Charlottesville, Virginia, spent most of a decade revising its zoning code.
It held endless community meetings.
It gave opponents ample opportunity to make their case.
They lost.
But a handful of rich homeowners sued and have gotten the new Charlottesville zoning code overturned on a technicality
https://communityengagement.substack.com/p/june-30-2025-judge-worrell-voids?r=blgf
9 millionaire homeowners, who couldn’t persuade Charlottesville residents and couldn’t win at the ballot box, decided they would throw everything they had to nullify their defeat.
And it worked
We are kind of dealing with this too, our city has been expanding a lot and now our little street where we normally walk to the grocery store or to downtown for events is being used as a way for people to get around the traffic from the main road so it sucks to walk.
They haven’t installed speed bumps or stop signs so its hard to cross most streets, even worse they are removing some cement islands that diverted traffic from taking some of the small streets to let traffic flow through. Now traffic is going more through our lower income area and avoiding the wider roads of the higher income neighborhoods that it used to