In recent years, Charlottesville’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee has been leading monthly walks across the city’s neighborhoods as a way of encouraging exploration and direct experience of the many different parts of the community.
On March 8, the group will head to the northwest corner of Charlottesville for one of the city’s most unique precincts.
“The neighborhood will be The Meadows so the walk will be meeting at 10 a.m. on Sunday the 8th at the Best Buy and then we’ll loop through that neighborhood which has some city / county interplay there,” said City Councilor Natalie Oschrin at the March 2, 2026 City Council meeting.
According to a fact sheet put together by the City of Charlottesville, the Meadows makes up about 0.56 square miles and is the 5th least dense of the city’s 19 neighborhoods and the 7th least populous.
The average rent is $1,580 a month, lower than the $2,100 average for the city as a whole. There are also more renters than most neighborhoods with 83 percent of households compared to a city-wide average of 61 percent.
The Meadows neighborhood also has the largest percentage of commercial area compared to residential area. Forty-two percent of land is commercial, 28 percent is single-family residential, 20 percent is government or nonprofit, and the rest is multifamily residential.
“The eastern portion contains restaurants, businesses, hotels, and shopping centers along Hillsdale Drive, as well as public and private market apartment homes along Michie Drive,” reads the fact-sheet. “More apartment homes line Hydraulic Road, while the western edge bordering Albemarle County has a more suburban neighborhood of homes built in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The neighborhood’s future will be influenced by a zoning code with much of the area zoned in one of the three Node Mixed Use zones.
“These Node Mixed Use zones allow a mix of office, commercial, and residential uses with base level height limits of 5, 8, or 10 stories,” the fact-sheet continues.
Here are some recent stories I’ve written about items in the Meadows neighborhood:
- Council wants District Avenue roundabout to offer full access to Charlottesville’s Meadows neighborhood, August 16, 2024
- Charlottesville Parks and Recreation seeks public input on planned park in the Meadows neighborhood, August 24, 2025
- Council signs off on revenue-sharing application for sidewalk in Meadows neighborhood, November 2, 2025
April’s walk will be on the University of Virginia Grounds. See the whole year’s schedule here.
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