out.

If you go to the next slide, we'll show the next two chapters.

So transportation, I think really strongly what we heard here was support for safer, more connected multimodal transportation options.

And people didn't always say it like that, but we've pulled out where people wanted more connected sidewalks or more bike lanes, for example.

We've sort of pulled that into this category and we can look at breaking that down more.

You know, it's a different individual categories as well.

But in general, there was a lot of support for improved transportation throughout the city, as well as looking at potential for more frequent bus service or expanded public transportation in general.

The next few chapters have, sorry if you go back once a little bit.

Thanks.

So with the environment, climate, and food access chapter, as you can see here, there's fewer comments we pulled out here.

But I think they're all notable and they sort of, they were reflected in some of the comments we got via email as well.

We heard concerns about tree canopy, support for enhancing the tree canopy, but also potential concerns about what additional development could mean for the tree canopy.

and then we heard support for climate and energy initiatives as well as support for food equity and local food.

If you go to the next slide with economic prosperity and opportunity chapter, again, these look like very small numbers.

We did not hear from as many people on these chapters as we did on some of the others.

But in general, we did hear support for addressing wages in the city, looking at additional workforce development,

We did hear some concerns that people didn't think maybe the plan strategies will adequately get us to the vision we established so you know we want to make sure we look at those comments closely and see you know what we may be able to address in the plan.

And then down on the bottom here, the community facilities and services themes.

We heard support for more parks and green space, as well as concerns about stormwater and some comments on policing and community safety.

But again, in general, there were fewer comments on the survey related to community facilities and services.

I would say, you know, in emails and I think another, you know, on the Wiki map as well, you'll see we did hear a lot of input about infrastructure and how infrastructure and development should be paired moving forward.

The last chapter, I believe, is on the next slide, Community Engagement and Collaboration.

I think we heard, in responding to this chapter, we heard that people wanted to see additional engagement around this process.

Some folks expressed they hadn't been involved in this process previously, and they, you know, want to see additional engagement with this current process.

But I think then we also heard general agreement with this chapter, which sets out goals around community engagement and collaboration, not only for this process, but for other planning processes.

And we heard, I think, good support for that.

So I think with that, I believe that is the end of my slides here.

Let's see if you go to the next one.

Great.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

So the area of element comprehensive plan that we received the most comment around was the future land use map.

Next slide.

Just as a refresher, this is the draft future landings map that was shared with the public through the month of May and June for feedback.

Also, we have not changed the map.

This is only here for reference just to give us all a sense of orientation as to what was reviewed as part of that review process.

Next slide.

So very similarly to how we organized comments for the chapters, we did the same for the future Land Use Map comments.

First, I'll start out by going over the feedback that we received from letters, emails, phone conversations, or voicemails.

So on the left, you can see kind of the top categories of concerns and comments that we received.

And you will see, I will note before I get started with this, that you will see across all the different methods that we obtain information that there are different themes, depending upon who responded to these different methods, for example,

For letters, emails, and phone comments, we received nearly 500 emails from the Charlottesville income housing coalition effort.

So those emails are reflected in the percentages.

So you can see as we move through the different methods, some of the concerns shift into different categories.

So that's something to keep in mind as we move forward.

So for letters, emails, and phone comments, 47% of respondents showed general support of the land use approach.

Two, there were concerns about displacement, particularly among Black and low-income residents throughout the city.

And then thirdly, there was a desire for more density in historically exclusionary majority white communities.

We received quite a few comments that perhaps this feature lanes map wasn't going far enough with equity.

So there was concerns around that.

And then point four, there were support for a general increase of general residential category, which is our lowest intensity residential land use category that we've shown on the future land use map.

We heard desires to perhaps instead of one to three units per lot,

to consider four to five units per lot.

And again, those top four themes highly reflect the input we received from the Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition's effort with the 500 emails, so I will move back.

And then below that we did hear concerns very similarly to what we heard for the chat room comments around the process and perhaps not having enough community engagement and view time to provide input

There were concerns around transportation and infrastructure, particularly considering the increase in density.

There are concerns around traffic and how people living in Charlottesville may contribute to more cars on the road and other negative impacts as far as transportation goes.

But we also, as Jeannie had mentioned, there were

support around mass transit and other alternative modes of transportation.

So that's reflected there.

There were quite a bit of concerns around developer intentions and implementation.

Citizens are very skeptical of developers, so there were concerns around

whether or not you know the increase of density whether or not developers could take advantage of that and had negative impact to the community and then we also heard concerns around property values and taxes property values decreasing there was some concerns around that particularly around increased density and then we also heard concerns around increased property values and

particularly lower income residents being pushed out of the communities that they love because the property values increase as more development occurs over time.

Next slide, please.

Again, we also received feedback from the comment forms and survey for these comments.

The comments were much more site-specific.

People were more focused in on their backyard, so to speak.

So 11% of those comments reflected that theme.

There was a general support, about 9% of respondents having that general support.

There were quite a bit of concerns around character, form, and height, particularly around the medium intensity and higher intensity mixed use categories where people were concerned.

and wanted to make sure that the increase in density respects the character of these existing neighborhoods.

Again, property value was a great concern.

And then we did hear a 6% general opposition to the future language map.

The graph to the right shows who supported and where they live.

So the bars in green represent a general support of the future land use map related to one individual neighborhood, and then the blue or purple

Bar represents where respondents felt like the future landings map was not appropriate for the neighborhood.

So you could see neighborhoods that will be experiencing or proposed to experience the most change, had the most negative feedback.

So communities like Barracks Rugby, Greenbrier, Lewis Mountain, north of downtown Rugby Hills, those communities did have

More negative sentiment around the future land use map and other communities that perhaps are less impacted like Fife Field, Frost Springs, you know, Martha Jefferson, Rose Hill, some of those communities, they have mostly more support for the future land use map.

So you can see geographically where sentiments around the future land use map as shown differ throughout the city.

Next slide, please.

We also asked through the survey very specific questions around whether or not respondents felt like the comprehensive plan or the future values map addresses the planning objectives of the plan.

We asked whether it was overall support of the overall concept of mixed-use nodes and corridors, which was

A framework we use to organize the future land use map.

We also asked about whether or not respondents felt like the future land use map supports the overall vision of increasing housing diversity throughout the city.

And we also asked whether or not respondents believe that the future land use map will support affordable housing throughout the city.

And you can see from the responses, they're pretty much flat across the board in many instances.

Some higher support, for instance, around the overall concept of mixed-use nodes and corridors and diversification of housing throughout the city.

But generally, across the board, it was relatively evenly distributed support and dissupport for the future land use map around these questions.

Next slide.

We also obtained demographic information from respondents, and this is one of the sample demographic categories that we were able to analyze.

We also included additional race and income demographics, which can be found in the appendix of the presentation, if you wanna take a closer look at that, or we can look at that, certainly, if there's questions around that.

But looking at homeowner versus renters, there was a higher degree of support for the future land use map from renters.

You can see that reflected here and less support from homeowners.

And again, with homeowners citing concerns around property values, community character, and other concerns that directly impact the places that they live and they own.

And renters see this as an opportunity to diversify where they can live in the city.

Perhaps there's more opportunities to rent in communities and neighborhoods that traditionally was out of reach.

So you can definitely see the differences between homeowners and renters within this feedback.

Next slide.

In addition, we also provide an opportunity for citizens to directly map geographically where they have concerns, and we were able to do that through an interactive online map, our WikiMap, and we received quite a bit of feedback.

It's been a very effective tool to enable people to really get down into the plan and be very specific with their concerns.

So kind of the top five areas of comments that we received very similarly to some of the other things, to the other methods, traffic, transportation, and infrastructure concerns around growth, a desire to decrease density, intensity, and height.

Site-specific comments, 14%, was number two in the themes that we heard.

Similar to that, we have the community character, history, height, and scale.

There were a lot of concerns, again, around increased density and what it means for these existing neighborhoods and the concern that residents don't want development that's out of scale and out of character to the places that they live.

And there's a lot of skepticism around what it means for the future land use map has shown and how that may affect community character.

There was some support in 11% of respondents that generally like the plan as shown.

And then there was also, in contrast to those who seek to decrease density and intensity on the map, there was also a desire to increase density and intensity.

And at almost 11%, we received that comment as a major theme as well, particularly around the desire to show more medium and high intensity residential

on the map.

Next slide.

So we touched on this earlier in the presentation.

We received over 745 individual comments from 225 unique IDs or users.

We did recognize that some people placed more than one point.

Some people really got into the map and really delved into the detail and provided significant comments, which was great.

We were also able to collect some demographic data.

It was optional, so not everyone participated in that.

Most people decided to be anonymous, but we did offer that as an opportunity, and we received a wide range of comments, and they're overall organized into three core themes, land use development considerations and additional ideas.

So the map on the right, the black dots, represent each of the individual comments that we received.

So you can see, we got comments for many areas of the city, but there's a strong concentration around the Lewis Mountain, Denable, Beardswood, and North downtown areas in particular.

Next slide.

So this is kind of a snapshot of what we heard and who we heard from.

So the graph to the left shows the 745 points of information we received and the 225 users.

We heard the most from, again, residents that live in communities that would experience the most change under the draft future land use map.

So communities like Davis Roadby, Belmont Carlton, Lewis Mountain, Rugby Hills, and north of downtown were areas where we had the most respondents or users to participate in the interactive map.

And on the right you can see where each of the points were located as well as where the respondent lives.

So generally you can see people generally commented within their neighborhood.

There were some people, again, that got into a little bit more of the details of the map and looked more holistically, but generally people were concerned with what was being proposed in their backyard, in their neighborhoods.

Next slide.

Again, this was a duplicate slide in the Planning Commission package, so I apologize for that.

We left it in just so that people don't get confused with the page numbering.

Next slide.

So we began to break down this Wikimap data into different categories.

So this map begins to reflect the desire to see less intensive uses.

So the dots in blue were a general decrease in intensity.

So you can see around the Venable Barracks Rugby area, I think along Barracks Road,

barracks and rugby roads, you see that there's a high concentration of blue dots.

So that's where we heard a lot of respondents say that they would like to see a general decrease in intensity that's shown on the future landings map.

We heard comments around where we're showing mixed use in several areas of the city.

Again, probably the places that we received the most comment on the map as far as mixed use areas were at the intersection of Barracks Road and Rugby Road where we're showing a neighborhood mixed use.

So you can see that high concentration of purple.

and then again up in the Greenbrier neighborhood in 250 Interchange.

That mixed-use node received a lot of attention.

And then along Rudby Avenue at the US 250 ramp in Interchange, we're showing some mixed-use at that location as well.

And that was another area that we heard a lot of concerns around having mixed-use at those three locations.

There was also some commentary around business and technology mixed use, the River Road corridor, the Harris Road corridor.

We did get some comments around perhaps opening those areas up for more types of mixed use, more residential use, create more complete districts at those locations.

And then again, for general residential and even single family residential, which you can see in the yellow and golden dots on the map, we heard from respondents that they would like to see that at those locations.

So we got a lot of those comments at Lewis Mountain, Venable, again the

The barracks, the barracks, Rugby Road, Rugby Avenue corridors down in Fry Springs, and then over at North Downtown, we have a highest concentration of that general desire to reduce the residential intensity in those communities.

Next slide.

So on the opposite end of that spectrum, we also heard desire to increase intensity in areas of the city.

So not as concentrated as we saw in the decreased intensity map, but there are some notable patterns here.

The blue dots represent general increase in intensity throughout the map.

So you can see those are fairly scattered.

People made that comment.

An increase in intensity with the red dots, so areas around Fifeville, Belmont, Carlton, some areas of downtown.

We saw the highest concentration of that comment for the increase in intensity generally at those locations.

There was desire to increase mixed-use intensity, representative of the purple dots.

No clear pattern, it was just kind of sporadic in different locations throughout the city for that comment.

And then we also received comments around increasing residential intensity, so the brown

The brown dark building dots represent that comment, and you can see that pattern.

North downtown, parts of Locust Grove, and then a couple of dots intended from Page, as well as the Belmont-Carlton area of the city received kind of the highest concentration of those comments.

But then there was other areas of the city where that comment was sprinkled through.

Next slide.

Then the next is general development considerations.

Again, you kind of heard these things through some of the other methods of feedback that we received from respondents.

So communicate to a scale, history,

was a concern, particularly, again, the Venable, the Lewis Mountain, the Barracks Rugby, Greenbrier, North Downtown, Martha Jefferson, and portions of the Belmont-Carlton area.

There was concerns around, particularly around where we were showing medium intensity residential

that there's just a concern that perhaps that intensity is too much for those locations and that people are concerned around how that intensity would fit into the existing character.

Kind of related to that transitions, how buildings step down and the overall urban form and development quality was a concern.

Those represented by the red dots, which are pretty scattered around.

We heard a lot of comments around transportation and infrastructure, particularly where we're increasing intensity of development.

Again, a common thing, the Rugby Road, Barracks Road, Rugby Avenue corridors, where we see a lot of comments for that issue in those areas, as well as scattered throughout the map.

And then environmental concerns, whether that's tree canopy, floodplains, climate, pollution, topography,

We heard those in various locations throughout the city, more so scattered throughout around the map.

Next slide.

And then last but not least, we heard comments around key issues related to affordability and displacement, getting back to concerns around property values, whether it's increasing throughout the city.

As redevelopment happened, what does that mean for residents that live in some of these communities, but it's not going to be pushed out?

So we heard a lot of those comments around Ferricks Road B, Greenbrier, some of the core neighborhoods such as Star Hill, 10th and Page, Fifeville, and scattered in other locations throughout the map.

Neighborhoods immediately surrounding UVA.

You know that UVA is a major institution of the city and it has far and broad reaching impact.

We heard from particularly neighborhoods immediately surrounding UVA concerned around that growth and how increased density in those neighborhoods may attract student housing and other development concerns around that growth.

And then property value concerns, the red dots, again, some of the key neighborhoods where there are concerns around decreases and increases in property values and various locations on the map.

Next slide.

Thanks, Ron, and I won't walk through this in full.

But what we want to reiterate here is that these are sort of the general themes we pulled out.

We took sort of what fell to the top of each of those different methods, the survey, the map, emails, and pulled them into here, as well as things that may have come out.

You know, we also considered, you know, what do we hear a lot at pop-up events or when out speaking with people in neighborhoods and we want to make sure that and those were generally reflected by what we had heard on those other mechanisms we've talked about.

So these are all sort of the general overarching themes we want to pull out, but I want to reiterate this first point that's on the bullet here, which is

I think by and large everyone agrees that it's important to address affordability in the city.

There's some disagreement on how it should be done and whether this land use map and the chapters and the affordable housing plan can get us there.

And so we appreciate all the comments we got again.

We've listed some of the main questions we're thinking about right now.

How can this work in implementation?

How can this really lead to affordability and benefit the entire community?

And then, you know, we want to be clear as we move forward, any decisions that are made about changes to the map or whatnot based on what we're hearing, we want to be really clear about that, you know, as we continue to go forward.

So those are things we'll be keeping in mind.

But in general, that's the end of our overview presentation.

I know we'll speak with you all more about that.

Great, thanks.

Mr. Rice, I think we're ready to open up for public input.

Let's see how we're doing in about 45 minutes.

Because I do want to give the commissioners an opportunity to ask questions and then an opportunity to provide input before we lose any of them.

And so let's do this for about 45 minutes, let the commissioners do what they need to do, then we'll open it back up again after the commissioners provide input.

All right.

And if you like to address the planning commission at this time, please select your raise hand icon.

Or if you're joining us by phone, press star nine, and that is star six to unmute and mute.

We will call on you in the order of hands raised and we'll have three minutes for comment.

And our first speaker is Nancy Summers.

Nancy, you're on with the commission.

You have three minutes.

Nancy?

I just wanted to say that you're talking a great deal about density and intensity, but you're not talking about population growth.

Obviously, if in every lot where, you know, this is general residential, you have four or five units, you'd have enormous population growth.

Now, everyone knows Charlottesville is tiny, 10.4 square miles.

and I just haven't seen any projection of the kind of population growth you imagine in our very small city.

Density, yes.

Intensity, yes.

But what about population growth?

We could be an incredibly intensely dense and crowded city.

We're already 4,600 per square mile.

What do you imagine to be the population growth of our city and why?

I've seen figures from, you know, Weldon Cooper of only 3,000 more people in 20 years.

What kind of figures are you dealing with?

I remember Ron, I remember you said in one of the sessions that you had no idea how many people would come to Charlottesville.

All right, thank you very much Nancy.

And next we have Laura Knott.

Laura, you're on with the commission.

Welcome, Laura.

And Laura, you're muted maybe.

You may be muted, Laura.

Are you there, Laura?

Okay, Laura, we will keep your hands up and we will come back to you.

Next up, we have Maddie Green.

Maddie, you're all at the commission.

Hi there.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Great.

I just wanted to comment on kind of where the comments came from in the plan.

and just noting that they came from a lot of communities that were exclusionarily zoned and had racial covenants in the houses and I think it's we can see that the residents are still advocating for those same policies and quite frankly they're racist policies in Charlottesville and they operate as economic policies now but

saying you don't want affordable housing in your backyard or any kind of density is effectively saying you don't want people who make less money than you in your backyard at this point.

And I don't think Charlottesville wants to stand for that.

And I think considering you got 500 emails from the Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition, you know where a lot of other citizens land on this point.

And I also want to support

protecting the historically African American neighborhoods.

And I think you had some comments from those areas about how they're concerned about their property values and development pressure in their areas, which we've already seen in Charlottesville.

So thank you for your time.

And I would just like to ask that you consider where the comments came from and the areas of the city that could use some change in order to provide more affordable housing for everyone.

And we'll try to go back to Laura Knott.

Laura, are you with us?

Go ahead and unmute, Laura.

So we will try her again.

We'll send her back to Q. Next up, we have NB.

NB, you're on with the Planning Commission.

Welcome, NB.

Andy.

Okay.

They appear to be unmuted.

So those of you who are having difficulty, check your audio settings, please.

And next is Jake Gold.

Good evening.

All right, thank you.

Members of the Planning Commission, consultants from the SEVO Plans team, my name is Jake Gold.

I live in complex in Belmont on an R2 proposal.

It's amazing.

I wanted to first thank the SEVO Plans team for pulling together this analysis.

This whole process has been just a gargantuan undertaking.

You all deserve tremendous credit.

I wanted to echo Maddie Green's comments.

Nearly half of the email messages that came in were in support of desegregating our community by putting more housing in historically exclusionary neighborhoods and by ensuring that

We are really investing in economic opportunity for people by putting new homes there.

I think it's a smart approach.

I think it's the right approach.

And I hope the Planning Commission will encourage the consultants to maintain that approach and build on it as the future land use map moves forward.

Thank you very much, Jake.

Sure.

And Laura, you are back on with the commission.

It looks like you're calling in now.

Are you there?

Here's something, but Laura, we'll keep trying.

We will send you to the back of the queue and hopefully you can hang on.

We will try NB one more time.

NB, are you there?

You will have to unmute.

And we will send NB back to the queue.

And next up we have Josh Kran.

Josh, you're on with the commission.

You have three minutes.

Hi everybody.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

So my name is Josh Kron.

I live on North Avenue in the Locust Grove neighborhood.

My family and I have lived in our current house for 13 years.

I've lived in lots of different other places in Charlottesville since 1991.

The main point I'd like to make today is that I support increased housing density, mixed use zoning for small commercial uses within neighborhoods, and planning in general for humans, not cars.

Specifically, my neighborhood is basically 100% R1 single-family detached houses.

It's not a rich neighborhood, at least not yet, but it is mostly white.

North Avenue and the surrounding streets around us are mostly small brick ranches that were all built in the 50s.

These have been relatively cheap quote unquote starter houses for folks who are able to get a mortgage.

But if land values continue to soar in Charlottesville, these houses are going to be replaced with larger buildings of some kind.

So we can decide whether we want to watch them become mansions for a few wealthy buyers or we can allow them to become multifamily houses and apartments for many more people who want to live here.

I think that's a no brainer.

I'd also like to quickly talk about walkability and bikeability.

My house is only a mile from the downtown mall, but it's extremely impractical for me to buy groceries without making a car trip.

I'd love to have a corner store and a cafe or a pub within walking distance or even safe bicycling distance from my house.

But those kinds of retail amenities are illegal under the residential zoning code.

I lived in Virginia for most of my life, but I did have the privilege to live in the Netherlands for two years in the mid-2000s.

And there I experienced urban planning that's truly designed for people and not cars.

I know it's hard for people who've lived in the US to imagine living without cars, but the car-centric landscape that we've built

isn't inevitable.

It's an active choice that we've made over the last 80 years or so.

And likewise, we can choose to plan our city for people and public health.

But that's a choice that we have to make and we have to follow through on it.

So this is all a way of saying that I support the future land use map.

I think it's a step in making that choice.

It's a small step, and I wish it went further, but it's crucial if we wanna move forward and build a community that's equitable, healthy, and sustainable.

Okay, let's try NB one more time.

NB, are you on with us?

NB, can you hear us?

It's like we're still having difficulty.

We will come back.

Next up, we have Mark Cabot.

Yeah, I just want to check if you can hear me first.

OK.

I think the first thing that we need to be thinking about is how dense do we want our community to be?

That seems to me to be the number one question that should be asked.

And do we have the infrastructure to support the higher density?

I want to relay something that I attended a seminar that was done by Tom Tom, I think it was about three years ago, in which they had three experts in the field of affordability come out.

And the bottom line that I got from their presentation, which was basically overflowing with people that attended it, some of you all might have attended it also, was that you're not going to achieve affordable housing

unless you by building new construction because new construction inherently is expensive and you're just not gonna get what would be considered affordable housing and that would be better to spend money on adding on to existing housing to doing something maybe a little house in the backyard

or renovating some of your larger houses, which has been done to a large degree here already in town, but could be done a little bit more so.

So I just want to convey that to you all.

And I think also what needs to be addressed is a lot of people don't really understand

what the term means when you talk about affordable housing.

What is affordable housing?

What dollar value would that really represent at today's market price?

And I'm putting together some data on that.

and hope to be able to share that shortly.

And also need to be looking at the standpoint from, we need to look at this not just from Charlottesville, but also Charlottesville, the university and Albemarle County.

I've been driving in Albemarle, going up to Madison the past week on business quite a bit.

and it's a lot of construction going on both for single-family homes as well as apartments and this all needs to be taken into consideration.

Then the growth area taking place in Crozet.

Not all these people are going to be driving to downtown Charlottesville.

A lot of them will be working in areas that will be outside the city limits.

So we need to consider all this and just don't fill that by building density that we're necessarily going to achieve affordability unless we have public funding from the government to help with that.

All right, thank you very much.

Absolutely.

For those of you having difficulty with your device audio, you can always try to call 408-638-0968.

And that is in the chat feature if you open up your chat, 408-638-0968.

and the meeting ID is 964-05-30-2089.

And again, this information is in chat.

Next, we have Kevin Hildebrand.

Kevin, you are on with Planning Commission.

You have three minutes.

Thank you so much.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

I wanted to just let you know that I did provide an email response and rather than reading through all of it,

If there's some way to append my email to the meeting minutes, that might save a lot of time.

It was a June 13th email in response to the request for comments by the 13th.

But one of the things that I guess, and as an opponent to the general change of R1 to medium density residential,

I live in the Johnson Village, Cherry Avenue neighborhood, which is very ethnically diverse and very economically diverse.

It has gotten very expensive in the last few years as house prices have gone up.

But most of the single family houses are still there, and they're a vehicle for wealth development for families who have invested there.

And I think the idea of transitioning most of the city to apartments in multifamily

dwellings where people don't have the ability to improve themselves through ownership is shortsightedness on the part of the city.

I also don't understand what employment opportunities the city projects over the next 10 to 20 years that is going to drive the need for this intense development change.

If there is no economic growth in the city as far as employment goes,

What are these people going to be doing and what jobs are being created that will pay a salary that's a livable wage as opposed to a minimum wage?

I just don't understand what is driving this intensity increase.

I think there's also a misunderstanding of the future land use plan in that it doesn't take into account the topography of the city.

There's a proposal to change residential neighborhoods into mixed use nodes that are on steeply graded streets by Cherry Avenue Christian Church that just wouldn't support the change for commercial with ADA and public access being readily available.

So those are some of the items that I mentioned in my email, but I hope that

you will consider these things.

And also the, as one speaker mentioned, the growth around the city that's currently taking place in Albemarle County, I think we're looking at Charlottesville in a vacuum and not considering the growth around the city.

And that in order to understand how the density that's projected is going to be accommodated in the county, not in the city is something we need to look at.

And also the fact that most of the work opportunities will probably be generated in the county, not the city.

So the idea that you're limiting vehicular traffic may not be a reality because that's just not the way people work.

Thank you for your time.

And I really appreciate your listening.

And next we have Nancy Summers.

Nancy, you are on with the commission.

Myself.

There is something.

that I have to say.

I live in a home that had a covenant.

It would have excluded me.

I couldn't have lived in my house.

It was from 1917.

And I feel very strongly that all of Charlottesville lived under these terrible Jim Crow laws.

They were horrible, nightmarish laws.

It wasn't just homes with covenants.

And some of the homes with covenants seemed to be expensive.

I don't know why this is necessarily the case.

When you say, well, there were the homes with racial covenants, the whole place was segregated.

You're drinking fountains, bathrooms, schools, universities, hospitals, not homes with covenants.

And I have a particular version to scapegoating.

I really do.

It's my own heritage, which suffered terribly from scapegoating.

And the idea that the covenants are somehow different than the nightmarish regulations of Jim Crow, it's just not different.

Some of them, I don't know why they put covenants on it.

1917, it was way before even an old lady like me was born.

Jews.

They kept Jews out, actually.

Mine said Aryans.

But this whole area, so you shouldn't scapegoat covenants.

You may have other issues with expensive housing.

I get that.

But it isn't the covenants that define Jim Crow.

That's just the kind of scapegoating.

I don't like it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm David Summers.

I'm Nancy Summers' wife.

I'm waving at everybody.

I'm waving back.

Yeah.

But the important point is, to my mind, and the things that we've heard so far, is does the projected population for the city of Charlottesville

which in the plan that I've read is very high.

We're talking about an increase in population of 100,000 people and the scheme for the increase in the construction of housing that produces the low cost housing.

Does this yield the low cost housing that we want?

One of the things I think is that everybody that I've heard so far is in favor of more low cost housing.

But the question is, does the growth of the city of Charlottesville promise to generate the low cost housing that everybody wants?

And I don't think it does.

If you have a difference between 100,000 people

Projected new residents in 3,000, which is what the university gives.

Mr. Simmons, you've got about five seconds.

Okay, that's it.

Okay, Mr. Rice, and I'll ask all the folks who want to speak.

If you've already spoke,

I'd ask you not to dial in again or to raise your hand again for this session.

And next up we have Ann Woolhandler.

Hi.

I would like people to take into account general cost benefit analysis.

I think this plan costs a lot in terms of loss enjoyment to people in the developed neighborhoods.

What are the benefits?

I've been looking today at some of the studies about general upzoning.

They are not that promising for increasing affordability and equity

particularly for the lower echelons of society.

When you do general upzoning, you often have some increases in transaction costs in certain areas, which means the property values may be going up on certain properties that can be used for more intensive development.

But as far as actually increasing affordability and equity,

That has not been shown to be the case.

Minneapolis has had, I gather, less affordability and equity with up-zoning.

There have also been studies in Chicago, you know, Fremont-Mark sites to those.

Those have not increased affordability and equity.

Some people at the sort of upper echelons right below

The most expensive housing may have a few more options.

It doesn't trickle down to the lower echelons.

I've also looked at Rodriguez-Pose-Storper.

Same.

They do not think general upzoning increases affordability and equity.

We are using the whole density notion.

It's so faddish.

It's the general academic view out there.

But the recent studies are showing it's not working.

And we're going to put this huge social experiment on our city, causing losses to people who

like their neighborhoods and not increasing affordability and equity.

Next, we have Don Morin.

Don, you're on with the commission.

Thank you very much, everyone on the committee and all the commissioners.

I know this is a difficult time going through this and it's taken a lot of work and time on your part, so I appreciate that and appreciate the presentation of the information that's been provided in the different surveys.

I join in a lot of the comments that question this plan, which seems to equate density with affordable housing.

Some of the issues I have, and I pointed this out in emails as well as support for petitions and things have been submitted by our neighborhood association.

I live in Rugby and Barracks Road.

and I join in Nancy Summers' comments about scapegoating.

I think that's no need for us to do that.

I think the entire city is on board with trying to give affordable housing and make it more available.

Everybody is.

It's a question of how to do it.

And my take on this is that the Weldon Center at UVA says our population is going to grow by 2,500 people by 2040.

Obviously, not all of those people are going to be the lowest income.

Not all of them are going to be the highest income.

and yet I look at this radical plan and I think it is radical because of the size of the change in the density across the entire city into all neighborhoods.

So I'd like to see, and I think other people commented about it, if our population growth is projected at 2,500 over 20 years, what does this land use plan do in terms of density?

How many more housing units are going to be available if this is all built up?

And as a subset of that issue, what is going to be the cost in terms of the city building the infrastructure to put this in place or to support it?

And if the city doesn't pay for it, the taxpayers don't pay for it, what developers are going to come in and say, OK, now I know I have to make a profit that will cover these additional infrastructure costs.

How affordable is that housing going to be that's eventually built?

And there was another comment, and this goes to the population, what are the job creators going to be in Charlottesville to support that population?

Where are they going to be?

And I agree that most of the jobs will be created outside the city.

We're landlocked.

We only have 10 square miles of territory.

We're surrounded by a huge county.

And people are going to be traveling out of the city probably to work.

One thing that I've noticed is that there's been a lot of commentary, but commentary has been coming from different groups and at different times.

And I think you all have seen that there's been a lot of criticism of the land use map since the change that occurred from March 31st to May 3rd, and then the comments that came after it.

Initially, during COVID, there was a lot of support, apparently, Lower Income and the Charlottesville Housing Authority.

But now that this has become apparent to a population general, more people are speaking to it.

We need more time.

You need more time to digest this information, to come up with a valid plan that works for everybody in Charlottesville.

Thank you very much.

Yes, Mr. Rice, your proposal is a good one.

Okay, next we have our city manager, Chip Boyles.

Right.

Okay.

We have Carol Manning.

Thank you and thank you for letting me speak.

We've had a lot of really good comments and I don't need to say things over.

I agreed with Kevin Hildebrand and Will Hander, Don Morin, so what they said goes for me as well.

I am very concerned that this is not based on data and neither data projections nor data indicating that this plan will work.

I think traffic is a huge problem.

It is hard for me to imagine that we are doing this, making these changes without working collaboratively with the county and with UVA.

We cannot do this alone.

And I think we need to, we should not even think about implementing a plan without having them on board.

So we also need higher paying jobs.

I don't think there has been enough attention paid to infrastructure, to the traffic.

I agree.

We do not want to live in a car-centric place and I don't think that there's been any attention paid to that in terms of where you're putting nodes, where you're increasing density, and what the traffic is like already.

And finally, I think the really good news is we all want affordable housing.

I haven't heard anyone say they don't want affordable housing.

But I think it's important to note that when the first callers called people racist, people who they don't know, that that is a non-starter.

That is a way to end conversation.

What we want is collaborative conversation.

We want to work together.

So it makes sense to not assume the worst about people, but to try to have conversation that will lead us forward in a positive way.

And next we have Elliot Casey.

Yeah, here we go.

Thank you.

Can you hear me okay?

Thank you all, and I really appreciate your work and you're carefully listening to the voices of everyone in the community.

I guess for me, I'm interested in why, in all this analysis, there doesn't seem to be very much study about how UVA and UVA student housing has been growing into the surrounding neighborhoods.

The plan

and this was confirmed, I think at the last meeting, seems to be to convert several neighborhoods, Lewis Mountain, Venable, Rugby, that are occupied by Charlottesville residents into student housing and that's something that we've been doing continuously for the last 30 years.

And you do what you always did, you get what you always got.

That plan hasn't done anything to increase affordability of housing in Charlottesville.

If you convert residential housing into UVA student housing, the inevitable result is that UVA just grows and adds more students.

And I guess I'm a little confused reading the plan as to why we're demolishing entire neighborhoods, building units with dozens of structures, dozens of apartments in them.

just to accommodate more students for UVA so the students can move in.

And I don't really see anything in this plan that incorporates UVA as a partner into the plan.

You know, they will undo everything that you do by simply growing as they always have since the mid-20th century.

I was here in the 90s.

I watched them displace residence in Frye Spring.

I watched them displace residence in 14th Street.

And I appreciate that consultants did some important research into the history of racial covenants and segregation in the city.

But they didn't, at least they haven't shared with us, and maybe they did do the research, I don't know, research into UVA and its impact in the community and how UVA and the student housing has affected the cost of housing and what's happened, the fate of housing when it's built in the community.

On the other hand, everything that I've seen post the pandemic, and this report really reads to me like a report that was written before the pandemic, before work stopped being in person, before we realized we don't have to go to a central office, we can work remotely.

And just came back from New York City where people, major law firms, major businesses are ending their leases, moving out of the city, finding they don't need to have a central office anymore.

So this projection from Weldon Cooper, I don't think that that's a pre-pandemic projection as well, that people may not want to live in the city anymore.

They may choose to live in other places because why?

You don't have to live in Virginia to work in Virginia.

So it seems to me wiping out Lewis Mountain, wiping out Venable, wiping out these surrounding neighborhoods just to turn over the housing to students does nothing to address affordability.

It hasn't addressed affordability for 30 years.

It just brings more cars.

It brings more students, fewer actual city residents, and it just hurts the city.

And I just really am confused as to why we're doing that.

Next is Vern Buchanan.

Vern, you're on with the commission.

You'll need to unmute your mic.

First off, I kind of bristle at that comment that the covenants were racist.

Maybe the one in 1917, the one for Greenbrier,

If my things are right was in 1958.

It's not about race.

It was about the people coming down from the North, moving in, moving in, and excluding the people from Charlottesville.

This is according to my wife, who is a local.

She was born and raised here.

I'm not a racist, I don't think.

And I have no problem with different people moving into the neighborhood.

It's fine with me.

What I don't want is to experience what I experienced over on River Vista Avenue.

It was the first house that we ever bought.

The house next to us was rented by some very fine people who were bar workers and I worked from 7 to 3.30.

A bar worker works until 2 and then gets off.

I don't want overcrowding.

I moved into Greenbrier

when we found it, it's about a half a mile from where my wife grew up.

I love it here.

I don't want to tear it down just for the sake of saying we're diverse.

Let the place become diverse.

It's going that way right now.

We don't need to add more housing.

I looked at the land use map.

There's multifamily designation in my backyard.

I'm not real crazy about that.

It borders on my backyard.

I don't like the idea of Banbury becoming multifamily housing.

Yeah.

And next up we have Josh Karp.

Josh, you're on with the conversation.

Hey, long time listener, long time caller.

I'm Josh Carf.

I'm renting on Amherst Street right now.

I'm calling to talk about climate, but I will just say, it shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway.

I'm pretty sure that racial covenants are racist and about race.

You all are the experts, but I think that those things are probably related.

Anyway, climate.

So it's been in the news a lot lately.

So over the weekend, Seattle hit record high temperatures of 108 degrees, at that temperature asphalt melts and streets buckle, beachfront condo collapsed in Miami, and we're looking at a really bad fire season in the in the western US.

And I bring this all up because

A research group at UC Berkeley led by a Nobel-winning climate scientists has been studying different options for cities, specifically for cities, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and do something about climate change.

And what they found comparing lots of options is that the single best thing that you all can do is not solar panels, not electric cars, those are good.

The single best thing you can do to deal with climate is to build more housing close to work and close to schools.

This team has got a great map you can look at, I hope that you do look at it, showing per capita emissions by zip code.

And if you look, Charlottesville is an oasis of relatively low emissions surrounded by a, I don't know, desert, Albemarle County, of very high emissions.

And so if you move a family from Charlottesville to Albemarle, as happens every day these days, their emissions increase by about 50%.

If you move a family from Albemarle to Charlottesville, their emissions decrease by a third.

And you can kind of see why.

One of the biggest sources of emissions now is transportation.

And so if you are living close to your work, close to your school, close to amenities, you can drive much less.

You can even walk more than that.

So I think there are many reasons about more housing in the city, for affordability reasons, for quality of life, for reduced traffic, but the climate piece is so critical.

If we're going to have any hope of a livable climate in the future, which I'm not sure we do, but we should try, we have to stop putting people farther and farther from the city, from their work and their schools, push them into Albemarle and, you know, in Rivanna and so on.

People need to be able to live close to where they work, and that means living in a city.

A final point.

As we know, climate change is going to have the worst effects on low-income communities of color.

But as we've been hearing, most comments that you all have been getting, including mine, I will say, come from people in Charlottesville who are wealthy, white, and own homes.

And so just thinking about the client benefits will accrue to people who are not speaking to you a whole lot right now.

So I would just urge you to continue to prioritize and center people who don't have the time or the resources to call in for meetings like this.

That's all.

Thank you very much.

Sounds good.

No relation, I don't think.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

I want to say that I totally support

your goals.

I'm impressed with all the hard work that you've done.

What some of us really want to see is your advocacy or your inclusion of some sort something in the nature of here's a range of guarantees of affordable housing that we strongly advocate and we think that the plan requires

these sorts of conditions because I don't believe that density in itself is going to bring affordability.

I think that's a dogma.

I think you have to have legal binding guarantees.

And there've been a lot of notable cases in Charlottesville of developers promising affordable housing and then

Frankly, weaseling out of the commitment, even though the permission to go ahead, in one case, a developer got a special use permit on the basis of promise of affordable housing, which he was not legally obligated to fulfill, so he did not.

And he basically thumbed his nose at my neighborhood and city council and everyone else, and said he'd be happy to pay into the fund.

This is not a good thing.

So I really implore you to include a range of reasonable guarantees, talk to low and affordable income housing experts, and please make it stick.

This is what we really want.

The other thing that

people and I live a little high.

The thing that a lot of people here are concerned about is preserving the tree canopy, keeping our roads from becoming overwhelmed by the traffic.

I completely endorse the earlier comments about reducing reliance on automobiles in the city.

I really urge you to just think about goals like that.

And next up, we have Liz Sloan.

And after Liz, we have Sean Mullane.

And per the chair's directives, we will pause public comment after Sean.

And Liz, you are on with the commission.

Welcome, Liz.

Hello.

Can you hear me?

Thank you all for your hard work on this and I'm going to keep my comments as short as I can since it's been a long evening.

Basically, I just want to say Charlottesville is just not any city.

We're the home of a great university and we're a world, which is a world heritage site.

There are only 24 of those in the United States.

My neighborhood happens to be the Lewis Mountain neighborhood, which is adjacent to this World Heritage site.

This neighborhood has been completely, unlike any other neighborhood in the city, has been completely shifted from, and we've been looking for the past 45 minutes to find your map.

So my next impression is put the map right on the city page.

You can just click right on it, because I can't find it.

I'm an architect and I'm used to going through this stuff.

going on, but we are the only neighborhood that's been completely changed from the yellow color to gold.

And it's just not in accordance with the University of Virginia and the great beauty and its historic nature.

We have tourists walking through our neighborhood.

Our neighborhood already has all mixed use.

I completely, and everyone that I have ever spoken to our neighborhood is in support of changing the zoning, going,

to which would be triplexes, which I don't think most people in the city realize that the entire city, and I know it's a land use plan, but the land use for the general housing is suggesting that it will all be triplex plan.

It's a very significant shift.

I support this shift.

The one thing we haven't been able to do in our neighborhood is to have the ADU units.

I think those are very important to have.

I guess my other point is we just need more time.

It's so exciting that people are getting involved in this.

The work that's been done is wonderful.

The data that's being collected is so inclusive.

We need to touch on more, you know, just more touches with more people, more neighborhoods.

Finally, I would just like to say that

The zoning changes are not gonna support the historical black neighborhoods because they are all being changed from single-family residential, which those neighborhoods are primarily, to triplexes.

So if nothing else you hear from me, protect those historic neighborhoods.

What's so lovely about them is their scale and the tension between these small single-family homes and the shared sort of porch space in the street.

Thank you very much for all your work.

And lastly, we have Sean Mullane.

And after Sean, chair, we do have about 16 people with their hand up.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Great.

So one thing, the main thing that I wanted to address, although several comments,

is something I think would maybe help the discussion.

And that's that.

In my eyes, there are really two things that are meant by affordable housing.

And I think when people only see, only really think of one or the other, it's very easy to talk past each other.

So those two types are, first off, housing is affordable for people who make substantially less than the median income in the area.

And

I'm thinking either the underemployed or people who would otherwise make very low incomes, maybe nursing assistants or wine cooks, who without substantial increase in wages cannot really hope to afford a house in the area.

And the other is affordable housing for people who are basically middle class.

They make somewhere on the median income, which in Charlottesville is actually fairly high.

I think it's something like $90,000 a year

for a household.

And the reason I think it's important to think of those two types of affordable housing is that the solutions for one do not necessarily really bear much on the solution for the other.

And so I think they really both have to be addressed, and they really have to be addressed in different ways.

In particular, I think I agree with people you can't build your way out to affordable housing if you're considering housing for the people who make those substantially lower incomes.

But I think you can.

build your way to affordable housing for people who are basically middle-class.

And what I'd like to avoid is seeing Charlottesville become like San Francisco, where it seems like even people who are middle-class can't afford a house because to a large extent it seems to be the lack of building, lack of growth there.

They're holding so tightly to the single family homes that unless you're making a wage like an average Apple employee, you can't afford a place there, you can't afford to live there.

So that's the main thing,

who we consider as really more than one thing being considered when we're talking about affordable housing.

A couple additional comments.

One is that for those who are talking about population growth projections, I have to assume there's a chicken and egg issue there where because there's so little free housing stock in Charlottesville, we can't assume that there will be any potential growth in the city.

Really, it's largely being concentrated in the county.

And so it's not to say that there's not a demand for housing in Charlottesville as that there's not housing available here.

So I think the housing demand here is actually probably a lot more substantial than the projections might indicate.

And so we shouldn't assume that low projections indicate low demand.

That seems to be something that a couple of people were assuming.

So lastly, 10 seconds left.

I live in the Rugby Hills area, in the area that's the mixiest corridor

All right.

Thank you very much.

So there are lots of people in the lobby that would like to speak.

I'm going to ask you to, if you're able to, to remain on and give the commissioners an opportunity to ask questions and to provide the consultants input

And once they've done that, then we will reopen the public area.

So with that, with your permission, commissioners, what I'd like to do is go from left to right and just ask questions for the moment.

Once we've done that, we'll go from left to right with any input you've got.

When you're providing your input, please keep your input to five minutes.

So let's begin.

I don't think Bill is on.

Bill, you want?

All right, then let's go with Ms.

Thanks, and thank you everyone for your comments.

I'd like to start with questions I heard raised by residents.

So one thing I heard was questioning, one resident was questioning the results of up-zoning that has occurred in cities like Minneapolis and I think Chicago.

My understanding was that

It's sort of like too soon to say and but it sounds like there's some other reports out there and I'm hoping, I'm wondering if there's consultants could provide any insight.

Sure, thanks Liz.

And thanks for all the questions.

In terms of the sort of looking at places that have done a similar, and everyone realized we're not currently talking about zoning, but the land use map is very related.

So that's why we're looking at places that have done up zoning more holistically, like we're potentially looking at.

I would invite Lee Einsweiler, if you want to weigh in on this as well, but I think in several of those locations, I think some of those changes were done quite recently, which does make it difficult to say, as you mentioned, and we'd be happy to look for any, you know, even if they're not directly exactly the same thing that we're doing here, we'd be happy to look and see if there are additional examples we can pull any of that from.

This is Lee.

I'm afraid that I have to agree with you.

We don't have a lot of information right now that points to any one given solution being the answer to this question.

But all of the ideas that are being presented begin to tackle the same problem.

If you don't have to have a car, you can save $8,000 a year on average.

If you can live in a smaller home, you're paying less for your total square footage.

I'd also like to add that the plan is a long-term vision.

You know, it's going to happen incrementally over time and that, you know, it's not going to happen overnight.

So I think that as the development pressures increase, you'll see this development in the field happen over time.

Thank you.

Another speaker asked about inclusion of guarantees of affordable housing.

And I believe that the housing plan calls for tracking measures.

And I'm not sure that it is possible to have a guarantee.

But I do want to, I guess, confirm that part of the recommendation in the housing plan is to,

Yeah, so in the Affordable Housing Plan, they lay out a series of recommendations, including funding, other initiatives, land use, that can come together to address that sort of housing need that was identified in the housing needs assessment that was previously completed.

So they've identified sort of what they're proposing to use that funding initiative to get there.

and then in the comprehensive plan we've pulled in those recommendations and we've we also started to lay out some metrics you know ways we can measure success of these efforts so that's definitely a piece of that as well and then you know we will be looking at for example we're thinking about inclusionary zoning which the city can now use and other other ways to potentially

include requirements in the zoning when we get to that portion as well.

Thanks, Jenny.

One other thing is, and the speaker was Mr. Krahn, I believe, and he talked about the existing conditions on North Avenue and noted that it's likely that those modest homes, or I think he posed that it would be better that those modest homes be replaced with multi-unit or more density rather than one large single-family one, but I just

want to poke at that a little because there's actually no guarantee that that would happen in a proposed up-zoning or in the, you know, with the zoning that's being proposed there because without a provision for affordability, someone could still build a family home with no guarantee of affordability.

So I think there's

and hopefully we'll be talking a little more about possible tools like overlays in our input section.

I think those are all my direct questions.

I did have one other question and it has to do with the ease of use in the interactive map.

I've heard some concerns that it

I think the tool represents those who commented on it, which you're right, based on, you know, we do have some information about the neighborhoods.

So we can see, you know, as I think we showed that map sort of the colored dots showing where people commented.

um but I think through you know there are certainly people we were not as uh not able to to reach and you know some of the neighborhoods are not as represented through all the different methods um you know more or less more or less even than they have been in previous phases with this you know process so um I think it

It's certainly possible.

You mentioned sort of the ease of use of the map.

I know we've heard a couple of similar comments on the survey, for example, that the question, you know, is sort of a lot to get through.

And there is, we put a lot out there to review.

And so, you know, someone could certainly be turned off by that as well.

But that's why we try to provide different, a lot of different methods for people to give comments.

And I think when you look at just the neighborhoods, even we did hear from different people on each of the different methods.

Okay.

Hey, thanks for being here and for all your hard work so far.

I don't have much in the way of questions, but I'll toss a couple at you.

First off, so jumping off Liz's question about studies on previous general upzonings, I guess my question is, so while it's too soon to say for the few cities, Minneapolis, Portland, now Charlotte, that have gotten rid of single-family detached-only zoning and what the effects are of that, citywide,

Would you say that data from places that have had a more localized and not necessarily municipality-wide up-zonings or just new construction would be germane and would have what we would expect to be comparable effects?

I'm going to thank you for that.

I will openly admit that I don't have any studies at my fingertips to share with you, Commissioner.

It is a challenging question to look at natural affordability and how to induce that, which is principally what zoning can do.

The inclusionary pieces and

and the funding pieces are ways to get beyond that but fundamentally we're looking for as much natural affordability as possible and I don't have a lot of examples.

We are hoping to get HR&A back involved in the inclusionary zoning stage and if that were to happen they are more likely than I to have actually

Yeah, I'm happy to do that.

Thanks.

So next I have a question.

On kind of the flip side of that data question, so we think a lot about the evidence we have to support change, but what data do we have on the status quo?

Obviously, in the housing market this year in particular with remote work allowing people to move to the city, we've seen prices growing very fast.

Do we have data on kind of turnover of homes, home flips?

As part of the affordable housing plan, HRA Advisors, again, a member of our team, did some analysis of sort of existing conditions over time.

I'm sure you may recall that sort of looking at how household incomes have changed along with sort of the house of like immediate home price, as well as looking at, you know, different changes in rental affordability and whatnot over time, but we

I don't believe they at that point did analysis so much where you're talking about sort of changes in that sort of citywide how land use may have changed and how that may have impacted affordability potentially over time.

And we have not done that separately as well.

But I think, sorry to interrupt you, but I would say just in terms of the status quo, in general, the affordable housing plan did lay out, you know, a lot of different types of data, looking at housing supply, looking at affordability and displacement.

You know, in general, that I think is really good baseline.

Thanks.

And now to change tacks a little bit, looking at the future land use map, I feel like we've heard a lot of concerns from people of the idea that if you have a four to 12 unit per parcel limit, that people could combine a bunch of parcels and build a much larger building.

So combine 10 parcels and build 120 units or something, or four parcels to 48 units.

My reading of that map is that that would be, well, being a per parcel and if you combine parcels, you still only get 12 units and have halved your overall ability.

You're definitely right, Commissioner.

That was how it was intended.

Those are per lot.

Great, thanks.

That makes sense to me.

I guess my last question is in terms of mixed use nodes, I feel like we've heard a lot of concerns that they will be car oriented.

I've heard them referred to as shopping centers.

A couple of them are located near the bypasses.

Yes, so the neighborhood mixed-use nodes are intended to be walkable mixed-use centers that can support neighborhood service serving retail services.

Think of a place to get a cup of coffee.

Dog groomers have small offices, so they're meant to be places for the community.

They are located in the areas that do have visibility to know that retail survives and thrives when it does have visibility.

We do have to put them in locations that have good vehicular visibility, but we also want to maximize alternate ways to get to these locations through bicycle and pedestrian access as well.

so we've looked at it holistically as to with the increases of intensity that we're calling for particularly with the medium intensity residential areas that we do have these places of convergence where we have more intensive mixed use

activity.

And we're not thinking out in along those lines.

We heard a lot of concerns around gas stations, shopping malls, large parking lots out front.

That's definitely not our intention.

We want good urban form, good urban design, walkable, bikeable places within these communities and that would

Thanks.

Actually, one last question on the subject of student housing.

Some people have said that the goal of this plan is to spread student housing into more neighborhoods.

I saw some dots of concern about student housing up in Greenbrier and down in Southern Frye Spring.

What are the anticipated changes in housing availability within current existing student areas in this plan?

And is there intent to spread them out?

So we have considered UVA as a unique hub of activity in the city, right?

Not only students, it's a huge employment center.

I'm telling you all things you know, of course.

So we have considered how we know neighborhoods near UVA have likely seen a lot of development that feels sort of university oriented, but recognizing

that if there are more people living closer to where they work, where they have to go on a daily basis, that can help address some of those goals we've talked about, reducing vehicle miles traveled, addressing some climate goals and whatnot.

So we have looked at potentially providing additional opportunities for density in those neighborhoods near UVA.

Again, not only for students, although students certainly need housing too, but also looking at people who work around there.

But I would say we certainly don't have a goal to, as you said, like spread student housing into more, you know, explicitly into neighborhoods throughout the city.

We are looking at increasing opportunities for housing in neighborhoods throughout the city for the community in general.

Just a quick follow up.

So if UVA were to grow, though,

Is there nowhere for students to go but out?

Well, that would be the goal of increasing potential intensity in some areas.

Again, not only for students, but for others.

We're looking at potentially increasing the intensity of use on a piece of land so that we can grow up and not so much out.

But we also know UVA is looking as well for ways to increase student housing on campus, which is sort of a growing up and campus in general, I guess.

And so that's a piece of this as well.

Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, I'm thinking, again, specifically about JPA and rugby and whether there's an ability.

Rugby, where students currently are, right?

Like south of maybe Grady.

I see what you're saying.

Yeah, well, I think we have shown potential for increased intensity in those areas.

And if they are currently student dominated by a lot of student uses and potentially, I think what you're saying is that would sort of increase the intensity of those uses on the site and sort of keep student

We're going to have to go on to the next commissioner.

Welcome to the virtual dais.

In these virtual meetings, you'll always be the next person after Rory to get a chance to speak.

This is your opportunity not to

Not to provide input, but just to ask questions.

You'll get a chance to provide input a little later.

Thanks, Hosea.

I do.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Just a follow up on the topic of student housing.

We have not looked directly at that.

I mean, if you look at the census data, whether it's the annual census or the ACS, you know, more frequent survey data, there's clearly

You can see, I think, student areas sort of pop out because there's certain demographics who might be students, whether it's age, income, or whatnot.

But we have not looked, as you know, as part of the Affordable Housing Plan, for example, we didn't look directly at what some of those sort of quantitative metrics might be about the impacts of student housing.

But we have heard concerns about it throughout this process.

And I think people recognizing EVA's position in the university, it's something, or in the city, something we've certainly heard quite a bit about.

But no, we don't have those direct numbers.

I guess I would ask if NDS is aware of anything else, please mention it.

Yeah, there is no specified metrics, but the housing needs assessments that was prepared by PEP, Partners for Economic Solutions, indicated that one of the contributing factors in the affordable housing challenges the city is having was UVA.

I think there was

an analogy that was used that you've got a, because of lack of affordable housing and demand exceeding supply, the folks at the upper income, they take the housing belonging to the middle income and the middle income folks are taking the housing belonging to the low income folks.

And then the students for the most part are competing

with low-income folks within the city in terms of access to the affordable housing.

Thank you.

Another question I had, I was looking at the future land use map and obviously some of the uses kind of mirror what exists today.

Is there a way to, do you have an ability to overlay what exists today with the future land use map to kind of highlight exactly what is changing in what areas?

And a follow up to that,

Just a general question on the light industrial use in the city of Charlottesville, especially in central near the downtown areas.

Just trying that down.

Yeah, so to respond to both of your questions, Ron, I'll take a stab at it, but feel free to follow up if I miss anything.

So in terms of looking at a comparison of the draft future land use map to the current land use map, which I guess is sort of the closest thing we have.

The other thing we can compare it to is we've done some mapping of tax assessment data where we can see what's on the ground.

But what we did during this most recent public community

Review period was in the webinar.

We had a comparison of the future land use map, the draft, with the 2013 version, the current.

So that's in the webinar slides.

So I could make sure you have access to that if that would be useful and that sort of gives some numbers of how they compare.

And then in terms of the light industrial uses or what we're calling business and technology, we have sort of shifted that to allow for some mixed uses, including some potential residential uses in some of those areas.

So that was recognizing, we've talked a lot with staff in this process, including with the Office of Economic Development.

And I know they feel strongly that there's a need for that type of land use in the city.

Thank you.

And sorry, last question.

Was there, I know that you had a lot of public comments period.

Was there a consideration to kind of a public education on what goes into, you know, people are, seems like, concerned about these neighborhoods overnight becoming apartment buildings or multi-unit buildings.

whereas there's an intensive city process with traffic studies and architecture review board processes in some areas that goes into kind of like an overlay on top of zoning or future land use map designations.

Yeah, we have talked about sort of the process when we talk about the land use map.

This is a long-term vision for land use in the city.

And even when we get to zoning, those certain things might be allowed in the zoning.

There are often other considerations, as you mentioned, that need to be taken into account.

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Hey, I'm Ms.

Good evening everyone and to the staff.

Thank you for taking the time to go over this with us tonight.

One of the questions that I have that I would like your response on is, it was mentioned tonight during public comment and also as I've spoke to different residents throughout the city.

is that I'm finding that our residents are feeling that the increased density and intensity that has been proposed is not actually going to solve our affordable housing crisis.

Thanks for asking this.

So we tried to be very

explicit when we talked through the in the webinar, for example, to mention that you know land use is not the solution on its own to affordability.

You know we I think it's great people are recognizing that and flagging that but it's just we're trying to use land use

potentially allowing for increased intensities throughout the city or some mix of uses that will need to be paired with financial support and initiatives and other support in other ways from the city.

So I certainly would agree that land use on its own will not achieve all of the affordable housing goals that are out there.

Anything else?

I have a few, but I'll try to be brief.

A question I bring up a lot, sufficiency.

Is this enough?

Does this hit our numbers?

Sorry, so you're referring to the 4,000 identified in the needs assessment, that sort of number?

Yes.

So as I think I mentioned earlier in the Affordable Housing Plan, HRNA advisors, again, a member of our team, they're not here tonight, they laid out a series of financial incentives and programs and just funding support that they believe could support

the implementation of recommendations that would lead to you know those hitting those goals for the number of units and so the you know only again only a piece of that is land use related but we are looking you know we've tried to provide opportunities for both higher intensity residential uses sometimes with a mix of uses that could support some of those initiatives as well as some

potentially largely, for example, rental initiatives that may be in there.

Then some of the other what they might call soft density increases throughout the city could better support some of the home ownership opportunities, for example.

I do believe it is sufficient if there is financial support, but we have explicitly not put out specific

uh numbers that say you know this is a number of units um and part of that is because this is looking at increasing intensity potentially providing for those infill opportunities throughout the city we're not looking at wholesale development of undeveloped lots in most cases so it becomes a bit difficult to say exact numbers um but so you know i think provide uh combined with those initiatives and funding um you know we

Yeah, I just want to add because this is the second or third question related to the land use as a savior.

The land use is just a piece of the pie, you know, and I'm encouraging

the public to go and read the draft affordable housing, which is on the website.

It spares out several recommendations.

One of which is land use.

Land use is just one of the few recommendations that's gonna help us to move from point A to point B. You've got subsidies.

When you talk about affordable housing, land use is not gonna get it.

because the people you are looking at providing housing for.

It's an expensive proposal.

So there has to be a lot of government subsidies in order to prop up the developers to be able to leverage their resources with the city's resources.

And then you talk about tenant rights.

If the city is providing the funding

for the developments, sustainability and affordability period becomes very critical.

And then we see these investments, we'll be able to accomplish that.

And then you also talk about racial equity.

That's part of the issues we have to address, because it cuts across everything, including economic opportunities.

There are several tools in that toolbox, and land use alone is not going to do it.

We've been talking about it for a long time.

I get a lot of questions about sidewalks, protected bike lanes, off-street bike paths, transit, thoughts about a circulation plan.

The development of the implementation chapter.

So, for example, the projects you mentioned are transportation or mobility related, certainly, and we will be working with staff to identify those projects that it's a piece of what needs to go into the comprehensive plan is a list of projects.

We will be working to, in general, more generally about the plan.

The chapter, you know, throughout the topic specific chapters of the plan we did in this plus engagement period provided some really high level implementation information within there.

A big concern from 2017 was diverse representations, especially black and low income representation.

I'm not really seeing that in these numbers.

Yep, you're right.

The representation we got through the input period, at least for the ways we can measure demographics, which is the survey.

Well, really, the survey mechanism was the one where we were able to gather a lot of demographic information.

And that certainly did not reflect the full diversity of Charlottesville's residents.

I think we did hear from a greater representation of folks through email, which was great, I think.

There's a sort of a lower barrier time-wise and otherwise for folks to shoot an email.

We certainly got a wide variety of levels of detail, for example, in emails.

But it's something we continue to work on and partner with not only our steering committee and others in the city to grow that.

And we look forward to, again, being able to be out face-to-face with folks.

We were cautious about protecting our staff and the community residents during COVID.

And we didn't send people out door-to-door to talk to folks.

And that is the best way to reach a lot of folks.

And so we worked a lot with community partners to get the word out.

And that's something we'll continue to do as we can.

Sure.

I'm going to come back on video saying that my internet does not get spotty again.

No, I agree with all those points.

You know, I think also from some of the limited in-persons that we've been able to do, you know, just some interesting feedback that we have gotten and none of this would necessarily be a surprise to anyone on the call is, I think, particularly among the Black residents that we have spoken with, there's a lot of skepticism around

the public process overall.

There's a lot of skepticism around the city and obviously a lot of very long time frustration for what many folks feel is a system that's really set up to not serve them adequately.

And so I think when you are seeing a large population of folks who have that level of frustration that's seeded in decades and decades of challenges

You're going to have even more challenges getting folks to participate in the public process.

You know, Jenny mentioned we've not been able to do a whole lot of in-persons because of COVID.

We've only been able to really start doing that more recently.

I was able to actually get down to the 10th and Page neighborhood a few weeks ago during our

during the engagement phase that closed in June, which is where we were able to actually talk to some residents and share with them information about the process, many of whom had not heard about it previously.

Let's just cut into the last one.

We've talked a lot about allowing for homes.

We've gotten a lot of public comment about allowing for homes citywide.

A lot of concern about this as well.

I guess I'm going to offer up to Ron or Lee.

Happy to chime in.

This is Lee.

The reason for looking at the idea of four homes is that it is probably the maximum that a typical lot could accommodate.

And that would probably mean not only additional new construction on the site, but then splitting up of the original house potentially as one of the ways to get to additional units.

Four is a maximum.

We wouldn't expect that on every site immediately.

Just a modest suggestion of the pace of some of this.

When Seattle first implemented its accessory dwelling unit ordinance, which allowed one unit additional in the backyard, in 10 years time, they had them in, as I recall, less than 5% of the lots that were allowed to place them there.

So, as was pointed out by Ron earlier, there is a time factor associated with this.

I think some of that can be supported by some ideas that may not have made it into the affordable housing plan.

The fact that you're on mute means that you've asked all your questions, Mr. Zelliot.

Ms.

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you, Jenny and Ron, for the presentations.

As we know, the draft plan that the consultants have put forward has quite a few areas of what is currently our one district's attached single family shown as being converted to a medium intensity residential, allowing up to 12 units at four and a half stories.

For me as a design professional this seems like a drastic change that's a conflict, but

So we are, as you correctly noted, we're showing some areas of this medium intensity residential, we're calling it, which would allow potentially of the four to 12 units at the four stories, I believe it is.

So we are showing that in a

because we have heard an urge to have additional housing types allowed or available to people in some neighborhoods where they have not been available.

The way we've decided to show it is along corridors because we believe that can help to facilitate transit-oriented growth where we are potentially allowing additional density.

It could also help to facilitate any sort of other infrastructure improvements that maybe needed to go with that.

So from our mind, showing this sort of corridorist perspective is one way we were trying to do that.

Yes, in the future landings map, you know, it's very general, and we have ranges and heights up to four stories, up to 12 units per lot.

And that allows greater flexibility to establish more defined zoning districts in the zoning phase, because just due to the general nature of the future landings map, you know, we kept it

in ranges as far as the intensity at this point.

And we understand and I recognize that it certainly would not be appropriate to have four stories in every location that we're showing medium intensity residential because it would be out of character, out of scale, and just not be fitting of that community fabric.

We definitely agree with that.

And it's not our intent that every medium intensity residential district on the future landings map have the maximum development capacity.

So as a future land use approach, we generalized it, we included a range, and we'll have to refine that going forward as we move into the next phase of planning, which will be the definition of what these zoning districts will be.

And I'll harken back to the existing 2013 future land use map, which only has

around, if I remember correctly, four or five land use categories, but the zoning map has up to 30 different land use zoning categories.

So you can see how those general districts begin to break down in the zoning phase.

More definition and more definition of appropriateness is established in that zoning phase.

So I want to

Thank you.

So I think a lot of the tools would be non-land use tools in some ways.

A lot of those other tools that were identified in the affordable housing plan, whether it's providing tax abatement or support for owner-occupied rehabilitation or whatnot, support for people who may want to add an ADU

if it's allowed, but they, you know, it may be too expensive for them to do that, for example.

So there's some of those non-land use elements are included in there.

And the other way we are looking to, through the land use map, you know, protect some of these communities that have seen a lot of impact through the years is by allowing for opportunities for development in areas of the city that have not traditionally had

a lot of opportunities for development or a wider range of opportunities for development.

Some areas of downtown that are traditionally African American communities have been focus areas for development.

And I know once again, I'm telling you all things you know, but that's one way we're thinking about it as well.

I think that we are anticipating tools that might link affordability and preservation of existing homes, preservation or renovation of existing homes.

We'll be looking into as many ideas as we can to retain the fabric

of those communities, while hopefully at the same time balancing the opportunity to join those who already own homes in similar settings in in

climbing onto that wealth ladder as it's been described.

So there will be some kind of balance necessary.

We may not be offering the same bulk and mass.

We don't necessarily want to take the existing home down.

Yeah, I agree with a prior

There was a comment made by one of the attendees that Charlottesville has a range of communities and there are some wonderful communities with very small houses, a thousand square feet of small lots that could help promote homeownership and allow

Lastly, you all gave us an analysis of all the engagement comments.

We've had conversations about it.

No, I mean, in general, I mean, of course, it's something that's always, you know, we're all thinking individually, I think, as we read through comments, but we have not had any formal discussions about it.

I was a little flippant there.

I just meant to say, you know, on and off, Ron, and I have, you know, exchange ideas or whatnot, but we don't have a formal, we haven't touched it yet.

We don't have any formal recommendations, partially because we wanted to hear from you all.

But partially because we also want to, as I mentioned earlier, go through everything again and make sure we've fully kind of absorbed what we've heard because there were a lot of really thorough comments.

Good.

But in addition to hearing from us, I would certainly like to hear from you all as the planning

what your response is to these comments and the future land use map that they're commenting upon.

Anything else, Danny?

No, sir.

Great.

So

After the discussion about the restricted covenants, I've gotten a lot of texts and I've gotten a few private chats that would like to know a little bit more about the restricted covenants and the way they impact what we do.

Our chief legal officer wrote a pretty good opinion as relates to the way they impact the way we ought to think

What I suppose we ought to do, Ms.

Creasy, and maybe Lucy can help me with this, is put that someplace on the website so people can look at that and maybe advise them as to where they might go to look at it.

Creasy, can we... That'll be fine.

You can put it on the website or, you know, otherwise make it available for anybody that would like to read it.

Okay.

Right.

Thanks.

All right, now the fun part, input.

Why don't we go all the way down and begin with Liz, I mean, Ms.

Russell, I mean, Ms.

My input is gonna sound like a question because it is a question that I forgot to ask.

But I think it is prudent that we talk about in advance of a presentation that I understand will come next month, generally understand what might be feasible within, what might be gain, what might be lose in a around the conversation of affordable housing overlay.

I also would throw in there as an alternate or addition supplement, some sort of a conservation and or demolition overlay.

Okay, I wasn't sure if you want to.

So I think for those who may not be aware of the affordable housing overlay you mentioned, there has been a proposal that has been discussed with the Housing Advisory Committee that will be discussed on the next Planning Commission meeting, correct?

That's right.

Okay, so that's what Ms.

Russell is referring to.

And we have in the land use chapter, we did provide, looking forward toward the zoning, we have provided recommendations about considering some sort of overlay in terms of affordability.

So, you know,

In terms of what these overlays may offer, you know, they could, it varies depending on what the, you know, what what would be in it, but in some ways it can provide

It could be a way to require a certain level of affordability or a number of units or something just in general for any level of development above a certain level.

For one example, you mentioned conservation or demolition overlays.

There certainly can be overlays that sort of are on top of zoning that could provide some protections for different concerns that we've heard.

So I think we

Thanks, Jenny.

I mean, generally my input would be that I have concern that

Density for density's sake will not result in what we are trying to achieve, but that something like an affordable housing overlay could tip the scales in favor of affordable housing.

Let's see.

I am also really interested in better understanding how, and we've talked about it a little bit tonight, the conversation around equity building and whether and how we would both preserve neighborhoods, but also not tamp down wealth accumulation in doing that, you know, in

lowering the intensity of use for preservation purposes.

How do we balance that with not limiting, capitalizing on possible increases in property value?

So that is something I'm thinking about.

And I just want to reiterate, and we use another point, and also Alex's point about needing more in our toolkit that the land use really can't do it all.

And I know it's taking up all the oxygen in the room, but the affordable housing plan, I really want to, to the capacity that I can ensure that it doesn't get put on a shelf because there's so many other

All right, Ms.

So at this point, I've read, I think, every email.

I read through the spreadsheet of all the survey comments, and I think I looked at everything on the map.

So I've definitely heard some main themes coming forward of specifically what people are worried about.

So to me, it seems like we have three name-sticking points.

So the first is going to be medium intensity, that light brown for those small apartment buildings throughout the city.

For that, I've heard two concerns.

First, I think foremost, as Commissioner LaHendra said, it's about height.

That idea of four and a half stories where the existing neighborhood fabric and the limit in hard one zoning is 35 feet.

And what I've also heard from some people is that the way the international building code is written, to go to a fourth story, you need to add an elevator in an apartment building.

and so to add three units to get to 12

No one's going to do that.

So to me, I think it would make sense to lower that to three or three and a half stories for apartment buildings.

And then the flip side, my understanding of why that's in there is to enable the stacked townhome format, which is a housing form that we don't really have in the city yet.

We'll have some in Flint Hill.

We don't see reflected in this land use map, but is the most affordable housing form for home ownership.

and I think we saw from the RST development in the county and they're building some in Brookhill, supportable about 80% AMI at market rate.

So I think preserving a height for stacked townhomes and then lowering it for apartments makes sense.

The other thing I'm hearing from some neighborhoods and some streets is that they feel that they were singled out, that they don't understand why their street is light brown and the next street over is not.

Lewis Mountain doesn't understand why most of Lewis Mountain is light brown, others are not.

And to me, I think a 12-unit apartment building or a six-flex or an eight-flex is small enough that it doesn't really have, you know, any super appreciable adverse impacts on the neighborhood.

And an apartment building, a small apartment on your street is not going to hurt you.

And as well, there are some concerns about physical constraints on lots.

We have site plan review processes that will ensure there's adequate infrastructure, sewer, water.

There won't be traffic concerns.

To me, I think the framework proposed by HAC makes sense in that it's left prescriptive of places and lets the kind of authority details of exactly how many units anywhere go up to the actual constraints of actual lots.

So I like that approach.

I think it makes sense.

The second thing, running out of time, these mixed-use nodes, specifically the kind of de novo ones in existing built-out residential areas.

To me, as I said in my email on April 8th, it seems like we're kind of throwing darts at the map, or on May 5th, rather, and we're kind of saying this is going to change over time and not letting it happen organically.

I'm having a hard time understanding

how, like, why we would pick specific places rather than let commercial uses arise kind of from crap.

My understanding is it all kind of results from Kirk Kiesecker's analysis that let us to know that there are areas without easily walkable or access to nearby commercial uses.

So maybe we should think of more of a framework to allow small-scale, completely non-car-oriented with strict limits on parking,

kind of accessory commercial units in people's yards for owner-occupiers, for long-term renter-occupants who are also proprietors, that sort of thing, pull-out corner stores.

We kind of have this in some of our other designations.

I'm thinking about the rugby, Westwood, and dairy ones.

And then lastly, I'm thinking about the sensitive neighborhoods and particularly that concept within that framework.

I'm a little bit wary of the idea of just saying we're going to down zone these to nothing and that's going to make it affordable because that hasn't worked in the past.

But I agree that they should be protected against rising prices.

And I'm looking at a Carmelita Woods neighborhood letter on behalf of Fifeville.

And in that Cherry Avenue small area plan, people want to see more affordable housing types in Fifeville, increased variety in housing type and form that accommodate residents across the income spectrum.

So my suggestion would be we crank that dial of affordability requirements under that framework

and use that as the lever to make sure that projects can pencil in wealthy exclusionary areas and at the same time that the pressure for development in lower income areas and historically black areas is not as strong, that prices rise.

So that's what I got.

Perfect timing.

Thanks.

Thank you.

I have just a couple of points.

I want to echo what was said earlier about the affordable housing overlay and what Rory just mentioned about what are now I guess called the low density or sensitive density, you called it, residential areas.

I think

I don't know what it would be, but we need to maintain the vulnerable communities in Charlottesville.

And I know it's a multi-pronged approach with real estate tax relief and other programs as well as future non-use map interventions.

I just want to bring that up.

And my other question is, or not question, sorry, point, is about focusing on equitable gathering spaces.

As I'm learning about what happened before I joined the commission, I know there was a portion about you were supposed to study why people felt unwelcome in some areas or not.

And I'm not sure what happened with that segment of the comprehensive plan.

I know at the sort of the end of the 2017-2018 initial updates, there was a survey completed that identified, that was one of the questions that was asked of folks was, you know, do you feel comfortable, for example, on the mall?

I don't have all the lists of questions in my head right now, but so, you know, we have taken the results of that survey early on, we reviewed that and that was sort of included in some of our early

thinking about the goals and visions for the comprehensive plan, but we have not done initial analyses about that.

But I'm not sure if the city has done any additional analyses.

Missy or Alex, do you have any?

No, not that I'm aware of.

I believe that was part of a survey that the mayor conducted.

And we have the raw data from that.

And I think that was about when we closed the first phase and went out to contract.

When I interviewed Green about what's important to him, equitable gathering spaces was one of the top things.

So I think that's something we need to have respect for his interest in that.

Ms.

I didn't realize I was already muted.

Okay, so for my input for tonight, I just want to echo Jody and also Lyle to be sure that we are making protections for our predominantly Black neighborhoods and our low income neighborhoods that we do not want

them to be gentrified out of the neighborhood.

And we also know to make sure we reiterate time and time again that home ownership does create generational wealth.

So we definitely want to do all that we can in this process to protect that.

One of the other things that I would definitely like to see, and we mentioned that Latoya touched on that a little bit as well, and also Ron did with the education component.

I think it is very critical as we move forward that the everyday common citizen can understand not only the terminology, but also the thought process behind where we came up with some of these decisions.

I like the example that Ron used earlier when someone asked him a question.

about the employment centers where the employment centers were based upon ease of access and

if there was parking and if there was a bus line.

So I think if people are aware of the processes that goes into the decisions that are being made, it may be a little bit easier to understand where we started at and where we're going.

So also another thing I think it's probably gonna definitely be beneficial, excuse me, to make sure that the public understands kind of what I touched or asked the question about earlier.

Like I said, I've gotten a lot of just face-to-face conversations of will the new updated comprehensive plan really does not give us the affordability that we're looking for with the increased density and intensity.

And so making sure that our residents are aware of the other

I haven't read every single email, but I've read many hundreds.

So I'd like to talk about some of the big ideas that I read there.

I hope it helps.

One big one from longtime homeowners, people on fixed incomes.

I'm concerned that my home will get even more expensive and I will get taxed out.

There are caps on how valuable a home can be to benefit from tax relief.

I'd like to have a better story for those people.

They are very anxious.

A major concern that I'm seeing from very high-income people is traffic.

They live in their cars.

They think most people live in their cars.

And for many people, they're right.

They're skeptical that we are going to make a transition.

And based on our past, they've got a good argument, really giving them a clarity that actually we are going to get out of our luxury trucks and how and when I think is going to be very important.

Finally, renters are hungry.

Just the renters that I'm reading, they're concerned, they know change is coming, they're concerned that change is going to be bad for them.

Any hope we can offer them I think is absolutely crucial.

Just a couple quick things.

In addition to hearing

I'm being interested in hearing what the consultant's opinion is about the engagement comments they've gotten.

I also like to hear their opinion about the recent proposal that HAC has put forward.

I know it's too soon to have that now, but I would like to get a professional's response to that.

And then, additionally, my biggest concern is the transition from R1 to medium intensity residential.

I'd love to see that scaled back, what's being called currently called for medium

intensity residential, or to create another category so that the medium intensity residential is more targeted to specific areas.

And that there's another category in between general residential and medium intensity for a more gradual increase in additional units.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Most of what I've got would be redundant, but there are a couple of things that I think I'll reiterate because I think they're important.

The first is the protection of the low income communities.

Whatever we do, we've got to

protect them from gentrification as we go through the land use process and as well as we go through the rezoning process.

So that's got to be written into this.

The protection of that has got to be written into this.

The other piece that Jody and Rory mentioned, and Jody is the HAC document.

I think that document addresses a lot of what Jody was talking about.

The ability to protect the low-income communities, but be a little more thoughtful in the way we increase density in places like Greenbrier and Lewis Mountain Road.

Still want to do something there, but the hacked document I think gives a lot of thought to that.

So I'd love you guys to take a look at that and come back and give us some feedback on that.

as a group, but I want to remind the consultants, and I'm sure they know, the city can't do this by itself.

It's got to be done with the university.

It's got to be done with the county.

The university has already agreed or announced that they're looking to add 1,000 plus affordable housing units over the next few years.

The county is under huge pressure as it relates to the urban ring and what's happening there.

So as we think through this stuff, we need to make sure that we're thinking through this and speaking to it in our comp plan and speaking to the cooperation between UVA and again, those additional thousand plus units and what's happening in the county, especially around the urban ring and how we can partner in just the region that they, the planning region we're in with the Greene County, Atlantic County, Albemarle County and the others.

The other thing, I was listening to NPR on my way from the gym the other day, and they were talking about canopy equity, and they were talking about the fact that there's lots of lush canopy in the wealthier neighborhoods, but in the lower income neighborhoods, there is not the type of canopy that we like to see there.

And Canopy does lend to well-being, health, and just feeling better about your environment.

So I'm not sure what chapter this is in.

What chapter would that be in, Jody?

But anyway, whatever chapter that would be in, I think we need to lend some thought to Canopy equity as well.

Kind of ties into Kareem's idea about space equity or location equity.

I'm going to give commissioners one more opportunity to offer input and then I'm going to take a five minute break because we want to be very attentive to the public input that we're about to get.

I guess I just toss in and some of the surveys or comments

There were specific groups for the Hinton Avenue Memorial Church and the Park Street Christian Church asking for high density residential and their properties to encourage the affordable housing projects they have for seniors and for folks with developmental disabilities.

I think those are good changes to make.

And lastly, I think for high density residential, in some of the places, especially the student areas where we want to corral them in, I think it might make sense to go a little bit more intense.

Some of the discussions from the 2001 reasoning that Lyle has been digging up

We're contemplating seven stories near JPA and I think it makes sense to keep students hemmed in in their area for exactly all the reasons commenters have said about having concerns.

Anybody else?

All right, why don't we please make it five minutes because we got people waiting to speak to us.

We don't want to keep them waiting.

Hey, thank you.

I was kind of talking to myself anyway, though.

Is everybody from the commission back?

I can't see you in this view.

Gallery view.

Yeah.

We'll give Missy one sec, and then we'll begin.

I see there's a few people in the- Yeah, I mentioned that, you probably didn't hear me, but I mentioned that we will let them speak again in this session, but they only get to speak once in this session.

Sounds good, Chair Mitchell.

And next we have Andrea Massey.

Andrea, you're on with the commission.

Hi.

You can hear me?

Yes.

Welcome.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you all for your work on this.

Um, and I just want, I just am hoping I'm a city resident.

I'm in the Elliott Ridge neighborhood.

I hope you will continue the approach of centering racial equity as we go through the process and making sure that we create affordability in the R1 and predominantly right neighborhoods and equally or more importantly, we prevent displacement in majority black neighborhoods.

Making sure that we do this is, of course, extremely important.

And finding the tools that we, as people have said, land use is not going to do this alone, finding the tools to ensure this happens.

And I know a lot of people are working on that now to find tools that will make sure this happens as the affordable overlay might, I'm hoping.

And just to talk about like what we're, and I know a lot of the comments about like the historical and community character preservation comments were in.

I want to make sure that we're being really honest about this.

And, and I know people, you know, were saying that they see this as talking about them as being racist or a non-starter.

I find that incredibly sad.

We have to be honest about where we are and how we got here and to repair and we have to do better.

I really hope the neighborhoods who are mostly against this, according to the graph that was presented earlier, Barracks Rugby, Greenbrier, North downtown, Rugby Hills, and because they are predominantly white and the most wealthy in the city do not get prioritized again and again and again.

We need to do better, and I'm hoping we can.

And next we have Bill Emery.

Welcome, Bill.

And you're muted, Bill.

You will need to unmute, Bill.

And Bill, you're still muted.

Sounds good.

And next we have Julia Williams.

Welcome.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Great.

Thank you all and consultants.

I really appreciate all the hard work you've done and everybody has done.

I'm speaking for myself.

I live in Belmont and I want to say that I personally

And finally, we're making some changes.

And I think the aim of creating equity and affordable housing and preventing displacement of lower income and disenfranchised Black and minority populations is really important.

But I do have concerns with the land use plan and actually the overall draft chapters in that I'm not sure I'm seeing yet enough attention to infrastructure.

And that includes certainly

mobility, transportation, schools, basic things like sidewalks and lighting, all those things.

They can't be put on the laps of the developers solely.

We know that because that will raise costs that make it not affordable.

So we need a real partnership with the city and maybe the federal government or whatever support systems there are.

So that's a huge concern.

In one of the webinars, I heard that some of the

parameters set for a general residential were based on an attempt to not encourage destruction of existing homes and neighborhoods by limiting to three units, I thought, instead of going higher.

So I see conflict in comments, people saying raise your density, go to four and five.

And I think people are forgetting that these numbers weren't just pulled out of a hat.

They're based on information that was preserving some important things, things that we view as important as a general population.

So

encouraging the planning commission as well as the consultants to be very thoughtful and explain again why we have these numbers.

I think somebody else in the planning commission will also explain there are other reasons for keeping that number.

I don't care about the number itself.

I just care about the intent.

I care about that we're smart about this.

There's no silver bullet.

And you can see just on comments about where jobs are going to be.

Are they in the county or the city?

We don't know.

What's the growth going to be?

We don't know.

We can come up with some targets and some educated guesses.

But this is an experiment, and we can make fixes down the road.

But I do encourage us not to put it all on the whole zoning plan.

That's going to be very hard.

We need to be thoughtful about this map.

And then the last point I want to make is about education.

So I have not seen you guys as a group reach out to neighborhood associations except in that one leader's meeting.

The leaders meeting happened in such a way that we could not bring it back to our neighborhood association and still get comments to you all.

So I'm not saying delay, but I'm saying this process is not quite functioning as far as educating our neighborhood.

We've done panels, multiple panels with police, with fire, with health department, with potential candidates for city council and other offices through Zoom.

And it's been so successful.

Why aren't you asking us to do Zoom meetings?

It's a huge loss to not use your neighborhood associations

We can't represent the whole neighborhood, but we can try to bring it together or at least factions.

I mean, of course we don't have full representation, but certainly in Belmont-Carlton, we do have engaged people.

So I encourage you to certainly in the next phase, this is maybe the biggest change in our city that I can think of.

And SIA had how many meetings did we have for SIA and in-person workshops and all?

And now the first time we're seeing something physical that we can wrap our heads around with a map and all that, we have one month to comment.

And that was very hard for people.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hopefully Bill will be on this time.

We'll try Bill one more time.

Bill, can you hear us?

We'll keep them in queue.

Next is Crystal Passmore.

Hello.

Can you hear me?

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

As a person who's lived in the city for over eight years and who's rented the whole time, I got married in the city.

I had a baby while living in the city.

I have a three year old toddler and we're still renting in the city.

So as a renter, it's frustrating to hear people who own their homes say they can't imagine whom our houses would benefit.

Almost half the residents in the city rent and rents have been rising quickly and supply is very limited, a lot because of the current zoning plan.

What we currently have, supply cannot keep pace with the increase of workers in the city.

The city artificially limits the number of houses we build and often only allows the least affordable type of housing, which is single family.

So about half of our current residents would benefit from more housing, which would take pressure off a few units we currently have.

On top of that, more housing would benefit people who work in Charlottesville and who would like to live in Charlottesville but can't currently afford it.

And therefore they live in Albemarle or the surrounding counties.

Allowing more housing in town would benefit people who cannot currently afford to live here, but who do currently work here.

We have a lot of people who commute in but would like to live in town.

It's also frustrating to hear people say that increased housing in the city would increase traffic without recognizing that pricing people out of the city means people have to commute from even farther distances.

People are more likely to walk or bike or bus if they live in the city near their jobs.

People are not going to walk to Charlottesville.

They're not going to walk to work if they live in Crozet or Flovanna.

So if you want less traffic, you have to allow more people to live here, where they work.

The young professionals I work with, many of them like to bike to work, but they can't find available two bedrooms in town.

They would benefit from allowing more housing.

The women who watch my kid at the YMCA at daycare drive in from green every single day.

They would benefit from our housing.

It's an equity issue.

It's a quality of life issue, getting people out of their cars more.

It's also an environmental issue.

We can literally cut car emissions if we allow people to live near where they work.

I don't think the plan currently goes far enough, but I think it's a step in the right direction and I don't want to see it watered down.

Thank you for your work.

Thank you for taking my input.

Next, we have Annie Kim.

Thank you so much.

I know it's been a long night and I do not envy your task.

It's a really difficult one.

I want to urge you, first of all, to think about that old cliche about don't lose sight of the trees.

I'm sorry, the other way around.

Don't lose sight of the forest for sake of the trees.

And I think I'd reverse that here too and say you must also, as planning commissioners,

be very well attuned to the facts on the ground.

There are many trees of which I am one, and we have many different interests.

So I want to tell you a little bit about who I am and where I live and my neighborhood.

I am a first-generation Asian-American immigrant, a first-generation college student.

I attended UVA, and I work at UVA.

So I have a deep investment in the community and in the university.

I own a very modest home of less than 1,700 square feet in what I think is a modest neighborhood, Inventable.

It's actually Tonlaw Place.

a street that was just mentioned by Commissioner Stolzenberg.

And I don't know if you've been to Palma Place, many people have not, because it's a street of four properties, three of which are currently single-family homes and one of which is a duplex rental townhouse.

If you walk down my street to where I live, which is at the bottom of a hill, you might actually mistake it for a private driveway.

The street is so small it doesn't look like a city street and we are hidden at the bottom of this street.

The street as it extends up the hill is so narrow that the many dog walkers who walk down our street at different times of day have to clear out to the side and hug the stone wall on one side of the street if a single car passes by.

We already have parked cars all along one side of that street.

That in a nutshell is Tonlaw Place.

And so I'm speaking tonight because I'm concerned and I'm confused about how a street like Tonlaw Place

can be up zoned if this future land use plan is ultimately carried out into law and turned into a zoning ordinance to allow the kind of medium intensity construction that's on the table right now, whether it's four and a half stories, three stories, or as Commissioner Stolzenberg just seemed to mention, seven stories.

I am not sure how even the infrastructure, the parking,

The very size of this street would accommodate that.

And I worry that in our, I think, mutual desire to think big and think radically and make big, fast change, we may not always be attuned to the facts on the ground and the granular facts such as how could we park any number of cars, any more cars on this street?

How could we accommodate that housing?

Finally, as I'm closing, I want to reiterate a point, a question that was raised and answered earlier about student housing.

And the question was, are we trying to increase or spread student housing through the use of the future land use map?

And I believe the answer I heard from the consultants was no, that is not the intention.

And so again, I wonder why is it that my four property street, Inventable, is being put on the map after not being on the map in March?

Is it really for UVA employees or is it for increased student density housing?

Good timing.

Next, we have Jamir Smith.

Amazing.

Okay.

So I'll just try to hit as few, as many points as I can.

Basically one of the things, all kinds of energies.

I formerly lived in the city.

I lived in Fry Springs.

I moved to the county primarily to like access more affordable housing because it just wasn't providing it in the city.

And as someone who also just recently graduated from the university, I imagine there's a lot of young professionals that want to stay in Charlottesville, live in Charlottesville.

there are alums that are here on the commission and stuff so you already know that Charlottesville is clearly a place that's like

desirable and somewhere that people want to live.

And even though that people are teleworking and everything, the largest employer in central Virginia, which is the university, is bringing all the students back, which means most people are going back to work, myself included as a university employee.

So one of the things that people are going to want is to be able to live close to where they work.

And one of the things that I think that some of the communities are concerned about

is that say Lewis Mountain which is tends to be a lot of like tenured professors and people that are living close to where they work they're kind of nervous that their community is going to be up-zoned and could possibly allow for other people like me to live close to where they work and I think it's interesting that a lot of the communities that are close that are further up north of the city like Barracks Rugby and everything are more worried about student encouragement when I can say for myself and a lot of my peers that

We want to live within a 15 minute walking distance or a high frequency bus.

And that community currently doesn't allow that.

But I will say that increasing density in that area could allow for transit options, which is what people want.

If we want traffic to go down, if we want more bike, bike, pedestrian infrastructure, if we want more like buses to take people places, you're going to want to make places for people to live because it's not going to come if the demand is not there.

And honestly, I think that one other thing I'll probably say is that especially with

If the university is gonna be the good neighbor and they follow their 2030 strategic plan with second year staying on grounds, one of the things we're gonna see is a possible opening up of apartment complexes in that area.

And we're gonna wanna build high intensity residential, not only for the students that are gonna continue to move off grounds, but also for the people that want to live close to all the amenities.

That's what makes Charlottesville super desirable.

Next, we have Mark Owen.

Can you guys hear me?

Yes.

Welcome, Mark.

Great.

Hey.

Well, first of all, thanks everybody for your time.

And I don't envy anybody.

on the call.

You guys have a very difficult job and it's almost nine o'clock.

So hopefully somebody got dinner on that five minute break.

And, you know, it was actually really helpful to hear some of your questions to the consultants, because I think some of the things I was going to say earlier were already addressed by a few of you guys.

I guess, you know, I wanted to reiterate, I think one of the points was just that, you know, I think it's just super important for the city

and the county and UVA to be coordinated on this.

And that was already said, but it's just, you know, the county's in the process of doing something similar to what we're doing.

When you look at the map, there's a bunch of gray areas on it.

The map and Charlottesville that are UVA, and it's just a piece of the puzzle that needs to be on there.

So that's easy for me to call in and say that, but I just do think that's paramount.

And then the other thing that I would say is that

You know, there's a lot of opinions, and some are from people who are very, very experienced.

Some are from people who, you know, have an equal right to their opinion.

But, you know, it's more subjective or anecdotal.

And I'm not going to propose, you know, that I'm on one side of the coin or the other.

All I'm saying is that it seems like there needs to be more data.

And what would be really helpful?

And I think, Jennifer, there was a question from one of the commissioners to you, which was,

You know, can we see numbers or ranges and you don't have a crystal ball, but you know, one of the instruments that we're proposing here is multifamily housing.

What is the current vacancy rate today?

How many units are available today?

What is the inventory?

How many are vacant?

There's units that are being proposed that have building permits that are under construction that are planned for near term development.

You know, what do those look like?

And to recognize that there's a difference between market rate

multi-family for rent and there's a difference between condo and there's a difference between single-family housing and I do know for a fact that there are people that have the ability to rent but they want to own a house and they want to live in a place with a yard that they can improve.

They want to build home equity and invest and own that home for 10 years and you know in an apartment

For profit developers have investors, institutional investors, the ownership transfers from private citizens to, you know, in many cases, large institutions.

And, you know, you're taking away that equity ownership in the city, and transferring it out of town.

So I think that's a really important point to make here.

And, and then finally, there are more tools than just building apartments, right?

There's

A segment of the population that's 50 percent or below AMI.

There's a lot of tools that are available.

This is a very progressive city.

It's not a zero sum game.

People don't have to lose for other people to gain.

There's a lot of people like me that would really like to help.

There are housing subsidies that are available at a federal level.

You know, the CLIC had a really interesting study, some other ideas.

So I've gone over my time.

Thanks for listening to me and seeing some numbers would be objective numbers and facts.

And the next report would be very, very helpful.