Crozet is growing, and it’s going to continue to grow. It’s been planned that way for nearly 50 years.
Q: When Did Crozet Become a Growth Area? (before a lot of people in Crozet were born)
A: 1971.
Fun fact: The average year built of a home sold in Crozet in 2019 was 2003
From Cvillepedia
Crozet was first designated as a designated growth area with the 1971 revision of the county’s comprehensive plan[1].
Old Comp Plans
I had heard it was sometime in the 1970s. Why then do so many complain about growth?
Easy answer is because the County have not provided infrastructure commensurate with the growth. And, for some reason, a lot of people don’t expect Crozet to grow.
From an email commenter:
A couple of thoughts on this Jim. First look at how easily developers thwart the efforts of planners, see the Vue.
You bemoan the lack of citizen participation in local government and planning. Health issues prevent my wife and I from attending meetings and really participating any more, but I have to say looking at the “progress” in Crozet in the ten years since we moved here, we wasted our time at those meetings, and that reflects the view of many of my neighbors the majority of whom are natives.
In addition, like most of my neighbors, I find myself asking what are the benefits of all this growth? We moved to Albemarle in 1995, we were growth. We’ve never purchased a new home, all three of the homes we’ve owned were pre-existing, the current one built in 1961, the others in the early eighties and one in 1905, all of them renovated and modernized, by us, ready to provide comfortable living well into the 21st century, without paving over forest or farm land. In the 20 plus years we’ve been here I’ve seen a constant push for growth and constant growth.
I’ve also seen a commensurate reduction in the quality of life. I don’t really see much to recommend future growth based on the impact of the growth experienced over the last 20 years. I’m not anti-progress but growth and progress are not synonymous, nor does one necessarily follow the other, while I see lots of growth I see precious little progress.
Progress in community development would include things like improved public education, improved traffic infrastructure, improved transportation overall, protection of natural resources, increased business and employment opportunities. Lots of growth not so much progress.
I do see improvements, the library WOW. Nothing is all good or all bad. The reason to plan is to strive for a balance of the improvements compensating for the compromises. How about the county place a moratorium on approval of future projects until we meet some benchmarks, to be established, on catching up to the growth we’ve already experienced.
So far I see the economy of the area depending on the first Christian miracle, turning water into wine. It’s the ultimate value added product, water into alcohol. I worry about the industrial equivalent of a monoculture. I fear we’re building a future on very thin ice indeed.
I sometimes feel like we’ve done it backwards. We’ve built tons of housing and invited tons of people to move here and are now scrambling to entice industry and commerce to come here to employ our newly expanded population. Hoping the industry will arrive in time to grow the tax base enough to pay for the now required growth in infrastructure.
The tax base growth will never catch demand in this equation. I wonder is there any precedent for a graduated real estate tax like income tax?
Property values in excess of some established figure $1000000 say are taxed at a higher rate. First million at the standard rate everything over a million at a higher rate. Kind of like Warren’s wealth tax, adapted to real estate.