Month: January 2023

Categories
News Real Estate

For a price

Area realtor Jim Duncan says that while people always look at assessed values, “they are a backwards-looking valuation, rather than a value that reflects today’s market.” Supplied photo.

There’s a long way to go until the end of 2023, but key metrics are coming in on how the real estate market fared in the last 12 months. But what impact will this new information have on transactions between now and December?  

“Assessed values are a number that people look at, and while by law they are supposed to be 100 percent of market value, they are a backwards-looking valuation, rather than a value that reflects today’s market,” says local realtor Jim Duncan. 

But those numbers will have an effect on property taxes for this year, and local governments will have to decide what they’ll do with the millions of dollars in additional revenue. 

Albemarle County set a record this year with average assessments up 13.64 percent over 2022. Last year’s assessments in Albemarle were up 8.4 percent. 

In Fluvanna, property values are up 13 percent for 2023. Figures for Louisa County will come out later this spring, as will assessments for Nelson and Greene. 

Charlottesville’s assessor has not released the figures for the city. The average increase in 2022 was 11.67 percent. Currently Charlottesville is expecting a $5 million surplus in the current fiscal year, but that figure will increase if the trend extends to the city. 

But even if the numbers are backward looking, they still inform understanding about how things have worked. Perhaps the large increase in Albemarle will fuel more appeals, but County Assessor Peter Lynch told the Board of Supervisors on January 11 that there were not many challenges in Albemarle last year. 

“They understood what was going on with the market,” Lynch said. “They knew people were bidding up the sales on houses and that the assessments would be higher.” 

Lynch also said he is aware that the increase may not be easily understood, given a general sense that recession is on the horizon. Yet, the assessment increases can be explained by a closer look at last year. 

The number of home sales was down in 2022, but sales prices continued to increase. Data compiled by the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors shows that sales volume decreased 19.9 percent from November 2021 to November 2022 for the whole region, but the median sales price increased 9.6 percent over the same period to $399,000. 

If the bubble does burst this year, assessments in future years could be lower. In 2009, the average assessment was down in Albemarle 2.59 percent, beginning a decline that lasted several years until property values began to increase. 

There’s also the potential impact on rents. Lynch told Albemarle Supervisors that the assessments of apartment buildings went up 28.2 percent.

“Apartments are a hot commodity in the real estate market and its really the difference between that’s an income stream that is sought after,” Lynch said.

While every property’s case is unique, the more expensive the house, the larger the assessment increase is likely to be. Homes over $2 million have an average increase of 15.29 percent compared to 9.13 percent for properties under $150,000.

Categories
Arts Culture

Speculative memoir

Sofia Samatar will read from The White Mosque as part of the Charlottesville Reading Series on Friday, January 20 at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

In Sofia Samatar’s latest book, The White Mosque, the author and James Madison University professor weaves stories from her life together with histories of a group of Russian Mennonites who migrated to what is now Uzbekistan. Ak Metchet, which means “white mosque,” is the name of the Uzbek village that was settled by 19th-century Mennonites known as the Bride Community, followers of a false prophecy of the second coming of Christ, their bridegroom. This eponymous mosque serves as an engine for wide-ranging explorations of identity, home, and belief, sparked by Samatar’s curiosity about the story that Ak Metchet might have become known as such because of the whitewashed church the Mennonites built there. It may be a mosque that is a church that is a village (that is now a book)—but that is just one telling of it.

From this central troubling of language to the vast unknowability of our lives, the author wonders, “How do you know whether you’re on a pilgrimage that will foster wholeness or just aimlessly roving?” Aboard a bus called the Golden Dragon, rumbling across Uzbekistan with other tourists on a Mennonite history tour, taking part in a very literal pilgrimage, Samatar puzzles the ways we build a sense of self and how we embrace community and history. “We are inhabited by archives, steeped in collective memory, permeated with images and impressions, porous to myth,” she muses. She examines the imprecision but also the joy that these stories and their imperfect language and interpretations afford us, probing the intersections of present and past, family and faith, Muslim and Mennonite, all juxtapositions reflected in her own life.

The child of a Somali Muslim who married a Mennonite missionary from Nebraska, Samatar recounts, “How often I’ve been told I’m false, impossible, unreal. Somali and Swiss Mennonite: no one can make it work.” She grapples with a “magpie existence,” cataloging her experiences as a child, a mother, a novelist, an academic, and someone whose life was inexorably shaped by beliefs she no longer adheres to. A person whose body was perhaps never fully accepted as part of the religion that is, to some, also an ethnicity, a white identity that overlooks the majority of contemporary Mennonites of color around the world.

Still, to think of The White Mosque as her memoir is to oversimplify and flatten, to overlook the light sparked by the conjunction of her own experiences with those of the 19th-century Mennonites. Rather, this is a speculative memoir, a multi-genre mosaic, and an outgrowth of Samatar’s other published books of speculative fiction, most notably her previous book, Monster Portraits, a fantastical yet autobiographical collaboration with her brother. A past finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize, her fabulist experimentalist style in fiction, now adapted to the nonfiction form of The White Mosque, is transcendent, a feat of transmogrification by means of poioumena, a work of metanarrative about the process of writing, which simultaneously transforms the act of reading into one of pilgrimage—or roving, albeit with aim and exuberance.

In her extensive research, Samatar traces the history of Mennonites, whose pacifism has led them to be “people leaving their homes time after time,” and for whom martyrdom is a prominent theme (see also the popularity of a “guess the martyr” game that the author played at Mennonite youth retreats). She tells of encountering Ak Metchet in a history class, forgetting it only to later encounter the story again in a photograph, which in turn motivated her to undertake years of research before and then again after the pilgrimage that forms the backbone of The White Mosque. She reads and re-reads the accounts of the pilgrims as well as the subsequent histories written about them. She finds in them the unerring faith of believers, and “language to shift the breath.” Samatar makes the choice to retell the past in the present tense, twice over, through the Bride Community pilgrims’ experiences, but also her own pilgrimage, which takes place in 2016. She inserts refrains back to previous sections, simultaneously echoing songs sung in a round and the process of working through a thought aloud, uttering words until the phrase has the intended mouthfeel.

Samatar often references other works; fragments of novels, biographies, poems, and songs seep in to create fractal re-imaginings, doggedly asking: “How do we enter the stories of others?” As readers, we are immediately alongside and, at last, fully immersed in this inquiry.

“To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting,” writes Samatar, and The White Mosque is a vivid, feverish haunting that is alive with the same “historian’s alertness to those small details that clarify the past” that the author appreciates in her research. It makes her own book a captivating and compulsive read. A different writer might have concluded by framing the pilgrimage experience as life-changing, a dramatic moment of becoming, of self. Instead, Samatar squares off with this narrative expectation, naming it and then putting it aside: “I thought it was the promise of integration, of seeing myself as one, of finally claiming emphatically I Am, but instead I saw them, those others, how variously and chaotically They Were.” In the end, it feels like a vital reminder that the search for wholeness, for self, is never undertaken in solitude, is always informed by our communities, our ancestors, and the stories we inherit about them—just as much as the future will be informed by the stories we tell about ourselves. 

Categories
News

Training for life

Former boxer George Rivera started Wartime Fitness Warriors to serve as a safe haven where young people can build strength, confidence, and self-respect. Photo: Eze Amos.

As a professional boxer, George Rivera fought under the name “Wartime.” Growing up poor and mixed-race, he learned to fight to survive. But now he’s taken on a different battle: Inspired by his late sister, Rivera is turning his Charlottesville gym into a nonprofit called Wartime Fitness Warriors, using boxing to help at-risk young people ages 6-24 build strength, discipline, and self-respect.

“Boxing changed my whole mental outlook,” says Rivera, 44. “It gave me purpose. And that’s what I want to pass on to these kids.”

Rivera grew up in the Harlem projects. “We called where we lived the Vietnam Building, because it was war inside and war outside” (thus his boxing name), and when he was a senior in high school, the family got out. They moved to Lake Monticello, where his aunt lived.

“It was total culture shock,” says Rivera. “Farms, trees—I’d never seen a praying mantis.” This was 1996—and many kids in Fluvanna County had never seen a Black-Puerto Rican kid. “Coming where I came from, we were big on respect … so my brother and I would get into altercations. I got labeled.”

After high school, a friend suggested Rivera take up boxing, and connected him with Charlottesville youth coach Joe Mallory, who also ran a boxing gym. Rivera says boxing “helped me with my anger. Hitting that bag, you’re releasing so much tension—it made me calmer, more relaxed, helped me focus.” After Mallory’s gym closed, he went on to train at the Staunton Boxing Club. Within a few years, he was fighting as an amateur (45 wins, five losses), and by 2005 as a pro (14 wins, eight  losses, two draws). 

But Rivera had a wife and family to support, so boxing was always a sideline. Eventually, he left the ring, but continued his involvement in athletics as a volunteer football and basketball coach.

Then, in 2018, a heart-to-heart talk with his younger sister, Daniela Johnson—“a beautiful spirit”—set Rivera on a new path. In the middle of a conversation one night, “she turned to me and said, ‘You have to get back into boxing, into coaching—you’re great at it. You have to cut that safety net [of having a full-time job and coaching on the side.]’  And I thought, ‘You know what, she’s right.’” A week later, Johnson fell asleep at the wheel on her way home from her night job, and was killed.

Her death spurred Rivera to take the leap and start his own gym, where he could train and coach full-time. Wartime Fitness opened in Fluvanna in 2019, and moved to a larger space in Charlottesville on Juneteenth 2021.

His gym drew a diverse group of clients from all around the area—and a lot of kids Rivera could see “were already getting judged, labeled, or getting bullied. I understood where they were coming from.” He began working intensively with the kids he calls “misunderstood” (he resists the label “disadvantaged”), getting to know their parents and their teachers, becoming another supportive presence in their lives. 

“I tell these kids, ‘You don’t have to box competitively; you are here to train yourself, mentally and physically. When you’re in this building, you have to do your best.’ Confidence is powerful, and we’re here to build confidence.” 

Rivera’s long-term plan for the Warriors includes renovating a space on Cherry Avenue to include classrooms and computers, so kids can get help on their schoolwork as well as their footwork. “I want this to be a safe haven, a community for them,” he says. In the meantime, Rivera is busy recruiting more club members whose dues will help support the mission, seeking grant money, starting a GoFundMe page, and building ties with schools in the area.

And through it all, he can feel his sister’s presence: “Her energy is here. She was always positive. We’re working to put that back out into the world.”  

Categories
News

Head start?

Skooma’s David Treccariche says “out-of-state money has influenced our locally elected officials against the betterment of their constituents.” Photo: Eze Amos.

Since Virginia legalized marijuana in 2021, laws surrounding the drug have been hazy. Though adults 21 and over can legally possess up to one ounce of marijuana and grow up to four plants at home, it will not be legal to sell weed until January 1, 2024. State Democrats unsuccessfully tried to speed up that timeline last year—but now, legislators on both sides of the aisle are pushing to start recreational sales ahead of schedule.  

In the House, Republican Del. Keith Hodges has proposed a bill that would allow pharmaceutical and industrial hemp processors to begin selling recreational weed on July 1, but prohibit the state from issuing marijuana licenses to other retailers until July 1, 2024. Democratic state Sen. Adam Ebbin has proposed a bill with the same timeline. While the proposals have drawn support from marijuana advocates pushing for recreational sales to begin before next year, some advocacy groups have criticized them for giving corporations an advantage, and removing social equity provisions included in the monumental 2021 legislation.

Under current law, the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority Board of Directors is required to establish standards and requirements for license applicants who have been convicted of a misdemeanor marijuana crime—or whose parent, child, sibling, or spouse has been convicted of one—as well as applicants who have lived in an area disproportionately policed for marijuana crimes (or an economically distressed area) for at least three of the past five years. People who graduated from a historically Black college or university in the state also qualify for a social equity license. 

Hodges’ bill, HB1464, would instead mandate standards and requirements for “any preference in the licensing process for applicants that intend to operate a marijuana establishment in an historically economically disadvantaged community.” Ebbin’s bill, SB1133, would mandate “criteria by which to evaluate and grant license preference to applicants who have resided for at least four of the last five years … [in] a historically economically disadvantaged community.”

By allowing pharmaceutical and industrial hemp processors to sell recreational weed before small businesses, and giving preference to applicants opening dispensaries in economically disadvantaged communities, these bills invite corporations and other outside actors to exploit these areas, and do not guarantee people harmed by the decades-long war on drugs will be prioritized in the licensing process, says Chelsea Higgs Wise, executive director of Marijuana Justice. 

“It’s a removal of the focus of the disparate impact of prohibition … and from individuals and families that have been targeted,” says Higgs Wise. “[This] appears to be the compromise across chambers to really encourage the false narrative of urgency to sales.”

The bills introduced by Hodges and Ebbin remove the word “equity” from multiple positions and organizations overseeing the legal marijuana market, and detail provisions for historically economically disadvantaged communities, rather than those specifically impacted by marijuana prohibition. Additionally, HB1464 no longer requires the Cannabis Control Authority to appropriate marijuana tax revenue to pre-kindergarten programs for at-risk children, the Cannabis Equity Reinvestment Fund, substance use disorder prevention and treatment programs, and public health programs. Republican Del. Michael Webert has proposed a bill, HB1750, that would delay retail sales to January 1, 2025, and remove social equity license requirements, too. 

Higgs Wise worries about the long-term repercussions of marijuana laws without strong social equity provisions—as more states move toward legalizing marijuana, they could follow the commonwealth’s lead. 

“Virginia has got to look across borders … and not only talk to people with the most money and the biggest mouths, which are the pharmaceutical companies,” says Higgs Wise, pointing to social equity issues within other states’ cannabis markets, like California and Illinois. 

However, Virginia NORML is in support of the early sales bills, stressing the need for a safe, legal market as soon as possible.

“These bills seek to address some of the most immediate policies for adult use retail sales,” says the organization’s Executive Director JM Pedini. “The priority for the General Assembly this session ought to be public and consumer safety when it comes to retail sales—not who gets to make money first or next off of those consumers.”

The ever-changing proposals surrounding retail sales are confusing people interested in opening dispensaries, says Higgs Wise. Sirak Getachew, who plans to open a CBD dispensary in Richmond this spring, hopes to eventually sell legal weed at his business, but is worried about the social equity requirements.

“It just seems like we are on the sideline with nothing,” he says. “It seems like the war [on drugs] is never over.”

David Treccariche, owner of Charlottesville CBD dispensary Skooma, echoes similar concerns regarding early sales and licensing. 

“Out-of-state money has influenced our locally elected officials against the betterment of their constituents,” says Treccariche. “The greatest injustice is to the victims of the state.  … Those individuals should be given cannabis licenses and grants as easily as they were given summons and tickets.”

It remains to be seen which of the proposed bills—if any—have a fair chance of passing this legislative session. Gov. Glenn Youngkin has yet to clarify his position on a legalization timeline, which is “creating a hurdle, specifically for House Republicans, on the issue,” says Pedini. 

Categories
Culture

HotSeat: Andrea Douglas

Andrea Douglas. Supplied photo.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center opened its doors. It’s a milestone achievement that wouldn’t be possible without the steely determination of Executive Director Andrea Douglas, whose hard work has solidified the historic school firmly in the heart of Charlottesville. Under Douglas’ leadership, the JSAAHC offers a variety of rich cultural programming, including art exhibitions, lectures, live music, theater productions from Charlottesville Players Guild, and more. jeffschoolheritagecenter.org

Age: Legal

Pronouns: She/her

Why here: Grad school

Worst thing about living here: Stores don’t open before 10

Best thing about living here: I eat well 

Favorite hangout spot: Crush Pad Wines

Bodos order: Egg cheese plain bagel 

Favorite restaurant: Bizou

Where do you start and end a night out: Crush Pad Wines

Who is your hero: My mother

Best advice you ever got: Mind your business

Biggest lie you’ve ever told: I don’t lie

Proudest accomplishment/achievement: Being part of JSAAHC’s accomplishments

Describe a perfect day: 95 degrees 

Do you have any pets: Nasi

Most embarrassing moment: I own my stuff, so not embarrassed 

Favorite writers: Nikki Giovanni

Favorite book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Most-used app on your phone: Instagram

What song are you listening to right now: Pat Benatar, “Shadows of the Night”

What’s a song you pretend you don’t like because it’s embarrassing that you love it? Again, I don’t get embarrassed

Last text you sent: Yeah

Most-used emoji: Thumbs up

If you could be reincarnated as a person or thing, what would you be: Butterfly

Best journey you ever went on: All of the cross-country trips I have ever taken

Next journey: PR

Favorite curse word: Fuck that shit

What have you forgotten today: My keys

Categories
Arts Culture

Night Moves

Night Moves plays at The Southern Café & Music Hall on January 22. Supplied photo.

Minneapolis-based quartet Night Moves returned from the COVID-forced break with unfinished business. The band’s new EP, The Redaction, is a short, melancholic listen packed with big pop hooks and American twang. The EP, which marks an evolution for the band, opens with “Fallacy Actually,” a “dense cosmic romp” full of layered synth, high harmonica, and soft flute. The stand-out track, “As Innocent Looking As Candy,” is a timely tune that pairs upbeat tempos with thought-provoking lyrics that examine gun violence.

Sunday 1/22. $15-17, 8pm. The Southern Café & Music Hall, 103 First St. S. thesoutherncville.com

Categories
Arts Culture

Drag Bingo

Cake Pop! co-hosts Botanical Fare's Drag Bingo. Supplied photo.

Botanical Fare’s Drag Bingo is a game night like no other. Come ready to play multiple rounds to win merch, gift cards, and more. Hosts Chicki Parm and Cake Pop! (right) serve realness and keep the party rolling, while the café serves up the vegan eats. Take a break between games to watch a dazzling performance from special guest Thea Trickality.

Friday 1/20. $15, 6:30pm. Botanical Plant-Based Fare, 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. botanicalfare.com

Categories
Arts Culture

Poe at heart

In The Pale Blue Eye, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) enlists a young Edgar Allan Poe to help solve a murder at West Point. Image: Netflix.

Writer and director Scott Cooper’s film of Louis Bayard’s novel The Pale Blue Eye is a reasonably engaging American Gothic mystery. It offers visually appealing historical fiction and, at just over two hours, doesn’t overstay its welcome. But with a mediocre script and lead performances that don’t equal its pictorial loveliness, the film only sporadically delivers on its promising premise.

Set in 1830 in the Hudson River Valley, former detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is enlisted by West Point to solve a cadet’s ritualistic murder. Landor becomes acquainted with cadet Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), taking him on as his assistant and sleeper agent within the student body. As the murders continue and Landor weaves his way through a sea of red herrings, insidious secrets begin to reveal themselves.

The basic plot device is clever: Poe, the future inventor of the modern detective story doing actual sleuthing. It’s not Poe’s first appearance as a crime-solver on film—The Man with a Cloak explored the same conceit—but The Pale Blue Eye really owes a debt to Shakespeare in Love. Throughout the film, we see Poe encountering flashes of his eventual masterpieces. The Tell-Tale Heart is the most obvious, as is Augustus Landor’s name, which Poe openly says inspired his immortal Auguste Dupin. There are other similar allusions that are spoilers.

The script is fine and diverting, but it gets convoluted. It suffers from too many secondary and tertiary characters, which prevents all but a few of them from being fully fleshed-out, and from transcending clichés like the stiff-backed military school commandant. Likewise, some of the dialogue is excruciatingly blunt, like Landor’s rant at West Point’s chiefs about their soul-crushing regimen. But beyond these flaws, some of the characters work well, and the audience is, at times, cleverly misled.

Like many current movies, the below-the-line talent is superior to the script. The cinematography nicely evokes the requisite period feel with its brownish, appropriately dreary color palette. The moody lighting in the 19th-century homes and taverns is particularly noteworthy. The costumes, production design, and overall creation of the film’s milieu are very good.

As far as the cast goes, the two leads are the only drawbacks. Bale spreads his artificial edginess with a wide brush. His gruff, mumbled, syncopated delivery gets tiresome quickly. And although Melling almost supernaturally resembles Poe, his Virginia accent is affected, and he overplays the great writer as an excitable oddball. Neither performance is terrible—they just needed reining in. Meanwhile, the supporting players appear to be having a ball, and their enthusiasm registers well on screen. Gillian Anderson shines as the neurotic Julia Marquis, wife of West Point’s physician (well-played by the reliable Toby Jones). Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, among others, perform admirably. Robert Duvall has a small but critical role as Jean Pepe, an elderly antiquarian.

All in all, The Pale Blue Eye adds very little to historical fiction, or to the cinematic Poe canon. It’s worth watching for its visual attractiveness and has its moments, but don’t come expecting a story of Poe-like quality. This is no Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Cooper’s tale runs short on both mystery and imagination.

The Pale Blue Eye

R, 128 minutes
Netflix

Categories
Arts Culture

Plain

Mary Alice Hostetter. Supplied photo.

Mary Alice Hostetter understood the power of words and stories very early on. Her new book, Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood, chronicles her journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Over the course of the book, Hostetter leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, growing beyond the prohibitions of her church, and coming to terms with her sexuality. Hostetter is joined in conversation by author Sharon Harrigan.

Saturday 1/21. Free, 4pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

Categories
Arts Culture

Acting in ‘The Twilight Zone’

Live Arts presents The River by Jez Butterworth, directed by Robert Chapel, and starring Caitlin Reinhard, Steve Tharp, and Christina Ball. Photo: Will Kerner.

A man catches a silver trout, which turns into a “glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair” before fading away. Though he grows old searching for her, he will find where she has gone, pledges the narrator of William Butler Yeats’ ethereal 1897 poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”

This yearning poem’s lyrics open and close Jez Butterworth’s The River, a play that will turn the Live Arts stage into a fisherman’s cabin perched on a cliff above a trout-filled river, from January 20 to February 11.

What happens on this moonless night, says Director Robert Chapel, is “something akin to what one might see while watching an episode of ‘Twilight Zone.’”

Chapel, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, led more than 50 productions as executive director of the Virginia Theatre Festival (formerly the Heritage Theatre Festival), and ran the UVA Department of Drama for more than 25 years. He says The River is like no other production he has introduced to Charlottesville audiences. “This is a very different play than they are used to me directing,” Chapel says. “I think it’s going to be fun to get their response.”

The River takes place on a single stage set, the remote cabin where fishing enthusiast The Man (Steve Tharp) brings his guest, The Woman (Christina Ball). What appears to be a simple setup is complicated by the introduction of The Other Woman (Caitlin Reinhard)—as well as the unsettling feeling that the chronology of the play is not as it first appears.

“We have found in rehearsal that the play has evolved, and the understanding of the play has evolved, as rehearsal has gone on,” Chapel says. “It’s not an easy play to decipher on the first reading.”

Ball and Reinhard bring what Chapel describes as a “different kind of energy” to each of the two diametrically opposed women, and the entire cast’s understanding of the play continues to grow alongside their characters.

“I try to be more of an editor than a director, because I was an actor once in my lifetime and I never liked a director necessarily standing over me and telling me exactly what to do,” Chapel says. “We’re all working together on this.”

Artistic Director Susan Evans introduced Chapel to The River when she asked him to return to Live Arts to direct it. He agreed before reading the play because he had already fallen in love with Butterworth’s writing while attending New York productions of The Ferryman, a journey to rural Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1980s, and Jerusalem, which received international acclaim for its punchy portrayal of modern-day Britain. When he picked up The River for the first time, Chapel was introduced to what he describes as a poignant and poetic new side of the playwright.

It took Chapel several read-throughs to cement his understanding of the story. “When I first read it, I gasped,” he says—but that doesn’t mean he wants audiences to spend their time agonizing over the story’s ambiguity. Butterworth’s intent, Chapel says, is for the audience to encounter The River, not solve it.

The River runs 80 minutes with no intermission, and many people will likely leave the production with questions, and maybe spend the drive home thinking it over. “You just have to play the play for its truths, and play the text, and let the audience decide what they will,” says Chapel.

The River

Live Arts
January 20-February 11