CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – A performance agreement between Albemarle County and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville for Phase Two of the Southwood rebuilding tops Wednesday’s agenda for the Board of Supervisors meeting.
It’s the first action item in the afternoon session that begins at 1 p.m.
Southwood is Albemarle’s only low-income development according to county officials, and is essentially a 93-acre neighborhood of trailers with about 1,300 residents.
Many of the properties had deteriorated in recent years and drew the attention of Habitat, which engaged neighborhood residents and property owners about a rebuild.
Albemarle County has put forward funds into the rebuild as part of what is now a Housing Albemarle plan, and Phase One of the project of 34 acres of housing to accommodate 90 families has been underway since groundbreaking in Sept. 2020.
Phase Two is a redevelopment of the current, occupied 93-acres and will occur without dislocating families.
As the reconstruction is done, families will be moved into new Phase One units. Habitat crews build 1,000 new units, with 227 characterized as affordable housing.
The new Southwood community is a national model for Habitat as the planning of mixed residential and commercial spaces is designed by neighborhood residents who will live and run businesses there.
The county has appropriated $2.5 million toward sewer and septic upgrades to the development, as well as contributed $1.6 million from the Albemarle Housing Investment Fund (AHIF) toward building 20 of the affordable Phase Two units.
The Performance Agreement that Supervisors consider Wednesday essentially assures that Habitat will build the promised affordable units.
In a second afternoon action item, Supervisors will consider a fee schedule for MicroCAT on-demand micro-transit service in the county.
“The service is an on-demand, technology-enabled solution that offers real-time trip requests and dynamically routed vehicles. It is primarily designed to provide a “first-mile/last-mile” transit solution that can take riders to either close-by destinations or transport the rider to and from a transit stop along fixed-bus routes where the bus will then take the rider to a farther away destination,” according to the agenda policy briefing.
“In 2023 Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) applied for and received a $1.94 million demonstration grant to implement micro-transit in the Pantops and Places 29 – North Development Areas,” the briefing said. “The County committed to a local match for this grant of $388,000. The service began operating in late October 2023 and in July of 2025 the service crossed the 100,000-rider mark.”
Supervisors last March agreed rider fees begin to be charged beginning the January 2027, and the proposal Wednesday is $2 for regular single passenger riders and $1 for each additional passenger on that same ride, $1 per ride for riders age 65 and over, $1 for a rider with a disability affecting their mobility, and $1 per ride for riders with income below 60% AMI.
Supervisors will also begin considering their 2027 General Assembly wish list which at the outset only has one major item: expanding authority to use photo speed camera devices on segments of secondary roads where speeding has been identified as a problem.
ACPD leadership and several supervisors have spoken over the years of how many of the rural secondary roads where speeding has been a problem, and contributed to a high crash fatality rate, are difficult to find space for officers to set up enforcement, and cameras can be a tool used in those zones.
