City's Draft Comprehensive Plan Emphasizes "Walkable Centers"
There will be a community meeting next week to gather public input on the draft plan.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Fredericksburg’s draft comprehensive plan, FXBG Forward, envisions a series of “walkable centers,” each with public services, amenities, housing, and open space, that create a sense of neighborhood place and contribute to the city’s “overall character and growth.”
The city’s planning department this week released a content draft of the plan, in advance of a community meeting on Wednesday, February 26, that seeks public input.
The comprehensive plan is a long-range, policy guiding document that helps plan for the future. Virginia Code requires local planning commissions to prepare and recommend a comprehensive plan for the local governing body to adopt.
The city’s existing comprehensive plan was adopted in 2015. Work on the update began last summer and is being led by consultants John Bachmann from Stantec and Anne Darby from Summit Design and Engineering Services.
Walkable centers form the “core” of the plan, which states, “Rather than focusing solely on individual land use plans, this comprehensive approach emphasizes the interconnected nature of the city—like how the human body’s various systems work together to sustain life.”
The plan groups these centers into three categories—regional, citywide, and community centers— “based on their size, function, and role within the community.”
Downtown Fredericksburg encompasses one regional center, Central Park a second, and the area surrounding the Virginia Credit Union stadium in Celebrate Virginia South a third. These regional centers should serve both residents and tourists, should feature open gathering spaces in different sizes, and should “promote a diversity of medium- to high-density housing types, ranging from 3-plexes and 4-plexes to small apartment buildings and housing incorporated into vertical mixed-use development,” according to the plan.
The plan’s proposed city centers focus on revitalizing older and under-used shopping centers, such as Westwood/Greenbrier in the Route 3 corridor and the Fredericksburg Shopping Center on Emancipation Highway near the intersection with Fall Hill Avenue. A third city center, called “the Brain Power District,” encompasses the area around the University of Mary Washington and Mary Washington Healthcare.
Development in these areas should “establish a block network and parallel grid of streets as larger auto-oriented shopping centers are redeveloped.” Pocket parks and piazzas should be considered, mixed-use provisions should be encouraged, and options for diverse housing types such as courtyard townhomes and “two-over-twos” should be provided.
The plan identifies four potential options for developing as “community” walkable centers—Idlewild, Mayfield/Dixon Street, U.S. 1 at the border with Spotsylvania County, and “Central Lafayette Boulevard.” These centers should have community focal points, should focus on pedestrian safety and connection to bike and trail networks, and should include higher density housing, like small apartment buildings, with small-scale, attached housing and townhouses at the edges, adjacent to existing neighborhoods.
The draft emphasizes keeping different parts of the city connected through walkable streets and shared use paths and recommends prioritizing the “planning and implementation of traffic calming measures in neighborhoods where cut through traffic undermines resident safety.”
Housing
The draft plan notes that “housing access is one of the most acute problems faced” by the city today. “Even under today’s modest population growth rates, effective demand for housing has increased in recent years with rising household incomes,” it states. “But the supply of housing is not keeping up with the increase in demand,” which has led to a 21% increase in median sales price just since 2020.
“To meet rising housing demand, about 2,400 new housing units are needed in the greater Fredericksburg region every year for the next 25 years,” it states. “Since there is little vacant land left within city limits for greenfield housing development, the primary option available to Fredericksburg for increasing housing supply is to redevelop existing, underperforming (usually commercial) properties as housing or as mixed-use.”
The plan offers a number of strategies towards solving housing shortages, such as removing barriers to developing “human-scaled multifamily small housing types,” developing an incentive zoning program for affordable and/or workforce housing and establishing and expanding home repair and homeownership assistance grants.
The public meeting on the draft comprehensive plan will take place on Wednesday, February 26, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at the Walker-Grant Center.
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Just a distraction from the Comprehensive plan amendment they approved last night.