Albemarle County is one of the most beautiful counties in Virginia, and Charlottesville is one of its coolest small cities. But the strip development on U.S. 29 North is one of the most god-awful products of the contemporary “planning” process you can find anywhere in Virginia. It’s as if Charlottesville/Albemarle took anything that could be remotely ugly or dysfunctional and smooshed it into an eleven-mile strip of state highway north of town Unfortunately, if you live in the region or travel through it, there is no escaping this horror.
Citizens seem serious about doing something, although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus about what to do. The Daily Progress has published a lengthy article describing the Places29 initiative and the controversy it is generating.
Places29, the product of local planners, provides what sounds like an attractive vision for the corridor (although the devil is in the details):
Electric lines vanish. New roads appear, giving drivers a way to avoid 29. Some commuters simply avoid the hassle by riding the bus. Walking is encouraged, because residents work, shop and play in coordinated communities.
And all it will cost is some $400 million.
The usual NIMBYs object to anything that might impact their neighborhoods, oblivious that by-right development will impact their neighborhoods anyway. And there’s always some joker — in this case John J. “Butch” Davies III, the local representative to the Commonwealth Transportation Board — who wants “Richmond” to pay to clean up the mess.
There are no magic wands for a place like U.S. 29 North. Fixing that monstrosity is going to cost money, and it’s going to take doing things differently than in the past. The longer the region delays in implementing a new vision, the more dysfunctional development that will take place. It’s critical to minimize future costs by getting landowners and developers to buy into a new vision as soon as possible. Then, through the use of Community Development Authorities, municipal bonds and some 30 or 40 years of re-development, the corridor might have a fighting chance. If key players are unwilling to adopt a long-term time horizon, any spasmodic effort at cleaning the place up is bound to be cosmetic and a waste of time.