Despite likely accessibility problems and pedestrian safety and transit issues, the Blacksburg Town Council voted five to one to approve the rezoning of the six acres at 200 Dowdy Drive behind the Bojangles’ and Speedway gas station on the South Main Street.
Because of these significant limitations, developers have struggled for months to determine an appropriate use, hitting finally on rezoning the property to allow multi-unit residential housing project called Cedar Overlook for the creek that runs along its border.
With no cut-through in the Main Street median, no crosswalk, set back from the road and surrounded by a bank dropping steeply to the creek, accessibility, visibility and topographical constraints made commercial development of the land challenging according to the developer’s agent Steve Semones of Balzer and Associates at the council meeting.
“This was kind of our last resort,” he said. “We’ve looked at a variety of different concepts and over last several years. We’ve worked with a variety of different users from extended stays, three different hotels, Virginia Tech looked at it office and warehouse space, car washes, auto part stores, but none of those users were able to make this space work for them.”
Now, the target market for the 10 studios and 99 two-bedroom units are students and professionals at the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Corporate Research Center.
Semones listed a number of design improvements including a density below the allowable bedrooms per acre and building and design practices that will follow green building Earthcraft certification guidelines.
The project also proffers a trail and about 40 percent open space, street trees and parking on all three sides and Semones reassured the council that traffic from the site with the current plan would be less than it would have been from those previously attempted uses.
Despite the benefits from the proffers, the intractable problems of access–and pedestrian and bicycle safety remain.
There is no median break at Dowdy Drive meaning that, to turn left, traffic needs to drive through the gas station parking lot or turn right onto Main and negotiate a U-turn.
While Blacksburg transit agreed to place a bus stop closer to Dowdy Drive, problems that increased access may not address the needs of the predicted target residents.
“There is no transit service to CRC or COM, which means many residents will choose to walk or bike or take personal vehicles,” Maeve Gould, a town planner who presented the staff report, said. “If you wanted to walk or bike to the CRC you may attempt to cross the street where there’s no crosswalk.”
The vagaries of human behavior were considered at several points by town staff, planning commission and committees over the months that this rezoning proposal has been considered.
“If you were coming from downtown or Kroger, you’d need to stay on the bus until it turned around, another 1.5 miles,” Gould said.
But the Blacksburg Corridor Committee who also considered this proposal worried that people would be unlikely to stay on the bus for that length of time she reported.
On nights and weekends, the transit service to the CRC and COM is also inconvenient.
During public comment, a citizen rose to point out the implications to Cedar Run of stormwater run-off from multiple acres of impervious parking and roof surface on its banks.
In final action, Anderson voted to approve the measure, Ford seconded, but before council vote, discussion was opened.
The dissenting voice was councilman John Bush, known for his three-minute gadfly declarations recalling the council to its responsibility to the comprehensive plan and larger town missions.
“I appreciate the applicant’s due diligence and difficulty in trying to find an appropriate use,” he said. “I get that.”
“There are better uses for this,” Bush said, describing again the convolutions required to exit the property especially pointing out that if the target population is intending to travel to the CRC or COM, they are going the wrong way requiring possibly 210 cars to make U-turns or a light at Ellet Road.
“It feels unnatural to me and it feels unsafe,” he said.
Bush was concerned not only by loss of commercial property with the rezoning to planned residential development, or PRD, but also by a disregard for design criteria the council say they want PRDs to meet.
“In fact the applicant hasn’t really addressed those items,” he said. “Because this is a PR proposal—and we’re seeing a lot of them, I would encourage my colleagues to take that very seriously because [PRD] is a catch-all designation for when you don’t know what you’ want to do with a commercial zoning or when the underlying zoning doesn’t allow you to do certain things.”
Beyond zoning and responsibilities to design criteria, Bush summed by pointing out that the access issues were simply dangerous.
“We have one overriding principle as a body and that’s safety. And this doesn’t feel safe to me to have all those vehicles coming out of there and going right.”
Bush was uncomfortable not just with safe egress from the property, but also with the decision-making fortitude of the body.
“We can’t even get a warehouse there. So, I’m not sure why we would want to consider, when all of those things are true, a housing complex with over 200 residents is something we should do because it’s the last thing they can decide upon. I think that’s not one of our concerns to make sure that developers find ways to that we give approval to that clearly don’t meet the intent of what we want PRs to do to become developable.”
Sutphin, who also sits on the Planning Commission, and had seen the proposal through iterations, also voiced concern, but said the applicant had tried its best to find ways it could be fixed
“You’re right John there are concerns. Even though I came up with a different conclusion, I just wanted to acknowledge your concerns.”
Jerry Ford pointed out there was little creativity of the design but he appreciated the Earthcraft aspect and appreciated the applicant trying hard to work within the constraints of the property.
Ordinance 1859 was approved 5 to 1.
