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Are Albemarle County's Growth Areas Too Big?
Oct 15th, 2024
Crozet United
October 16, 2024
Connecting you to what’s happening around town
A CROZET UNITED EXCLUSIVE REPORT
Crozet is one of five designated growth areas in the County.
Albemarle’s Growth Areas too BIG? - Albemarle County has 20 years worth of approved housing in backlog and may be legally required to shrink the size of its “designated growth areas” as part of its AC44 comprehensive plan update, according to our preliminary interpretation of Virginia law.
The key excerpts from that law are shown in the boxes below.
The [growth areas] designated by [Albemarle County] may be sufficient to meet projected residential and commercial growth in the locality for an ensuing period of at least 10 but not more than 20 years, which may include phasing of development within the [growth areas].
The boundaries and size of each [growth area] shall be reexamined and, if necessary, revised every five years in conjunction with the review of the comprehensive plan and in accordance with the most recent available population growth estimates and projections.
Albemarle is expected to grow by 26,000 new residents and reach a population of 143,379 by the year 2044, according to the County’s Land Use Buildout report (shown below).
Source: Albemarle’s most recent Land Use Buildout Analysis from September 2022.
If an average of 2.5 people live in each home, Albemarle will require 10,400 new homes (26,000/2.5) over a 20-year planning horizon (2024 - 2044).
How many more houses does the County need to approve to reach that goal?
The answer can be calculated based on Albemarle’s development dashboard. As of July, there were 11,459 homes that had been approved but remained unbuilt across the entire County, plus 211 more housing units that have been approved in the 3 months since that report.
After adjusting for Old Trail, which is likely to build 1,000 fewer homes than it originally expected, the Board of Supervisors has approved 10,570 new homes that haven’t been built yet.1
In other words, the County has already approved enough homes to last it more than two decades, the entire time horizon of its AC44 Comprehensive Plan update.
The inescapable conclusion is that the County’s development areas (e.g. Crozet) are substantially larger than they need to be to accommodate UVA’s Weldon Cooper’s Center’s expert opinion of Albemarle’s expected residential population growth through 2044.2
If the Virginia Code referenced at the beginning of this article can be taken at face value, then Albemarle County may be technically required to “shrink” the geographical size of these growth areas.
This insight on Albemarle’s enormous residential housing backlog begs other critically important questions:
Public Question #1: Does the County intend to use a reliable population forecast as the basis of its AC44 Comprehensive Plan? If not, how does it expect to plan for how big our housing supply, roads, schools, water supply, and other essential public services need to be?
Public Question #2: If 15% of the currently approved homes (10,570) are designated for “affordable units”, why aren’t they being built? What is the County doing to ensure those 1,600 affordable units are brought to market in a timely fashion?
Last week, Crozet United asked White Hall Planning Commissioner Lonnie Murray to raise this issue during the Planning Commission meeting, but he did not.
This week, we’ve asked Supervisor Ann Mallek to publicly address the issue in tonight’s Board of Supervisors meeting during the AC44 agenda item.
We’ll continue to follow this story and update you with pertinent developments.
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1- These figures exclude another 4,000 housing units currently in the County’s proposed development pipeline, or any others that will be proposed over the coming 20 years.
2 - Crozet United did not evaluate whether the growth areas are also large enough to accommodate the next 20 years of estimated commercial growth.