With the 2013 hit single “Chillin’ It,” Cole Swindell went from a tiny town celebrity to a growing star. He got his first break in Nashville by writing tracks for his Sigma Chi brother Luke Bryan and went on to pen tunes for Thomas Rhett and Scotty McCreery. When Swindell began to write and sing his own songs, his reputation blew up and his own music career took center stage.
Wednesday 8/26. $34-37, 7pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4980.
If Kurt Kroboth was hoping for a better life with a new identity in California, the ex-convict received a painful surprise last week when he was arrested for a parole violation that may, ironically, have stemmed from something he put on his name change application.
Kroboth is being held (under that name) without bond at the Martinez Detention Facility, according to an automated information system for Contra Costa County.
It was Kroboth’s sworn assertion on his name change application that he was not under the control of the California parole system that raised eyebrows, according to a California official, speaking on background.
Albemarle prosecutor Jon Zug, who prosecuted Kroboth for two parole violations, called Kroboth’s sworn statement “very interesting.”
Kroboth was convicted of attempted murder in 2006 after breaking into his estranged wife’s home and attacking her while wearing a vampire mask. She survived the encounter by fighting off the attacker, but testimony indicated that Kroboth, captured less than a mile away, was found with latex gloves, chloroform and a knife. The phone and power lines to the house had been disconnected.
According to Kroboth’s name change application, which was filed in March, his old name had become “inconvenient and embarrassing.” In May, Contra Costa Superior Court granted him a new one: Oscar M. Glass, with the initials, O.M.G.
Kroboth is a changed man and deserves to be free of his past, says a Richmond, California, woman who describes herself as his girlfriend. She asked not to be identified over concerns that her children wouldn’t understand.
“He’s paid and paid and paid,” says the woman. “He’s a 60-year-old man just trying to get through life.”
She says the Columbia-educated financier, who formerly earned a six-figure income, has been living modestly, renting a single room in a suburban house in the Bay Area city of Hercules.
“The person I know is pretty humble, modest and slow to get upset,” says the girlfriend, who says they met on an online dating site.
“Before three dates, he told me his entire story,” she says. “He didn’t try to twist the situation or make up excuses for himself.”
She wishes that America would emulate the European concept of the “right to be left alone” because Kroboth has become a model citizen, a man who volunteers fitness instruction at a senior center and helped repair her house.
While in prison, she says Kroboth assisted fellow inmates in getting their GEDs as he worked through his own issues with anger-management classes, medication and psychotherapy. He’s now practicing Buddhism.
Last Thursday, Kroboth’s probation officer called the girlfriend to pick up his briefcase, phone and car. The arrest has destroyed his most recent career as a tutor, she says.
“He had a tutoring client later on the day he was arrested and another one Monday. They’re going to think he flaked out, and I’m afraid he’s going to have lost all of his livelihood.”
Albemarle prosecutor Zug says he knew of about Kroboth’s planned name change before it happened and did not object because he knew it would just be a matter of time before the press found out.
“It’s gonna be back online, so anyone who Googles Oscar Glass will be referred back to Kurt Kroboth,” says Zug. “I knew it would be a waste of Kurt Kroboth’s time and money.”
Ann Gordon recognized that it was pretty sketchy downtown after hours. Her children later came to call it “wino safari-land.” She walked there with them sometimes during the 1970s. “There were strange derelict people,” she recalls, “and a men-only bar at The Brass Rail. There was a flop house, men living in single rooms renting week to week, and a very bizarre set of shops that were just old school. It wasn’t changing. You could feel that it could stay that way forever. Or it could just be gone the next day.”
One of the things that killed the old ideal of a traditional Main Street was that after hours it tended to become safari-land. When the office buildings emptied out for the day, what need was there for the department stores and appliance stores and clothing stores to stay open? Businesses started moving where the people were, or where they could get to more easily. Out in Barracks Road Shopping Center there was ample space for broad, paved lots for cars. As a result, like downtowns almost everywhere, Main Street was becoming more than a little seedy.
But seediness can be a seed-bed. By the early 1970s the city had seen the writing on the wall. It decided to roll the dice and develop a desperation plan to revitalize downtown by closing a portion of Main Street to traffic and creating a pedestrian mall.
Just as those plans were developing, almost as if an alarm clock had rung, a wave of young entrepreneurs was finding opportunity in low real estate values and fringe properties to open businesses downtown. They were not typical business owners. Some of them were hippies, activists and protest veterans. One was a Greenwich Village bohemian who had moved to Canada to dodge the draft. A few were disaffected young lawyers leaning toward a life less ordinary by indulging their interests in the arts, music, food and drink.
They were the Not Ready for Chamber of Commerce Players. They were about to bring something new and something radical downtown, something that would chart a path toward what it would become. And Ann Gordon was one of them.
When I first came to Charlottesville in 1981 there were tumbleweeds rolling down the mall. Or at least it seemed that way, and not only to me. The experience of walking downtown in search of nightlife was like a desert march from one oasis to another. There were pools of light and life and noise at Vinegar Hill Theater, at Fellini’s, at Miller’s, and way down on the east end of a long desolate expanse, at the C&O. If you were there before 8, when Williams Corner Bookstore closed, you might link up with a small crowd as a poetry or fiction reading was breaking up. But otherwise, nothing. Turn up your collar and hustle through the dark and hope you make it to the next watering hole.
Six years earlier, not a single one of those oases had yet opened, and it wasn’t at all clear where a downtown night life, even a rudimentary one, might come from. A 1968 study of the Central Business District had confirmed that what was happening to Main Streets all over the country was happening here as well. Declining business revenues and declining property assessments spelled doom for traditional shopping districts.
Things were not yet dire downtown in 1968, but more businesses were leaving for Route 29 all the time, with few new businesses coming in. And there was only one way for that to end.
The folks sitting on Charlottesville’s City Council decided to answer the challenge with an ambitious, and contentious, plan to revitalize downtown—building a municipal parking garage, turning Main Street into a pedestrian mall, and developing a master plan that emphasized small-scale retail and restaurants mixed with residential and office space.
There were voices who argued that downtown should just be allowed to fail—that when it all crashed, developers would move in to pick over the bones and re-build and re-develop on a larger scale without tax dollars being wasted. Mitch Van Yahres, who as a young council member thought long and hard before finally casting one of the deciding votes in favor of the mall in 1974, told a story years later that encapsulates the resistance. When he came on council in 1968, he “asked for a study of downtown housing and transit. The previous city manager laughed. Who would want to live downtown?”
That was a question that needed answering if the mall was to succeed. The Democratic city council was unanimously for the revitalization plan. And a new cadre of city employees, Cole Hendrix the new city manager, and Satyendra Huja, the new planning director, had the vision, and the political support, to see the vision through.
But that vision needed to be something that would change people’s hearts and minds about what downtown was, and what it could become. As Huja put it in a magazine interview in 1977: “People tend to go where things are going on, and we want this to be such a place. Very diverse, urban. Its success depends on community attitudes, as well as numbers of shoppers.” But how do you change community attitudes? And once you create a place that people might want to live and to play, what’s the driver, what’s the engine that’s actually going to get them to start coming?
One of the first indications of changing attitudes actually happened before a single brick was laid on the mall. The first lurch of the train as the engine kicked in came when Ann Gordon and her husband Chief bought the former Jarman motorcycle showroom on Market Street and converted it for use as an art house cinema.
“One day in 1973,” she says, “Chief found this building for sale for $30,000, and said ‘Let’s buy it.’ I was basically a UVA graduate student who had never finished her masters, and Chief wanted to act. He was dedicated to bringing the arts to Charlottesville. We knew almost nothing about what we were doing, except that we thought we had good taste in movies.”
They started with the idea of creating an arts complex. The 200-seat cinema, to be named Vinegar Hill Theatre, would reside in the Market Street frontage. The back of the building, the vintage part fronting on Old Preston (Vibethink is located there now), had been a working garage and office and was in much rougher shape. They decided to limit themselves to opening the cinema first, and sell remaining part of the building. That was when they met the anarchists.
John Conover and Virginia Daugherty had drifted into town in 1971 at the end of a year of driving the country and living out of an old converted bread truck. The truck had been fitted out with a bed and an ice box by a sailor in Norfolk, where the couple had met. “We wanted to see America,” Conover says. “We went from hippie farm to hippie farm. We just wanted to be free. Of course we thought the world was going to come unglued. That was spring of 1970. The war was at its peak. Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was dead. Bobby Kennedy was dead. People had been to the moon. Some people didn’t believe they had been to the moon. Something was going to happen. Good or bad. There was going to be an apocalypse.”
Waiting for the apocalypse in a bread truck got a little stale, however, and they decided to settle in Charlottesville where John had done his undergraduate work, and where they knew a few people. Their activist sensibilities had been sharpened by the tumult of the ’60s, and they dove right into the local political scene. They volunteered and canvassed for the local Democratic Party. And they started hanging with the revolutionaries manquées of the Black Flag Press.
Black Flag was a collective that had started when UVA student activists went looking for a place to print up protest material and found that local print houses would have none of it. They managed to raise enough money to buy some printing equipment and set it up above the Studio Art Shop on West Main Street. The group took their name from the emblem of the anarchist movement, and they set out to stir up a radical economic upheaval in Charlottesville. By the time Daugherty and Conover joined up, however, they were also taking on some commercial print jobs.
“Nobody else could do that work, and we got into it fairly cheaply and ended up doing a lot of university work,” says Conover. “Then it started to be economically viable. Then we fell in with Chief and Ann Gordon, and we realized it was a business and not a terrorist operation or an idealist operation.”
By the time of that realization, most of the original anarchists had melted away. Daugherty and Conover bought the back half of the old automotive building from the Gordons for $18,000, moved the operation downtown, and renamed it Papercraft Printing.
Vinegar Hill Theater opened in 1976, just as the pedestrian mall was about to be completed. You could see the films of Billy Wilder, Howard Hawkes, Bergman, Huston, the French and Italian New Wave, Altman. It brought a dollop of urban sophistication to the newly-opened mall, a bright red cosmopolitan cherry on top of what was still the plain vanilla of an old Virginia Main Street. “Charlottesville itself didn’t have that sparkle, that edge that said ‘Let’s have new, let’s have different’,” says Ann.
But the Gordons were dedicated to supplying new and different. A few years later, they bought the old flop house just up the street and opened Fellini’s restaurant. By that time, their marriage was dissolving. After the split, Ann reverted to her maiden name, Porotti, and continued to run the theater. Chief presided over the restaurant in his white dinner jacket. A scene was starting to develop in downtown Charlottesville, but would take a while to mature.
“I think sometimes we were buoyed by our own narcissism,” Porotti says. “We wanted to start a movie theater like The Circle in D.C., or the New Yorker in New York, or The Brattle in Boston. I guess we thought that people would come because they had come in other places. By the early ’80s it was good days for us, but not so much for downtown. I used to ask my employees when they came in, ‘How’s it going out there?’ They’d say, ‘Tumbleweeds’.”
In 1974, as Gordon and Porotti were moving their theater toward launch, and Black Flag Press was starting the transition to legitimate business, Sandy McAdams arrived in Charlottesville with 20,000 books in a railroad car. He had been through town briefly some years before, though he had no real connection to or feeling for it. But when he started looking for a permanent home for the book collection he had been amassing and selling out of a barn in the Hamptons, a friend of a friend showed him a photograph of a building for sale at the corner of Market Street and Fourth Street, NE in Charlottesville. He took one look and said: “That’s it.”
There’s a great Yiddish word that describes people like him. Edward “Sandy” McAdams is a macher. It means “someone who gets things done, makes things happen.” But it can also carry a suggestion of being overbearing, a bit too much. I’ll leave it to those who know McAdams to decide whether that shoe fit him back in the ’70s. For certain he was a big, bristly personality in a heavily bearded, well-knit, if undersized, package.
In the early ’60s he attended Vanderbilt, where he ran for a student senate office with, he reports, no political platform whatsoever. “That’s my wild expectations,” he says. “I thought I can do this. I ran for it. Did nothing, except I visited every single room and talked to people. A day or two before the vote, my friends and I broke into the administration building and hung a huge sign on the clock tower saying ‘It’s Time to Vote for Ed.’ I won by the largest plurality in the history of the school.” But by the end of the year, Vanderbilt had kicked him out of school. Why? “It’s hard to say,” he says with a sly grin.
McAdams finished his undergrad degree at NYU, and he went on to finish all of a masters degree but the language requirement. He lived in the mid-’60s Greenwich Village of Dylan and Ginsberg, worked as a building super, and was introduced to the book trade by befriending some booksellers over on Fourth Street. He worked for a summer on Cape Cod unloading fish off the trawlers, an experience he wrote about for a State Department publication touting life in the United States-type slices of Americana. After NYU, he taught school for a few years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to stay out of the way of the draft. He and his first wife were tempted back to the States when his in-laws offered them a farm in the Hamptons, Long Island but that came to an end when his wife left for the West Coast with some guy on a motorcycle, and McAdams started looking for a place to move his bookstore.
McAdams opened Daedelus Books in 1975. With his personality as a magnet, it quickly became a hub for some of the edgier more interesting people in town, many of whom were looking to make things happen. One of those was Philip Stafford. Stafford was born in Georgia but had done most of his growing up in Richmond. He attended UVA as an undergrad, but after a couple of years of the drinking and road trip social life, he tired of the frat-centric scene and wanted to get away. He went to Ann Arbor for law school partly because he’d heard that the student progressivism was more well-established there. He had some eye-opening experiences, one of which had to do with the new politics of food.
Younger generations may hate it, but it’s just a bald, inescapable fact that baby boomers started everything first. The foodie movement got its earliest start in the late ’60s as back to the land and political activism combined to take on factory farming and convenience foods. In Ann Arbor, Philip Stafford caught the bug. “The book that made a tremendous impression on me was Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe,” he says. “It was published in 1971 and I read it shortly after that. It contributed to my early interest in food, which in turn led to a career in food and wine. This was primarily a book with a political argument, but it was also a cookbook. Lappe argued that meat production wasted environmental resources that led to food scarcity. Her tone of suppressed rage caught the mood of the times, and in the second part of the book she provided dozens of vegetarian recipes. I removed meat from my diet, and started to learn how to cook.”
In 1974, Stafford returned to Charlottesville, interested in trying out small town life. He worked as a lawyer doing legal research for a time, but pretty soon he started talking about his desire to open a restaurant. His counter-cultural leanings had already brought him into contact with McAdams: “I was walking around, and I walked past Daedalus. I had been looking for this Aldous Huxley book for a long time. And I walked into this room—I can picture this pretty well to this day—this sort of eccentric looking guy walked up to me with a beard down to his waist, and sort of put his face up to me and said ‘What do you want?’ I said ‘I’m looking for this book The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley,’ and he said “It’s right over your shoulder.’ And he just reached over and handed it to me.”
Sometime after, a friend mentioned that she had heard that McAdams had some interest in a restaurant as well. So he went back to Daedelus and re-introduced himself. Within a few weeks, they had bought a building and were setting about to bring haute cuisine to the Downtown Mall.
The building was a little shell down by the old railroad station on Water Street. It had housed a greasy spoon for a while, and had formerly served as a bunk house for railroad workers. But it had potential. They found wood from a barn in Crozet to build what became the bar downstairs. Bricks and more wood came from the porch of a house being torn down on West Main. They cannibalized vintage beadboard from the old bunkhouse to create an austere, minimalist space that became the fine dining restaurant upstairs. Stafford was to be the food and wine guy. “What I brought was hard work,” says McAdams. “Sandy had the vision,” says Stafford. “I think instantly when he saw that C&O building and the way it looked he understood that would be a place. If we could do the right thing inside the building, plenty of people would in fact come and find us from anywhere.”
Indispensable training came from Claudine and Walker Cowen. The Cowens were gastrophiles, she a chef from Brittany, he the editor of the University Press of Virginia. “They took us by the hand and helped us into the world of fine dining,” Stafford says. “Walker gave life lessons, and Claudine held small classes in her home for the first chefs at the C&O.”
When they opened the C&O Restaurant in 1976, they had arrived at a formula that coupled ongoing training from the Cowens with exacting standards of quality and service. Jason Bell, who became a waiter and later a maître d’ upstairs at the C&O, remembers that “we all got this incredible Ranger boot camp training in food. You can’t play at this. You absolutely had to be able to understand an entire menu and deliver it every single night. You had to pronounce the French correctly, and understand the cooking principles involved.”
The experience, according to Bell, could be life changing. “Every man goes through at least one experience where they find out what it means to work hard and to be serious and to be ethical about what you were delivering,” says Bell. “That’s what the C&O was to me.”
Lightning struck when New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne came through town to meet the writer Peter Taylor, and Taylor took him down to the C&O. Surprised by the quality that he found there, Claiborne gave the restaurant a glowing column in the Times. And more national recognition followed.
A lawyer by training and a scruffy bohemian had put the Downtown Mall on the nationwide culinary map. But as just as important perhaps as the culinary success upstairs was the bar culture that developed downstairs. “It was a pretty glossy crew down there,” says Bell. “Everyone was really, really smart. It was a Paris, 1914 kind of thing.”
I used to make this snide joke when I first moved downtown in the late ’80s. Downtown shops, I would say, consisted of little boutiques run by the spouses of UVA professors with too much time on their hands and with money to burn. Not much of a joke, I know. Just a condescending piece of graduate student snark. I mention it with shame. Not my finest moment as a human being.
I don’t excuse it, but there’s a hint of something true in it. The truth is in that word boutique. There were starting to be a lot of them around—little antique shops, craft and art galleries, specialty shops with a narrow thematic or market focus. The scale was small, the vision was personal and the owner was often the person who greeted you when you walked through the door.
It turns out that was planned for and was the key to the mall’s ultimate success. Bill Lucy, a retired professor of urban planning at UVA, and a downtown resident himself, did a study a few years ago entitled Charlottesville’s Downtown Revitalization. Lucy talks about the approach taken by the city as playing “small ball,” a phrase that refers to the strategy in baseball of winning by focusing on small achievements. As Lucy puts it, you “activate the existing fabric with small investors and small entrepreneurs.” Instead of city block demolition, you get vintage buildings being rehabbed. Instead of chain superstores, you get bohemian creative types and mom and pop doing their thing.
Mom and pop are, quite literally, the folks who brought Williams Corner Bookstore into being. Michael Williams came here with his family in the ’60s, and went to Lane High School just as the school system was first resisting, then badly botching, efforts to fully integrate. Williams describes the demonstrations as he and 400 fellow students staged walkouts and demanded better treatment for their classmates as “one of the most empowering experiences of my life.”
In 1976, Williams’ parents decided to quit their library jobs and follow their dream to open a bookstore. They bought a building on Main Street that they had always been fond of, and Michael helped his family run the business. Besides becoming the best bookstore in town for paperbacks, fiction and poetry, the store’s reading series, which Williams inaugurated when a series at The Prism Coffeehouse closed down, became a signature literary offering downtown. For 20 years, until it closed in 1996 because of competition from the big chain Barnes & Noble, there existed an open conduit between the creative writing program at UVA and Williams Corner. Jason Bell, before he worked at the C&O, was a wunderkind poet, packing the house for readings at the store. Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown and a host of writers of national reputation gave readings there when they were in town. And students like Bell, as well as UVA faculty, had a generous local platform to bring exposure to their work. Like Anne Porotti and Chief Gordon, like McAdams and Stafford, the Williams family had “activated the existing fabric” to create a business that seriously upped the cultural texture of downtown life.
By 1981, at the old Miller’s Drug Store building two blocks away, Steve Tharp was busy doing the same thing. He had already started a restaurant on the UVA Corner, but that wasn’t the dream. “I had always fantasized about creating a jazz club kind of scene,” he says. “You know, everyone wants to be Humphrey Bogart in the corner with a dinner jacket. I had a thought that that might work here.” John D’earth, and members of his group Cosmology, became regular performers at the club, and momentum built that established Miller’s as the live music mecca downtown.
With music, film, literary events and a few vibrant bars and restaurants, there was now the strong beginning of a scene to draw people to downtown. There is a direct line from Vinegar Hill Theatre to the Virginia Film Festival. There is a direct line from Daedalus Books and the readings at Williams Corner to Charlottesville’s vibrant used book culture and the Festival of the Book. There is a direct line from Papercraft to the Virginia Arts of the Book. There is a direct line from jazz at Miller’s to concerts at the Pavilion. And there is a direct line from the C&O to the explosion of fine dining that has taken place downtown since.
It would be way overstating it to claim that these pioneers saved the Downtown Mall. Every one of the people I interviewed for this piece mentioned numerous other individuals, businesses, organizations and strategic decisions that went into creating the mall’s success. From other early restaurants like the Hardware Store and Court Square Tavern, to imaginative developers who fostered creativity like Gabe Silverman and the Kuttners, to civic events and organizations like McGuffey Arts Center, Live Arts, First Night and Fridays after Five. And it would be wrong to suggest that they changed everything, because there are important remainders of old Main Street still operating and contributing tradition and depth to the fabric of the mall—like Timberlake’s Drug Store, Tuel Jewelers, The Young Men’s Shop and New Dominion Bookshop.
But what they did was definitive. They pioneered downtown as an intellectual and artistic center—as the anti-university, as a place for fringe, disaffected creatives to live, work and play, and thrive. It was their bohemian sensibilities, combined with the vision of Charlottesville planners, and the transitional, underdeveloped nooks of real estate on the mall that combined to make that new version of downtown Charlottesville possible.
A taste of Costco’s reliably cheap chow
There’s a cult following around a new place to eat in Charlottesville, and it’s not a restaurant run by a James Beard nominee. Costco, the long-anticipated membership-only warehouse club located in The Shops at Stonefield, already seems to have found its niche here. At lunchtime, a steady stream of shoppers comes and goes, pushing carts with 42 rolls of Kirkland paper towels and lifetime supplies of Dr. Bronner’s soap, and stopping by the little cafeteria for a meal that is almost guaranteed to not exceed $6.
So let’s talk about this small, cheap, comforting menu. If you’re feeling adventurous (or inclined to clog your arteries), the popular chicken bake offers more than 700 calories worth of creamy, bacony goodness cooked into a crusty, cheesy loaf of bread. Other menu items include chicken Caesar salad, BBQ beef sandwich, polish sausage, a chewy churro roughly the length of an infant, smoothies and frozen yogurt.
But for the classic Costco dining experience, you’ve got to go with either the quarter-pound hot dog or the cheese, pepperoni or combo pizza. For a whopping $1.58 you can treat yourself to the unapologetically simple and reliable all-beef hot dog, plus a refillable soda. The massive slice of pizza is exactly what you expect—you know, the kind that barely fits on the paper plate and exudes those beads of cheesy oil that you could sop up with a napkin but why bother.
Oh, and don’t forget to save room for free samples. Possibly the most appealing thing about shopping at Costco—aside from the $15 jeans and shampoo sold by the vat—is the presence of employees at nearly every corner offering two-ounce servings of everything from chicken alfredo to vitamin water. Not only could you probably lunch on samples alone, but if you chat with those apron-clad folks behind the tables, you might pick up some cooking tips. Spinach and artichoke dip (sampled with Kirkland brand tortilla chips) used as a marinade for chicken breasts? Who’da thunk?
Take a hike
The months-long discussion about an increase in the meals tax from 4 to 5 percent drew restaurant owners into City Council meetings week after week, and they argued that a 25 percent increase would put too heavy a burden on the local restaurant industry. Now that the tax is in place, at least one restaurateur is still keeping tabs on the issue.
“I have been tasked with keeping it in front of Council and asking questions,” says Maya owner and Charlottesville Restaurant Association member Peter Castiglione. “We’ll be having this conversation every month.”
According to Castiglione, the tax increase is more nuanced than simply adding a few extra cents onto the tax line of a dinner bill.
“We can’t raise our prices because we have to keep up with the competition,” he says, adding that transaction fees from credit card companies eat up a large chunk of the tax dollars they owe the city. “Ultimately restaurant patrons who go out have to pay more, and for people who work in the business, it makes it harder to pay them more. It trickles down.”
Castiglione wants the city to follow in Roanoke’s footsteps and consider a sunset provision, which would raise the tax for one year, then bring it back to 4 percent. He’ll be on the issue like “white on rice,” he says.
“It’s marginalizing the good places, and my big fear is that places will start to close,” Castiglione says. “The quality of nice restaurants starts to fall, and this wonderful culture we’ve spent the last several years creating starts to go too.”
Nationally there is good news for commercial real estate, and local agents express similar optimism about our local market.
A commercial market report from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) based on national survey data indicated “an upbeat pace of sales during the second quarter.” They also reported a “6.4 percent quarterly increase, following a 3.8 percent rise during the previous quarter. Sales of commercial properties rose 9.1 percent on a year-over-year basis.”
Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist for the NAR, cited a stronger labor market and increases in housing formation as underlying trends supporting this growth and continued expansion of the commercial market. Nationally the demand for apartments continues, backed by a growing demand for housing from young adults, and the multi-family market, with its very low vacancy rates, leads the commercial recovery.
Charlottesville agents were similarly optimistic about the market here and about the strength of the multi-family sector, although they expressed some concern it could soon be over-built. Geographically, Downtown and Pantops continue to be strong markets, with evidence of growth as well on the 29N corridor and beyond.
Continuing low interest rates also contribute to the improving market, explained Benton Downer with Downer and Associates. In contrast to the days of the recent down turn, today’s market is in what he called “more of a growth mode” as evidenced by the number of businesses relocating, opening second or better locations or expanding at an existing location.
The Local Commercial Market
“The market is improving over last year,” said Hock Hockensmith with Roy Wheeler Realty Co. “There is less vacancy than there was a year ago. Multi-family is still the leader,” he said, and “there have been some massive projects to keep up with the demand.”
Ed Brownfield, with Brownfield Realty Advisors, also cited the apartment market as “a big player in the commercial market recovery.” Of course, in our area there is always demand for housing from the student population, which Brownfield says has attracted “some big players from out of town.”
“The commercial market in Charlottesville is picking up,” said Bill Gentry with Jefferson Land and Realty in Madison County. However, recently he has experienced what he described as “nibbles” from people interested in property in Greene County, attracted by the lower price per acre than was available six years ago.
“The market has started to show a lot of movement in the last couple of weeks and the phone is ringing,” said Sara Schroeder, a partner in Real Estate III Commercial Properties. Some of her calls have been about office space, but two last week were about retail space, definitely cause for optimism about a market sector that has been somewhat slow. Schroeder agreed that while apartment buildings are in demand, she is also seeing small (defined as less than 5,000 square feet) office sales. In terms of geography she said, “Downtown and Pantops are where it’s at!”
The Market for Office Space
Yun predicts gradually improving demand for office space nationally, leading to a modest decrease in vacancy rates in this important sector.
In our area, the strength of this market is second to that of multi-family as many business owners take advantage of favorable prices and interest rates to find more suitable office space for new and expanding businesses. Examples of companies currently relocating reflect a wide range of businesses including non-profits.
Steve Melton, Property Manager for Virginia Land Company, facilitates the leasing of his company’s office space. He is excited about the activity in their new building on Pantops where he has leased three spaces in the last several months. He also sold one of his units to a physician who will be relocating there in late September or October. In addition, Melton has other prospects waiting in the wings. Two are looking to lease in his Pantops building soon and he was recently contacted by a third, a physician who is interested in possibly leasing or buying there as well.
Virginia Land also has property on 29N near Hollymead. At the same time that he expressed concern this area has been a little slow, Melton described an existing tenant who not long ago expanded his space by leasing the office next door. Meanwhile, the same tenant is thinking about leasing the entire building in the near future. Other Virginia Land tenants recently located to that complex include a Montessori school that Melton says is “doing very well,” and a medical company that delivers hospital supplies to patients at home.
Melton has also leased space in two of his other buildings to area non-profits, clients of local commercial agents. One of these is Keys Academy, a private school that serves a special education population, and is now located in Culpeper. The school will be moving into space on Fontaine. SARA, the Sexual Assault Resource Agency, another non-profit, has found a new home on Greenbrier. SARA offers free services to victims of sexual assault in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties of Albemarle, Louisa, Nelson, Fluvanna and Greene.
Another non-profit that just completed a move is the Northside Library, which relocated to West Rio Road next door to the Daily Progress. After years of renting space for the library at Albemarle Square, the county’s Board of Supervisors voted to purchase and renovate the Rio Road property, formerly home to a building supply company. The new library is light and bright and offers an array of books and informational programs as well as computer access, book groups, crafts, a job seekers support group, a gallery area where local artists can display their works, and much more in a space that is twice the size of its former home.
Another popular area for new and relocated businesses is the neighborhood around the former Martha Jefferson Hospital, now the CFA Institute. “The surrounding properties are coming back,” Hockensmith said. He explained that this area is attractive to start up businesses, some, but not all, of which are medical care related. Others are professional companies that are software and computer oriented.
While retail businesses need to be near the population they serve, office based companies, especially those that serve markets beyond their local area, may choose to locate according to the needs and interests of owners and employees rather than customers. Bob Kahn, with Bob Kahn Realty & Investment, explained that an office staffed with younger employees might choose to be near Downtown in walking distance to the excitement of the mall and all that it has to offer. On the other hand, more mature employees may prefer working further out, away from the congestion, and where parking is not an issue.
Either group may initially choose Charlottesville over other areas because of the strong economy, thanks in large part to UVA and the number of other large employers like GE, NGIC and State Farm already established here. Other strong points include our highly educated workforce and a quality of life that includes natural beauty, a wealth of cultural activities, and a location convenient to DC, Richmond and other east coast centers.
New Life for Retail
While retail is often described as the slowest market to recover, nevertheless there is movement there as well. For example “the smaller specialized shops in the Downtown Mall are very busy,” Schroeder said. Recently the boutiques were joined by The Pie Chest on Fourth Street NE, where everything is made from scratch and demand for its sweet, savory, gluten free, vegan and breakfast hand pies is booming.
Anyone who shops at the national chain, Family Dollar, Neighborhood Discount & Dollar Store, may recall that it often shares a strip center with anchor tenant Food Lion grocery store. Gentry explained that to locate in these strips the Family Dollar stores had to agree to limit their sale of groceries to avoid competition with Food Lion. Now many Family Dollars are moving to stand alone locations to avoid this conflict and open the door to more grocery sales. Recently Gentry was the agent in the sale of just such a location to a Family Dollar in Madison County. Similarly the Family Dollar in Lovingston, in Nelson County, moved out of its long time location in the Food Lion strip center on Route 29 and into a standalone location across the street.
The popularity of The Shops at Stonefield, with its six restaurants, Regal Cinema, Trader Joes, Face Value Salon, the Hyatt Place Charlottesville hotel and a growing list of high end shops of all kinds is clear evidence that retail is alive and well here, and the now open Costco can only draw more crowds to this area.
Across the street at Seminole Square, Krogers plans to move into an expanded and renovated spot formerly occupied by Giant. When it opens for business, the new Krogers will be the largest one in the region.
As the 2016 opening date approaches, there is also a lot of excitement about the start of construction at 5th Street Station featuring Wegmans, a well respected, family owned grocery chain out of New York State. Wegmans, known for giving back to the community, has also won many awards over the years, including being named #1 in a list of 100 firms with the best corporate reputation according to a national Harris Poll. This year in June, Wegmans was one of two retailers nationwide to receive the EPA’s Safer Choice Partner Award for its introduction of a safer line of cleaning products to its stores.
A long list of other national retailers will join Wegmans at 5th Street Station including such well-known names as Field and Stream, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Mattress Warehouse, Panera Bread, PetSmart, Jersey Mikes Subs and Sprint, with more leases under negotiation
People who live and work on Pantops will soon be able to enjoy one of Charlottesville’s newest fast food restaurants, Chik-Fil-A, which is now under construction in the location that used to be Aunt Sarahs. Melton worked with the owners as part of their process of obtaining county approval and gave them high marks saying, “They are a nice company to deal with.”
Residential Market Supports Commercial Growth
An important consideration in where a company chooses to locate is the strength of the local residential real estate market. CAAR recently reported an impressive 12 percent increase in sales compared to second quarter last year with half of the homes selling in 33 days or less. This kind of result bodes well for continued growth in the commercial market.
One last note, when visitors come for business, pleasure, or to look for a new home, they will find lots of hotels to choose from including Graduate Charlottesville, now open, and the Marriott Residence Inn, still under construction on West Main.
By Celeste M. Smucker, PhD
Celeste Smucker is a writer, blogger and author who lives near Charlottesville.
The primary purpose of a Homeowners Association (HOA) is to preserve a subdivision’s property values so owners can enjoy a consistent quality of neighborhood and lifestyle.
One way they do this is by enforcing standards for the external appearance of homes and yards as defined in the neighborhood’s restrictions and covenants. Another is by maintaining the common areas throughout the subdivision including entrances, median strips, and roads and in some cases naturally occurring features such as lakes and wooded areas, all of which require some form of regular maintenance.
If a neighborhood offers amenities such as pools, tennis courts, golf courses, walking and bike trails and playgrounds, these are also maintained by the HOA.
Some communities such as Wintergreen in Nelson or Lake Monticello in Fluvanna County provide their own police force and fire and rescue squads.
How They Work
Subdivision developers create the HOA and builders and homeowners must adhere to the covenants and restrictions. Initially, the developer approves all plans, specs, and plot plans and overlooks details such as exterior colors, siding and roofing, landscape design, size and location of storage sheds, and fencing.
After the sale of a predetermined number of a subdivision’s lots, the control of the HOA passes automatically to a Board of Directors elected by and made up of homeowners who serve their community as volunteers. Most then also have an associated Architectural Review Board, explained Judy Savage with Savage and Company Realtors, “to monitor exterior changes to properties to insure uniformity and keep property values high.” In some instances the Board may hire a professional management company to handle the business of running the community.
While HOAs have certain common functions, no two are identical. “I’ve lived in numerous neighborhoods,” said Savage, “and the HOA varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. Every one of them is different.” A good example is Wintergreen where the HOA helped make their neighborhood an official Bear Smart Community, increasing resident’s safety while still respecting the local wild life.
HOA Finances
Property owners support the HOA by paying dues in the form of annual assessments plus fees for special services like golf course use or clubhouse rental. Some communities also assess their homeowners in advance for seasonal maintenance items like snow removal or clean up after a big storm to assure sufficient funds are available if and when they are needed.
Managing the Association’s finances, including items such as insurance, is a big part of an HOA’s function, and that includes planning for sufficient money to fund long-term capital projects, explained Thomas Barger, Managing Director for Nest Community Group, which provides management services for HOAs. For example, a community may need to repair and upgrade roads or sidewalks. If the HOA has not maintained a reserve fund for these kinds of expensive repairs they will need to do a special assessment to raise the funds.
Barger stressed that prior to purchasing a home in an HOA community, buyers need to inspect information about the association’s reserve fund to avoid a situation where they are surprised with an unexpected special assessment. “The HOA dues are part of the home’s deed and must be paid,” he said. This means if homeowners can’t pay, the HOA can foreclose on their property.
HOAs that collect dues are governed by the Property Owners Association Act, which mandates that buyers moving into one of these communities receive a disclosure package once they have successfully negotiated a contract to purchase. “A buyer has three days after receipt of the disclosure package to review the rules, regulations and budgets of the Association. If they are troubled by any of it they can terminate the contract without penalty,” Savage said. Barger suggests they also look at minutes from the Board meetings to “get a feel for how the HOA is run.”
Advantages and Disadvantages
HOAs promote a certain quality of life by assuring the community is well maintained and there is consistency in how homes and lots are kept so that property values remain high. Another benefit of HOA communities is that they are more likely to offer amenities such as pools, tennis courts, club houses, golf courses and walking trails, all of which require a high degree of maintenance.
Buyers who appreciate that kind of lifestyle may prefer an HOA neighborhood. However they are not for everyone, especially those who don’t like lots of rules and regulations. “I do have many clients who just say ‘no’ to subdivisions with HOAs,” Savage said. “Besides the dues, they don’t want someone else telling them what they can and can’t do with their property.”
Call your agent for more information about the pros and cons of HOAs. He or she will educate you on the basics and help you find a community that meets your unique needs.
By Celeste M. Smucker, Ph.D.
Celeste Smucker is a writer and blogger who lives near Charlottesville.
Last weekend marked the annual ritual of the UVA undergraduates move-in, when students and parents haul semester survival gear from SUVs to dorm rooms. This year, the weekend also celebrated a move of a different kind—one with less heavy lifting but far more gusto. On Saturday, New City Arts Initiative moved out of its office at The Haven in a parade of pinwheels as volunteers provided a spark of whimsy while carrying the local arts nonprofit to its new downtown home on Third Street NE.
As New City Arts approaches its sixth anniversary, this move promises to be monumental for the young nonprofit. It’s been five years since NCAI went from working in coffee shops to its first office located in The Haven, Charlottesville’s day shelter for the homeless and very poor. With that move, NCAI Executive Director Maureen Brondyke gained her first office mates as well as a partner organization that would prove vital to her work.
Executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless, Kaki Dimock shared an office with Brondyke at The Haven. “[Brondyke] understood the potential intersection between her work and The Haven’s work immediately,” says Dimock. She knew that disenfranchised people are often exploited in the name of making art and worked to create a respectful, nuanced, guest-centered experience at The Haven instead. She understood that the process was more important than the final product.”
Beginning in 2011, New City Arts operated an artist residency program at The Haven. Each year, selected artists would work with shelter’s guests: first as volunteers who interacted in a general way; then, as teaching artists, encouraging creative expression. “The Haven staff—many of whom are poets, artists and musicians themselves—had always hoped for artists to work with guests in some way,” says Brondyke. “The partnership was a natural fit.”
Nine individuals participated as artists during the program’s four-year run, adapting with each cycle for the creation of projects ranging from a community quilt to a collaborative mural. In exchange, New City Arts provided the artists with affordable studio space in order to develop skills and gallery exhibitions to reach the broader community.
With this month’s move, the artist residency program will continue to adapt. Artists who are interested in working with New City Arts can apply before September 1 to be considered for the residency program, which will be held at the Third Street location. For artists who wish to work with The Haven and its guests, however, the NCAI residency no longer has the same hands-on approach. Rather, Brondyke encourages these artists to get involved with the soon-to-launch collaborative project between The Haven and New City Arts known as Housing2Home.
“New City Arts emerged as a real force in this community in the last five years in large part because of Maureen’s vision, strategy and community-building efforts,” Dimock says. “While other arts organizations have struggled or faltered, New City Arts has grown its audiences, created meaningful collaborations and expanded its programming.” This is evident in Brondyke’s planning and execution of the artist residency program, and in her strategic decision to move the organization onto the Downtown Mall at this particular time.
As galleries like Chroma Projects, Warm Springs, and BozART have all been forced to shutter or move off the mall, Brondyke hopes her organization’s new home will help reinvigorate First Fridays. “I think it’s important for the local art community to have a presence on the Downtown Mall because it draws a diverse audience,” she says. “A gallery might not be a visitor’s destination, but if they happen into it by surprise and are exposed to new work, organic arts audience development might occur in a way that an event can’t always facilitate.”
NCAI’s new location will be the organization’s first experience with foot traffic on the Downtown Mall. The space will house the organization’s office and a studio for the revamped artist residency program as well as a gallery.
Since New City Arts will also continue its gallery partnership with the WVTF and Radio IQ studio, the move actually doubles its capacity for monthly exhibitions, which will take place at both galleries beginning in September.
According to Brondyke, we can expect more artist talks and a wider variety of types of work shown—expanding to include multimedia or installation art, and perhaps even performance art. “Once we have the funding for things like a PA system and chairs, we hope the space serves performance artists, musicians and writers in new and unique ways,” Brondyke says.
For now, basic renovations and new furniture are closer on the horizon, along with a crowdfunding campaign that’s expected to launch in about a month.
The New City Arts Initiative gallery will open with “Animals and Clouds” by Dean Dass and a First Fridays reception on September 4. For details, visit newcityarts.org.
What’s your favorite gallery?
Tell us in the comments below.
According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, more than 35 million Americans move each year. And, although most movers are reputable companies, the number of complaints is on the rise. Moving into a new home is an exciting event, but the reality is that it’s often stressful for the entire family. That is why the U.S. Government has partnered with the moving industry and various consumer groups to help educate the public in an effort to keep them from being taking advantage of by dishonest movers. Because the process can be rather stressful and overwhelming, you don’t want to procrastinate by waiting until the last minute to start planning. Doing so can lead to poorly packed boxes, unorganized preparation and unnecessary chaos. If you have a big move coming up, don’t despair. With some advanced planning and good packing advice, you can make the process less stressful and more enjoyable.
Let the Professionals Handle the Move
If you have never hired a professional moving company before, Eddie Giles, the proprietor of Professional Movers Incorporated (www.professionalmoversofcharlottesville.com), suggests you begin the search by checking your local phone book. Furthermore, this task can also be accomplished by doing a Google search on the Internet for local moving companies within your locale. According to Giles, some movers will have customers complete an online estimate sheet in order to provide an estimated cost and time. However, if you are moving out of the state, they will give you an estimated weight as well, he adds. Giles doesn’t believe that this is the best practice for providing an accurate estimate. Instead, he suggests that you have the mover come to your current residence and give you a visual estimate. In his opinion, a visual estimate eliminates any frustrations down the road, especially when the customer receives the final bill that exceeds the initial estimated quote. Furthermore, Giles says be prepared for “sticker shock” because prices have changed. If your last move was say 20 years ago, be prepared to pay a much higher premium today. “I’m going to tell you what you don’t want to hear, not what you want to hear,” says Giles. “I’d rather let you know up front what to expect cost wise, rather than quote something ridiculously low because, at the end of the day, doing so makes me untrustworthy.”
Charlottesville has a lot of moving companies popping up constantly, providing customers with many choices and options. But keep in mind, “not all movers are the same,” adds Giles. According to Giles, some of these companies do not have trucks, they don’t have licenses, they don’t carry insurance, they don’t have workers’ compensation insurance, and they don’t have a full-time staff. His advice, “Buyers beware when you are looking for a mover.” When doing your due diligence on a mover, you want to start with the Better Business Bureau. Although many movers are not members, using this avenue for research can help when gathering information regarding customer complaints. In addition, you can go to www.protectyourmove.com and pull up any mover in the United States. If they are not registered with this website, then it’s questionable because all moving companies are supposed to be registered and in their database, according to Giles. You can provide the company’s name, their Department of Transportation number (DOT) or their Motor Carrier number, and their information should instantly pull up, giving you some idea about the company. Giles says that this is particularly important to do if you are moving out of state.
You Pack They Haul
If you have decided to go with a professional moving company but the cost is a looming factor, you could save money by packing yourself and letting the moving company haul everything away. If you do pack yourself, it is very important that you label your boxes: what’s in your boxes, where they need to go in the house, and into what rooms. However, with furniture you don’t necessarily need to label it, says Giles, but once the movers bring it into the house you can show them the designated location. To further make this process run smoothly, Giles likes to visit the new home location when possible (which many moving companies don’t do) because it allows him the opportunity to assess any unforeseen problems before the actual move day. “If I have any questions about driveways, or trees hanging down or the stairways, or questionable pieces of furniture not fitting, I can decide what method we need to use to get it into the house,” he says.
Although packing yourself can help with the cost, keep in mind that many movers will tell you that they are not responsible for damages, according to Giles. For example, if you do not pack a box correctly and you hear something rattling inside, that means the box is not properly packed and the mover should not take it. However, if they do move the box, and you notice that the box is flatten, that means that the movers possibly sat something on top of the box and damaged the items. In this instance, Giles believes that the mover should bear some responsibility for the damages. Although you packed it, they stacked it wrong. Labeling and packing the contents within the boxes properly is very important because it helps the movers strategically stack and place items on the truck.
According to Student Services Moving & Storage Co.’s website, if you have oversized furniture and you are moving into an apartment, there is a possibility that it won’t fit. By measuring your items and the dimensions of your new location, for example, elevators, stairways, door jams, and corners you can avoid surprises and eliminate unnecessary stress on move-in day. Student Services also suggests that you empty your refrigerator, defrost your freezer and disconnect your washer and dryer. Student Services advises that if you are packing your items, you should use an excessive amount of paper on your fragile possessions. Make sure that you label each box and make note of the contents inside and where they should be placed in your new home. In addition, Student Services believes in making use of all available space, which is why they advise packing linens and clothes in drawers, chests, and trunks, and loose items in trashcans.
Whether you plan to go with a professional moving company, or handle the move yourself, Bob Hughes, of Nest Realty (www.nestrealty.com), believes that it’s a good idea to begin planning four to five months out. Doing so allows the homeowner time to de-clutter, and get rid of items that they no longer need or want anymore. It can also help the homeowners’ wallet because they won’t have the extra cost of hauling items to their new location only to later trash them.
Giles also wants homeowners to keep in mind that going with the cheapest price might not work in their favor. For example, according to Giles, if you hire a mover that doesn’t have workers’ compensation insurance, and the employee gets hurt inside your home or falls down the steps on your property, then the consequences could mean a big lawsuit. Since the employee doesn’t have workers’ compensation insurance, and he wants to get paid for his injury, he will most likely sue your homeowners insurance, or even worse, you. So taking the risk of hiring an uninsured moving company could prove to be a very expensive consequence later.
Storage Facilities
If you have items in a storage facility, there is an additional charge. “Extra stop, extra pickup, extra drop off,” means an added charge, says Giles. It is important to let the mover know during the initial assessment because the mover needs to know what’s involved, what size storage unit, where it’s located, etc. All this factors into the final estimate or cost of your move. For example, if you are moving items out of a home and into a storage unit because you have sold your current home and are waiting to close on another, you just can’t take those items to storage and set them in place. It’s like putting a puzzle together, he says. For instance, when Charlottesville Professional Movers put items in storage, the way it comes off the truck is the way it goes back on—in reverse. If the customer wants to save money, having that storage unit packed correctly initially could save them both time and money in the long run. In addition, the homes levels will determine the final cost as well. A homeowner moving into a one level home can expect a different cost than someone moving into a two or three level home with a basement.
Furthermore, if the storage unit was not professionally stacked and packed by his company, Giles says that he likes to visit the storage unit, if possible. Normally, he would not look at units that are 5 x 10 because you can only fit so much into them. However, if his customer has a 10 x 20 or 10 x 30 storage unit, he typically makes the trip to the unit, because in his experience, often times people get larger storage units to accommodate what they thought was a lot. But, what he has discovered is that many of these units are not filled to capacity. By making this trip, it usually means a great savings for his customers.
Making Sure Your Valuables Are Covered
If you are still not sure whether you want to hire a professional licensed moving company, or you just can’t afford one, if you have a homeowner’s policy, some of your valuables might be covered during a move, according to John Egan, editor-in-chief at Spare Foot, the country’s largest marketplace for finding and booking self-storage. Even if you lack homeowner’s insurance, or your current policy doesn’t cover your property while in transit, during a state-to-state move you should be covered, he said. Under federal law, a registered moving company must offer two types of liability coverage: released value protection and full value protection. Release value coverage reimburses up to 60 cents per pound and comes at no additional cost to consumers. On the other hand, full value coverage comes at an extra cost and covers about one percent of the value of your belongings. Egan suggests that you understand what’s covered and what’s not before you allow the moving company to load a single box into a truck.
In addition, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates interstate movers, warns consumers against signing a delivery receipt for household goods if they “spot language about releasing the company or its partners from any liability.” Furthermore, you should keep valuables like “cash, credit cards, coin collections, jewelry, irreplaceable photographs and critical documents like birth certificates and passports” with you, according to Egan. Hughes says that he would not let movers handle anything that is confidential, personal and important. However, things like utility bills, receipts and other non sensitive items can be handled by the mover, but “any personal financial documents should stay with you.” Although some of these items can be replaced with just a phone call, keeping them with you saves the added hassle.
It’s no mystery that a well planned and organized move will make your life so much easier. And for many, hiring a professional moving company is the perfect solution for a stress free transition. However, for many consumers hiring professionals is just not the most economical or cost effective solution, which is why you should turn to organizations like the American Moving & Storage Association, and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to gather helpful moving tips that can potentially save you money and valuable time. Whatever route you decide to take, don’t let your move in day have you pulling out your hair.
By Janet Thomson
Janet Thomson is a freelance writer, copywriter and military wife residing in Charlottesville.
Those heady first weeks of freedom as a college student have a name: the red zone, the time when freshman females are most at risk for sexual assault. And this year, the University of Virginia is mandating two online classes on alcohol and substance abuse, and sexual violence for both male and female students.
UVA is no stranger to either issue, but the sexual violence course is new and follows UVA’s latest sexual assault policy that went into effect July 1, the Newsplex reports. If the two hour-long nodules aren’t completed by September 18, student access to grades and test scores will be suspended.
Over in the dormitories, the student sexual-assault education groups One Less and One in Four are working on a safety initiative called Dorm Norms to bring up the sexual assault conversation with all first years, according to the Cav Daily.
A 2007 campus sexual assault study found that 50 percent took place in August, September, October and November, and that assaults on women usually took place early in their college career.
On August 19, Senator Mark Warner attended a round-table discussion hosted by local hiring platform Moonlighting about employment, the government’s role in a sharing economy and efforts to help people make more money.
More than a dozen local workers from freelance and independent contract companies like Uber, Etsy and Airbnb attended the discussion, in which rising concerns and opinions about how policymakers can make the on-demand economy work best was a main talking point.
“Whether by economic necessity or by choice, as many as one-third of American workers now find themselves piecing together two, three or more on-demand opportunities to make a living,” Warner said, according to a press release. “Yet Washington mostly has remained on the sidelines as the U.S. economy, its workforce and the workplace have undergone perhaps the most dramatic transformation in decades.
Warner says he is committed to finding practical solutions to keeping up with the shift in the economy.