Liz Kirchner
communitynews@ourvalley.org
An inability to declare limits to high-density zoning has led the Blacksburg Town council to amend future land-use plans, raising concerns that a zoning creep may drown single-family residential neighborhoods in a sea of apartment buildings.
At Tuesday’s regular meeting, a public hearing of the Ordinance 1840 requesting the rezoning of 2.22 acres at 509 Broce Drive and Tom’s Creek from R-4 low-density residential to multifamily, planned residential to build two apartment buildings.
The property lies between single-family and multifamily use property along Tom’s Creek Road.
The Stonegate II project has been discussed since earlier this year. The staff report submitted a packet to the council that described the property as complying with town evaluation requirements and goals, such as marketing Blacksburg to young professionals.
“This is not within a mixed-use area, but it is an urban walkable neighborhood,” the staff member presenting the information said.
Although the review noted that a sewer will have to be relocated, the procedure was acceptable and a VDOT traffic-impact report was not required for the site.
The packet also contained input from a June community meeting in which density, compatibility, parking, buffers to single family neighborhoods and incompatibility of student housing with single-family neighbors were listed as concerns along with 50 signatures.
The applicant representative’s presentation described Stonegate II as serving students, young families and young professionals and as having a “quiet reputation.”
They said the intention is to improve the visual aesthetic of the apartments, keeping existing trees and energy efficiency, saying multiuse makes sense considering the multiple services nearby.
Public comment on Ordinance1840 followed in which a citizen, a member of the single-family home Glade-Westover neighborhood, across the street from the proposed site, urged the council not to rezone the property citing worries about “quality of life,” “property values” and “impact to infrastructure.”
“This is a fine and balanced proposal. What I am afraid of is the future of that area. Without proper infrastructure, heavy traffic is an outcome of that deficiency. We asked the town to leave the Comprehensive Plan unchanged. The change would affect the whole block — something the neighbors had not anticipated when they bought their properties.”
He had jokingly mentioned that it might be better just to consider a density change to the density of the entire block.
”In fact, that seems to be what’s happening,” he said.
The citizen said, because people have moved away or because they are dissatisfied, he was alone at the meeting that evening.
He asked the council to reject the resolution and not to continue to contribute to previous mistakes and the continued decline of that part of town.
The council moved for approval, and called for discussion.
John Bush, who had voted against future land-use changes, spoke for nearly three minute opposing the re-zoning.
“I think the mistake is not recognizing where the transition is. When you move these large-scale buildings across the street from R-4 and single-family residential, the context and the scale is inappropriate. It doesn’t matter if all the amenities that the applicants throw in there are nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the buildings are out-of-scale and out-of-character,” he said.
Citing point of evaluation 1151 in the Comprehensive Plan, that change should be evaluated with “respect neighborhood context” Bush said an apartment building at this site does not respect neighborhood context. He warned of a gradual, but irrevocable shift in scale and context that moves residential single-family scale and context out of a neighborhood and large-scale apartment buildings in.
“When you move those buildings and build more of them across the street from these residential buildings, the scale and context is changed. I think it was a mistake when we did the future land-use change, and I think that kind of mistake leads us into this kind of mistake.
Regarding the need for multifamily dwellings in Blacksburg, Bush said that it is in the transition edges that decision-making is difficult and that those transitions are more and more common in Blacksburg as property is in-filled to minimize sprawl.
“Things that are really bad are easy to see. We can turn those down. Things that are really good, we’ll approve those. But things that are kind of in the middle those are harder to look at for the sake of clarity, context, and logic.
When you see the existing land-use and existing zoning there of R-4 [residential] when you move that density across the street, you’ve blown that logic and you jeopardize the folks that live in those R-4 housing, those single-family homes, their livelihoods, their context of living, their scale,” Bush said.
The council voted 6 to 1 to approve the rezoning. The next meeting is a work session at 11 a.m. Tuesday in the Blacksburg Motor Company conference room (400 S Main St).
