One Brick Short

I have great sympathy for the Park Street pack that purchased places of domicile based on the nearby woods owned by someone else only to recently discover that there are development plans afoot for the wooded lot.

(See story at: http://www.dailyprogress.com/servlet/Satellite?c=MGArticle&cid=1173354035680&pagename=CDP/MGArticle/CDP_BasicArticle)

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the beast that is Charlottesville. The city is building on every nook and cranny it can, affordable housing beginning in the $250,000 range. Check out the condos high above Melbourne Road, built on a ridge or bluff or whatever you’d call that particular geographical feature. Look at the line of cookie-cutter, three-story landslide houses built along Brandywine Drive in the past year. If there’s a couple acres, they will build.

So it goes with the Park Street woodlot: 19 houses are proposed for the 6.2-acre parcel, which includes steep slopes, a creek, the woods and an adacent grass field. The owners have allowed the Soccer Organization of Charlottesville-Albemarle to play youth games on the field.

The woods “are kind of an icon of the neighborhood because they are so visible from everywhere and really add to the character of the neighborhood,” local resident John Peterson told Seth Rosen, of The Daily Progress.

Now the owners are selling, the developers are buying and the residents are not happy. They want to keep what they have by preventing someone else from developing what they have and making money off it. You can’t blame the neighbors for not wanting an additional 19 neighbors moving in, the trees moving out and the soccer field going bye-bye as well. Neither can you blame the property owner for wanting to sell, considering the owner of a $350,000 house in Charlottesville—that would a 3-bedroom ranch with a full basement—on less than a half-acre pays $277.08 a month in taxes to the city.

If a half-acre or so lot is valued at about $60,000 in the city, and it is, that would make an acre about $120,000 and the 19 acres worth about $2.28 million. That makes the property tax about $21,660 a year or $1,800 a month. Of course, I don’t know that for sure, that’s just extrapolation using my own tax bill for a basis, but my guess is that my guess ain’t far off. That’s a lot of money for a landowner to pay so that the neighbors can enjoy the woods and kids can play soccer.

And that’s one reason why the bigger city tracts have been slowly developing in the past few years. The city wants the tax money and the owners want the cash flow to be positive rather than negative.

It’d be nice if the property didn’t develop. It’d be better for the air, the traffic and the neighborhood, but not so good, or fair, for the property owner. The only way to assure it doesn’t develop is for the neighbors or the city to buy it. So far, no one’s offered.

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