At its June 21 meeting, Charlottesville City Council voted to pay $1.6 million for a 39-spot parking lot at 921 E. Jefferson St. to expand downtown parking capacity. While a new parking lot has been framed as a pressing need for years, some community members claim the decision to purchase the lot is based on […]
At its June 21 meeting, Charlottesville City Council voted to pay $1.6 million for a 39-spot parking lot at 921 E. Jefferson St. to expand downtown parking capacity. While a new parking lot has been framed as a pressing need for years, some community members claim the decision to purchase the lot is based on […]
It’s a process that happens over and over again in Charlottesville and other localities. A big project is proposed, but before any money is spent on construction, the city hires a consulting firm, often to the tune of six or seven figures. Projects like the Belmont Bridge, the West Main Streetscape, and Cville Plans Together […]
After Charlottesville City Council voted to rezone Hinton Avenue United Methodist Church—the future site of Rachel’s Haven, a 15-unit apartment complex for low-income individuals, adults with developmental disabilities, and people at risk of homelessness—from residential to neighborhood commercial corridor in 2019, nearly three-dozen disgruntled residents filed a petition against the city, demanding a judge overturn […]
Former Charlottesville mayor Maurice Cox, now Detroit’s director of planning and development, talks about managing growth, recovering from a crisis, and the power of telling the right story. There was a time when Maurice Cox couldn’t escape being recognized in Charlottesville. In August 2012, almost a decade after he served as mayor, he sat with […]
A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since December 2017. In this issue, Conger, in the first of what […]
“If Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,” my 7-year-old asked me the other day, “why did he have slaves himself?” The notion that “all men are created equal” was a radical and noble idea, and it still is, if you take “men” to mean “human beings.” But back then, as I struggled to explain […]
In the early 1970s, City Council adopted a plan to turn Grady Avenue into a four-lane road running all the way from downtown to the bypass, with the goal of providing quick and easy access to I-64. Venable residents worried that the move would ruin their quiet neighborhood, and banded together to form what was […]
Here’s what readers asked for: Each year Albemarle County forgoes about $20,000,000 in taxes on land use parcels, but the exact figure is not known to the public since the amount is not carried as a line item in the budget and there is no public discussion as far as I can determine.—Harold Timmeny Land […]
When Joy Johnson moved to Westhaven in 1983, she was a single mom with four young children. She barely had time for everything that needed to be done, let alone those things that seem like you can put them off indefinitely. But the fliers kept showing up – in her mailbox, on her door, by […]
Music and real estate mogul Coran Capshaw’s Riverbend Development, known for 5th Street Station, the Flats, and City Walk, among many other projects, is now aligning itself in a different direction: a partnership with Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority to build new public housing for residents of the crumbling Crescent Halls. Riverbend and the nonprofit […]