Northsiders approve Virginia Place project

About 60 Northside residents filled McKie Recreation Center on Aug. 15 to talk about bringing change to a long-vacant section of that neighborhood: Virginia Place near the intersection of Virginia and Colerain Avenues.

Developer In-Line Development, which built the Rockford Woods development in Northside, presented a plan to build 85 new single-family homes on a site where the Ohio Department of Transportation once planned to build an expressway connector off of Interstate 74. That plan, which was originally developed in the 1950s, fell through, but not before ODOT razed some 200 homes and businesses along the route.

Former Northside Community Council president Tim Jeckering said the neighborhood's residents organized in the late 1990s to produce a development plan for the area, which included the planned Northside Skate Park and residential development in the Virginia Place location. That plan was approved by the community in 2000, and earned ODOT and state approval as well. Its mix of residential development and greenspace became part of the city's Northside Comprehensive Land Use plan in 2007.

But some residents in attendance at the Aug. 15 meeting raised contentious objection to the plan, much of which centered around one word: LEED.

LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a green building certification program developed by the US Green Building Council. Although it is rapidly becoming a standard of measurement for the environmental friendliness of a building, it is a voluntary rating system: not every home that incorporates green features is LEED certified. Several residents called on David Wittekind of In-Line Development to mandate some or all of the houses built at the site to be LEED certified.

Wittekind explained that, while he plans to promote energy efficient construction and appliances with the development's builders, mandating LEED certification would add $10,000 to $15,000 to home prices, making it difficult to offer homes in the planned range of $100,000 to $200,000.

Nevertheless, some residents argued that In-Line's refusal to mandate LEED certification risked the development becoming something the neighborhood didn't want.

"To me, Northside is about old housing stock and greenspace," says NCC vice-president Chuck Brown. "We're taking a big leap of faith; what are we getting back?"

Other residents at the meeting pointed out that the site of the planned development is an overgrown lot that has sat vacant since ODOT razed it, and that community members planned for it to become residential development in the 2000 plan.

"Most of the property set aside in the plan was for greenspace," argued one woman from the back of the room. "This little bit set aside for housing was what we agreed on. We passed it years ago. This is absolutely reasonable."

"A lot of people in this room claim they support diversity and choices," said another attendee. "If you insist on [the LEED mandate], you're saying we're going to be really exclusive. To me, that goes against everything, a large part what this community is about."

In the end, however, the measure passed with 26 votes in favor to eight opposed and eight abstentions. Many of the most vocal critics of the plan were unable to vote, as they were not actually members of the council.

The plan for Virginia Place will go before City Council for further approval before groundbreaking begins, but Wittekind says the development could be ready to host CitiRama - a bid is underway and appears to have strong support - in September 2012.

By Matt Cunningham