James City County’s Fort Magruder Hotel could become apartment complex with affordable units

JAMES CITY — A property management and development firm hopes to bring more apartments to central James City County — including affordable units — by transforming a hotel with a distinctive historical feature.

New Jersey-based Conserve Holdings is asking the county’s Board of Supervisors to approve a rezoning that would allow for a complete overhaul of the Fort Magruder Hotel and Conference Center, located at 6945 Pocahontas Trail. The proposed master plan calls for 32,000 square feet of commercial space in what is now the property’s conference center and the conversion of the hotel’s 303 guestrooms into 126 apartments.

A major component of the proposed redevelopment is affordable housing. Conserve Holdings’ plan calls for 40% of the units to be offered to renters meeting specific income thresholds. Conserve Holdings already owns and manages Grand Village at Williamsburg, a rental community next door to the Fort Magruder Hotel.

The county’s planning commission unanimously voted to recommended approval of the rezoning at its April 2 meeting. The Board of Supervisors will consider the rezoning application at its May 13 meeting.

The 52 affordable units will be available for renters on a tiered structure based on the area median income, which is $106,500 annually for a family of four in Hampton Roads. According to a county staff report, 21 units at the proposed apartment community will be targeted for renters who make 60% of the AMI, 18 units will be rented to people with incomes at 80% of the AMI, and 13 units will be reserved for renters making 120% or less. The remaining 74 units will be rented at market rates.

Offering affordable housing for people making 120% of the AMI diminishes the available affordable units for those with significantly lower incomes, Denny said. “In James City County, we are a largely a service area where a lot of the people work for hotels and restaurants or Busch Gardens,” he said. “The wages don’t put them at 120%.”

Planning commissioners said they appreciated that the proposal incorporated workforce housing. Commissioner Crystal Haskins, a public school administrator, said she’s heard of teachers saying they couldn’t afford to live in Williamsburg.

Conserve Holdings has also said it will keep intact a historical feature known as Redoubt 3 that now exists in the hotel’s courtyard. The earthen structure is one of 14 self-contained fortifications, known as redoubts, that enslaved people and Confederate soldiers constructed east of Williamsburg during the Civil War.

Redoubt 3 is not Fort Magruder. The partial remnants of that namesake fortification lie three-quarters of a mile east on Penniman Road. Both forts were the scene of fighting during the Battle of Williamsburg on May 5, 1862, when Union and Confederate forces suffered a combined 3,800 casualties.

Roads, neighborhoods and commercial buildings slowly overtook much of the battlefield in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1976, Fort Magruder Hotel’s guestrooms and conference center were constructed around Redoubt 3, leaving what remained of the fortification in its central courtyard.

Officials with the Williamsburg Battlefield Association, which works to protect the remaining undeveloped battlefield sites and educate the public about the engagement, declined to comment about Fort Magruder Hotel’s redevelopment.