There are going to be some angry taxpayers in Virginia Beach.

Now the city wants taxpayers to pony up almost twice as much to pay for the next development in Town Center, $56.4 million, which would include another Aloft hotel, 195 apartments no one can afford to live in, an actual office tower, which traditionally downtown would or should have, and a garage.

It a beautiful thing that Town Center will actually include an office tower, and that Virginia Beach will have something taller than the office space around the Mall in the Lynnhaven area. It’s a bad thing that taxpayers have to pay for it.

Perhaps this is because they are short $81 million. Or perhaps it is because Armada Hoffler is Virginia Beach, you would think considering the statement that a single entity is behind the construction of a major cities downtown, either way it sucks.

Taxpayers should not bear the burden, they have already bore the burden of building the convention center that seems underutilized, among other things. Virginia Beach desperately needs a downtown, considering the numerous tens of blocks that Norfolk, a city almost half the size of Virginia Beach has. At the same time the downtown is not organic or real in any stretch of the imagination, this is a master plan micromanaged and built to perfection in a city that strives in every way to come off as the perfect place to be.

Town Center has generated around $5.2 million in revenue, in it’s own defense. I love the idea that this post-suburb is building a downtown. I hate the idea that said downtown is synthetic though. On the bright side, $56.4 million isn’t that much for a city of almost 500,000.

You get nice upscale shopping like Anthropologie, some of which the city already had, just scattered all over the place. Interestingly enough though you don’t get an actual upscale shopping mall, just enough shops to comprise of one in a tight space.

So this pretty much sums it up. Virginia Beach should have Town Center, should have done it years ago and quite honestly, never should have allowed cities like Portsmouth and Norfolk to have bigger downtown areas than they do to begin with. You can’t have a city of that magnitude and not have anything truly urban about the place; it looks foolish, should leave you feeling embarrassed and suggests that the nostalgia about suburbia, which is outright adolescence considering the situation that Virginia Beach is in is the order of the day. At the same time developers that insist on carrying this vision out, as well as the city leadership they work in conjunction with, need to find a way to pay for this thing without asking anything from the taxpayers.