The University is planning to expand yet again — the Board of Visitors Buildings and Grounds Committee has already chosen a site in the Emmet-Ivy area for new student housing. If all goes according to plan, this construction aims to accommodate all second-years in on-Grounds housing by the year 2030. To be clear, this is an exceptionally admirable goal — requiring second-years to live on-Grounds can foster a sense of community, alleviate the affordable housing crisis for Charlottesville residents and mitigate the stress of finding off-Grounds housing for students. But while the second-year housing expansion may be well intentioned, the manner in which it is being undertaken belies its fundamental goals. In fact, it is part of a barrage of large-scale construction projects which push the boundaries between the University and the neighboring Charlottesville community, projects which are so constant that they beg the question — will this expansion ever end?
As a community, we have every reason to believe that the answer to this question is “not anytime soon.” On the contrary, the sheer number of recent expansion projects, especially in the Emmet-Ivy corridor, suggests that this construction will be unending. The University’s new Data Science building just opened up this fall at the entrance of the corridor, with a new center for the Karsh Institute of Democracy, a hotel, a conference center and a performing and visual arts center to follow suit. Additionally, backed by millions of dollars in donor support, University Athletics is building a new football operations center and Olympic sports complex. This territorial expansion has gone so far as to extend to not only off Grounds but outside of Charlottesville, with the University’s new Northern Virginia campus scheduled to open in January 2025.
At surface level, these unapologetic and shiny expansions seem to advance the University’s overarching goal of becoming the best public university by 2030. But a dissonance exists between this goal and other, perhaps more fundamental, responsibilities of the University. For example, such expansions imperil the University’s stated goal of being a good neighbor for Charlottesville. Though all of the above expansions materially enrich the University student experience by offering state-of-the-art facilities and potentially advance University rankings, they also inevitably encroach upon the physical Charlottesville community — an encroachment which demands transparent conversation. …