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Further HBA recognized the importance of tourism to the local economy “because of the existence of an unusual number of places of historic interest.”
As HBA helped the CPC craft a zoning ordinance they spoke of the beneficial effects of zoning regarding residential neighborhoods:
“Through zoning a city can exercise a beneficial control of future growth to insure spacious residential neighborhoods free from the detrimental effects of intermingled business or industrial uses…Zoning, carefully designed and carefully administered, can protect and upgrade existing property as well as insure future desirability.”
“A Report Upon Population and Economic Background, Charlottesville, Virginia”
prepared for the City Planning Commission by HBA, Atlanta Georgia.
With the introduction of the 1958 zoning map, the CPC and HBA laid a broad band of industrial zoning over the backyards of houses in the Woolen Mills residential neighborhood, from Leake Lane to Franklin Street. This disparate mix of zoning, with it’s lack of a natural buffer between the residential and manufacturing uses, has been a persistent source of conflict in the neighborhood ever since, a slow motion bulldozer.
Why was this decision made? Why were HBA and the CPC not concerned about
“the detrimental effects of intermingled business or industrial uses.”
We will probably never know