Christian Trejbal

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The Christiansburg Town Council rarely sees a development proposal it doesn't like. Last week it approved town houses that will sit incongruously in the center of the Cambria historic district.

More than 20 years ago, local preservationists placed the historic train depot at the intersection of Cambria and Depot streets on the National Register of Historic Places. A few years later, historic designation expanded to an entire district around it.

Today, people visit the area to shop at a toy store in the old depot, an antique mall across the street and a local chocolate shop on the other side of the tracks.

It's not much. This isn't a bustling business hub swamped with pedestrians who stop at open-air cafés to sip coffee on a sunny afternoon. But it could be if citizens and business owners have their way. They envision a quaint commercial area that caters to tourists and locals.

Parts of the district have a long way to go, like the historic little white house at 655 Depot St. It sits on a low rise, overlooking the area.

It's a dump.

A gutter dangles from the decrepit roof. The front porch appears on the verge of collapse. Paint peels from warped walls. Weeds grow throughout the unkempt yard. Trash is strewn about.

"It's a mess up there," Councilman Ernie Wade rightly noted at Tuesday's council meeting. "If I was going through town and saw that, I might not stop."

The owner, C.L. "Buddy" Draughn, and his developer friends want to fix up the property by building 11 town homes on the site and demolishing the current structure.

When they asked the city for permission, those who dream of something special in Cambria went into a tizzy. They don't want cookie-cutter town homes breaking up the historic character of the area.

Denser, upscale housing could help build a vibrant neighborhood around the historic depot, but what the developers propose is the same pavement-intensive, faux row houses found throughout the town.

Just because the district is on the National Register does not mean it is safe from development that does not fit the existing historic character of the area. It's up to local governments to do that with historic review panels, but Christiansburg is not big on such oversight. The town does not even conduct architectural review, which should surprise no one who has seen some of the buildings.

The council had one tool at its disposal to protect Cambria: zoning. The property is not zoned for residential use. Before town houses go up, Draughn needs a conditional use permit.

And this is where the council departed from sound civic leadership on Tuesday.

Citizens had expressed their concerns at a previous council meeting and a public hearing. They explained that the town houses, as proposed, would not fit the historic character of the district.

The planning commission, which advises the council on conditional use permits, recommended the council not grant the permit.

It did anyway.

When council members sat down to deliberate Tuesday, they had a new mystery proposal before them, a list of conditions proposed by the developer and not shared with the public.

For the most of the debate, the council kept the conditions secret. They obliquely referred to the list and held a vote based on it without actually telling anyone what it contained.

When the council did decide to share, the project architect rattled off the conditions so quickly, it remained unclear what was being considered.

The council could have postponed action. It could have asked residents if the proposed conditions answered their concerns. It could have started a dialogue.

That's not how they do things in Christiansburg. Councilmen rushed headlong into catering to development over quality of life.

The two council members up for re-election, Steve Huppert and Mike Barber, voted for it. Ann Carter and Brad Stipes opposed it initially.

On the motion to grant the permit, however, they both changed their vote. Perhaps they sought to forge artificial unanimity.

The new conditions are an improvement over the original proposal, but they still leave much to be desired.

The project will put up a pleasant façade facing the historic area, but that's all. It will offer the bare minimum of green space. It will still contain cramped town houses with a parking lot instead of a front yard. It will not be the sort of project that could have anchored the district.

"We have to keep Cambria looking the way it should," Huppert said Tuesday, "but we also don't want to have a ghost town there."

Those need not be mutually exclusive goals.

Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.