The City is working with an outside consultant team to update Charlottesville’s Comprehensive Plan which involves a big rewrite of the city’s zoning ordinance to achieve two primary goals: a big increase in overall housing density and a significant increase in the availability of affordable housing. There are many different understandings of the proposed changes Charlottesville Plans Together is pushing for, so please spend some time reading the documentation on this process.

The draft Land Use Map is available on the full city map on the Charlottesville Plans Together website. The Land Use Map is the basis for creating a new zoning map but it is NOT the actual zoning map; the zoning map will contain more detail and will apparently allow for various adjustments and refinements. Below is a cut-out from the proposed Land Use Map of our neighborhood with blue boundaries and the names of a few places like Charlottesville Day School (CDS) added to help clarify what is being shown. You can click on the map to enlarge the image of the map for Little High and nearby areas.

In the draft Land Use Map, the Little High Neighborhood will have high density areas on three sides encompassing what appears (to my untrained eye) to be close to half of the neighborhood. The portion of our neighborhood between 9th and 10th streets (in purple on the map) is being designated for 5-8 storey buildings and will allow up to 10 storeys. All of the neighborhood between 10th and 11th streets from Charlottesville Day School to East Market and then along East Market to Meade Ave is designated as a “Neighborhood Mixed Use Corridor” (in pink) with an average of 3 storey buildings going up to 5 storeys. The area along East High street and the entire block bounded by East High, Meade Ave, and Stuart Street (in blue) is designated an “Urban Mixed Use Corridor” with the average height of new construction at 5 storeys going up to 8 storeys at “key intersections.”

Drilling down further into the map, one can see that the “Urban Mixed Use Corridor” runs smack into the General Residential zoning area at the dead end on Meriwether Street. This is a carry-over from what appears to be a harmless anomaly or even oversight in the current zoning map, but the push for greater density raises new questions about why this overlap exists. Efforts to find out why the boundaries of the Urban Mixed Use Corridor are drawn this way have not yet been answered.