Planning Commission Meeting   8/11/2020

All righty, good evening and welcome to the August 11th regular meeting of the Planning Commission.

I think we have a quorum and are ready to begin.

Why don't we begin with the commission reports?

First things first.

Yeah, hi everybody.

It's good to see everybody again via Zoom.

Just a couple things.

I'm sure everybody's following the news at UVA about our reopening plans and all that.

And I just wanted to kind of point everybody to some of the official engagement.

stuff that's out there.

There was a town hall last night, which I'm sure you guys all heard about, that was kind of focused on community focus with interfacing with Charlottesville.

That was last night, but you can find a recording of that if you missed it, if you care to watch that.

There's also the video.

It's pretty easy to find on the UVA web page of President Ryan kind of giving the overview of our latest planning for reopening.

which just in a nutshell is that online courses are going to begin August 25th but in-person classes is tentatively delayed till September 8th and then if students are living in dorms or planning living dorms they'd be able to move in a few days before that but all those dates haven't been set yet

And then one final thing is just that the Racial Equity Task Force report was just released last night and that's also easily available from the UVA web page and it sets out their 12, that Task Force 12 recommendations for improvements that can be made at UVA.

Well, I think the fact that the Big Ten and the Big Twelve have decided not to play probably

You know, might make it might make the decision easier.

Ms.

There was a TJPDC meeting last Thursday.

But we did not, I didn't get to participate.

I had an emergency kid run to get him out of the storms.

And then by the time I got back, everybody else had lost power.

So they're postponing that and going to have it, I think week after, like next week, I think they're going to redo that meeting.

So we did have one meeting, the MPO tech meeting, where we discussed A, there's a new public participation plan draft, and that will be coming up for the MPO meetings, I think, in September for adoption.

and that just kind of lays out what the procedures are for public participation.

You can request a public hearing on things.

That was the main thing.

We also discussed smart scale updates.

Council of course submitted some applications and we kind of went through the feedback that we received from the public and kind of discussed at length sort of new plan for the Fontaine intersection.

So no longer a diverging diamond.

Now, I don't know if there's actually a name for what it is.

It's kind of odd.

I also asked about any updates on open street plans during coronavirus to let people get around easier or recreate, but didn't get an update at that meeting on that.

Okay, Ms.

Dowell.

The Board of Architectural Review met on July 21st.

We had six projects come before us for certificates of appropriateness, and all six received those certificates.

And beyond that, the Tree Commission has yet to meet since last February, but

We are now allowed to meet in August and we'll be meeting at the end of this month on a date that has yet to be determined.

Okay.

None of my groups met, but it looks like we are beginning to pick up things again.

I think the UVA Albemarle County Charlottesville Land Use Group is going to meet either next week or week after.

There are a couple of other groups in the meeting.

Yeah, that was the latest that I heard.

I don't know.

I haven't seen an exact date on that, though.

I think Deidre's sitting in plan.

I think it's like the middle of September.

So I'll have more to report on next month.

Ms.

Sure.

So we, just to reiterate for September, the Planning Commission meeting will be on Wednesday, September 9th.

City Council will be meeting on September 8th, which is the Tuesday.

And those shifts are due to the Labor Day holiday.

So definitely keep your calendars marked for that change.

Our department, we continue to mostly work remotely.

We have all of our inspectors in the field doing that work.

but we have a few staff in the office regularly and most everyone's teleworking and coming in once or twice a month to pick up materials.

Also, one thing that we had, we were working on for the commission is information pertaining to family day home.

Ms.

Robertson has submitted information to our congressional folks, so they have that as something to work forward with, but we have also been working on

Potential language and potential way to address family day homes.

Most of which one can do right now from one to four children is allowable in all residential areas within the city and five to 12 that gets a little trickier.

But we've got some language that we're preparing to get to you all for consideration to help clean up the language that's in the code.

I think those are the only announcements I have right now.

I did want to note that the City Hall building will not be open tomorrow, which is August 12th.

Mr. Solla-Yates

Yes, Housing Advisory Committee has been busy.

And actually we haven't been able to meet as much as we so very much wanted to.

So we've only got two meetings to report to you, I'm afraid.

The July 15th, the full hack met.

We discussed the draft affordable housing ordinance, the accessory dwelling unit ordinance, short-term rentals, and our loss of our city housing coordinator, John Sales.

The housing authority has stolen him away.

He'll do very well there and we miss him very much.

I think he's already left us.

The short-term rental analysis found about 200 homes in the city, roughly about 1% of inventory, something like that.

So not as big as some feared, not as small as some hoped.

Mr. Sales indicated that council may no longer be interested in moving forward with the accessory dwelling unit and affordable housing ordinances and we'll check back with what council wishes on that as far as timeline.

Yeah, I can help you out with that.

Council did talk about that at their meeting in September, the one that went really, really late.

And they decided that they wanted to integrate that into the code updates that are underway with the consultants.

And so the materials that we have to date have been forwarded to Code Studio to assist with that process, but they didn't want to pursue that outside of the larger code update.

So it's going to move forward.

So what does that mean for the work that we've already done?

Well, a few of us have already done.

That's encouraging.

I've got one more hack meeting to talk about.

It's great.

This was the policy subcommittee, the 22nd.

This one we talked about detailed COVID relief and housing data standards.

Go back and check it out.

It was very detailed.

Most of the new relief money coming down from federal is going to renters.

Quite a few homeowners have applied, just two are getting through.

We got a tech demo from the Housing Hub, which is a new website that will help people find housing assistance, but has no organization who wants to own or maintain it.

So it may just be nothing.

We'll see.

That's what I have.

Thank you.

So I am just a little melancholy tonight.

This is the last night that we'll have the official benefit of the wisdom, intellect, leadership, and most important, passion of Ms.

Green.

But the spirit is tempered a little bit by the fact that she's leaving us to join the Housing Authority Board.

And that organization has seen tremendous positive momentum in the last few months.

And they've got a wonderful new very energetic young leader.

And I do believe that that group will benefit mightily from, again, the leadership and most important, the passion that Lisa brings to everything that she does.

But in particular, the leadership passion she's brought to her work with us.

So to that end, Mr. LeHindra has something he would like to offer up.

Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it.

My headphones are telling me I'm running out of juice and I was trying to make a change right in the middle of that.

So I missed my great beginning, but I do have the distinct honor and privilege to make this

A presentation of a resolution by the City of Charlottesville City Council.

Whereas Mrs. Lisa Green served on the Charlottesville Planning Commission from October 2010 to August 2020, serving as chair from September 18 to August of 19 and vice chair from September of 17 to September 18 and

whereas Ms.

Green served as the Planning Commission representative to the Budget Development Committee, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transportation Citizen Advisory Committee, the MPO Technical Committee, the East High Street and Emmett Street Steering Committees, SmartScale, the Board of Zoning Appeals, the Rivanna River Planning Effort and the Neighborhood Leaders Group

You've been busy.

And whereas Ms.

Green used her professional experience in zoning and code enforcement to provide the community with feedback and guidance grounded in the realities of construction site compliance and adherence to approvals, and whereas Ms.

Green provided many years of service and leadership to the Planning Commission in preparation for an active participation in commission meetings

and whereas Ms.

Green has been a key participant in the updating of two city comprehensive plans, providing leadership in the current update during the first phase of review and whereas Ms.

Green has routinely gone beyond the typical duties of a planning commissioner to provide valuable guidance to applicants and the community with the goal of improved future submissions, now, therefore,

We, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby thank Ms.

Lisa Green for her years of dedicated service on the Charlottesville Planning Commission and wish her success in her future endeavors.

Signed and sealed the 11th day of August, 2020, by the Honorable Nikkiah Walker-Mayer.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I know, right?

I've enjoyed every minute of it.

I know sometimes it doesn't seem like it, but I am passionate about the city and I see all the potential.

And

They asked me when I was applying for the Housing Advisory Redevelopment Authority.

Why are you doing this?

I ask myself that sometimes too.

It's another three year commitment, but I think I am rooted into public service.

I believe in public service.

I believe in local government.

I believe in all the things that we can do better.

And I truly believe in

that there are systems that we can change to make it more equitable for everyone in this city.

And I wanna be a part of that.

I do, I know that my passion sometimes is seen as other things and that's, I get that, but I am passionate about this city.

I just celebrated my 19th year at the county

working a couple weeks ago.

And so I think I'm rooted.

The kids are here.

They were born here.

And I think this is where I will stay.

So I'm proud to be a Charlottesville resident.

And I'll never be a native.

I wasn't born here, but the kids are.

So I'll ride their coattails for a little bit.

But I thank you all for your patience.

And thank you all for listening.

And Missy, Lisa, the planning staff, thank you all for your patience.

Guess what though?

I'm not going anywhere.

So I'll be paying attention and just let me know what you guys need.

Lisa, thank you.

We are most certainly a better place because you have passed this way.

Okay, we currently have about 22 attendees and currently no one with their hands raised currently.

But if you do wish to address Planning Commission during this time, you'll have three minutes to do so.

Please click the raise hand icon and you will be called upon in the order of hands raised.

Don't see anybody joining us by phone, but if you plan on doing that as well, you would press star nine.

And no one with their hand raised.

All right, then we will move on to the consent agenda.

Yes, I just have one minor change to the minutes.

Page 87, talking about the having to apply for a PUD and critical slopes at the same time should say could not have just asked rather than could have just asked.

Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any objection?

Any abstentions?

All right.

The consent agenda is approved.

We do not have any public hearing items, so we'll move directly into commission item action items.

And the first action item is a presentation from C of Seaville plans together.

Ms.

Sure.

So, Mr. Rice will, will promote the individuals who will be working with this.

We're going to start out with Jennifer Koch from

She will be starting out the presentation and introducing the other speakers as part of this presentation.

Joey's going to be assisting us with

Thanks.

Can y'all hear me okay?

Yes, welcome.

Thanks.

Thank you for having us here tonight.

That was congratulations.

What a

I just want to give a brief introduction.

We don't need any slides up right now, but I'll let you know when we want to go into that.

As far as who's on the call today, you've seen the agenda.

I will be talking a bit about work to date.

LaToya and I will then go through some of the engagement we've done and what we're planning for the future to get some thoughts on that with you.

And then I'll hand it off to HRNA who will walk through some thoughts about housing that they'd like to get your input on, particularly as we're working towards meeting with the Steering Committee at the end of this month.

So I want to note, I did send some updated materials this morning.

I know at least a couple of you saw it.

It's one update, but very large update.

So once we get to that slide, I'll make sure to point it out there.

Excel got me on that one, sorting a column.

But I think we've got it all fixed now.

So just an overview of what I'm going to talk about.

Actually, we already did that, so I'm not going to go through that.

Overview of where we are today.

So we, I guess overview of the project for anyone who might be listening who's not as familiar quickly.

This effort that we're calling Seaville Plans Together is an effort that we as a consultant team are working with NDS, with the Planning Commission and others to continue the update to the comprehensive plan that was started in 2017, 2018.

That includes a big focus on housing and housing affordability.

So it's a specific housing plan that will be a part of the housing

chapter in the comprehensive plan.

So that's what we will be talking about in a little bit.

Once the comprehensive plan is updated, that update is finalized, which we're currently planning for early next year, early spring next year, then we will be working on the code revision.

So Code Studio is not on the call today, but they will be reviewing whatever comes out of this call and we'll be working with them as we move forward here.

If you're not familiar with the project and you're listening, feel free to go to SevillePlansTogether.com and you can find more information there.

As far as what we've been up to recently, we've been summarizing all the input we got in May and June, a significant amount of input.

We'll go into that in a second.

You know, we're going to go through a really high level survey results today, which are many of those charts you started sort of demographics of who we heard from, which are really important piece of the story.

The last two charts are the prioritization outcomes that we'll be digging into deeper when we get to the detailed summary.

We are working on cleaning up the survey data so we can get that out so people can look at it and play with it.

We want to make sure we fully understood what was in there before it went out.

And so that'll be coming.

I know there's interest in that from from some of you and others as well.

So that's still something we're going to be doing in the short term future.

We have also been meeting with staff sort of in topic specific groups to talk about the different areas of the comprehensive plan.

making sure that we start to work with them as we're looking into the chapters and saying, how might we be suggesting edits to this?

How do we continue these updates from the 2018 version of the chapter and continue it forward?

So we want to make sure we're working in partnership with staff on that.

And I think we've had some really good discussions over last week and into this week, continuing over the next few days.

So that's been very useful for us.

Those have been really productive conversations.

The other thing we are certainly starting to do is that piece of the puzzle saying here, you know, we're working on summarizing what we heard in May and June and starting to think about that piece of how might this influence what's updated in the comprehensive plan and I won't go into that much now, but when we talk about the next phase of community engagement, obviously the big piece of that is what are we talking about with people and getting input on.

So we'll talk about that in 10 minutes or so.

I won't get too much into what HRNA has been up to, but they have been having a lot of conversations around housing that they'll, I'm sure, give you a brief overview of when they get to their piece of the puzzle.

But with that, Joey, if you can bring up the presentation, the Siebel-Pence Together presentation, not the housing-focused presentation.

Great.

Thanks, Jenny, and good evening, everyone.

So I'm going to go through in a bit more detail than what's on the slide some stats around what happened during our engagement process, how many people we spoke with, the different groups and people that participated in the process to date, and also talk about a couple of the tools that we leveraged in this first iteration of engagement.

One thing that I do want to start off by highlighting is, you know, one of our primary goals when we started this effort was to really make some good connections in the Charlottesville community across a broad swath of residents, stakeholders and interest groups.

and our goal was also to develop partnerships now that would also be leveraged going forward in this process.

There's a lot of very robust and rich networks in Charlottesville already, so our big focus was trying to tap into those networks, build relationships, and have our engagement process be a catalyst for leveraging the strength of those networks.

As all of you know, we had a very unexpected activity that happened in the spring called COVID.

And so that obviously impacted much of how we thought we were going to engage with the city of Charlottesville and as someone whose business is engagement, it has impacted how we do engagement all across the country right now.

So we've had to adapt our approach.

A lot of the traditional engagement tools that we would normally undertake, things that I personally love doing like door knocking and outdoor pop-ups, we had to table those things obviously for safety and health reasons.

And so, as most of you know we adapted our approach to virtual and telephonic methods.

Some of the key tools that we leveraged were the project website to share information and collect information about the community.

Zoom-based webinars to introduce this whole process to the community.

Zoom-based virtual conversations that allowed us to meet with residents in a virtual platform similar to how we would in person to actually start initial conversations around ideas for this process.

We also leveraged social media.

We have a toll free number.

And of course, the community wide survey that was distributed via hard copy and online.

And Jenny will talk more about the survey in a minute.

Just a couple of quick stats for you.

Again, we'll go through the survey in more detail in a few minutes, but we had over 1100 survey respondents.

Of the three webinars that we hosted, we had between 30 and 50 participants in each webinar.

We hosted nine public, so publicly advertised virtual conversations.

In addition to those nine public conversations, we also hosted at least 16 what I call specially scheduled conversations that were for targeted interest groups.

Some of the groups that we had conversations with included Java, Partners for Mental Health in Region 10, Cadre, residents from the IRC, residents of Friendship Court, Sin Barreras, members of the Baha'i Faith Community, Habitat for Humanity,

as well as the Charlottesville Youth Council and several African American homeowners.

And that was a conversation that was actually organized by one of our steering committee members.

We also conducted conversations with other Charlottesville-based organizations and agencies, some of which include the Charlottesville City Schools, Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, Home to Hope, the Office of Delegate Sally Hudson, Community Climate Collaborative, and the Bike and Pedestrian Committee.

In terms of numbers of participants, we had at least 220 participants in the various virtual conversations that we had.

The size of those ranged anywhere from 3 to 27, 28 participants each time.

We also tried to leverage additional tools, understanding that not everyone has access to virtual technology and Zoom.

We did mailings, we actually did a large utility mailing that went up with the utility bills.

We also partnered with the Housing Authority to do a mailing with the rent statements.

We partnered with Cultivate Charlottesville to support survey completion at the UACC Friday markets.

We worked with local residents in particular.

We worked with a resident at Friendship Court who works regularly in the community center.

She actually helped us to connect with 75 Friendship Court residents who completed the survey.

We also partnered with media outlets.

Jenny and I drove down on Father's Day to do a segment on 101.3's show, In My Humble Opinion.

We've also done interviews with 106.1 The Corner, as well as Seville Tomorrow and NBC 29.

And of course, what I call good old-fashioned phone calls.

So we've managed to connect with a number of seniors throughout this process, some of whom we followed back up with, mailed them materials about this process, and even called them by phone to complete the survey over the phone.

So we've tried to use a number of different tools, understanding the challenges of COVID and the challenges of not being able to reach people in person as we normally would.

And of course, the last thing I'll mention is our steering committee, which we've tried to leverage as well, not just in participating directly in the process, but also sharing their expertise and trying to leverage them to connect us with other networks in Charlottesville.

Sure.

So Ms.

We spoke with FAR as well.

The Baha'i faith community was the only religious affiliated group that we were able to get an organized call with.

We did reach out through the Charlottesville Clergy Collective and got some responses from one or two churches who were distributing the flyers and PDFs of the survey through their network.

Yeah, I think it was harder since churches weren't able to meet in person themselves, finding ways to distribute information.

But it is a very important pathway.

So we're going to continue figuring out how we can do that.

Let's see.

So churches may also now be more familiar with the Zoom meetings.

So it may be that time to reach back out.

I think that's right.

Yep.

Agreed.

Probably goes beyond churches as well to anyone who, you know, it takes a little time to get used to meeting virtually.

All right, so I'm going to walk through some of these survey findings.

I don't want to take a super long time on all of this, but I mostly want to just take a look through and I'm happy to answer questions.

I might not be able to answer all of your questions right away, but I'm happy to follow up in the coming days with information as needed.

But we will be, you know, this is a preliminary summary.

But we are creating a more detailed summary that gets into some of the details behind these, looks at sort of how the priorities were different based on different demographic groups and whatnot.

So that level of analysis is not in here, but that is forthcoming.

But in general, we had 1,170 responses.

So every chart that you see is a breakdown of all those responses.

So you don't see like a total number of responses on each slide.

That's why there's sort of blanks built into those.

So if you go to the next slide, you can see surveys were largely submitted online, but we did have some paper surveys submitted largely through Cultivate helped us out.

And then at Friendship Court, we had a great distribution there.

So that was good to see.

We did have eight surveys submitted in Spanish.

Those were all online.

Those were not paper copies there.

I want to note

We did get 1,170 responses.

There were some that were partial responses and some that were blank where people sort of just clicked through the survey.

And that'll be, we'll make that a little more clear in the final summary.

But by and large, most of the responses had at least a partial response in the survey.

Next slide.

Here's an overview of sort of where people live in terms of do they live in the city of Charlottesville and how long have they lived in Charlottesville if they do.

The note at the bottom of the slide I want to bring up, there is some inconsistency with whether people identified themselves as being a city of Charlottesville residents.

where they might actually sort of live in the county.

I know you'll see on the next slide with the neighborhoods, we asked people to identify their neighborhood if they live in Charlottesville.

Sometimes it was sort of county based neighborhoods that came out, but we wanted to show those anyway, especially where there were more than a few people.

But you can see here, most of the respondents were from the city of Charlottesville.

But we did have a lot of Albemarle County residents, which is really important for us.

I mean, housing is a regional conversation.

A lot of these things we're talking about is our regional conversations that need to happen.

And so, you know, that we certainly encouraged and we're happy to have respondents from the neighboring counties.

As you can see, most of the respondents said they have lived in Charlottesville for 20 plus years, which was good to see.

And one thing I guess that will come up on the next slide.

Yeah, if you just want to go to the next slide, Joey.

You know, if you look on the right side,

We asked if people are a current student at UVA, and most of the respondents said they were not.

And I think, you know, had we not been in a COVID situation and more students had been around, we would have probably had more student responses on that.

So just wanted to point that out.

Looking at neighborhoods, you can see here, as I mentioned, we know we realize that some of these are in the county, they're outside of the official city line.

but we included them here.

One thing we're going to use this information for as well as a lot of the other demographic information is when we're looking at the data, it'll help us to break it down to say where were there specific concerns in certain neighborhoods, certain income levels and whatnot.

So this neighborhood piece is one of those.

Not only looking at breaking down survey data, but also to say where do we need to be reaching out more specifically to people to get their input.

Obviously, getting people to tell us their neighborhood is a good way to know more about that.

I do want to point out we did have quite a few blank responses on this one.

It's a downside of not having any required questions on a survey, but we wanted to leave that flexibility.

Next slide, please.

Here's how the race ethnicity breakdown looked on the survey.

We know this is not reflective of the diversity of the city of Charlottesville.

And, but like with the neighborhood side helps us to realize who we need to reach out to more specifically in a targeted way.

We'll talk more about this on the final survey results, the detailed summary, but you know, the way that we asked this question was sort of a combined race ethnicity question, which is different than the way things like the census ask for this information.

And so when we're comparing it to the latest census results, which at this point of the 2018 ACS estimates, you know, it's a little hard to directly compare how well the proportions match up with the city, but we will do our best on the detailed summary to look at that.

I know this was a similar way that I think the last survey was completed during the first phase of the comprehensive plan process.

Next slide, please.

Looking at gender identity and age, you know, there were more than half of the respondents identified as female and Age, you know, I think we I was really interested to see this age distribution that we had You know, we asked people just to choose within a range and I think

I think this is quite a fairly good even distribution based on what the census sort of says demographics are.

But we'll continue to think about what this might mean.

And in particular, I'm really interested in getting more input from the 18 to 24 demographic or even later teen years.

I think there's a lot of really interesting things happening there.

And so as we think about our next phase, we might consider how we can build that consistency.

Sorry, excuse me.

Next slide, please.

Looking at income, you can see that we heard from people at various income levels.

Again, this is one of those demographics that'll be good to look at comparing responses between different demographics and what that might mean for priority areas.

Next slide.

In looking at who we heard from in terms of who is a renter, who owns their home, we know that, again, this breakdown of renter and homeowner does not match with the city's demographics.

We know that renters make up more than 50% of the city's demographics.

So this is certainly not reflective of that, and that is an indication that we need to work harder to reach residents in the future.

renters in the future.

But I think the fact that we had so many county respondents may weigh into that a bit.

That's something we will be looking at in that detailed analysis.

And then the other chart on the slide shows that we asked if people owned property in the city, different types of property.

And most respondents do not, but we did have some people who do.

And that might be another interesting way to look at data.

But since there were so few that responded that they own other property,

You know, I'm not sure what those numbers, the significance of those numbers might be.

Lastly, on the sort of demographics piece, we just asked people how they like to hear from the city.

Email alerts for the top, social media, that's certainly not a surprise there.

But there were several people who said, you know, mailing is really important.

It's really important.

So even though, you know, things like mailing are not at the top of this list, they are certainly something we're considering that we have used and that we'll keep considering in the future, especially in the next phase, which we'll talk about in a second.

Next slide please, Joy.

For those of you who took the survey, I'm not sure if you all had a chance to do that.

I hope you did.

We had two main questions.

Question one was, please tell us how important you believe it is to address the items below, which you see here, in order to achieve a fair, equitable, and positive future for all Charlottesville residents.

And so for each of those, people indicated whether they thought it was very important to address in the short term, less important to address now, but could be a priority in the future.

or whether it was not important right now.

And so you can see the breakdown here.

This is for the general sort of overall, all the different pieces of the comprehensive plans come into this chart.

Housing, a top priority.

Community health and education.

I don't think those are surprises at all.

Community health-wise, especially with COVID, I think it's a very natural response to see there.

Looking at education, I think part of that certainly plays into COVID and uncertainty about how education was going to continue.

But we're looking into what all of these mean as far as a breakdown.

Excuse me for one second.

Sorry about that.

Other major priorities on here, economy and jobs, environment, transportation.

All the way down the line here, we are looking into what people said as far as the priorities and how they tied to some demographics.

But the other really important key piece of this is digging further into what people said for specific outcomes for each of these.

Beneath each of these elements, there was a text box to say what people wanted to see as an outcome.

And that is the piece of this analysis that has taken a longer time because that's an open-ended box.

So we are working on coding those to make it

Easier to do analysis on them.

So that's what you'll see the results of in the detailed summary.

I just want to know before we move on to the last survey slide here, we got a lot of comments on the survey, rightly so, that it's hard to comment on different priority areas because they are very connected.

And that is very true.

But this just needed to be a sort of initial way to do this.

And so I think especially as we get into thinking about the overarching values for the comprehensive plan, we get those guiding principles.

That's really the place that we can start to pull some things together and create that narrative about how we

So about a month ago, I mean about a year ago, the Parks and Rec folks did a survey something like this.

And you may want to take a look at the result of their survey as well, because the audience may have been completely different, but the

One of the main things that the respondents wanted were more open spaces and more attention to the parks.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think I spoke with the Parks and Rec staff last week as part of that series of conversations, and I think they mentioned that.

So we'll make sure to look at that.

I think, you know, looking at this, there's these different issues that touch on all these variety of things in the city, and I think

Sometimes the prioritization of things pushes some things to the bottom that really come out in some of these other areas.

So that's another piece of the puzzle here, but you're right, we'll make sure to take a look at that to see what might have come out of that.

All right, if you go to the next slide, the other question we asked was related, similar format, but was specifically related to housing.

The question was, please tell us how important you believe it is to address the items below in order to adequately respond to Charlottesville's housing needs.

And so you can see here, this is the chart, by the way, that I updated this morning.

Again, the labels had been moved around incorrectly.

So this is the correct data.

You can see racial equity, top of the line as it has been in many of our conversations.

Rental affordability, also toward the top, location, especially location of affordable units, you know, in proximity to healthy food options and transportation and jobs.

That came out a lot in the survey.

displacement and gentrification, housing supply, just the need to have more housing in general came out a lot.

We'll see that in the results.

So I won't talk through all of these.

What does stability mean?

Eviction or displacement, yeah.

And so some of these as well are crosscutting, there is some areas of overlap, but we want to ask different categories, because I think people think of things in different

sort of different pots of issues.

And so having, asking the same, almost the same type of question in different areas, you know, gets us just a sort of a richer answer there.

Hi, Jennifer, I just had one quick question.

Sure.

And you may cover this in the next portion of your presentation.

And I just wanted to say, first of all, thank you for the great work you and your team are doing.

But as a planning commissioner reviewing this information,

I'm having a hard time seeing where any of the data that you've collected has changed from our first round of collections.

It seems that we have the same people responding and we're still not hitting that mark of the younger generation and also people of color responding to our survey, hence as to why the comprehensive plan update was stopped in the first place.

Sure.

I think, um,

You know, what we felt our call to action to do is certainly to build on what you all gathered.

And so I would say, I think you're right.

A lot of what we heard is similar to what we saw in the results that you got.

I think maybe one thing that we were really focused on was having these conversations with people about focused on equity, like really focused on that as sort of a central

component and I think that may have been slightly different from the way those conversations might have the focus of things and I'm happy and you know I may be wrong on there but I think having that is the central sort of piece of the questions we were asking in the survey and then when we had these small group conversations you know that to me we had some

Interesting conversations really focused on that thought.

And so when we look at what else might need to be updated in the comprehensive plan, and again, starting from where you all left off, because you made a lot of great edits, it'll just be sort of filling in that anything that's missing in that arena.

But yeah, we will be talking more in the next piece about how we know we need to change some things in the engagement in the next phase.

Thank you.

So with that, I will

suggest we go on.

Thank you, Joey.

So we've got some preliminary thoughts about the August through October engagements, how we plan to engage with folks starting in the next couple of weeks going into October.

And so if you go to the next slide, Joey, I'm going to invite Latoya to speak about this.

But in general, we've got these August activities on this slide and the mid-September to mid-October on the next slide.

What we're really looking at is maybe in August, sharing overall, getting people up to speed, people who we maybe haven't connected with yet, you know, connecting with our steering committee.

And then it was beginning to mid-September, October, having another larger public engagement push.

Thanks, Jenny.

So I started off kind of the first phase overview with our goals.

I want to start off our next steps with kind of what our goals are as well.

First off, we want to continue leveraging the relationships that we've made to date.

We've obviously connected with a number of organizations, agencies, entities in Charlottesville.

So we want to try to leverage those partnerships that we've made to date as we continue our effort through this comp plan process.

We also want to make sure that we're targeting specific neighborhoods and groups that were not as represented or participatory in the process.

That includes some of the neighborhoods in particular.

West Haven came up as one, for example, that we really didn't hear much from.

And so when we think about what our additional outreach efforts look like, that's one of those target neighborhoods that we are going to figure out how to do something a little bit differently.

I think to the commissioner's point around youth involvement as well.

We certainly didn't have as much youth participation as we would have liked.

We had a call with a few of the Charlottesville Youth Council representatives, as well as with the Charlottesville City Schools, but also understanding that the schools were navigating, I think their own challenges in the time of COVID and trying to stay in touch with their population.

So I think our hope, I know my personal hope is that

Now that we've been in the state for a while and folks have started to develop some systems to try to move forward with how they are maintaining their own connections within their existing networks of people, that we'll be able to tap into those a bit more efficiently as we move forward.

The last goal that I want to share is really doing what we promised we said we would do at the end of the first phase, which was sharing what we learned and making sure that we heard correctly.

When we started this process, we told people that it wasn't going to be asking questions and then going back into a black hole and making a set of decisions.

It was going to be a collaborative and an iterative process, and so we're still very committed to that approach.

As I mentioned, some of our focus areas are understanding who we're missing.

The survey has really helped us to understand some of those groups that we are missing and then figure out how to tailor our approach to get to those groups.

We're also focused in this phase on education, particularly around the comp plan process.

What the comp plan

can and can't do as a document and what the visions and goals for the comp plan will be going forward and that will work collaboratively with residents to determine

Most of the virtual tools that we've talked about are going to stay in place.

COVID doesn't seem to be going anywhere and so we're going to have to operate with some of those same tools as we move forward.

We are going to be looking at trying to do some socially distanced pop-up activities in Charlottesville and those will be very targeted for neighborhoods and communities where we've not been able to connect with folks as easily.

And they will be socially distanced and set up in as safe a way as possible for us to be able to connect with people and get information and share information, but also not putting anyone's health and safety at risk in that process.

We also want to try to leverage the peer engagers that we have talked about earlier on in the project process.

We put the peer engagers on pause.

We had not really firmly committed to anyone yet, largely because we didn't want to move forward in the time of COVID with

having people go out when it was really not safe to do so.

So we're going to revisit the peer engager strategy and figure out how to safely identify and implement peer engagers on the ground so that they can support this effort but remain safe while doing so.

I do also want to reiterate these peer engagers will be paid for their time.

The last thing I want to mention in terms of a tool that actually came out of some of our later conversations in the process is trying to work with community-based businesses, including barbershops, hair salons, laundromats, local markets, other places where

The people who are using those services, they may be on social media, they may not.

They may use internet services, they may not.

Using hard copy materials to get information out, trying to use as many different existing resources in Charlottesville as we possibly can to move through this process.

So going through the remainder of the fall, I'm not going to go through all this in detail, but as I mentioned earlier, the things that we're going to be focusing on going forward include understanding what's going to go into the comp plan and helping people to understand what the comp plan document is, what its components are, and helping us define what the visions and goals are for those sections.

This will also be the time when the housing tools and recommendations get discussed.

I know we're going to go into housing in a few minutes, but for the fall engagement effort,

All of our public activities are going to be revolving around how do we start getting some shape to this comp plan document?

And again, that's all that is starting from the 2018 sort of chapters and making it clear to people how

This becomes a document like the 2013, the current comp plan is, what else do we need to add in there?

How do we maybe need to continue those edits?

But we know a lot of people are familiar with that process.

They participate in your process.

And I'm sorry to keep interrupting.

I want to get it out before I forget one thing that I would like to maybe recommend or you can

move forward with is I know they're doing back to school supplies through the Charlottesville City School System.

And so even if you're not necessarily at every giveaway or each of our city schools, I know you said providing literature, if you could just give them the literature and have them put it in the book bag, that's one way we can get the information out and maybe cut out some of the legwork on your end as well.

Yeah, reaching people where they already are, where they're already getting information, I think will be really important.

So thank you for bringing that up.

I was not aware that was happening.

Well, you're welcome.

Do you know when those are starting?

I don't but if you give me a few minutes, I'll try to check my email and then update you before you guys sign off.

Sure.

That'd be great.

If you want to go to the next slide, Joey, that'd be great.

I'm happy to, both of us will be happy to answer questions about any of the things we've discussed related to the survey or engagement, but I know we have a lot to get to tonight.

So I've got a couple questions.

So I think the survey results as presented were kind of helpful, but I'm curious about how you're going to present the more qualitative information.

So rather than just, you know, summed up how you rank things like obviously a thousand people wrote in, you know, two dozen text boxes.

Are you going to be kind of summarizing that, reading them all, summarizing it and passing along to us?

Or are you going to give us like the raw data or kind of still down?

Oh no, go ahead.

Oh, sorry.

I got excited to answer.

Yeah, so we're cleaning up the raw data a bit just to make sure there's no identifying information because people certainly didn't sign up to get everything out there.

But once that's cleaned up, we're going to give the raw information out.

But yeah, we are going through and we have a specific to get into the details of how we're looking at those.

We have a list of sort of codes that we've broken out for the comments and we're coding each of the comments.

And so we're reading all of them.

It's a lot of comments, but it's great.

We're getting a lot of really good feedback from that, but that is why it has taken us a bit longer than anticipated to read through them.

And just to add, sorry, just to add to that really quickly as well, in addition to kind of the survey overview comments, we also have been going through the comments from all the small group discussions that we've been having as well.

So there's a lot of, because we took very detailed notes through each one of those.

And so that's a lot of the additional information, qualitative information that's going to be summarized.

Great.

And then my second question, somewhat unrelated, is like, given the kind of deficiencies in reaching certain groups of people, like

Obviously you're gonna try to reach as many people as you can now or in this, you know, August to October timeframe we just talked about.

What happens if we're still coming up short?

Do we push out the schedule some more?

Do we just, you know, redouble efforts even more?

That's a good question.

I think we would

Probably, I think we'd want to partially work with you all, work with our steering committee to figure out what the path forward would be on that.

I think there is certainly openness to adjusting the schedule a bit, especially if there's a lot of difficulties with schools or other things that are really making it difficult for people to engage as we get into the fall.

We recognize that having our next phase of engagement right in the first few weeks after school starting may be difficult.

So we're certainly open to adjusting there.

But I would say we will address that situation when we get to it kind of thing at this point.

But there is openness to adjusting the schedule.

Well, whatever you do, don't make a mistake we made.

Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

That's a mistake we made.

Noted.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's why we're glad we asked so many demographic questions, because that's, um,

You know, I hadn't thought necessarily of waiting, but I think we could look at that.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

Oh, thank you.

I think one of the things Jody and I were at the West Haven days,

And you said you had not had a lot of response from West Haven.

I think what I heard the most at that time was that there was a lack of trust.

So I guess, how are you guys framing this and who are you outreaching and have you have you outreach to some of the community leaders in West Haven to have some understanding that this is not about

coming in and redeveloping West Haven, per se.

This is not information to redevelop West Haven and kick folks out of their home.

Because I know that there was some fear around that when we were talking to people.

Again, that was three years ago.

Yeah, I would say, and Latoya, please feel free to jump in, you know, we've we really, I think, work to try to reach different leaders of especially different communities that we knew had not maybe been as represented in previous processes.

You know, we had some difficulties reaching people because I think everyone was struggling to to get people information they needed.

and sort of assistance that was needed.

But that's something that we're certainly going to keep on doing.

I think Cultivate Charlottesville was great.

They helped us hand out surveys.

For example, at West Avon, I think that type of partnership will be really useful for us as we keep moving forward here.

And I think the peer engager program LaToya was talking about where we can find those community leaders and

work with them in a way to reach out, I think is a way to build trust.

Also, just really quickly, one other event that's coming up this Saturday is the Community Cares event.

That's the West Haven Clinic.

I think, Lisa, were you just referring to that?

Okay.

Yeah, I think I have seen something about that as well.

I think

If in August and as we get into September, I think those types of events, there's so much already going on in the city.

I think that's what we would look to partner with is that type of event.

I know HRNA is probably itching to talk with you all about housing here.

So I'm going to suggest we can move on to that item.

But again, please feel free to reach out with any other thoughts.

And thank you for your help.

Joy, I'll let you switch over then, I guess, to the other presentation.

There we go.

Thank you.

Great.

Hi, everybody.

I'm Sarah Kirk.

I'm a director with HR&A.

I am the project manager for the housing plan portion of this project.

Philip Cash is also online.

Great.

All right, I think you've already got a pretty good overview of the various efforts that are making up Charlottesville plans together, so we can go ahead and skip this, but we are part of the overall comp plan update effort.

Sure, I'll go through this quickly because I think we've presented, I mean we've definitely presented to you all before, so I think you're generally familiar with this, but HRNA is

We are a planning, economic development, and public policy consulting firm.

We work on a broad range of issues, but primarily we're the bridge between public sector and private sector action.

So in this case, it's housing where the public sector wants to take on housing issues and is trying to, part of that necessarily involves

I lead our housing practice and our housing work.

We really work in three areas.

We do housing plans and strategies, which is what we're working on with you all, really trying to understand what the drivers are in a market and what the issues and priorities are for that community.

And then we actually do policies and programs.

So designing, inclusionary zoning policies, land, public lands position.

All the potential policies programs we're going to talk about here, we actually design implement, and then we do projects.

So advise on projects, so public housing redevelopment, tax credit deals, mixed income housing, all those different types of efforts.

So generally, we think we're better at what we do, because we work on it at all the different levels.

So we actually know how easy it is to recommend something, you know, and recommend inclusionary zoning policy, but how difficult it is to actually design it.

And we know how difficult it is actually to interact with some of these policies at the project level.

I think that generally makes us better at making plans that are implementation focused.

And definitely that's been a consistent theme across all of our conversations with everyone that they want a plan that's actually going to make things happen.

They want things that happen.

Everyone is, people say it in different ways, but that's come up in every conversation we've had.

So we've been working on a process, I think we spoke with the Planning Commission back in January and we've spoken with several of you kind of throughout.

We started out with work to identify the housing issues that were most relevant in Charlottesville are the highest priority for the housing plan to address.

We have then been working to research the housing tools that exist in Charlottesville, the housing tools that maybe don't exist or have had challenges in the past and start to understand how policy changes and tool changes might be able to address those priority housing issues.

Where we are now is continuing to work on that, but also starting to think about

establishing some goals and a real strategic framework for the housing plan.

So the slides that we'll present here really think about bridging where we are in thinking about tools and possible solutions with overarching goals for the housing plan.

And moving forward, we will be working with the Steering Committee to finalize those and then draft the plan.

Go to the next slide.

What we're going to talk about today, and some of you have seen this already, is a preliminary strategic framework for the housing plan.

So we have some guiding principles that really underpin the housing plan, and then we start talking about how we're thinking about some potential tools and implementation needs for the housing plan.

Go to the next slide.

So the guiding principles.

These are three guiding principles that really underpin all of the recommendations in the plan.

So these are not necessarily living in any particular tool.

They're rather they're lenses that we're bringing to thinking about how to shape housing policy and how to implement the various tools and recommendations across the plan.

So the first one is racial equity.

I don't think that's a surprise.

That's been a pretty clear

focus of the project really since before we were hired to do more work on the plan.

But we understand that that is a lens that's going to be really important to thinking about all of the housing tools and recommendations in the plan to understand the ways in which they will advance goals of racial equity for the city.

The second is regional collaboration.

That's not to say that the solution to affordable housing in Charlottesville is to let the county take care of it, but

It is to say that housing is a regional issue and meaningful regional collaboration is going to be important in order to make meaningful change and progress on addressing those priority housing issues.

The third is a comprehensive approach, which is to say you can't solve housing problems by just focusing in one area.

You can't just work on land use.

You can't just work on subsidy.

You can't just work on rental affordability.

You have to really think across a range of housing issues and a range of types of intervention in order to make meaningful progress on affordable housing.

Next slide.

We talk about each of these in a little bit more detail.

Basically racial equity relates to all of the other

types of housing issues that we've talked about.

And it really informs how we think about implementation.

We can go to the next slide and you can actually skip ahead two more.

Yeah, let's go to the next one.

Great.

So when we talk about the potential tools for housing, we have three main categories of tools.

Actually, if you'll go back one, I think it's helpful.

Sorry about that.

So we talked about land use tools, which is really about zoning and development approval processes.

Subsidy, which is the ways in which the public is able to provide financing or land or other resources in order to make it more feasible to develop low-income affordable housing.

And tenants rights, which is really about helping to

maintain a better balance between the rights of landlords and the rights of tenants.

Currently, the state skews pretty heavily towards the rights of landlords.

So the city is a little bit limited in terms of what it can do there, but it is really an important part of a comprehensive approach to affordable housing.

Next slide.

Great.

So

For land use, really the primary goal that we want to be talking about and we would like input on if you have any thoughts or comments.

Land use is really about revising the city's regulations and development approval processes and the goal of that is to allow for an increased supply of housing production in proportion to the amount of demand and particularly thinking about increasing the supply of housing in high opportunity areas.

When we say high opportunity areas, we talk about areas that are either served by transit

have access to good schools, moderate high income neighborhoods.

We're talking about making sure that basically where people live, they have access to opportunity to get employment, education, and all of those other things that help with mobility, economic mobility over time.

The tools that we're talking about within land use are multifamily and what we're calling soft density or single family by right zoning.

So Code Studio is going to be, we're working with Code Studio, they're going to be doing these specific zoning updates, but we, particularly with the Planning Commission, want to talk about kind of how zoning changes can advance

the development of housing and support, the development of more housing, particularly in those high opportunity areas.

And then we're also talking about accessory dwelling units and inclusionary zoning, and particularly how to use those as ways to increase the development of affordable housing units.

Sure.

So I'll just make a couple of comments.

One, the next piece we're going to be doing with these

We're going to be going through this in much greater detail with each tool with the steering committee at the end of August and getting into a detailed conversation about each of these tools to get their feedback on them.

The conversation we're having with you, we've been having similar conversations with council members, other community stakeholders, frankly, just generally lay out this is the direction we're headed in based on what we've heard so far.

And here, where are we wildly off target or where do we need

Where are we off target?

What are we missing?

What are some things we should have in mind?

On the land use piece, we start with that one because frankly, we think it's, we believe it's fundamental.

You can't address, we can go back to land use.

Two slides back.

We don't believe you can address affordability if you don't have appropriate land use.

But we also acknowledge it doesn't solve bouncing around.

As long as you're just bouncing around, but I'll just talk to you.

Just focus on my voice.

So

We, sorry, land use is fundamental, but land use alone won't serve your lowest income households.

So we're trying to balance it there.

We see land use as the hardest piece though.

Subsidy is really about allocating resources and conversations about increase in taxes, which can be hard.

And like Cindy, Missy, I don't want to outplay how difficult that is, but in particular, land use is the most difficult because it's both about

getting a concrete change to the policies and regulations and then sticking with that change at a project by project basis, which you all, talking to you about that seems a little ridiculous given how much you know that and experience that.

And so, you know, we know there's been efforts in Charlottesville on reforming land use and making changes here have gotten stymied and part of these conversations we've been having with other folks and want to have with you all is

Okay, so we're going to go into each of these tools, particularly the buy-write multifamily.

We're talking about identifying additional areas where multifamily can be allowed buy-write and areas that allow multifamily buy-write now, making sure that special use permits are less necessary so it's more actually buy-write in practice.

That's easy for me to say once we put together a map and start to put actual

You know, we're with code so you can actually put a map together and actually show things to people.

People are going to get, generally my life experiences that people are going to get upset.

Nothing about Charlottesville makes me think that'll be any different.

You know, at a high level pushback or thoughts on that, like about, I guess there's two words, pushback and thoughts on are these the right tools?

And then the other piece of pushback and thoughts are how the conversation, like how to have that conversation both through the housing planning process

and through the actually COVID, right?

Because again, my experience is that it's not that hard to get a plan through that says allow by right multifamily or allow single family, but to actually get the zoning and approval process changed to allow it is extremely difficult.

And we want, you know, the city has set us up in a better position than most places because they've tried to tie the two together.

And I want to make sure we do our part to actually set this process up to be able to move on.

So first question is like,

Do these feel generally like the right tools?

I know there's much more specific versions of them necessary, like multifamily by right is a big tool.

But generally, do these feel like the right tools?

And then on the process, what do you see as like the key obstacles in the process to actually make both get something move forward and actually make it happen?

Any thoughts on that?

Sorry that there's not a slide in front of you, but imagine the slide where it says single family, soft density, single family and multifamily by right.

I'll talk about IZ, inks and zoning in a second.

Any thoughts on this?

You all have thoughts about zoning and development approval.

I guess I'll kick it off and hopefully Lisa and Joni will jump in to me, since they've been wrestling with us for years.

I guess we need to factor into whatever we do, the fact that we are built out.

And so there just isn't a lot of space to build new stuff.

So we're going to have to

We're going to have to take stuff down to build up stuff.

And the places where there is space to build stuff, they're on critical slopes that require very creative development to support.

So I guess my point is we need to factor that into your thinking.

One, that we are built out.

The spaces available for building are in areas that are very difficult to build on.

And we'll have to take down some existing infrastructure or housing to do some of the stuff we want.

And actually, I just want to tell you something.

You noticed something that I didn't speak to and a very silly of me I speak to is we talked about having a racial equity lens and centering on race and a lot of these tools.

So with multi-family or single-family soft density,

You're right.

There's going to be, like, there's some development that's got to happen, some infill, but to do that and not consider how you might actually end up driving more displacement would be to miss the point on this.

No, I just wanted to make the comment where I know we definitely need more housing.

We need more affordable housing and not these ridiculously priced high-end units that the average working person definitely cannot afford.

We need housing that does not require you to be

someone who works 40 plus hours a week or more than one or two jobs and you still have to apply for a subsidy in order to live in this city and we also need to keep in mind that while we do need more housing we do not want to be built to the max either I think that was one of the other things the earlier Commission when working on this comp plan discussed why yes we know that we need housing we do not want to have these

enormous skyscrapers to get us that housing, nor do we want to be built to the max either.

So please definitely keep that in mind.

Some of that is part of the uniqueness of the character of Charlottesville.

We are not New York or DC.

So let me talk about that directly because I think that gets into the core tension here.

One is acknowledging like

New development generally is going to happen at the top of the market.

So that means it's going to be the most expensive stuff.

Now, maybe we can have an inclusionary zoning policy that gets some affordable units, but new developments going to be the most expensive stuff that comes on the market, which means it's going to be for households making well over 100K in most cases, which does not solve our affordability problem.

I want to acknowledge that.

The thinking behind allowing more supply is that that takes pressure off of your units that are more affordable, your existing stock,

so they don't get displaced because, you know, Charlottesville is a desirable place and COVID is actually not going to hurt, make Charlottesville less desirable.

People are going to have more flexibility in location.

It's actually going to, like Charlottesville is a really, and so we live in a free market economy, which means that people can bid on properties and those with more money win that bidding at least a displacement.

And I think there's limits to this theory.

I want to acknowledge it, not oversell it.

The idea is that if you're building more housing, that takes some of that pressure off of neighborhoods and leads to less displacement.

But it doesn't, like, I want to acknowledge that that doesn't solve, land use alone does not solve at all for the need to serve households 60%, a household making $40,000 a year or a household making $50,000 a year or a household making less than that, which is a significant portion of Charlottesville.

So there's this tension of, we're not going to solve it completely, but acknowledging.

And Charlottesville may decide it doesn't want to go that approach, that it doesn't want to have supply to keep up with demand, that it wants to preserve character.

The ability to protect affordability, if it doesn't, though, requires either very strong tenants' rights or enormous amounts of subsidy.

And we're trying to lay that out and talk about the tension there.

And one of the ways that we're doing that is thinking about trying to be thoughtful about where, right?

We're not advocating for allowing soft density in every single family neighborhood in Charlottesville, right?

I would just, you know, this was one of the things that is was some of the most complex discussions that we've had.

Chair Mitchell was correct.

We are landlocked.

I'm not sure if we're built out yet or not.

But you're right, something has got to be torn down to then rebuild.

And you're absolutely right.

That's the

Where I get nervous is we know that nobody's just going to come in and go, here's an entire neighborhood of just affordable housing.

Everything we see, even in some of our redevelopment says we need some market right here.

That's what makes that's what makes the projects work.

So there's that part of it.

My other part that I kind of

keep preaching that they're probably tired of hearing about is when we start looking at the density, we also have to look at the infrastructure that's in place.

So we've got water, sewer, and roads.

So you can't just, you know, Commissioner Dowell was talking about how, you know, where we're building, you know, we've got to make sure all those things are in place because

Building a lot of low income housing for folks is not going to do any good if the infrastructure is not in place and there's not much water or the sewers, you know, failing.

I mean, that's not a great situation either.

So that's kind of the struggle I've had throughout this whole entire process is, so what is the answer?

Because we do know when you tear down and somebody builds up,

that they're going to build it at a market rate.

And it is desirable.

And that's why people want to come in and pay.

I look out this window that I sit here next to and there's I don't know how many townhouses that are $1.3 million.

So

And to me, I thought that because I said, that's the perfect place.

It's on a bus line.

I mean, that's the most desirable place for affordable housing.

It's near downtown, it's near jobs, and it's on the bus line, directly on the bus line.

And we have a row of, they're beautiful, but they're row and row of $1.3 million town.

I think that that's, there's a real limitation there on how much housing it takes to do it.

And with Charlottesville having limited growth opportunities, one of the things we've looked at and I want to, well, I want to hear you all depending on anything you want to talk about, but in particular on, you know, outside of Charlottesville, but the bound, the area around Charlottesville,

that you have an agreement with the county to allow for more development.

So as we've looked at areas like to do just straight affordable housing, so tax credit, lower income housing, tax credit development are similar.

You know, we see those as real.

That is an area really that's going to be important because there's not a lot of sites that are going to do well to get tax credit development.

But it can also be true for more market rate development and taking pressure off.

So, you know, the way I see it, obviously, the vast majority of the growth in the region has been in Albemarle County lately, and now even in the outer counties surrounding that, you know, Rutgersville up in green,

I started putting lots of townhomes and apartments.

And from a climate perspective, that's obviously very bad because we're sprawling further and further out.

We're disturbing more of the natural environment and people are commuting further to come in.

But of course, people are forced to move that far away just to find a home that they can afford to live in, a drive till you qualify.

So to me, I think it is really important to start to grow within the urban core, both in the Albemarle urban ring

like they want in their development area, but also in the city itself.

And I think, you know, one thing we've really seen is that when we have had growth in the city, it's been very much concentrated in areas that aren't those, you know, high-income, high-opportunity areas because they've kind of zoned it out of existence.

And so we see a lot of pressure on, you know,

on West Main, on Fifeville, on 10th and Page, both in terms of the new apartment buildings going up, but also in terms of single-family homes that get torn down and then rebuilt as much, much more expensive single-family homes or just renovated into much more expensive single-family homes.

and, you know, I think it's really important to direct some of that growth or allow it in higher energy areas.

And in particular, I'm thinking like the tallest building in the city, 500 Court Square, is nine stories tall and has like 50-something apartments in it, but it's in north downtown in an area zoned for like a 35-foot building.

And like those

Historic just clamping down on it over the decades in places like North downtown, which are right near where all the jobs are, you know, high income area.

Both

I want to ask one really quick question as you answer that based off of there was just a recent article or something I was listening to after we've had this pandemic where there has been a rush to leave these high-rise apartments to go to the suburbs because people don't want to be stuck at a high-rise in a pandemic.

And so I wonder, has there been thought with this?

And this has been something that I've been thinking about, too, is we had density, density, density, high rise, high rise, high rise as we were having these conversations three years ago.

And everybody wanted to build up and squeeze in.

And I just wonder in some of these micro units that we talked about.

And so I'm wondering how that is being looked at now and potential

I apologize for the answer I'm about to give, but it all appears to be a bit up in the air still.

What isn't changing is the desire for, well, what hasn't changed is the desire for density on the developer side to keep costs down.

And so they are looking at like, can I do the higher density development with multi-entry points?

The other thing that, you know, so that isn't changing people's desire for walkability isn't changing their frustration that they're not allowed to walk anywhere.

Like everything's closed.

I live in DC.

I'm actually in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I grew up in a middle of subdivision with my in-laws house because

Why not?

Like I can't walk to any of the places I normally walk to where I live.

So I'm going to hang out here with a big backyard and nice, but it's not what I initially would have chosen.

So I don't know how that's going to end up.

I know we're coming up on time.

So I want to be respectful and like, this is not the only time this conversation.

You guys will have copies on this and we'll talk more.

The other thing I want to hit quickly is on the inclusionary zoning piece.

Like I think I'm hearing useful impact.

Everything you guys are saying is useful, particularly on, okay,

Like one, how does like development actually really, are we actually gonna be able to build enough that's really gonna take pressure off and actually make a difference on affordability?

I think that's very, I'm hearing very healthy skepticism on that.

Two, how do we make sure it's not actually displacing folks?

And then three, a big conversation here about where, where, where, where, where, like it's one thing the same with density, but it's really, really important about where it ends up.

And particularly, I think on the second point, the soft density in some of the single family neighborhoods,

that historic, like not pushing multifamily into a few places it always gets pushed into.

I will say on the inclusionary zoning piece, just talking to that quickly, like that's not a tool you all have now.

We think that's a tool that can be useful.

It still only produces a very modest number of units and will only produce those affordable units if we have an actual pipeline of multifamily development.

Now that's not a reason in and of itself to have more multifamily development if we're against it, but certainly as we look to reform the multifamily,

Inclusionary zoning and multifamily by rights should almost be nested together.

If you're redesigning your multifamily by right, you should be thinking about what inclusionary zoning policy you want to go with that as opposed to tacking it on afterwards, which is what most communities end up doing.

And they've basically given away all their negotiating power before they ask for the affordability piece, which we would not recommend.

Philip, just one quick question just to make sure not only that I'm following on the same page, but just all of our viewers.

I apologize.

Absolutely.

So inclusionary zoning is a requirement that in new housing that's developed or existing housing that's significantly redeveloped, a portion of the units are affordable.

It generally targets

60% of area median income or 80% of area median income.

It's normally in a range of 8 to 12% of the new units.

There's some variability there.

But it's basically, if you want to build new housing, a portion of that housing has to be affordable.

And there's a lot of variation about whether there's any incentives like allowing for additional density or waiving parking requirements to go with it.

Historically, Charlottesville have not been able to do it.

But state legislators moved, and Charlottesville now has the ability to move forward on this.

So it's an exciting new tool.

But even counties or cities that have the most aggressive policies produce dozens, and the biggest places, 100 units a year.

Thank you for that clarification.

I apologize.

Oh, no worries.

And the last little comment that I wanted to make, cause I know we are pressed for time and I like to be respectful of everyone's time.

Um, is that I know we need more units and I know we're talking about multifamily trying to get those, but I do feel like if we are truly going to make change in this city, especially for those that are below the 80% AMI, you still have to figure out some type of affordable single family home.

because an affordable single family home not only makes a difference today, it creates generational wealth that makes a difference 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.

So I know we need more density and more housing, but we also cannot only talk about apartments.

We can't talk about units.

As in a cluster, we need to talk about a unit as if it is a single family home with a yard.

Because while you are fortunate, and so am I, to be able to have multiple places we can go during a pandemic, not everybody is that fortunate.

We need to level the playing field so that more than just me, you and the few people on this panel have those options as well.

That's a health issue for me as well, too.

Point well taken.

And we should, can we move over to the subsidy slides?

So, um, I think I've acknowledged this, but I'll say it again.

I want to be really direct.

Land use can increase the supply of housing, but there's a level of income where households don't earn the income or wage, or the wages aren't sufficient to cover the cost to build and maintain a property.

and outside of changing the wage structure.

So minimum wage policies or others, really that leaves you with the option of subsidizing housing.

So if you're serving households generally in your market, $40,000, $50,000 a year or less, there's some kind of, generally there's some kind of subsidy that's got to go on.

If you're going to create a new stock, it's affordable at that level.

And there's different issues we can get into.

And the first area is really about affordable rental stock.

So there's the low-income housing tax credit, which is a,

It's a subsidy source that comes from the federal government that's distributed by the state that lets you build apartment buildings that are affordable, but you still have to be making a pretty decent income to afford them.

There's also public housing redevelopment that's going on in Charlottesville.

And then there are what we call preservation funds or funds that really go out there and acquire existing housing that's affordable and take the market pressure off of it.

So they take it, they buy up that property,

and really any rent increase that occurs in that property is just about what it takes to maintain that property.

So what rent is it going to take to put a new roof or a new HVAC system in that property?

There's no profit motive in those properties.

And those are all tools.

And I want to respectful time, but also compliment like normally we spend a lot of time looking at different tools and putting them together for our city.

Charlottesville has a strong ecosystem of affordable housing advocates and practitioners.

and you all generally have looked at as a city, almost every tool that's out there, it's really more of a conversation about which tools to prioritize as opposed to introducing new concepts.

Those are three on the rental side.

On the home ownership side, there's a number of different tools that we can do to promote home ownership and ranging from new development of single family that's affordable to down payment assistance that helps households actually access home ownership

The point made previously by Commissioner Dowell is well taken that homeownership is about more than just the affordability of the unit.

It's about wealth building.

It's also, if we're talking about centering this on race, it's about addressing both historic obstacles to access to homeownership and much more recent obstacles in the foreclosure crisis that wiped out equity for Black Americans across the country.

One of the commissioners made a comment previously about disaggregating the data and not just looking at numbers.

One of the things we found when we talked with the Steering Committee and we talked to others that homeownership polls lowest when we actually just straight count numbers.

But when we talk to Black stakeholders, Black Steering Committee members, it shows up much higher.

I've done this for a long time.

That's not unique to Charlottesville.

That's neighborhood improvement, anti-displacement and homeownership show up much stronger.

And that's really an understanding of the historic obstacles and historic and current obstacles to accessing that.

And so we have homeownership in here as a tool.

We have a lot of conversations that we're gonna be having in the steering committee about what are the appropriate mechanisms to actually do it.

Is it community land trust that doesn't give full ownership and full appreciation ability

appropriate or not.

How can this be blended with some of the property tax relief programs?

How do we take existing homeowners and help them stay in their home and enjoy the home and be in a position to receive the appreciation from it and keep its affordability, which usually those are not things you can reconcile all of them.

Usually one of them has to give, but there are efforts to really rehab people's homes and put a lien on the value for the property value of that improvement.

Not to prevent them from getting appreciation, but to actually make sure that that lien actually becomes a down payment for the next homeowner.

So it's more affordable.

So we're trying to figure out where we can do that and then reducing costs.

So these, you know, this is about helping households just supplement their income so they can afford.

So this is tenant based vouchers, which Charlottesville has moved forward on and emergency rental assistance, which Charlottesville and the rest of the country is rapidly expanding in response to COVID.

but frankly needs to be a more systemized and sustained effort because households experience income crises all the time.

And there's generally not outside of your faith-based community, not a standardized set of tools to support them.

So we're looking at all these outside tools.

We're gonna be going through with your steering committee to get a more detailed set, dial in on these and put them out in greater detail and then have another round of comment.

I'm gonna go to tenants rights and talk about those and then I'll pause for more conversation.

On the tenants' rights side, tenants' rights are about, you will always have market pressure or you'll always have landlords who want to push up the rent or maximize profit.

We live, again, capitalist society, that's the structure.

The tenants' rights we're looking at are really about trying to balance that and limit and defray some of that market pressure.

And there's two pieces to them.

One is just making sure that tenants have the support to exercise the rights they do have right now, even if they are not that strong of rights.

So let's write the council.

That's ideas of landlord registry.

So your landlords just have to be clear about who they are and they can be contacted and held more responsible.

And then it's creating and pushing for additional rights, rights that are present in other parts of the country but aren't present in Virginia or Charlottesville.

Most extreme version of that is rent regulation, rent control.

So the idea that you can only raise rent a fixed amount is generally related to investment in the property.

You cannot raise rent just because the market went up.

that's not legal in the state of Virginia currently, but it doesn't mean it's not something we're, it's still something we wanna talk about and figure out how Charlottesville would wanna approach something like that.

Concepts like just cause eviction or tense opportunity to purchase a property if the property is being sold.

These are rights that exist in other places and can be when poorly designed they do harm, but when well-designed can be really beneficial and take some of the market pressure off of lower income residents.

So we're gonna look at these both focused on

What can we do to increase the rights right now and actually make those rights actionable?

Because a right you can't take action on isn't much of a right.

And what could we advocate for?

There's a piece in here that we don't talk in this version, but we're evolving on is anywhere Charlottesville is putting money into a property, it has a lot more ability to push tenants' rights.

So tenants' right to organize

rights requirements for just cause eviction, registering the landlord, all kinds of different pieces.

We're going to look at how we make how Charlottesville is making requirements on any property they do right now, because Charlottesville is putting support in to create low income housing tax credit developments.

And that's great.

But the state of Virginia, when it gives those credits, doesn't require any additional.

Well, that's not exactly doesn't require significant additional tenants rights.

But Charlottesville could decide it once.

Different rights on those properties and start to

start to make change there.

So these I went through this quickly, but these are all the tools we're looking at at the highest level.

We'll share this document would be interested if there are tools we're missing or particular tools you think are important for us to focus on, or just recommendations on that sounds great, but it's gonna be really hard to do in Charlottesville.

The other two pieces we're looking at quickly are funding.

So the city needs a dedicated city has a housing trust fund we're looking at are going to be talking with this joint committee on

How much funding is appropriate for that?

And how does that get dedicated?

What requirements are put with that?

So it has to serve certain income levels.

Does it have to serve homeownership and rental?

Does an organization receiving funding from housing trust fund have to meet certain standards of behavior in terms of addressing racial equity and supporting affordable housing overall?

So we're going to have a conversation both about how much funding and then what requirements come with the funding if it comes from Charlottesville.

and then the other piece is governance.

Charlottesville has a couple of commissions and boards and planning groups and we're going to make recommendations on who is the champion and really the owner outside of local government.

So we have good owners inside local government of Charlottesville's housing plan.

Who's monitoring it, reporting on it annually and advocating for its implementation.

Is that the hack?

Is that a modified version of the hack?

Is that another entity?

We probably will not suggest net more entities unless Charlottesville's population grows significantly.

Same kind of conversation for housing trust fund.

If you have a housing trust fund, who's making recommendations, official recommendations on where, how that funding gets allocated and how do we address conflicts of interest?

Because you want expertise for those who are practitioners in this case, but you don't necessarily want them controlling the funding alone.

And particularly a point called earlier is, where are the recipients?

So those who are actually participating in programs involved in guiding the implementation of the overall plan and the funding.

So households that are participating in programs, Charlottesville is not alone in this, but generally aren't in a position to make recommendations on how the programs are designed.

And this is

partial racial equity issue and partially, frankly, just a better program design issue.

Not involving your customer and the design process is not how the private sector does it.

And I think, you know, again, not disparaging Charlottesville, because this is a national every community problem, but it's really a legacy of how we view those who need this assistance.

And, you know,

and trying to move past that in the way our governance structure is so that households who are participating and have the most direct experience are given a standardized and institutionalized voice in how the programs are designed and give the field a little more closely.

So I went through all that very quickly because I know it's 7.20 and people want to do other things with their life.

We are available to have more one-on-one conversations and you all have copies of this and we'll be coming back again and I'm happy to talk about

Anything right now that you all want to cover?

That's why I know we don't necessarily need to cover next steps.

That was on our agenda originally.

I think we've already talked about that a bit.

We're working toward the steering committees at the end of the month.

And that information with the steering committee will be public on our website.

So we'll make sure that gets to you as well so you can see how we're progressing there.

So, commissioners, any questions?

You're still the intro.

You've been very quiet.

Do you have anything?

Forgive me, Lyle.

I didn't mean to step on you.

Oh, I have nothing.

Thank you.

Yeah, I guess so in terms of affordable homeownership, a couple more options I have in mind.

So I know homeownership housing choice vouchers are a thing that can be used for federal that we haven't really talked about here.

and also thinking about not just homeownership of single-family detached homes but also of condos and townhomes or single-family attached where, you know, condos are the most affordable homes in the city.

So we will not make ownership exclusive to single family, but we will certainly call out, and this will be more on the program implementation side, is the key piece to multifamily home ownership, particularly affordable, is often how condo fees are structured and even how the governance structure inside of those condo associations works.

I feel like the smaller geographic scale you get to in governance structures, the meaner people get sometimes, and the less thoughtful they are at times.

So generally, I 100% agree, and I think we'll try to lay out some safeguards in there too.

Just a couple of quick comments.

I'm constantly struck as I drive and walk around the city how many modest homes there are in Charlottesville, 900 to 1,500 square feet.

And the study that was done 10 years ago or so showed that we have a large number of those kinds of homes, a bell curve in the center,

And then very little low income homes and very little high income homes.

And so when those two ends are competing for those houses in the center.

I know who's going to win and who's going to outbid the other.

I do believe that it's an issue of we need more housing period at all levels to take some of the pressure off of those more modest homes that are within reach, hopefully with these other tools that have been talked about.

Another is I really go back to the first comprehensive plan, the intro comprehensive plan that was done

and those nodes, those transit nodes that we talked about of high density at the entry places of corridors coming into the city and having transfers from those or that being a place where you could have high density

affordable housing as well as condominiums.

I'm getting older.

I'm looking for a place to go with my wife to a condominium.

It'd be great to go to someplace like that that had that transit connection to downtown instead of having all that density go around your downtown area and damage the integrity and the character of the downtown.

That's about as much as I can say right now.

So briefly, the sense that people have around here of more homes is West Main.

People think about West Main.

And that's good and that's bad because West Main is not perfect.

Some people say it's too tall.

There's no transition.

It's all kind of new.

So if you don't like that style, you're out.

That's helpful to understand.

One of the things we'll be coming back to you all more with is as we work with Design Studio is, or sorry, Code Studio, is more specifics on what the zoning change would actually look like and how that would actually work.

Because again, it's hard to get people on board with density.

It's even harder when it's actual density, and then it's the hardest when it's a real project.

The more culture gets to reality, the more opposition there is.

Yeah, thanks all.

I know we're at our time, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the Star Hill plan.

I'm sure you all are, too.

So I'll stick around for that conversation.

And please feel free to reach out to us with any other comments or questions.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I was going to invite you guys to stick around for the work session.

We'd also invite you to participate.

So if any questions pop up, please, Graham, feel free to ask.

We do, the current vision is to include the vision plan in the comp plan.

So you guys will be working through that as we try to figure out how to do that.

Okay, thank you.

So before we do that, why don't we take about a five minute break?

So back in five minutes and we'll move on to the work session.

Is that good Ms.

I will wait one more minute to give Ms.

Dow an opportunity to get her dinner organized and then we'll jump back in.

In the meantime, Ms.

I'll provide an overview.

Oh, okay.

Got it.

Thank you.

Sorry.

No problem.

We will wait another minute.

And Ms.

Arrell is doing the presentation.

Yolanda Harrell.

And there she is.

Hi.

Life is good.

Hi, Alex.

How are you, Missy?

Good.

How about you?

Mr. Mitchell, you had just asked the question about who's doing the presentation.

Myself and Shelley Brady are both going to be doing the presentation.

And our partner, Matt, who I helped with the market analysis is on the call as well, but

You will not see him.

He lives in Illinois and does not have power.

So he's only going to use his audio.

So why don't we go ahead and begin?

Yeah.

OK.

Good evening, commissioners, Mr. Chair.

Tonight, we're presenting a Star Hill vision plan to you.

On November 18, 2019, the City Council passed a resolution to transmit the plan to the Planning Commission for consideration.

And on December 28, 2019, staff reviewed the Star Hair plan, and it was determined that it needs to be considered as a vision plan due to the scope of work.

And tonight,

The work session by the city council is designed for the planning commission to, sorry about that, the work session about the planning commission is designed for you guys to hear the Star Hill plan presentation by a new Hill Development Corporation.

And subsequent after that, then staff will prepare the plan finally for public hearing.

And with that, I will hand it over to

Yolanda Herrera, who's the CEO of New Year Development Corporation, and she can introduce our team and then take it from there.

Well, again, good evening, everyone.

It's wonderful to finally

get before you.

It certainly has been a interesting year, this 2020.

It's kind of like the gift that keeps on giving in a lot of ways, but excited to finally get before you here.

On the call with me today is going to be our project leader, Shelly Brady, who's with Flora Kane over in Richmond.

And then we also, as I mentioned earlier, we also have Matt Schuetteman on as well, who is with RW Ventures, who did the work for the market analysis piece of it.

And again, Matt, his video won't be showing because he does have a power outage situation going on up there.

And so we're going to just hope that he can stick with us through this process.

And of course, I'll be able to answer any questions.

He'll be available to answer any questions that you may have as we work through this.

So I'll start out with the presentation.

It's going to kind of bounce back and forth between myself and Shelley as we go through this.

and we look forward to answering your questions.

So I wanna start out with giving just a little bit of background so that we can make sure that everybody understands how we came to be and how we got to this point.

So New Hill was brought together, or what is now New Hill, two former city council members, Councilman Bellamy and Councilwoman

Galvin brought together a group of African American business owners and entrepreneurs and business leaders to talk about how can we, what would it be like to see more development led by the black community in Charlottesville and why isn't that, why does that not currently exist?

And then it kind of morphed into, well, what would a Black business district look like?

And so the idea that they had initially was around the city yard opportunity that existed, a 10-acre plot of land right in the heart of the city.

that was adjacent to a community that was raised in the 60s that was a predominantly African American community where business life and home ownership was a thriving part of that community.

And so it was the initial thought of how can we do something

to have a higher best use, better use for this piece of property than what we currently have that could then give back and really have some intention behind it, especially as it relates to equity within our city.

So we can advance to the first slide.

I'm sorry, the next slide, please.

So with that in mind, as we received the donation from the city in 2018 to begin this process, we actually received the, they passed the agreement and we started the process actually in 2019.

But with that,

As we approach this work, it was really about the focus of the top three things.

Community engagement, market analysis, identifying trends, really understanding what is our market doing, who does it serve, how do we fit into that particular market, the market trends, and what are the future opportunities of our particular market.

And then what is the community's vision around what it would like to see for itself as the community is developed and as development continues to happen in Charlottesville?

And how do we articulate the aspirations that we have?

And so the land use recommendations and the resource available to make those things happen is really in service to the top three things in this plan, which is who are we serving?

which community members, what does the market currently look like, and then what is the vision for what our community would like to see.

When we took this approach, we wanted to make sure that we were very focused in how we went about doing our work.

So we wanted to make sure that we first

I've heard from the Star Heel community itself, those that are right there in the community that would be most affected by anything that happens in the community.

And as you all know, Star Heel has a small residential piece to it, but the majority of the community is commercial.

and so but we still were very intentional in making sure that we talked not only to our residents but also to the commercial residents in that community as well and so we started there then we expanded out because then we wanted to talk to the neighboring communities because obviously they too would be affected by anything that happens in the Star Hill area so we wanted to make sure so we reached out to the neighboring communities to to to talk with them to

hear their concerns, hear their visions of what they would like to see happen.

as far as the community is concerned.

And then we reached out a little bit further and then we said, okay, let's have some focus groups and let's talk with folks from the city.

Let's talk from other stakeholders, other nonprofits that are working actively within this area or within our community in general.

Let's talk with business institutions, our anchor institutions.

Let's make sure that we have a really good understanding of who's here, what are they doing?

What are the future opportunities?

What are the plans?

and based on what the community would like to see for itself, how can this all work together?

And of course, we wanted to take a look at a regional perspective because we wanted to make sure that we understand what are the goals for the region?

What are the economic goals?

What are the housing goals?

What are all these things that are happening so that we can take those things into consideration?

We didn't want to just think about the current lived environment and those that were here, but also the future, who was going to be served and making sure that

the current residents, the current community, especially with an emphasis on equity and the current black community, how do you see yourself fitting into the future of Charlottesville?

How do you see yourself fitting into the current state of Charlottesville?

And then what could that potentially look like if there were other opportunities within our community?

So if you can advance the slide, please.

So when we started the process, what we wanted to do is we wanted to look at planning.

We wanted to look at implementation.

And throughout that whole process, we wanted to make sure that community engagement happened.

So one of the first things that we did is we set out about making sure that we hired a community ambassador team.

Folks that could go out, that could talk, that could talk with the neighbors in the community, the ones that weren't going to be able to make a meeting.

But we could have those conversations, not only the residents, but also those business owners.

Because again, there's a number of businesses and those businesses are active.

And so we needed to make sure that we engage them in this process.

So even if they couldn't make a public meeting, their voice still could be heard during this process.

So we wanted to create that team, which we had a great group of individuals that were able to work through that with us.

The first thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to look at our data collection.

And when we talk about the data collection piece of it, there were things that we wanted to understand.

So we worked in tandem with RW Ventures

to look at the market analysis, but also to get local data on the ground data of what was going in Star Heel and then also what was happening in and around the area.

And then we also wanted to be able to talk to not only the individuals in that community, but also in the broader community.

to talk about what are some of the possibilities that could happen in this particular area.

From that, we move to the next phase where we got our vision and our strategies in place.

That's where if you are looking in the PDF online, you would be looking at page 27.

That's where the vision and the guiding principles come about.

They come from the community.

They come from the engagement.

They come from everything that we heard from the community.

We put these together.

We presented it back to the community and say, is this exactly what you said?

Is this what we heard?

So that we could understand how we then develop strategies as we move forward.

And the guiding principles for this work were a more equitable community,

promote black prosperity, belonging and inclusion, continuous learning, strong connectivity, and most importantly to respect existing residential fabric.

So those were the guiding principles that are the overarching guidance for this plan.

The next thing we also wanted to look at is, okay, so what then are some of the strategies based on what we heard

what are the strategies that could be put in place to achieve what we heard and then who could be our partners to potentially do this and then how could we possibly pay for it

if we were going to do some of these things, or if the city wanted to do some of these things, or the community wanted to do some of these things.

And so the strategies, the partners, the financing, that piece of the, if again, if you're on the PDF version, that would be found on page 133, that gets into the section on the various strategies and who would own those.

And you'll see repeated oftentimes in there, New Hill, because we are a community development corporation with the purpose

of making sure that we understand what the work should be and so therefore a lot of this we will take ownership of and we have already taken ownership of and started to work on.

And so I wanted to make sure that you understood where those things are and how they laid out because they're very important to understand

not only if we have a strategy but who could possibly be our partners in it and how could it possibly be done.

And of course we also looked at the land use and we made some recommendations around density and we did some analysis there and of course we talk when it comes to the implementation piece of it that when we talk about implementation we're thinking more of

Once you're ready to develop something, that's going to be the next phase.

That's where the modeling is going to happen, and that's where development plans are going to be put in place.

But for now, the implementation that we've put forth speaks specifically to partnerships, what are some of the things that should be done first, second, third, and then also how do we go about paying for some of those things in the process.

If we can go to the next slide, please.

In our work, we completed a market analysis.

We wanted to make sure that, as I mentioned before, that we had a really great understanding of what all, not only from an economic perspective, but also from a housing perspective, like what was happening, who was doing what, based on the strategies or based on the comments that we heard from the community during our engagement piece.

Is this being done somewhere and is it a matter that we just don't know about it or is it that it's not being addressed?

So some of the key things that we found and which of course I'm sure is no surprise to you all, that the current state and the dynamics of our local area is that we have a lot of great assets, but those assets just aren't equally shared.

And so how do we change that?

How do we fundamentally change that?

And so we looked at Charlottesville and the Star Heel area, the assets there, they're strong, it's growing.

We've got a great regional economy and rapid growth in our population and employment.

We're well resourced in terms of anchor institutions.

We have a strong neighborhood residential piece of the Star Heel community.

It's very strong, very financially solid, very financially stable neighborhood.

But there again, you know, there's assets throughout the broader community that aren't equally shared.

And so the things that came from our conversations, the things that came from our research, the things that just really are blatant and exist, that there's a significant racial disparities in income and education attainment.

We looked at things like the gaps and supports for entrepreneurs and workers, the various financing options that either just don't exist or not made available to entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs of color in the black community.

We looked at high property values and the limited supply of affordable retail and commercial and co-working spaces, because that's one of the things that came out really strong in our

in our community engagement pieces.

And I believe I heard in the last presentation that when you are talking to the African American community, ownership is very important.

The ability to not only physically and financially own something, but to just kind of atmospherically own a space.

Where do we gather?

Where do we go to?

What is ours?

What do we

own in terms of the space in Charlottesville.

And so that came up a lot.

You know, we talk about co-working spaces here.

Yes, co-working spaces exist in Charlottesville, but co-working space is designed for who?

And that is something that really came up over and over again.

And of course, the tight housing market with affordability and the burdens and the AMI bans, you know, how do we address that?

Some key things

that we looked at.

And throughout this plan, you'll see us referred to as Star Heel Plus, because it's more than just the Star Heel area.

It's thinking about the broader community as well and the opportunities that exist for the broader community.

So some key things that we pulled out that are strategies that really could help is small business and entrepreneurship supports.

We wanted to look at the workforce for the next generation jobs.

Those are some things that can be done.

How do we utilize City Yard to provide additional affordable live workspace?

And then also, how do we leverage the area anchor institutions to expand opportunities for small businesses?

That was very key.

And we see a lot of work that's been done across the country.

One of the great things about partnering with

LISC to do this work.

LISC works all across this nation.

They do a lot of wonderful work in helping cities to transform and creating funds and working with folks to bring money to the table and resources to the table.

And so we're able to leverage that information to be able to say, okay, well, what's happening here?

Same thing with RW Ventures.

You know, they work across the country as well, and they

They're able to apply some of the information that they've learned about other things that other cities are doing that we were able to kind of look at as we talked about some of these initiatives here.

While he's doing that, you're talking about area anchor institutions.

What exactly are they?

No, I mean UVA is an anchor institution, but you have the hospital system.

You have, you know, you also have Sentara, Martha Jefferson.

Many of you may know like Sentara and LISC, the company that we, the organization that we worked with to put this plan together, put together a hundred million dollar fund down in the Hampton Roads area, but that can be used in the Commonwealth anywhere there is a

Sintera.

And I think just to add the where we started, like that little pebble in the pond, right, and then circled out from there was we started out with the voice of those immediately impacted instead of letting the big

Big voice of the anchor institutions and the other entities sort of overpower it.

So there was a very deliberate engagement path.

And that way, everybody that was affected in the immediate vicinity and in the neighbor vicinity, they kept getting included with each iteration of community engagement so that they became very invested, very powerful.

which they said in the course of the process was they thanked us a lot because normally it's the other way.

Normally the big people are talked to and they just get the memo.

So that was a very intentional path.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when we look at, when we started talking about the community strategy and the community visions, the three opportunity areas that we focus on are the economics and entrepreneurship.

Under this one,

And you can find this on page 28 in the PDF where we start talking about like creating a visible hub for black businesses, creating accelerators or incubations.

And I know that this has come up in other plans as well.

I know it was an SAA.

There was something about incubators and accelerators.

This is something that we heard over and over again from the community.

How do we get more black businesses developed and how do we get those black businesses to be able to scale and get to the next level?

And what are the opportunities?

Of course, financing.

The financial gaps, that's a big contributor.

How do we support and how do we fill that?

We talked with a number of organizations within the community and really got a good understanding of where those gaps exist, which again are not necessarily surprising, but then what is the work being done to change that significantly?

We also looked at support for firm startups and growth for black entrepreneurs and targeted industries.

We looked at what the Region 9 plan and okay, so what are the traded clusters?

What are we trying to grow in terms of jobs?

And are we doing enough to make sure that for the community members that either want to have a business that can then directly tie into those industries,

that they understand what those industries are and how to connect, but also for workforce development.

And then also deepen the engagement and coordination with the anchor institutions.

There are so many communities beyond our community where you have your anchor institutions like a university or a hospital system where they are really working and being very intentional about the amount of business that they do with the local community so that the money

flows back into the community so that more jobs are created.

And so that is definitely something that came out loud and strong that what could possibly be done.

And then of course, scale and expand industry focused workforce development.

So that's in that first category of economics and entrepreneurship.

That was a big piece that came out loud and strong in the engagement process.

The second one was the housing and connectivity.

How do we sustain and grow Starheel's residential core?

Again, Starheel has a strong neighborhood.

He has a very vibrant participating neighborhood, but it's a small neighborhood and there's opportunity to be able to add right there adjacent.

So one of the things that we suggest in this plan that right there along Brown Street, which is adjacent to City Yard, that why not utilize that area of land there to put some new homes in?

And one of the things that the community members, the residents of Star Hill said is, well, we would like that to go to first time homeowners.

And so that we can make sure that we are helping in that home ownership opportunity.

We also talk about under the housing and connectivity ways that you can use future taxes to support the anti displacement tax fund.

to really start thinking about not only that we aren't going to build this, but then there's going to be taxes and there's going to be revenue that's going to be generated for the city, but then there's also going to be a cause and effect.

We're going to raise the property values, which is not a bad thing, but then that's also going to raise taxes and what happens to individuals who are on a fixed income and they can no longer afford those taxes.

The city had already in this wisdom put together an anti displacement tax fund and has expanded that fund.

And so what we talk about

is let's think about that right now that any development that happens in the future, let's use some of the new taxes revenue that'll be generated to feed that fund so we can make sure that it stays sustainable and that for all the individuals that are gonna be continuously affected by the development.

So those are some of the things that we looked at when it comes to housing and connectivity.

Also, how do we get the neighborhoods back flowing together again?

You've got tunnels there that are closed off.

Part of it because of City Yard.

So again, opening that space up, we can connect the neighborhoods again.

Of course, placemaking culture and legacy.

When we talk about placemaking, we talk about that sense of place.

Do you see yourself represented in this community?

The Jefferson School is a wonderful

institution around which the community is kind of anchored.

And what we are suggesting is that it needs to really be amplified and highlighted even more so, and that we need to really pull out the culture out of that building and out into the community even more so, but even amplify it more so around the building itself.

And how do we strengthen the park that exists there?

And how do we bring more art

and more vibrancy to that area.

So I'm going to transition now and let Shelly kind of get into some of, based off of these initiatives and principles, how does that play out in the use of land?

Thank you, Elanda.

So in the front of the PDF that you have, and I don't know exactly which page it's on, but we laid out some guiding principles that

from all of our engagement, we kind of discern like these six or so guiding principles that would inform whatever we do.

You kind of heard the same kind of strategy in the presentation before us.

That's really what you want to do, right?

You want to figure out what is needed in the area and how can you put those as kind of guardrails and how you, all your actions and ideas reflect from that and support it.

So,

Some of the big things that we heard helped us create what we wanted to just kind of map out called character zones.

Instead of looking at the land as in land use, like, what would, how would it be experienced?

How would it function?

And then let that kind of drive what we turned around and did for zoning.

And since I don't really have a pointer, on the right on the

I don't know which side is yours.

I'm going to call it on the left side.

You see some dotted lines, and that is the CSX rail line, both the active and the inactive spur.

So that creates one edge of the Star Hill community.

And three roads, major roads, really create the other three edges.

You have Preston on the north.

You have Ridge MacIntyre on the right and on the east, if you will.

And then you have

both Main Street and the railroad again on the southern edge.

Most people think of Main Street as being the southernmost edge, but actually all of the boundary of Star Hill goes all the way to the other railroad along the bottom.

But all three of those roadways really belong to higher systems than this community, if you think about it.

None of those three roads belong to the Star Hill area.

They're all just a segment in a larger system of connectivity through the city.

We just get to experience it in these brief moments.

So one of the things we wanted to do was really think about with the high level of activity there and each of them all actually have their own plan inside your larger system of your master plan.

We immediately said, well, we honor those because those had particular studies done.

So given the parameters of that, what else can we do?

Two things.

One, really trying to honor the small community that does exist.

And sorry, I'm wanting the desire to point, but in that light blue area is City Yard.

And so just to the south of that is the small residential community of Star Hill.

It's like 45 houses, maybe 250 people.

Do I have the numbers right, Yolanda, somewhere in there?

So they are petrified.

Somebody spoke earlier in another presentation about the development on Main Street.

And the community really spoke to that here.

They were petrified that the big abominable snowman was going to come and smother their little community, which they thought was a very vital community.

So part of the strategy was to hold onto that and then build out from there in scale and mass and density so that the larger, heavier uses were along those already heavily trafficked roads.

So that's just take that as an overall kind of theme.

So you're starting with just like we had that circle that Yolanda had showed earlier, same kind of thing here in the center of the Star Hill, 48 acres is the smallest, shortest, most sensitive footprint.

It's where the people are there 24 seven.

And then from there, we can build out and scale up and get away from the home, allow the sunlight to come in, if you will,

and keep all those other areas where people go home somewhere else at a higher density.

So that's one.

The second concept was to create an interior arterial system.

Since those outer edges all kind of belong to a greater system, how could we create and navigate something inside this community that felt more communal?

And so you see those couple of circles there.

If you think of that as kind of the vertex and commerce and fourth street come out from that,

and they actually wrap around something that is much more communal, community oriented to this place.

Inside there is the residential community, inside there are some churches, inside there is the Jefferson School and inside there is City Yard, which could become something again, much more collective, much more part of the fiber.

than is currently used.

Right now it's just, it's an industrial commercial site that's got no relationship to anything else in this particular community.

And then one last guiding principle and kind of see it in the bright green strip there, and that is connectivity.

To try to create a connection between the Jefferson School, which is in the green,

and going across 4th Street and Ridge, which that light green area is what little bit of property remains a part of the Vintage Hill footprint, and then goes into the east towards the mall and create some connectivity that way.

And I'll talk about connectivity again, but those were some of the big planning concepts that got distilled out of the community engagement.

So if you could switch to the next slide, please.

So Yolanda had already outlined, once we had our guiding principles, we also had these kind of buckets of opportunity and she outlaid them already.

There was the economic and the housing and the cultural placemaking.

One of the things in the economic part and entrepreneurial part was not only researching what all was being done in the city and in the region, but what was going to happen in the future, and could we get ahead of it?

Because if we could identify it and get ahead of it, we could start the education now.

We could seed the places now that we could grow into.

Instead of always just building who we are today and what we are today, could we actually forecast and allow ourselves something that would really blossom?

And that was a big part of that study.

And so to your one point about the anchor institutions, we actually challenged the anchor institutions instead of saying, do you have jobs for people who need jobs?

Or can you give business to small businesses and entrepreneurs?

We said, you know, your system is so big.

Is there a way you can change some of your system to actually allow better points of entry for these kinds of folks?

And we didn't find that anywhere else happening in the city and in the region.

And it really became part of the focus as we began to look at creating hubs and entrepreneurial centers and relationships into the broader community.

So in looking at what could be done, one of the things was

You know, the concept of city yard, what could be done in city yard that would really maximize it for all of the different needs and agendas and interests that the community had.

And when I mean community, it's again, that concentric circles, right?

So this is just conceptual.

It gives you an idea of what could be done.

It looks at some mass, some density, some square footages and some uses.

and I'll go into them a little bit more in the next slide.

But bottom line is that it would be mixed use and you can see there'd be a lot of public spaces from just the bright pictures.

And then you see the staircase over there on the side, but it's another way of creating connectivity.

Go into the next slide, I'll show it a little bit more.

Okay, so up in the, depending on what your screens are looking like and where everyone's pictures are, up in the right-hand corner,

is a map of City Yard and you'll see three grade areas.

Those three grade areas is kind of how we would think about, you know, how you might plan this space.

It takes into account the easements that already exist and some of the environmental issues that are already been uncovered and shared with us, which you all have privy to, I mean, access to.

And so, again, this is conceptual.

How could this mass out if we took all those things into consideration?

Because we're trying to do something that's conceivable, something that's doable.

So that's the sketch on the top.

The sketch on the bottom again shows the railroad that we have referenced in the other one, but then how you might begin to connect to other spaces.

Open up those tunnels and go through them.

Now we can connect to the next neighborhoods and those folks can connect into this one and walk to grocery stores or other retail uses.

that without this connectivity, they actually either have to get in their car or they have to take dangerous routes to be a pedestrian or a cyclist.

And so we really looked at that a lot.

And then we began to mass to that idea of something smaller in the middle and scale it out and where we would put residential and retail and office.

This concept and many concepts are

are designable here, but this concept actually considered having the mixed use in every structure.

So ground level retail and office use and with residential, you know, above and same with office and that way

If you only put up one building at a time, you would actually have that mixed use in each thing.

But it depends on what you want to do for a development.

You can do them all singly.

But we looked at that.

The other thing we looked at was how much all of that form would translate into if we kept true to the kind of the concepts we're proposing about scale.

And over then, you can see some of those numbers.

So if you think about it, some of the

Things that we heard in our interviews were, well, maybe the city wants to use this for its new office complex.

Well, you can see that there's over 400,000 square feet of office space and some of the tape that we got from maybe a city program might be 250,000.

So you could easily be part of this development in addition to some of the other things that we're proposing with

from a vision standpoint of having retail, incubator, housing, restaurant, all those kinds of social and commercial spaces.

And then just one last note, if you look down at the little cross section,

that for anybody who's really familiar with the City Yard site, it's kind of like a bowl and it's very low in the middle and then it goes up on the sides.

So some of the area just by its geography, particularly by the railroad and then as it advances up towards Preston are very steep.

And so we played to that.

And so that cross section down there shows you how you could actually build a building kind of nestled in the north side of City Yard that would be accessible

from both the City Yard site, but also up on the Preston site.

And all of a sudden, you have this ability to really create some connectivity that currently doesn't exist, all by the ways that you thoughtfully use that 10-acre site for City Yard.

And then one thing that'll allow us to transition to the next concept, and that is,

If you go back up to the little image on the upper right with the shaded areas, you'll notice two white parcels at the bottom of that.

In the next two slides, you're going to see those shaded.

But those are the part of City Yard that actually flank right up to Brown Street.

And if you then drop to the bottom image, you'll see what looks like a bunch of little rectangles.

And that begins a housing transition.

In the 10 acres of city yard, what you have is an old gasoline plant facility, which is closer to 4th Street.

And then you have an old prison site, jail site, that's on the western side closer to the railroad.

And so

Just conceptually, if you think about environmental issues, those are really more towards Fourth Street.

And I think, again, planning staff has some reports that you can look at for that.

And anybody who continues on with the design would look at those deeper.

But the preliminary thumbs up were some of the things that we were looking at for use here were actually viable.

But I bring that up now because the section right there on the southern edge of the site could be

As you're considering relocating the plant, as you're considering what you might do with 10 acres, the southern part of that site could actually be lopped off right now in a subdivision.

and used in a lower scale residential.

And that's going to lead us to our second kind of focus area, which was residential.

Talked about some high density here, but if you flip to the next one, what we're talking about now is how do you create a mixed product?

Now, some of that, again, in that we've got our little residential community and as we go out, we can get higher and higher.

So this is kind of that middle stage where this is a little bit denser, a little bit taller, but it's not something really high.

and it gives us some housing variety.

The little sketch in the corner just shows how you might create some of that connectivity through the neighborhood that doesn't currently exist and so you're just kind of seeing some opening up of intersections and stuff.

If you go to the next one though, I'll go into a little bit more detail on what a housing concept might look like.

up in the upper right hand corner.

The two little grayed out areas are again, still part of the 10 acre site.

We're suggesting that those be, you know, like subdivided off and used towards this lower scale.

So the little blue sketch is how that might look.

And some could have, you could open up a road that already exists there.

It was closed off at one point.

You could put some of that higher density to the north as it faces what could become even larger scale density.

And on the southern side of that, it actually butts right up onto Brown.

If you've been on Brown Street, and we have a few pictures in the study there, it's actually like a toothless street.

There's many lots on Brown that don't have a house on it.

It has a chain link fence and people look into an overgrown

you know, vegetation and the backside of utility trucks.

And so that makes it a very, very awkward street to be on if you if you live there, if you walk there, just if you were to pull that chain link fence back, and dedicate that, you know, throw that land back into the edge, you could actually build several houses along there and fill out

the street, and kind of give a proper edge of integrity, you know, to the community.

And the community loved that.

Because right now they're feeling very vulnerable.

You've got the big development coming from, you know, West Main and the university.

And now you've got everything happening along the mall.

And the idea that anybody could come in and build a massive development of anything that

wasn't community-oriented on City Yard.

It was very intimidating to them.

But just that small gesture of completing homes, single-family homes on Brown Street, really felt like it gave them an edge to the community that kind of filled the hole in the bucket, if you will.

And that was really important for them to feel like their homes wouldn't be overtaken.

The other concept with doing this, and again, this is like a maneuver that can be done now.

The other concept with doing this is to change some of the zoning.

Right now in R3, I believe, is the current zoning and it would allow for some sufficient sites lots that would mean that you'd not necessarily be a first time owner anymore.

to buy a house there.

So if we were to change the zoning, create a different one that would allow for a smaller lot and therefore a smaller home, which would give an entry point for first time home buyers.

And again, these ideas were conceived out of the community.

They loved it.

They just really felt like that kind of inventory was missing.

So anyway, the study goes in to talk about several different ways that we are attempting to create different products

for different markets, affordable and market rate, and kind of a very inclusive there.

So a third concept that came, if you'll go to the next slide, is all the other bits that kind of glue everything together, right?

So I talked about connectivity in the character zone one, and it was that bright green strip.

So

The kind of C-shaped, U-shaped building over there on the far left is the Jefferson School.

And the green rectangle is the parking deck.

And then the oval kind of encapsulates a swath of parking lot in front of the Vinegar Hill Shopping Center.

Some people call it Staples Building, but it's actually, I think, known as the Vinegar Hill Shopping Center.

If we were to reclaim just a portion of that parking lot and redesign it into some creative parking and green space, you could begin to create kind of a public square to really kind of recohere this right into the center of the neighborhood as being important and a more public space than you currently have and then to actually create the connectivity from

Jefferson School, front door, all the way straight over to the mall.

And that would be without building a single building.

These are things that you could do in the landscape alone.

And you're not cutting out parking.

You're just taking what is a solid black top and reconfiguring it, beautifying it.

Then another part of this concept of going back to the green rectangle at the parking garage is to actually use some of these built environments, spaces between buildings like you see in the lower right-hand corner, using them to green them, to make them, to not deconstruct them, but to make them more neighborly, more user-friendly, and bring some more of the environment in.

If you go to the next picture,

Thank you.

To just take all of the surfaces we have, you see up in the right-hand corner, just greening the spaces, there's what's called green wall and green roof.

You can use these surfaces.

And Jefferson School Board?

Jefferson School Foundation Board.

Jefferson School Foundation.

Thank you, Linda.

They were really excited about this.

They actually own that deck.

but the idea that they could allow that to become something better and more of a part of a city beautification thing, a center beautification thing.

And then also structurally, it's capable of taking another tray of parking.

They just, when they originally built it, ran out of money to do that.

So we had some preliminary conversations with the board and with their engineers and looked at that and it's all very viable.

And then, like I said, do some greening on it and those can become orchards or floral things, you know, we looked into a lot of even how cities grow, you know, can do these kinds of gardens and rooftop gardens and wall gardens and actually create a food source for themselves.

that can feed either school systems or whole cities or so forth.

So we kind of love the idea of that because we had a lot of chef entrepreneurs and half dozen other things and cooking programs.

So we really love the ways that those could begin to sync up moving forward.

But other things, again, we were trying to look at things that were small and immediate, quick wins.

where people would feel like something really was going to be done with their ideas all the way to something longer so you know it could be maybe it was a cultural social or beautification thing that was immediate something might take a year and something might take a little longer view depending on what you're trying to do with it but we were trying to create something where it didn't have to be an all or nothing and it didn't have to be forever from now so

So taking a surface like a plain brick wall and painting it with murals, taking a space in front of the school that's not historic significance, the plot of dirt itself,

and maybe turning it into an amphitheater where we could have outdoor jazz or some performance.

One of the things that the museum really thought was important was to have more places of engagement instead of always being dependent on the stage inside the school.

And so that began to prompt this amphitheater in the corner there.

and going back to creating the crosshairs concept of reclaiming commerce and Fourth Street for the community and then putting these other public gathering spaces there just began to really sync up.

And then one last concept with this that's visible in this slide, and there's more ideas in the book, but is to actually, again, small gestures, but it's a visual cue.

If we were to

resurface these two streets, maybe pave them with brick or paint them or do a couple of different things.

It would create visually that they were different than those cartways that surrounded on the other three edges.

And so again, it just becomes more about the community, more about the pedestrian trying to complete the sidewalks so that people could want to walk in these spaces

So it highlights and it magnifies the entry way into that portion of the school, the original school

And you brought up a great point because it is off the entrance of

of the entrances off of Commerce, but that brick building is right across from the entrance.

And so the idea of even when you walk out and stare at this building, and if you like, wouldn't it be great if this could be a mural in itself?

Yeah.

And so one of the things that we talked about

with the Quirk Hotel because Quirk, one of the key points about them is they love their art, but how do we incorporate, you know, is there a possibility to bring art out of the African American Heritage Center as well as out of the Quirk Hotel and again make that part of the community so it just adds to overall beauty and it just encourages that to be more of a community

And to be able to have just different ways of demonstration of culture in that particular area.

So anything else to add on this and then we'll wrap up because I know we're getting through it on time.

Okay, if we can flip to the next slide and that'll just kind of get us to a point of summation here.

So

One of the things that we look at here is we're thinking about, okay, so what can be done?

What are the next steps?

What should we do?

And one of the great things about having the study done,

The market analysis and especially with the emphasis on the on looking at it from a through a perspective of the the black community and its place within Charlottesville and within the within the city and the the greater area was to understand what are some things that we could be focused on now because many of you may know that New Hill Development Corporation, that is our focus.

We are focused on

the advancement for the black community of Charlottesville.

And so from that, there are things that we knew that right away we could start to focus on and we could start to partner with individuals.

Things like securing commitments and identifying what initiatives that can be moved upon.

looking at things like the business incubator, as well as the financing gaps that currently exist.

So those are some things that we've already started to work on with partners throughout the community.

Some shorter term things we met initially with the Jefferson Foundation board to talk about some of the things and concepts.

We've talked with the tenants in that building as well with some of the ideas, of course,

right when we did that COVID hit and so that's kind of been abbreviated or kind of stifled a little bit but of course we intend to continue those conversations because there's a lot of wonderful things that can happen in the interim while some of the bigger ideas and concepts are moving forward and of course one of the things I also wanted to point out to you for

Those of you, again, that are looking in the PDF, in your PDF, it would be page 150.

And that gets into the community benefits.

And that's one of the things that I think is really important that we take a look at in this book or in this presentation, in this vision plan, I should say, because it really gets into what does the community get out of this?

And how are some of those things that can be done

in implementing a particular plan that can think about equity, that can think about who benefits, that can think about how do we ensure that procurement and construction and who's doing the work that the local Black community, that the local community

can benefit from that.

And so those are some of the things that we speak to in the community vision or community benefits section.

We also talk about things like, you know, when considering, you know, the housing mixture, again, this is a mixed development, we want to think about ownership, we want to think about rental, we want to think about condo, we want to think about business ownership for, you know, we want to incubate black businesses,

There's so much that can be done here.

And how do we make sure that it's affordable?

How do we make sure that a spectrum of individuals can participate in this process?

And so some other things that we look at are things like housing vouchers, that definitely housing vouchers can be accepted here.

And then of course, you know, when we think about like, how can we have a large scale

development that has a ton of affordability in it, it's going to take a number of things.

It can't be a one size fit all.

We're going to have to look at it from a number of different ways.

And one of the things that we did at the very onset, before we even started doing any planning whatsoever, is we convened a meeting of a number of foundations and institutions that could potentially provide philanthropic dollars, as well as institutions that could potentially invest that

had patient money and friendly terms that can allow the affordability to be built into development.

So those are some of the things that we thought through on the onset of this and that we really wanted to make sure that as we were thinking about this, when we worked with LISC and their housing team that do housing plans all over this country, we said, here's what we want.

We want to make sure that it's between 50 and I think we've even amended that to 40% to 80% AMI.

How do we do that?

How can we ensure that the majority of that area median income can be served through this?

And there's ways that they've done that in other places that also create ownership opportunity as well as opportunity for rental.

But again,

Wealth creation is a huge part of what we want to do, and we know we're not going to be able to do that completely through rental.

We're going to have to look at ownership opportunities, not only for homes, but for businesses.

And how do we do that in our community?

And considering the history of our community, how do we ensure that the next things that we do, that we're demonstrating that we've learned from our history, and we're recognizing that, you know what, we have

opportunity to right some of the wrongs in our history and make sure that every member of our community, especially the black community is really benefiting from the lived experience of Charlottesville.

So I'll stop right there and thank you for your time.

Very good.

Lots of stuff there.

I first want to say thank you for all of your hard work and time.

As a young African-American in Charlottesville, it is so refreshing to know that there is going to be a dedicated space for me.

Often there are many times or many things going on in the city, and yes, it is inclusive, but it's not designed for me or people who look like me.

Even during the pandemic, hence why I say this presentation is very refreshing, even during this pandemic,

Often me and my daughter just kind of go take a little ride so we can get out the house.

And if you go downtown, if you go through main street, you can go through anywhere in this city and you see people out and they're having a good time, but they do not look like me.

So to be able to have a space, I saw the open area where you were talking about possibly holding like jazz concerts or bringing art and culture outside of just the quirk and the,

Jefferson School, that is so refreshing.

So I really appreciate that and look forward to watching this project coming to fruition.

I've been a proponent for this particular project for a long time.

Yes, you have.

And I'm going to let you know a little bit why.

For some of the new commissioners that were not on the commission when we did our first round of community engagement, Tania, you're going to know what I'm talking about when we were doing for the comprehensive plan.

One of the things that kept coming up was City Yard in that area.

And let me tell you what I heard during those community engagement sessions.

Placemaking, city, I mean, using the city yard, housing and jobs.

And I don't know, but I think I heard all those things again tonight in this presentation.

And so out of all the things that we were working on in our comprehensive plan, and what we kept hearing over and over in these community meetings, especially the one we asked folks, where do you want to see housing?

Where would you like to see jobs?

And if you look at that original heat map that we did, that city yard area is the brightest of the purples that we that we did, because that's the heat map we used.

And that's when all the things overlap.

And so I always heard, and I want to know how you're addressing what I've heard about it being a brownfield and how you address that contamination.

I want to know about that because I am concerned about that.

I also want to just mention a couple other things.

You mentioned working with Sentara, Martha Jefferson Hospital, and I've written notes as you were talking and I wrote down topography and then

You, of course, touched on how you're working with the topography of the land instead of clear cutting.

And if you ever go see, if you went on Pan Tops, if you ever saw the first iteration of the Martha Jefferson Hospital, they cut the top of the mountain off, and then they just built this monster hospital.

And another designer came in and worked with the land.

And it is just, it's a gorgeous project if you haven't been up there.

And it works with the land.

Two things I heard there is that you are utilizing the topography and there's so much opportunity there.

I love opening the tunnels and opening those areas.

Again, placemaking transition areas, home ownership, and the missing middle, what I heard was missing middle.

And again, all of those things are what we were hearing when we started our comp plan originally many years ago now.

I do want to know also, are you looking at extending 5th Street Northwest to connect to that development so that there's some thoroughfare through there?

And then I love, love, love that public space in front of the Jefferson School across 4th Street.

And ah, ah, the irony, because wouldn't that be a public benefit?

I got you.

Those are just thoughts I had.

I mean, somebody else can throw things out.

Shelley, please.

Well, I do want to reiterate that, you know, this is trying to give a

you know a vision and guiding principles to this land and if you guys are buying into that that's what we're asking you to attach to the master plan you know one of the things

I will say we took a lot of variables into account.

So when we started this, you had three governing documents that all contradict each other, right?

And you are in the middle of doing this.

But again, she's talking about starting a project, a conversation about what if started in 2017, and here we are three years later, and you just started those other things.

So dial back time, we started with those variables on the table.

So we did not bring

We also heard most development pick one of the three, manipulate the parts that they want, and hold the others against us, hold us hostage.

Please don't do that.

So I'm going to tell you, we didn't do that.

What we did was keep all three of those in mind and try to give you, again, guardrails.

If you change the zoning to do this, or consider framing your zoning

And so some of it, you're going to have to come up with some new tools.

But anybody who's done master plans, you know, you know that that's available, right?

So I'm not saying that you have the zoning to create that smaller footprint right now on Brown Street, but you certainly can create that.

So we wanted to put enough of those kinds of recommendations out there so that when you did work with your consultant, which you have now, and Yolanda and I have met with them, they contacted us a few months ago.

Yeah, it was after COVID.

So we were doing some

We were empathizing with the engagement, but we really spent about a good two hours really talking about these concepts.

And anyway, so, so yes, on the topography, we're recommending that there's a lot that can be done working with the topography.

Again, they're rough sketches just to give you mass just to give you

Footprint, but that is Timmons' plan underneath there.

So all of those, and I sat down with planning staff, you know, we really looked at what it would mean.

You know, some of that stuff runs so deep, so wide, it's not cost effective to try to relocate it, right?

And so we said, okay, what would it look like if you just, if you worked with it?

And that's kind of what it would look like if you worked with it.

If you open up the tunnels, you have to put in another right away.

That's that's a consideration too.

So all of those things, and we can go into more detail with the whoever's doing, you know, into that kind of minutia level of granular level in the master plan.

But, you know, all those things were taken into account.

And so the vision holds those, and I think that any development can hold those too.

And yeah, to your idea of

One thing people hate more than demolition.

And that's like trying to clear land just to get it where you've got the topography right.

And the topography is beautiful.

It's so characteristic in the way that it is already.

And people got really excited about going under the bridge and over with the new.

Because we met with Piedmont Environmental before that, while they were still in more quiet conversations on the forefront.

So they've been a part of this also.

And also Yolanda still sits with them at all of their meetings.

Yeah, so you get these tunnels that go under and the walkways and the train that go over and then I can go through a building and I can put some skates around them so that I can either be in the building and go out and up or you're talking about a really urban connectivity environment.

That's what we were trying to do.

We were trying to create the experience.

It's going to be about the person in the environment, not about the brick and the dirt.

You know, and that was really trying to honor bringing the pedestrian back.

You're talking about a walkable community.

The other thing that residents said, and they were lovely, they were like, I live here because I can walk to my job, because I can walk to my grocery store, because I can walk to entertainment.

But the other thing they said is, but everything around me right now, I have to pay 20 bucks to sit down and have a glass of water.

Like where's MySpace?

There's Star Hill Park is a little footprint,

There was thought about making it a parking deck.

So this said, don't do that.

It recommends, please don't do that.

Please don't take away the park.

Beautify it and then create more spaces like that.

So that's why we went back into the interstitial spaces.

All of those spaces between buildings, they're forms for art, they're forms for plantings.

There's places to pause, put a bench, allow them to just become, you know,

Lisa, you're probably aware of this and others, but like parking day has become a big thing, but it's been out there for decades.

There are so many things that if you gave a community an opportunity to have a footprint, you know, what would they do with it?

You've got a lot of community that wants to help you do this.

And to your point about the connectivity and the landscaping, I mean, the plan or the vision is about creating a lot of outdoor spaces, but they don't have to be whole parks that Parks and Recs operates.

Just little places.

The museum put out two umbrella tables out in front adjacent to the sidewalk.

That was a little something.

All these moments to create a place to pause are huge community builders, and they're inexpensive.

And you also have a university with an A school, and you have a lot of really talented landscape designers

And I'll bet you if you gave them that parking lot in front of the Vinegar Hill Shopping Center building and said, what would this look like and give a, you know, a nice little design competition, you could have some incredible designs there and then you could implement something like that.

I mean, there are some really

We were just trying to think of all kinds of ways of who could play with the city to help create a better community.

And so there's all those different levels.

And I don't know if I spoke to everyone.

Oh, you said fifth street?

Yes.

Fifth street and the Brownfield.

On the back side, as we began to look at it, it might meander around the parking deck.

There is a connectivity opportunity there too, and the topography can handle it.

Oh, yeah.