Another very serious flaw in how we view growth is a faulty assumption that by increasing density that you automatically reduce demand elsewhere. If you review the statistics for who buys homes in the county, you’ll see that a significant number of them are bought by people from outside the areas. Of those, a large number seem to be retired baby boomers. So, clearly the demand for homes is not local but rather from migration. That being the case, I’m not sure we could ever satisfy the demand by building more homes. It would be as if Albemarle was asked to supply enough bottled water to meet the demand of everyone in Northern Virginia. Even if the assumption about density and demand were true, would we want to actually lower demand right now? Why would we want our home values to decline? If I’m not mistaken, that’s already happened and it isn’t exactly a good thing… Furthermore, what happens when all the Baby Boomers sell their large homes and move into apartments and retirement communities all at once? I think the current economic situation should be an opportunity to rethink how and where we want to grow (If for no other reason, so we can shield ourselves from future economic disasters).

It’s also clear that urban density must be pared with rural protection and creation of urban greenspace. Without that, we’re just getting more development without much real benefit. We can do that protection through market based incentives, but there is no amount of high density suburban properties that you can sell that will reduce the demand for new large homes on rural parcels.

Of course, Charlottesville-centric thinking has historically left out many important culturally distinct places in the County like Crozet, and Batesville, and the same questions above apply equally to them.

I think having a new state park in our county really presents the opportunity to rethink the big picture for what we want for Charlottesville. From that perspective there are two related questions I’d love for the community at large and local Government to discuss:

1) While Charlottesville is unique in it’s culture and history, what other cities in the U.S. represent a good goal for where we we’d like to go and what we’d like to acheive? What are the qualities of those cities that we’d do well to learn from? How did those cities achieve those goals in their community?

2) What kind(s) of economy do we want to have fro the future in Charlottesville? The Baby Boomers are aging and this has huge implication for our economy since we have a large number of them that retired and bought homes here. What are sustainable kinds of businesses that we feel bring value to our community and how can we attract them? Are there ones that might fit naturally with a city like ours that has a large State Park and is an established tourist destination?

Thanks again, and welcome to the world of blogging.