Until a few weeks ago, the people who live near the Countryside Golf Club had no neighborhood association.

Life was so splendid there, they had no need of one.

Except for a few Titleists in the yard and some jet noise they learned to ignore from habit, what was there to worry about?

It was a hidden gem: Roanoke's lone middle-class neighborhood that is truly racially mixed, according to U.S. Census data - the picture of harmonious living. "The ideal place in the city," City Manager Darlene Burcham called it recently.

But neighborhood activism is born out of crisis, and Countryside found crisis suddenly bearing down on it this spring like a cargo jet on final approach.

So attractive was life there, that after years of quiet study city officials moved to expand the neighborhood by buying the golf course for $4.1 million to develop upscale mixed-use housing on its 140 acres. It's part of the city's strategy to create a greater variety of upscale housing types in the city. The sale is set to close before the end of November.

In a matter of days, the neighborhood organized, caught the ear of city officials, and hopes to win a seat at the table that reviews the development proposals. Residents say they have no choice.

"If you sit back and be invisible and say nothing," said Virginia Stuart, a 22-year Countryside resident, "then what you get will be nothing."

'This deep, sick feeling'

Most residents there learned about the Roanoke City Council's approval of purchasing an option on the golf course from one news source or another in early May.

"We had this deep, sick feeling in our stomachs," said Roseanne Saunders, who with her husband, Ken, moved into a new patio home in the area in 2000. They loved it so much that when they decided they needed more space, they bought a house just a pitching wedge away across the 10th fairway.

"We just saw our retirement flushed down the toilet," said Valerie Garner, 58, who has become a leader in organizing the neighborhood.

"Instantly, we could not sell our house," said Ed Blevins, 60, who with his wife moved into what they thought would become their retirement home. Who would want to buy a house with who knows what coming in across the street, he asks. Nevertheless, they and some neighbors are already looking at homes elsewhere.

Garner, an avid bird-watcher, can peer through binoculars from her dining room table at the wildlife outside. She keeps a birding guide right there. Airplane traffic is worth putting up with for the green scenery, she said.

The Saunderses watch the golfers play No. 11 from their deck, when they aren't playing themselves or walking the neighborhood with Ed and Sharon Blevins.

None of this was new to Stuart, a retired city schools administrator and Ferrum College professor who years ago discovered the calming effect of walking Countryside's cart paths in the evening with her husband, Sherley.

"That's mentally relaxing," Stuart said. "The open space, that heals depression."

Which brings residents to the troubling paradox they see in the city's plan.

If the city plows under the golf course, they point out, the centerpiece of the area that was the catalyst for the attractive life lived there now will be destroyed in the service of attracting more people.

Finding a role

Just four days after the council approved the option to buy the golf course, Garner, city planner Brian Townsend, city councilmen Brian Wishneff and Sherman Lea, and about 50 of her neighbors crammed into her living room for a meeting.

Later, Townsend, Wishneff and Burcham returned for another meeting.

Garner and her neighbors have moved through the denial phase quickly and are focused on shaping what will be built.

If it's an extension of what they already have, they can live with it, they say. Burcham says the development will only improve the value of the homes already there. With the city owning the land and interested only in housing valued above the regional average, she said, residents can rest assured only quality housing will be built.

Ken Saunders isn't convinced. He sums up the situation this way: The city says, "Don't worry, we are going to control it," but when city officials are asked what it will look like, the answer is, "Well, the developer hasn't told us yet."

Garner and her neighbors have formed a steering committee to keep in contact with city officials, and they are pushing to have a seat on the panel that will review proposals from developers interested in the property.

Burcham said the city will "find an appropriate role for them once that process is better defined."

Residents have plenty to say in that role.

They want to see as much green space preserved as possible, maybe even nine holes of the golf course.

They oppose rental property being included in the development.

They want the density of the development to be limited.

And they are concerned about their quiet, looping roads becoming through roads to carry traffic to the frontage road by Interstate 581.

At this point, city officials aren't ruling anything out, even rental property.

"I don't make promises I'm not sure I can keep," Burcham said.

'More than just

a beauty pageant'

In fact, the city will seize only so much control of the development, because being too controlling is a turnoff to quality developers, officials believe.

"It's more than just a beauty pageant," said Townsend, the city's planning chief. Rather, it's a prelude to a negotiation.

The development process will work this way:

The city issued a request for qualifications from potential developers the first week in August.

From that, a list of qualified developers will be compiled and a request for development proposals will be issued to them. From those proposals, the preferred one will be chosen.

But that request will not be very specific as to what the city wants, said Townsend, because officials don't want to limit the developers' creativity.

The request for proposals for the Colonial Green development on city land on Colonial Avenue Southwest, the city's first effort at facilitating the kind of housing it wants at Countryside, provides an example.

That request called for high-quality design and architecture in a mix of housing types. The most specific guidelines were for "maximizing the scenic views of the mountains and making "every effort to preserve existing trees ... and enhance open green spaces."

The city's greatest influence comes in when a preferred developer is chosen, and officials sit down with the developer to work on the details of the development, Townsend said.

"If the city wasn't interested in quality," he said, "we'd have kept the $4 million in our pocket."

Playing it right

Burcham and Townsend point out that several changes to the Colonial Green project were in response to concerns from residents in the area, including some from Roanoke County.

Countryside's activist residents believe they would have no influence if they didn't seize it for themselves.

"They wouldn't have sought us out. Why would they?" said Peggy White, Garner's next-door neighbor. "Whatever is required by law, that would have been it."

But their organization and insistence is already earning them access to the process.

"They've played it right," said Bob Clement, Roanoke's neighborhood services coordinator.

"They're communicating not only amongst one another, but with the city," he said. "They've kept from being upset and demanding ... and they're seeking answers without making judgments."

Countryside's residents come back again and again to the same conclusion, though. They have no choice but to organize.

"What may happen to your fellow neighbor may one day happen to you," said Virginia Stuart. "No one is untouchable these days."