Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412150045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Nor does residential development creeping over the hills of rural counties mean one parcel of farmland after another must be sliced and diced before advancing lines of tract housing and strip shopping centers.
A couple of recent decisions by Montgomery County supervisors exemplify first, small steps that can be taken toward reconciling development pressures and conservation needs.
Recognizing the need for stricter controls in rapid-growth areas, the board has approved an overlay district for the Virginia 177 corridor from Interstate 81 into Radford, where Radford Community Hospital is planning to relocate. The supervisors wisely imposed rules now to govern the expected building boom.
Countywide, supervisors have approved zoning-law changes that will allow developers more creative use of their land to preserve open space. Developers no longer will need a special-use permit to build clustered housing, in which a portion of land is left as open space around a group of housing units. And residential and commercial planned-unit developments will be permitted, providing for clustering, open space and mixed uses - some commercial in a predominately residential development, and vice versa.
These changes were part of a progressive open-space plan that the board unfortunately defeated a year ago. They hardly meet the range of planning needs that that document would have addressed. A river overlay district such as Roanoke County recently adopted had been part of the Montgomery package, for example, and it remains an important piece of unfinished business.
But the zoning revisions are helpful nevertheless. Rather than pitting preservation against development, the open-space provisions make it possible to build homes in the country without turning it into the very homogenized sprawl that homebuyers were trying to flee.
It's a scenario for a four-way win. Farmers still reap handsome profits if they opt to sell their land. Developers still have the opportunity to build and sell homes profitably. Yet homebuyers don't have to drag suburban tract housing along with them into the country. And the community does not lose the benefit of the open land.
Our region desperately needs more new ways, like this, of thinking about development.
Rural counties where growth worries farmers who want to work the land might look, for instance, at Clarke County's sophisticated sliding-scale zoning. Rather than minimum lot sizes, the county allocates building rights proportional to the acreage of a parcel and, in agricultural areas, imposes a two-acre maximum lot size. That ensures that on a 100-acre parcel with four building rights, 92 acres will remain farmland. Buyers, it turns out, are willing to pay premium prices for two-acres amid countryside that won't be developed.
The tradeoff of greater housing density (with a more neighborhoodish feel, and perhaps a store within walking distance) in return for more open space should, especially in the long run, boost rather than depress property values. The first step toward taking advantage of this fact is to recognize that the values of green and of greenbacks need not conflict.
by CNB