A City Bought
73 Acres for $10.
Then Did Nothing.

Let's be precise about the ten dollars. It's not a typo. The Norfolk EDA acquired the Military Circle Mall site — 73 acres at the intersection of I-264 and I-64, in a majority-Black ward, at the highest elevation in a coastal city losing ground to the ocean — for $10. This is public record. The land had value. Someone decided it didn't need to go to market.

What happened next is a familiar story. Pharrell Williams had a plan. Emmitt Smith had a plan. Bruce Thompson had a plan. Each of them wanted to build on the land. Each of them wanted the city to sell or lease it to them — a master developer who would extract value for 50 years and leave. The city shelved all three.

The current plan, floated quietly by city staff, is a library and a fitness center. A placeholder. A way of appearing to act while actually waiting for a bigger offer to arrive.

The Eastside Civic League — the organized residents of the ward that surrounds this land — named this pattern accurately in a letter to City Council in March 2025: "Downtown Tunnel Vision 2.0." Resources flow toward downtown. The Eastside gets managed decline dressed up as investment.

Here is what is maddening: the hard part is already done. In most cities, building affordable housing fails because land costs a fortune. 25 to 40 percent of any project's total cost is just the land underneath it. Here, the land is already owned. The city already holds the asset. All they have to do is decide not to sell it.

The proposal is called Eastside Commons. Built from real GIS parcel data, real construction cost models, and real federal financing programs. One rule at the center: the city doesn't sell the land. It transfers it to a Community Land Trust — a resident-governed entity that holds the land permanently, leases parcels to small developers, and ensures that rising land values flow back into the commons rather than out to shareholders.

The result: 5,118 homes over 20 years. 96 percent permanently affordable. Condos at $150,000 in a market where equivalent units sell for $295,000. Storefronts at $1,200 a month when the market is $2,100. An operating surplus of $43.5 million per year once the project stabilizes — generated by the commons itself, not by city subsidy.

This is not a new idea. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has been doing exactly this for 30 years. Two thousand five hundred permanently affordable homes, resold at affordable prices through five ownership cycles. The model has a track record. The federal financing programs — Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, Virginia Housing construction loans, CDFI impact debt — exist specifically for projects like this.

The only thing blocking it in Norfolk is a city council vote. One vote to rezone Military Circle and charter a Community Land Trust. Against that: a placeholder library, an incumbent mall operator with 45 acres and uncertain plans, and a city government that has historically interpreted "redevelopment" to mean "find someone to buy it from us."

There is a wrinkle. In July 2020 — while publicly discussing redevelopment — the EDA sold a 15.6-acre spine parcel to the incumbent mall operator, MPB, Inc., for $20 million. The EDA had bought that same parcel for $2.5 million in 2014. They made $17.5 million on the flip and handed the most strategically important piece of the site to the private incumbent. MPB's leases with Ross Stores run to 2036. After that, as mall retail continues its national decline, MPB faces a stranded asset. That is when the commons should be first in line.

Military Circle sits at 8 to 12 feet elevation. Norfolk sinks 4 to 5 millimeters every year. The flooding that already threatens Chesterfield Heights, parts of Larchmont, the low-lying neighborhoods gets worse every decade. The people displaced by it need somewhere to go. The commons argument and the climate argument are, in the end, the same argument: the highest ground in a flooding city should be where people live — under community control, permanently, without the ability of any future government to sell it.