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“CLUSTERING” is a planning concept that developers and planners alike are fond of espousing, even in rural counties such as Rappahannock. But an interesting situation has arisen in Loudoun regarding this method of building, which supposedly is designed to help maintain adequate open space in residential areas. Loudoun’s experience could be valuable for Rappahannock and other rural counties just beginning to feel development pressures.
Too often—and Loudoun is not the first place where this has happened—“clustering” in practice turns out to be a device for obtaining a higher housing density than a given building tract would otherwise support. How does this happen? In Loudoun, builders have been getting “density credits” for unusable sites included on the overall tract; e.g., in .floocfrlains. In other words, if a 100 acre tract is zoned for one unit per acre, but 50 acres of that tract are in floodplain, the builder could build 100 units any way, if they are “clustered.”
Is this practice really serving the public goal of maintaining open space? Those 50 acres in floodplain would be open, anyway, unless economically impractical methods of “flood proofing” were employed, and even then it is
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