Could old school be used for housing?

Carroll County:

“An idea to turn the old classrooms at the former Woodlawn school into housing has been added to the list of what Carroll County supervisors could do with 100-plus-year-old facility. The future use of the building hasn’t been clear since it reverted to Carroll’s ownership recently and ended its long run as an educational institution.

Citizens have expressed an interest in using Woodlawn as a youth center, a place for community functions and school athletics. While county officials have noted there will be a cost to continue operating the facility, Supervisor Tom Littrell reported at the April 14 board meeting that he’s seen successful examples of old school buildings being remodeled into affordable housing by a private agency.

Littrell recalled visiting with officials from Community Housing Partners in Christiansburg, along with Supervisor Sam Dickson and County Administrator Gary Larrowe. That’s where the county officials learned of the possibility of getting a housing developer involved.”

~Writes Christopher Brooke of the Galax Gazette

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F.C. Planning Commission Gives Unanimous Thumbs Up to Proposed Kensington Project

City of Falls Church:

“An almost four-hour long sequence of meetings at City Hall Monday night culminated with a 5-0 unanimous vote by the Falls Church Planning Commission to recommend approval of the proposed Kensington Assisted Living project at the W. Broad site currently occupied by a Burger King. The Planners’ recommendation of approval was a key step to getting final approval from the Falls Church City Council, which sat with the Planners through the first nearly three hours of a work session deliberation. Following the joint work session, the Planners went into formal session in the Council chambers awaiting some last-minute clarification language on the 18 proffers offered by the developers — Ed Novak of Nova Habitat and Harley Cook of Kensington Homes — and when they were hammered out and signed off on by the developers, it then did not take long for the Planners to finish the night’s work around 11:20 p.m. tonight with their unanimous vote.

The key to overcoming concerns by some on both the Council and Planning Commission that persisted to tonight had to do with additional language added to the Kensington’s proffer package that served to insure the project would yield significant new revenues to the City annually. The change was more semantic than substantive, but it worked to make it clear the project was not seeking a subsidy, but on the contrary is willing to make ‘supplemental payments’ on its tax obligations to, as City Manager Wyatt Shields said, ‘pay its fair share of taxes.’ In an effort to underscore this, the project developers were willing to submit to a tax payment schedule annually equal to a basket, as it was stated, of comparable average tax payments of the 10 highest-taxed commercial entities in the City in any given year.”

~Writes Nicholas F. Benton of the Falls Church News-Press

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Ecovillage: Housing development centered on people, earth

City of Charlottesville:

“Not satisfied with the state of community and the environment, one group has decided to create something more to their liking, an ecovillage. During a recent open house, about 50 people met at Charlottesville Ecovillage’s property off East Rio Road to hear about plans to use the 6.6-acre site as an intentional community and ecovillage — an alternative approach to housing focused on caring for oneself, each other and the Earth…

The vision statement for the community identifies ‘compassion, kindness, cooperation, open communication, justice and mutual trust as central to healthy living.’”

~Writes Effie Nicholaou of Charlottesville Tomorrow

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