What’s in your backpack?

Year: Senior Age: 21 Hometown: Rome, GeorgiaMajor: Studio art and English Allison Harbin What’s in your backpack? Makeup, environmental science 101 notes, iPod, proofs from latest photography project about her Southern heritage and race in the South, a bright pink t-shirt with sentimental value, external hard drive, wallet, cell phone, balled up miniature Reese’s Cup […]

Lady Cavs roll in NCAA opener

Playing its first game of the NCAA tournament, the UVA women’s basketball team breezed past the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos 86-52 on March 23 and will face Old Dominion on Tuesday night. We may have had to consult a dictionary to figure out what a Gaucho is (for the record, a rebel-rousing South American cowboy), […]

Caught!

By Scott Weaver and Will Goldsmith On a day in 2003, Thomasine Wilson walked into Advance America on Madison Road in Orange with a checkbook from her newly opened account at SunTrust. Wilson had recently moved to Orange from Charlottesville when the rent on her one-bedroom apartment went up $400 a year. She’d found a […]

Q: Why go to a payday lender?

More features: Caught! How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Advance America’s pocketbookThe numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Know the scoreCredit reports 101 Leading the lending fightVirginia Organizing Project has headed the charge against predatory practices You call this reform?Legislation moves interest rates from bad to worse With their triple-figure annual […]

Advance America’s pocketbook

Advance America, which has two Charlottesville branches, is the nation’s largest payday lender, with more than double the stores of its nearest competitors, Check ‘n Go and Check into Cash. The company, based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is also one of the few publicly traded payday lenders, which means that it must produce an annual […]

You call this reform?

More features: Advance America’s pocketbookThe numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Caught!How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Know the scoreCredit reports 101 Leading the lending fightVirginia Organizing Project has headed the charge against predatory practices Q: Why go to a payday lender?A: Because there aren’t better options While $15 for every […]

Know the score

More features: Caught! How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Advance America’s pocketbookThe numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Leading the lending fightVirginia Organizing Project has headed the charge against predatory practices Q: Why go to a payday lender?A: Because there aren’t better options You call this reform?Legislation moves interest rates from […]

Leading the lending fight

More features: Caught! How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Advance America’s pocketbookThe numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Know the scoreCredit reports 101 Q: Why go to a payday lender?A: Because there aren’t better options You call this reform?Legislation moves interest rates from bad to worse Much of the credit for […]

Land designation altered against owner’s wishes

For the third time in a year, Clara Belle Wheeler has been caught unawares by the county, and she is livid. On Monday, March 17, the Board of Supervisors voted to move Wheeler’s 77 acres from the designated “growth” area to the “rural area,” as part of the Pantops Master Plan, despite her wishes that […]

State approves Fifeville historic district

Despite an outcry by several residents, Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources has designated the Charlottesville neighborhood Fifeville a state historic district by a unanimous vote of the State Review Board. “I’m disappointed,” said Antoinette Roades after the hearing in Richmond. She has been one of the most vocal critics of the Fifeville historic district [PDF], […]