James City approves 139 new homes in Westwood Park

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Westwood Park location, left, and design concept

After six years and multiple iterations, James City County supervisors narrowly approved a new mixed-use development to add 139 homes in the new Westwood Park development next to New Town.

Chair John McGlennon, Vice Chair Ruth Larson and Powhatan member Tracy Wainwright voted in favor of the project Tuesday night. Jamestown member Jim Icenhour and Stonehouse member Barbara E. Null voted against.

The supervisors who voted in favor of the development, on 79.56 acres of surplus Eastern State Hospital land, said they were impressed by the significant number of affordable housing units the developer is offering.

“We need to be able to attract young people and their families to live here,” Larson said. McGlennon said the county needed to develop diverse solutions to create affordable housing, saying “what (the developers) are doing is truer to the kind of urban village concept that New Town is about.”

Icenhour said he approved of the affordable housing but was concerned about the cumulative impact of adding more homes to the 7,000 units that have been approved but not yet built in the county.

He said the state damaged the Powhatan watershed over the years it owned the property and refused to pay for it. And he noted the county’s sewer system was already overburdened and created pollution during heavy rainwater events.

The county is scheduled to hear from the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in two weeks about what it will take to alleviate the stormwater flooding, and Icenhour said the solution will be expensive and “will be paid for by...all of us taxpayers.”

Since the project was first proposed six years ago, the developer has made various adjustments to meet concerns of New Town neighborhoods. The developer reduced the number of proposed housing units from 186 to 176, and then to 139.

County resident Chris Henderson called the process a “six-year saga...and we wonder why we don’t have affordable housing in James City County, and it’s exactly this type of process that burdens” construction.

Of the proposed 139 housing units 82 would be single family homes and 57 would be townhouses and apartment units. Affordable homes would comprise 20% of the units, with 16% of them priced for families earning up to 80% of the county’s average median income and 4% priced for those earning 60% of median income.

Developer Michael Youngblood told the supervisors he expects single family homes would sell from between $700,000 to $1 million, and the townhouses that are not set aside for affordable pricing would be in the $475,000 - $600,000 range.