Virginia Beach neighborhoods unite to block possible housing development at former Signature golf course

Ed. — From the Sunday, Aug. 13, print edition.

BY DENNIS HARTIG

VIRGINIA BEACH — Fourteen neighborhoods representing about 3,100 homes have rallied behind the Villages at West Neck’s campaign to persuade the Virginia Beach City Council to vote against an anticipated proposal to rezone that community’s dormant golf course and build new housing. 

The Signature at West Neck course failed in 2019, and its 202 acres went into foreclosure. The current owner, JBWK LLC, has no interest in a golf course. The West Neck Community Association has fought it over upkeep of the former course and its efforts to start a tree and sod farm, leading to conflict and litigation. 

Issues with nearby communities became even more heightened this spring after a fire raced through 36 acres of the former course but was put out before doing serious damage to properties in West Neck and nearby Indian River Plantation.

Now the owner of the land in question wants to build 153 homes in a community that would be called Signature Meadows. Peninsula developer Harrison & Lear has said it has an option to buy the property if it can obtain a rezoning from the City Council. 

The proposal calls for Southern Living-style homes exclusively for over 55-year-old residents. The homes would be clustered in five villages occupying 19 of the golf course’s 202 acres. The remainder would be woods, trails, dog parks, lakes, managed meadows and recreation amenities. In late summer or early fall, Harrison and Lear President Jonathan Skinner said, the rezoning application would be ready for submission. 

But critics have pointed out that the former course originally was approved as part of a larger plan for West Neck, which means the council should not rezone it now.

In letters to Mayor Bobby Dyer, City Council members or the city written between April and July, leaders of neighborhood associations argue that allowing homes on the former fairways would oblige the city to allow more homes than are recommended on the remaining small tracts scattered around their neighborhoods.

The transition area is a section of the city between the suburban north and rural south in which residential development is allowed, but it is meant to be high quality, cluster uses, include open space and minimize impervious surfaces.

West Neck Villages was one of the first neighborhoods built in an area that was opened for residential and commercial development in the 1990s with low-impact policies intended to shield the agricultural south from the creeping sprawl of the suburbanized north. 

In his letter, John Cole, president of the Ashville Park Homeowners Association, captured the sentiment of the neighborhood boards.

“Our bottom line: this is a slippery slope,” he wrote in a letter on Wednesday, May 3.

“Any attempt to count the Signature golf course property again after it was used to obtain the approval of the Villages at West Neck would negate the Transition Area density guidelines,” Christopher Wolf, president of The Estates at Munden Farms Homeowners Association, wrote on Wednesday, May 24.

Wolf added that a “deviation from Virginia Beach Comprehensive Plan and the intent of the Transition Area would be a deceptive bait-and-switch directly impacting all homeowners and their families.”

“Development of this property … would in effect negate the density requirement for all in the Transition Area,” wrote Maria Caputi, president of the Three Oaks Homes Association, in a Monday, June 12, letter.

Skinner said he is proposing fewer homes per acre than are recommended in the city’s master plan.

The letter writing campaign was organized by Thomas G. Luckman, the vice president of the West Neck Homeowners Association board. Luckman supplied the letters to The Independent News. Luckman said that unless long-standing zoning density rules are kept in place there is a possibility for apartments or condominiums that would “drastically change the intent and character of the entire Transition Area.”

“Homeowners have literally bought into the Transition Area characteristics of large, self-funded open spaces in beautifully maintained self-regulated communities,” Luckman said. “The leadership of these communities simply saw any change to the rules for one homeowner community to be an affront to every other homeowner community in the Transition Area and spoke their collective opposition to council.”

For the last approximately 30 years, the 5,900-acre transition area buffer has protected the city’s many farms, and the fragile watersheds around Back Bay and West Neck creek. The transition area is bordered by Princess Anne and Sandbridge roads to the north, North Landing Road to the west, Indian River Road to the south, and New Bridge Road to the east. 

Most of the farmland envisioned for residential development has already been built to the high standards recommended, according to the city’s comprehensive land use plan. In these neighborhoods, only one home per acre is recommended, but they are clustered so that 50 percent of the land is devoted to open spaces for trees, trails and buffers and the other half is for the homes.

• There would be 0.75 homes per acre on the 203 acres, less than the guidelines.
• It would not hurt agriculture.
• It would use existing infrastructure.
• The plan for Signature Meadows features open spaces and natural resources that protect the character of the transition area, and it includes a conservation easement preserving existing woods and proposed reforestation areas.
• Much of what appears to be open land around the opposing neighborhoods, like Ashville Park, is required open space that was turned over to the homeowner association by the developer. This land could only be sold with the consent of the homeowner associations. West Neck is different, Skinner said, because the golf course was never owned by the homeowners association. 
• Finally, City Council approval of Signature Meadows would not set a precedent. Skinner said his research shows the council has approved at least four rezonings with twice as many dwellings per acre than recommended in the transition area master plan. As recently as this past May, the council approved Princess Anne Village across from the old courthouse on Princess Anne Road. It was approved for 2.5 units per acre including 16 garage apartments, he said. 
• West Neck has 2.4 dwelling units per acre, above the current guideline. However, in 1999, the City Council made the exception because the city got an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course for the public without putting up taxpayer money. 

The money to build and run the course came from the sale of the homes and the golfing business. 

The neighborhoods that wrote letters are Ashville Park, Eagles Nest, Heritage Park, Heron Ridge, Highgate Greens, Indian River Plantation, Kingston Estates, Mathews Green, Munden Farms, Seaboard Acres, Sherwood Lakes, Three Oaks, Victoria Park and West Neck Commons.

Two other neighborhoods representing a sum of 24 homes have not yet decided whether to write letters, Luckman said.

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