It’s a perennial question: What’s the proper balance between planning and free markets in governing a municipality? That issue has come into sharp focus in Charlottesville as city leaders juggle property rights, economic development, transportation capacity, affordable housing and quality of life. Some developers are warning that the city’s effort to exert more control over future development downtown could backfire and deter growth, reports Seth Rosen with the Daily Progress.
Last week, the Planning Commission endorsed height limits on buildings in order to preserve the pedestrian-friendly character of downtown. Meanwhile, the planning staff is seeking to decrease by-right building densities downtown in order to force developers to apply for special permits, which in turn gives the City more leverage in extracting monetary concessions from them. The tighter regs, says commissioner Mike Farruggio, provide “some more latitude and control to make sure it is healthy development and is what we want to occur.”
Oliver Kuttner, who has re-developed several downtown properties, condemns the proposed changes. “If you drop the by-right you basically stop all development downtown,” he says. “Any developer who buys property buys it strictly on by-right calculations.”
It’s a tricky trade-off. Handled incorrectly, Charlottesville’s proposed new approach becomes a mechanism by which the political class extorts wealth from developers for redistribution to favored causes and constituencies. If developers are spooked, downtown could stagnate.
On the other hand, a laissez-faire approach towards development has its drawbacks. Re-developing old properties at higher densities increases requirements for parking, street capacity and municipal services, which the city must bear. If the city embraces the principle that growth should pay its own way — otherwise taxpayers wind up subsidizing the developers — it needs a mechanism for developers to contribute to the added strain their projects impose on city infrastructure and services.
The strategy proposed for Charlottesville is very similar to the way Arlington County conducts business. Arlington officials tout their development model, but they warn that it requires certain political preconditions. First, there must be a long-term consensus on what the community should look like and how development takes place — no whip-sawing back and forth between conflicting policies. Second, Arlington hires top professionals in their fields, including men and women with hands-on experience in the private-sector side of the business, who can approach negotiations with realistic expectations and creative, problem-solving ideas. Charlottesville leaders would be well advised to consult the Arlington County experience before proceeding with their experiment.