Chris Chittum went to Virginia Tech hoping to become a band director.
“I did not flourish in that, to say the least,” he said. After a couple years, it became clear he needed a change in direction, he said. He remembers his school counselor suggesting an urban planning class, based on the interests he shared with her.
“And so I took the class and just fell in love with it,” he said. “I went from a really poor student to a really excellent student really quickly, focused on what I wanted to do.”
This led to a lifelong career in urban planning — Chittum just finished 31 years working for the city of Roanoke. He retired at the end of November as director of planning, building and development, a position that he’d held for eight years. He recently served as acting assistant city manager during interim city manager Lydia Pettis-Patton’s term.
During a recent city council meeting, Mayor Sherman Lea read from a public commendation saying that Chittum was “instrumental” in “modernizing” the zoning code. Chittum led efforts to eliminate single-family-only zoning in Roanoke and was the city’s representative for related community engagement efforts.
He was there for an ongoing debate over what to do with the city’s largest undeveloped swath of land, Evans Spring, and another featuring the old Countryside golf course property in 2011. He’s watched as an old industrial site has been transformed into the Riverside Center for Research and Technology.
The city council’s commendation recognized the “exceptional and meritorious service of Chris Chittum to the City of Roanoke and its people and expresses its deepest gratitude on behalf of the City and its residents.”
Chittum will continue to live in the Grandin neighborhood and now works for a professional services firm based in St. Paul, Minnesota, that provides engineering solutions for architects, contractors and building owners.
Chittum talked recently about how Roanoke has changed in the 30-plus years he’s worked for the city, and about what might come next. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why stay with Roanoke so long?
A: Well, one is familiarity. It has the challenges of an urban space, it has the exact same problems as, you know, Chicago, just on a smaller scale. It’s where I’ve lived and where I’ve loved all my life, I guess, so the familiarity and wanting my hometown to succeed, and the way I can influence that has been really appealing to me over the years.
Q: How much influence does a city planner have on hyperlocal issues that residents want addressed?
A: I think lots. I think that one of the jobs that a planner has is to go out and understand a community’s issues and what they like and so on. And that’s where community engagement is helpful — so we understand and are able to solve the right problems. But understanding what a community wants and needs and the ability to craft interventions through zoning changes — that’s incredibly impactful for decades.
Q: What were the best and worst parts of the job in your eyes?
A: They’re one and the same. I mean, the really difficult projects are the most fulfilling for me — the projects like the Evans Spring plan and the zoning reform, years ago, the Countryside Estates plan, which was very controversial, and working on those to get as much consensus as we can, understanding all the different interests that the city as an organization has. We have to consider housing needs, economic development needs, and all those that are kind of beyond, you know, hyper-local interest that somebody might have about something going on next door to them. And so it’s important that we think about that in the larger sense because it has an impact for the whole city, and it impacts how much taxes people have to pay.
Those tax rates are linked to the revenue that we need to provide essential services like garbage collection, fire protection, all these different things that we provide. And it takes money to do that, and so we have to ensure that we kind of shore up our revenue streams. And it’s not because we’re greedy, it’s because we need to do these things. I think it’s characterized like that in the community, very wrongly. It’s like, it’s your money. We’re all pooling our money together to buy fire protection. That’s what we’re engaged in — the city wants more money to provide services to you.
But you know, these challenging projects have been the most fulfilling because they are often doing something that does have a big impact, and therefore they’re kind of visible, and they get press and recognition. There’s a lot of deliberation that takes place. And so those have been, I think to me, the best projects I’ve worked on.
Ultimately, the two plans that I mentioned, Evans Spring and Countryside Estates, ended up responding to resident concerns — by protecting certain parts of the land for greenways and parks in the case of Countryside Estates, and then there’s a lot of land in the Evans Spring plan, but off-limits to development. I think that’s very responsive to all the different interests. Again, what goes on next door to you is not just impactful to you, but it could be impactful in a very favorable way to 100 or 1,000 other people in a city.
Q: What kinds of major changes have you seen in Roanoke in the last 30 years?
A: It has become a lot more progressive, a lot more aware of itself. When I first arrived for the city with the city organization, the decades prior to that, through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, people were developing the county, and there was a lot of energy in suburban development sprawl in that.
And we, like many other cities did, kind of adjusted our development codes to mimic those development patterns, which was kind of harmful. We ate up a lot of our land area with sprawl development, and I felt like we were kind of ashamed to be a city.
I’ve seen that change, and over my tenure with the city, it’s done a complete 180. I think we’re very, very proud to be a city, and all we have to offer with the amenities and services and excitement and different housing options, and all the different variety of businesses and just interesting things. The city is more interesting, and we need to celebrate that. We need to pay attention to the design of the city, and not try to replicate the suburban areas. And really, that was a thing of the 2001-2020 comprehensive plan, and we continued that with the more recent plan. That’s our competitive advantage with our neighbors. We have sidewalks, we have beautiful buildings, we have historic neighborhoods, and we have quick access to things that you need, medical care and all of that. I think that’s something to be very, very proud of.
Two things that I’m very proud of seeing happen right now is over there, 20, 25 years ago [points toward the Riverside development], that was a junkyard, like a concrete plant or grain mill, and like a mishmash of, like, really the worst kind of industrial pieces. To see that transform like it has to be one of the number one economic engines in southwestern Virginia is just amazing. And I think Riverdale is going to be even better. It’s got a little bit of a jump start with its common ownership and visionary leadership. Those were two of the worst places in Roanoke, and one is one of the best places now, and the other one’s got the potential to be, so that’s so exciting to see.
But that never could have happened 20, 25 or 30 years ago because there’s not as much interest in urban development back then as there is now. It’s just amazing — this interest now in urban living and urban life is wonderful. I think it’s great to be a city.
Q: How did you handle the community disagreement over eliminating single-family-only zoning?
A: I’m able to understand that there are some people in the community that do want to understand these issues and deliberate about them in a constructive way. And that’s why I’ll have a meeting with anybody, anywhere, about anything, to talk about these things. And hear their perspective, and they can hear mine. And then that becomes a discussion. People who are willing to engage in that discussion, regardless of how they land on the issue, I respect that.
There are a lot of people who just do not inform themselves about these issues and fancy themselves experts when they’re not. They’ve come to weigh in on these issues, and they’ve simply not done … they’re kind of making things up in terms of what the impact will be, whereas I have to study it, I have to be held accountable for the results for the community and stand behind it confidently. I can’t just go post something online that says, “This is a disaster for Roanoke,” which is just hyperbole, and there’s no evidence to back it up. That’s where I can’t really respect that viewpoint because it’s not supported by anything.
Q: Do you think the newly elected council will repeal the zoning amendments from this year?
A: I don’t know. I think legislatively, they would really have to go back and rewrite the comprehensive plan, and this is a two- to three-year process, and it discounts all of the hundreds and hundreds of hours of citizen engagement and input to talk about this issue that led up to the adoption of that plan.
People have to understand that there are loud people out there, but there are also lots of proponents. And indeed, I think there are more people that spoke at the second public hearing for it, in favor of it than against it. So I just hope that they keep it in place because it’s the right thing to do. Our whole planning profession believes it, and we didn’t arrive at this place by accident. Now is the time to recognize that, acknowledge it and move on.
Eventually, most localities, if it’s not something that’s federally mandated 10 years down the road or something like that, as a fair housing element, localities are going to be continually doing this work until it works its way through the system, as it is a common thing that we all do now. Sometimes you need to get some experience, some data. We need to get the court cases settled.
Here’s another thing: If there’s a movement to dial back or repeal the zoning amendments, they are removing property rights that people now have that they didn’t have before. That requires a lot of comprehensive plan support. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it legally, but you have to have your comprehensive plan firmly behind any decisions to down zone. And we don’t have that. In fact, the comprehensive plan recommends exactly the opposite. That’s why I’m saying the comprehensive plan needs to be reworked in some manner if they want to ballot back. My advice would be to keep things like they are, keep it in place, see what it does, see what effect it has, then make a decision. We’re seeing some benefit from it, but we’re not seeing a construction of neighborhoods by any name.
Q: What kinds of benefits are you already seeing?
A: We’re seeing a couple of lots in Wasena. They’ve been vacant for decades. We had to send them notices to clean it up and cut the weeds and things like that. Now each of those lots is going to have a duplex on it, plus an accessory dwelling or plus another dwelling unit in the back. Once we turn the developer loose — which is a very good developer, very reputable and does great work — we’re going to get six units out of that on two lots and don’t have to consume really any more land. It’s just infield development. Another is a duplex over on Kenwood Boulevard in Southeast that didn’t require special exemption. They could just do it. It probably would have been approved anyway, they have another great developer.
There’s a proposal for some actual duplexes to be built in between existing duplexes — I’ve never seen anybody do this before. They’ll end up like townhouses, filling the spaces in between them, and then putting the parking in the back. That’s probably 20 new housing units right there that you couldn’t have done under the old code.
And then we have the single-family subdivision [zoning category], because we made amendments to the lot size requirement, they got seven more lots out of the same piece of land that they would have under the previous zoning, which means we’re using our land more efficiently, and we’re starting to generate housing units. It’s not going to be enough, and so we have to have a whole housing strategy on the back end of this that we are going to be working on in the coming years.
Q: What would you like to see the city do in the future?
A: Going forward, I really want to see each of our neighborhoods have a neighborhood center. That’s a dream that’s going to take decades and decades and decades, going back to like the ’90s. We can really embrace that, the idea of having a school and some stores and some shops and a coffee shop, a few restaurants and things like that in every neighborhood that you can walk to. Every neighborhood deserves that. That was a pattern that just occurred naturally before and usually where the streetcar lines turned around. That’s why Grandin Village was like it was. And then it formed that neighborhood.
It would be so great if every neighborhood was made so that people could walk, kids could just walk to the store safely down the block and create some of that autonomy as they grow up. I just think that’s very healthy.
But, yeah, that is something that I would really love to see. It’s very, very difficult to do because the Walmarts are working against us. The malls work against us. The malls work against downtown. We need to all realize that our downtown has struggled because of mall development and strict commercial development. It’s kind of like a buffet: The food’s not very good, but there’s a lot of it, you know.
