"Downtown Tunnel Vision 2.0. Another round of resources flowing toward downtown while the Eastside gets managed decline dressed up as investment."
— Rosemont / Forest Shores / EP Civic League, March 29, 2025 letter to Norfolk City CouncilIn 2022, the Norfolk Economic Development Authority bought Military Circle Mall for $10. Ten dollars. Seventy-three acres at the highest elevation in a flooding city — transferred to public hands for less than a cup of coffee.
Then came Pharrell Williams. Emmitt Smith. Bruce Thompson. Every one of them wanted to buy the land. The city shelved all three proposals. Then City Hall floated a library and a fitness center. Not a plan. A placeholder — a way to do nothing while looking like they're doing something.
We named this correctly: Downtown Tunnel Vision 2.0. The same pattern. The same extraction. The city owns the highest ground in Norfolk — and their plan is to hand it to someone who will spend 50 years extracting what they can before leaving.
There's another way. We've mapped it.
A Community Land Trust holds the land. The city transfers it under a ground lease — it never leaves public hands. No developer buys it. No future city council can sell it. Buildings go up, people move in, businesses open — but the land stays ours.
That one rule is what makes every other number possible. Construction costs stay the same. But with land removed from the equation, rents come down, purchase prices come down, and the whole thing stops being a gift to a developer and starts being an asset for the Eastside.
That's right — you can own your storefront for less than you'd pay in rent. SBA 504 loan, 10% down ($13,500), 20-year fixed. The land stays in the commons. The building is yours.
You pay less than market rent — and you're building equity. Not a subsidy. Ownership. When you sell, you keep your equity plus 25% of any appreciation. The CLT uses the other 75% to keep the next home affordable for the next person.
Military Circle sits at 8–12 feet elevation — the highest ground in Norfolk. Norfolk sinks 4–5mm every year. The flooding that is already happening in Chesterfield Heights, in Larchmont, in the low-lying neighborhoods — that flooding gets worse every decade. The people displaced by it need somewhere to go. The highest, most resilient ground in the city should be where the Eastside — not the market — decides who lives there.
There is a plan to build a sponge park on the 3-acre wetland parcel — a living bioswale that captures 70% of annual runoff, provides public park space, and hosts a sea level research station in partnership with ODU, Norfolk State, and HRSD. The research station generates data licensing revenue that funds the community wealth endowment. The same parcel that protects the neighborhood from flooding also pays for its future.
Everything described here is real. The CLT model is real — the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has 2,500 permanently affordable homes and a 30-year track record. The financing is real — LIHTC, VHDA, CDFI are federal and state programs designed for exactly this. The site plan is built from real GIS data — 19 confirmed city-owned parcels, real coordinates, real acreage from the Norfolk FY26 assessment roll.
The only thing that isn't real yet is the political commitment. That's what we're building toward. The Eastside Civic League named the problem. This document names the solution. What we need now is the coalition to demand it.
Military Circle is zoned C-R. Under that zoning, any housing development over 24 units requires a separate City Council approval — a Conditional Use Permit. With 200 parcels in this plan, that's 200 council votes over 20 years. A hostile council can kill this one vote at a time, forever, with no accountability and no visibility.
There's a better path in the same ordinance: a Planned Development district. One council vote. A master plan that governs the whole site. Every major mixed-use development in Norfolk — East Beach, Harbor Walk, Broad Creek — got approved this way. The city knows how to do this. They use it all the time — for projects they actually want.
Our ask is simple: one PD rezoning vote. If the city won't take one vote to commit to 5,118 permanently affordable homes on land they bought for $10, that tells you everything.
Here's what the city hasn't said out loud: in July 2020, while publicly discussing "redevelopment plans" for Military Circle, the EDA sold 15.6 acres — the spine parcel connecting the civic cluster to the Main Street corridor — to MPB, Inc, the private mall operator, for $20 million. The EDA had bought that same parcel from JC Penney for $2.5 million in 2014. They made $17.5 million on the flip and handed the key piece of the site to the private incumbent.
MPB, Inc now holds roughly 45 acres at the site assessed at $230 million. The EDA's 73 acres surround their holdings. The commons plan works around MPB's property — for now. Ross Stores leases from MPB through 2036. After that, as malls continue to decline, MPB faces a building worth less every year. The CLT should be first in line when that conversation happens.
The 2020 sale deserves public scrutiny. It happened quietly, during a planning process, and it removed the most strategically important parcel from public control. The city should be asked to explain it.
The Eastside Civic League has already done the hardest part: named the problem, organized the community, put it on the record. If the city stonewalls a PD rezoning, there are paths that don't require their cooperation.
None of these paths are pleasant. But they exist. The commons model doesn't require the city to be heroic — it requires them to not actively block what their own zoning already allows. If they choose to block it anyway, they'll have to do it in public.