Author: Ben Hitchcock

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Coping with confinement: Stuck inside, senior living residents reflect on crises past

Ross Thomas is the leader of Westminster Canterbury's residents' association. Photo: Zack Wajsgras

 

“I was a boy during the Cuban missile crisis, and we felt we were going to be blasted off the face of the Earth,” says David Speedie, who now lives in Westminster Canterbury, a large senior living complex on Pantops Mountain. Though the Cuban missile crisis was shocking, Speedie says it wasn’t as disruptive as what’s happening now. “That only lasted five or six days. [The virus lockdown] is a long, attritional process. So in a way it’s worse than that.” 

Like the rest of the residents at Westminster, Speedie hasn’t been able to leave the complex in weeks. “I have a son, and daughter-in-law, and a wonderfully active and engaging 3-year-old granddaughter in Batesville,” says the former English professor. “But I haven’t seen them in a month.”

Westminster’s 450 residents have been quarantined since April 1, when a community member tested positive for COVID-19. All visitation has been stopped. Three meals a day are delivered to residents’ quarters. Public spaces like gyms are closed, and everyone has to wear a mask when they walk around within the complex. Equally stringent rules have been put in place for the staff, who have their temperature taken at the beginning and end of every shift.

Such precautions have become commonplace at senior living facilities around the country, where large numbers of vulnerable people live close together. In Fluvanna, more than 60 residents at senior living center Envoy at the Village have contracted the virus.

Like Speedie, many of Westminster’s other residents are drawing on memories of upheaval from their long lives to help contextualize this extraordinary situation. And there’s plenty to draw on. 

“We have a handful of residents in their 60s, we have two or three that are over 100, but certainly plenty of World War II generation folks,” says Erin Garvey, who works in Westminster’s development and communications offices. (Speedie calls Westminster’s closely-monitored entrance “Checkpoint Charlie.”)

“One of our residents is a British woman, and she was talking about where she lived in England during the war, and her city was bombed. She was drawing lots of connections,” Garvey says. 

Perhaps that wartime spirit of collective action has animated some folks in Westminster—a group of residents has sewn 700 cloth masks for the staff and their neighbors over the last three weeks. Garvey says the community has plenty of folks from the Depression era, “which is the other key event where people had to really make do. That’s why all these women know how to sew, I think.”

Ross Thomas says he’s heard tales of the Depression from his neighbors, though he doesn’t go quite that far back himself. The former engineer is now the leader of Westminster’s residents’ association.

“One of the crises that I worked on was in 2011, in Japan, when there was a 9.0 earthquake that kicked up a 14-meter tsunami wave that knocked out a nuclear facility,” Thomas says. 

“That one, the damage for the most part was done in a matter of a few hours,” he says. “And here we’re dealing with something that’s probably going to run for months.”

Residents have held all manner of activities via the complex’s in-house TV system, to try to keep everyone’s spirits high. There have been flower arranging tutorials and music performances—and soon, there will be reminiscence, too.

“We have a resident group called the memoirs group,” Thomas says. “They’re going to read memoirs from earlier days. Adventures, and so forth.”

For Speedie, though, the virus crisis defies comparison. “I’m sure people have drawn some parallels,” he says, “but frankly, there is no parallel.”

 

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Busted budget: Schools, housing initiatives among programs affected by coronavirus crash

Councilor Payne addresses his fellow councilors via videoconference.

 

The City of Charlottesville was almost all the way through the always-laborious yearly budget process when the coronavirus crisis derailed its plans. City Council held an online meeting Monday night—its first meeting in a month—to discuss the city’s deeply uncertain finances.

The most recent projections, delivered by City Manager Tarron Richardson, suggest $8.5 million of lost revenue as a result of the crisis. That means that many of the new, exciting programs the council had planned are now in jeopardy. The creation of a Director of Equity and Inclusion position and the Unity Days programming, two appropriations that community activists had fought for in the wake of Unite the Right, will be deferred. The pre-coronavirus proposed 2021 budget had given $2.1 million more than last year to the schools, but that increase won’t happen. The $7 million Capital Improvement Plan, which includes a variety of projects, from affordable housing initiatives to a controversial downtown parking lot, will be delayed; those funds will be put in an emergency reserve to combat the short-term effects of the virus.

“Something that gives us housing five years from now or three years from now is less important to me than something that might keep people in their homes now,” said councilor Lloyd Snook. The city has already suspended utility shut-offs and public housing evictions. 

UVA’s plans remain a looming unknown. Mayor Nikuyah Walker was pessimistic about the prospect of students returning: “We have an economy that’s built off of the university and tourism, and we’re going to have neither of those things,” she said at the meeting.

Things could get worse, too. “We could see the revenue gap grow substantially larger,” said councilor Michael Payne. “There’s going to be very difficult decisions to make.”

The council extended the deadline to pass a budget from April 15 to June 30. “I think we’ll be able to maintain our public services,” said Richardson. “But there will be some struggles.”

 

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Mourning in isolation: Hospice workers prepare families for grieving in the time of coronavirus

Betty Pittman "taught half of Charlottesville," says her daughter Cookie.

 

For decades, Betty Pittman was a U.S. history teacher at Lane and Charlottesville high schools. “My mother taught half of Charlottesville,” says her daughter, Cookie Ferrier. But when Pittman was dying, of pancreatic cancer, no one was allowed to visit.

While the casualties from COVID-19 continue to mount, the virus is changing even the way those who aren’t infected are experiencing death, says Ron Cottrell, CEO of Hospice of the Piedmont. The hospice guides patients and their loved ones through death and mourning, and now they’re helping Ferrier’s family through a journey that has taken on unexpected contours. 

Because of coronavirus precautions, Ferrier’s father, who lives in a nursing home, wasn’t able to leave to be with his wife when she died. And Ferrier was able to make only a brief visit to him—negotiated by the hospice—on the day of her mom’s death.

“I couldn’t touch him,” Ferrier says. “I couldn’t hug him… He wasn’t able to be present with my mom in her passing.”

Hospice of the Piedmont, which provides pain relief and emotional support for patients with a terminal diagnosis, regularly serves around 300 patients at a time. Except for 10 ICU beds and eight beds in their downtown hospice house, all of that care is delivered in the patients’ places of residence. That delivery of service is complicated by the stay-at-home situation. Cottrell says the organization has been doing as much business as possible online.

“We’re trying to stay connected with the patients and the families via Zoom,” Cottrell says. “We can have very good conversations. That doesn’t replace the physical visits, but [physical visits] are less frequent.”

Ferrier feels that the hospice team “went above and beyond” to keep her and her mother as calm as possible, even as a global pandemic broke out.

“They didn’t stop and they didn’t spread the fear either,” says Ferrier. “They taught us how to maneuver the journey during this crisis.” 

Hospice workers taught Ferrier practical skills, like how to properly wear masks and sanitize. But they also taught her what to expect after her mother’s death. 

“They got me ready for mourning in isolation,” Ferrier says.

Teresa Haase is the director of bereavement and supportive care services at the hospice—her team works with patients’ family members for up to a year after death. But everything they do—individual counseling, group therapy sessions, youth grief camps—has been moved to telephone. 

“In some ways, [the virus] is exacerbating grief,” Haase says. “We’re wired for connection and relationship. Mourning goes better when we can mourn with others, and when others can witness and walk with us in our grief.” 

Certainly, Ferrier has mourned her mother in a way that’s not typical for her family. “We’re United Methodists, and one thing that Methodists are known for is casseroles,” says Ferrier. “Casseroles and potlucks. So one of the things that my church does, when someone passes, is we cook for you. We bring food to you.” 

There are no potlucks in the age of social distancing—so Ferrier has looked inward, instead. And she’s found solace.

“I’m Cherokee Indian,” she says. “My ancestors were Native Americans. And the Native American way for the elderly was to walk off by themselves and pass. It doesn’t mean your loved one was not loved by you, if you’re not present when they pass.”

She’s also clung closer to those who are still here. Ferrier still can’t be with her father, but, she says, “I can FaceTime him. And I make sure whenever I do that I’m always saying, ‘Daddy I love you.’ And he goes, ‘I love you too.’ I never let a moment pass that I don’t tell him.”

Haase, the bereavement counselor, is a professional when it comes to talking about death—something we’re all doing a little more often now, as we brace ourselves for each day’s bad news. She advises that everyone follow Ferrier’s lead.

“We’re all experiencing loss at so many different levels,” Haase says, “not to mention this awareness of death. What is important is that we take stock of what is important in our lives—we love the people that are around us, we tell them that, we make amends when [we] can.”

The virus crisis has offered a striking reminder that life is short and unpredictable.

“When I started here, what I learned, there are these five things to say before someone dies,” says Haase. “They are: thank you, please forgive me, I forgive you, I love you, and goodbye. And I thought they were so profound. What if we did that every day? It would be so profound.”

 

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A ‘Tiger King’ is born: Netflix star Antle started at a rural Virginia yoga commune

A young Bhagavan Antle and Swami Satchidananda pose with one of Antle's lions. Photo: Living Yoga: The life and teachings of Swami Satchidananda

Before he was a tiger king, Bhagavan Kevin “Doc” Antle lived in the rolling green hills of central Virginia, at the Satchidananda Ashram, in Buckingham County’s Yogaville. Antle has become an international sensation thanks to his starring role in the Netflix documentary miniseries “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.” The show portrays Antle as both a talented animal handler and a sinister cult leader, who mistreats and abuses his young and vulnerable employees.

In the 1980s, when he lived in Virginia, Antle was a magician with a yard full of wild animals. 

“It was very exciting,” says Martha Louis, who lived next to Antle’s Buckingham operation. “Night noises. Lions roaring. Tigers purring. The elephant, Bubbles, doing his thing. They would sometimes come into our yard because we were right next door.”

“[Antle] could be seen on Howardsville Road, walking—like you’d walk a dog—he’d walk the tiger,” says Louis.

Antle came to Yogaville in the earliest days of the ashram, around 1982—which is also when he bought his first tiger, according to a 2015 Rolling Stone profile. At the time, he was also working in marketing for Exxon. 

Antle evidently felt at home at Yogaville, a meditation complex founded in the early ’80s by Swami Satchidananda, the celebrity yogi who delivered the opening blessing at Woodstock in 1969. The spot draws people from around the world to practice in the placid Appalachian wilderness—residents eat vegetarian, meditate multiple times per day, and pay cheap rent. Many adopt Sanskrit first names. (Antle’s name, Bhagavan, was given to him by his mother, according to Rolling Stone.)

Shortly after arriving, Antle had a robust private zoo up and running, not far from the ashram. Louis estimates the 14-acre property held 100 animals—lions, tigers, bears, monkeys, birds, an elephant, and more.

Martha Louis’ family with one of Antle’s lions. Photo: Martha Louis

“He lived at the zoo,” Louis says. “He was there most of the time because those animals all needed to be fed. He had a freezer full of meat, like a full big freezer full of steaks.”

Antle’s animals regularly appear in photos with Satchidananda, who died in 2002, but whose image is still ubiquitous in Yogaville’s advertising materials. A 1986 Washington Post article describing the dedication of Yogaville’s central Lotus building mentions Antle, and Bubbles the elephant, leading a celebratory parade.  

The big cats helped Satchidananda cultivate an image of holiness. “This so perfectly captures the utter fearlessness and also love of animals and nature that #SwamiSatchidananda embodied,” reads a 2017 post from the swami’s Facebook page, above a photo of a windswept Satchidananda posing contemplatively in a field with two of Antle’s tigers.

Satchidananda with two of Antle’s tigers. Photo: Sri Swami Satchidananda on Facebook

Despite this peaceful talk, it wasn’t all smooth sailing at Antle’s Buckingham zoo. Once, says Louis, “The buffalo got out. Buffaloes are not a good pet, they’re kind of crazy. I think it went right through the fence and brought a few animals with it.”

“He’s not really a nice guy,” says Louis of Antle. “You probably picked that up from the publicity. He was nice to us.”

The circumstances of Antle’s departure from Buckingham remain somewhat mysterious. 911 Animal Abuse suggests Antle fled the property in December 1989, leaving behind peacocks and deer. A 1990 article in The Tennessean recounts an earlier incident in which a visitor named Clint Baron had his hand mauled by a tiger—Baron filed and then withdrew a lawsuit. Louis remembers that at one point an employee was “clawed by a bear.”

Antle didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story, and Yogaville didn’t return multiple calls. (Give them a ring, and you’ll have the option of pressing 1 to make a reservation, or pressing 2 if you’re “in need of spiritual guidance.” Neither line is interested in talking to the press, apparently.)

The Netflix documentary makes serious allegations about Antle’s treatment of the employees at the sprawling Myrtle Beach Safari that he now calls home. According to Barbara Fisher, a former employee interviewed on the show, Antle pays his employees $100 a week to work 12-hour days, seven days a week. Many of his employees are young women who arrive as teenagers and never leave. The documentarians ask various people in the show how many wives Antle has, and guesses range from two to nine. 

In a 2007 film about the value of Satchidandanda’s teachings, Antle gives the swami’s lessons credit for his zoo operation. “Integral yoga is what has given us the tools to transform people into tiger caretakers,” Antle says.

According to Fisher, “There’s this concept where a guru will touch you and you’ll become enlightened.” And Antle, she says, invoked this concept, “shakti-pa,” to get his young employees to sleep with him—“Essentially, it’s shakti-pa with penis.”

Many of yoga’s most prominent gurus have faced sexual assault allegations over the decades—including Satchidananda, who in 1991 was accused by students of sexual abuse, and was met with protesters holding signs reading “End the abuse” when speaking at a conference. 

In the weeks since its debut, “Tiger King” has been criticized for reveling in the wild lives of its subjects and ignoring more serious abuses hiding in plain sight—abuse of both animals and people. Antle—“He’s a performer,” Louis says—knows better than anyone that tigers can be distracting.

 

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Get out of jail virus-free: Coronavirus crisis sees local justice system adopt progressive reforms, for now

Chanell Jackson is one of 61 people recently transferred from the ACRJ to home electronic incarceration. Photo: Zack Wajsgras

 

Chanell Jackson is home early.

The local resident and mother of three had about seven weeks left on her six-month sentence in Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail when she was transferred to house arrest in late March. She’s one of the 61 non-violent offenders who have so far been released with ankle monitors, as the ACRJ braces itself for the worst-case scenario playing out in prisons across the country: a coronavirus outbreak within the jail. 

“It feels good to be home and with my family, especially with everything that’s going on,” Jackson says. “In the jail it’s scarier if you get sick. I don’t feel like I would be able to quarantine properly.”

Jackson’s concerns are legitimate: more than 5 percent of inmates in New York’s huge Rikers Island complex have already tested positive for COVID-19, meaning the jail has a higher infection rate than any country in the world. In Virginia, as of April 8, 11 inmates and 12 staff at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women have confirmed cases of the virus. Some Virginia prisons have had serious health care problems even in the best of times—in 2019, a judge determined the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women had failed to provide sufficient care after four women died while incarcerated there. 

Also nearby, local advocacy groups report that 100 immigrants held in a Farmville ICE detention center have gone on hunger strike to protest their continued incarceration despite confirmed cases of the virus in the jail. The facility, run by the for-profit company Immigration Centers of America, experienced a mumps outbreak last year. ICE denies that the current strike is occurring.

“The jails and prisons already don’t have adequate health care for people who are inmates,” says Harold Folley, a community organizer at the Legal Aid Justice Center. Given the virus, “if you lock somebody up, I feel like it’s a death sentence to them.” 

Under normal circumstances, ACRJ has six “hospital cells” for more than 400 inmates. 

ACRJ Superintendent Martin Kumer understands the concern. “I want to be clear, jails and prisons are not set up for social distancing,” he says. “They’re designed to house as many people as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

 

Emptying out

Across the country, advocates have demanded that local justice systems reduce the risk for incarcerated populations by letting as many people as possible out of jails. Some such programs are underway—in March, California announced it would release 3,500 people over the next two months. 

Locally, some prosecutors have enacted progressive emergency measures designed to reduce jail populations. Others haven’t deviated from their usual practices. 

Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania and his Albemarle counterpart Jim Hingeley have worked with the jail to identify nonviolent prisoners with short amounts of time left on their sentences, and transfer those people to house arrest or release them on time served. The commonwealth’s attorneys have also recommended releasing nonviolent prisoners being held pre-trial. That’s resulted in 122 of the jail’s 430 inmates leaving the premises so far. 

Nelson County prisoners also go to ACRJ, but Nelson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Daniel Rutherford, a Republican who campaigned on aggressively prosecuting drug crimes, has not participated in the efforts to decrease the jail population, says Hingeley. Rutherford did not respond to a request for comment.

“People don’t understand, the commonwealth’s attorneys have so much damn power,” Folley says. “Joe and Jim have the ability to release people to home monitoring free of charge.” Normally, offenders must pay their own home monitoring costs, up to $13 per day.

“Home electronic incarceration is not release,” says Hingeley, a point Platania also emphasizes. People on HEI are still incarcerated, and can be returned to the jail without any court getting involved if they violate the terms of their house arrest by doing things like traveling without permission or failing a drug screening.

A history of violent convictions will ensure an inmate stays in jail, Kumer says, but there are other considerations, too, like if the inmate is medically vulnerable or where they might go upon release. “We have a large number of individuals who are otherwise nonviolent but they have no place to live,” Kumer says, so they have to stay in jail.

Police Chief Rashall Brackney supports the shift to home monitoring. “I am very confident in the commonwealth’s attorneys, as well as the superintendent, that they are reviewing those cases and taking a very careful look at each of those individuals who would qualify,” she says. That’s a more tempered tone than some other police chiefs in Virginia: “The COVID-19 pandemic is NOT a get-of-out-jail-free card in Chesterfield County,” the county’s police chief wrote in a Facebook post. Last week, two employees at the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center in Chesterfield County tested positive for COVID-19.

The jail is emotionally isolating in the best of circumstances, Jackson says, and coronavirus precautions won’t help—all visitation has been halted, except attorneys. The jail is offering two free emails and two free phone calls per week to try to ameliorate the situation. (Normally, an email costs 50 cents—“a stamp will cost you more than that,” Kumer notes—and a phone call costs 12 cents per minute.)

Fewer people behind bars means prisoners can be more spread out and the facility requires fewer staff to operate. Kumer says the plan is to segregate—the jail has emptied out and rearranged one wing to house all inmates who start exhibiting symptoms. 

For now, inmates and officials wait with bated breath to hear the virus’ dry cough rattle through the cell blocks. So far, “no one has been symptomatic enough to test,” says Kumer.

Despite these precautions, Kumer isn’t rosy-eyed about the situation. “There’s not a lot we can do if an outbreak does occur,” he says. 

 

Looking ahead

The 308 inmates currently inside the jail is the smallest number in at least 20 years, says Hingeley. 

The emergency measures represent baby steps towards a more equitable justice system. The city-commissioned Disproportionate Minority Contact report earlier this year concluded that black people were disproportionately punished at every level of the local justice system. As it turns out, releasing non-violent offenders and people serving short sentences disproportionately helps black people: A little less than half the jail’s total population is black, but two-thirds of the people transferred to HEI due to coronavirus are black. 

“There’s a lot of folks who are not paying attention to people who are incarcerated,” says Folley. “When you think of people incarcerated you think, automatically, they are criminals, right. But what people should know is they are human, too.”

“I think they definitely should offer [HEI] more,” Jackson says. “There’s still rules and regulations that you follow, but some people have minor violations and they’re being incarcerated and taken away from their family. At least on home monitoring you can stay home and take care of your family. Because every day is precious.”

Jackson says she loves cooking, and she’s been doing plenty of it since she got home. Her favorite thing to make is lasagna; she just pulled one out of the oven. “I’m very family oriented. I’m very happy to be home with them,” she says. “I have a younger daughter, she’s 1, so I’ve been catching up with her, spending time with her…Everything is mama, mama where’s my mama,” she says, laughing. 

Will the change last? That depends who you ask. 

“We’re taking some calculated risks with some of these decisions,” Platania says—he doesn’t want to “overreact one way or another.”

He says it’s “absolutely” possible that the local justice system takes a more progressive view of sentencing and bail decisions after coronavirus. “But you know to turn that on its head,” he adds, “if we make a decision to release someone on a nonviolent larceny offense, and they break in to someone’s house and steal something or hurt someone, do we then say well, everything we did was unsafe and foolhardy?” 

Hingeley, who ran his 2019 campaign as a candidate for prosecutorial reform and alternatives to incarceration, is more direct. “Absolutely it is my goal to have these practices last,” he says. “From my perspective these are things that we should be doing.”

The emergency measures offer an unusual opportunity to see progressive policies in practice. “We are going to be accumulating information about the effects of liberalized policies with respect to sentences and bail decisions,” Hingeley says. “I am optimistic that that experience—as hard as it comes to us, in this emergency—that experience nevertheless is going to teach us valuable lessons. And we’ll see big changes going forward.”

“I can take the initiative, but other people have to agree,” Hingeley says. Platania also emphasizes that judges are a coequal branch of government to prosecutors, and though there’s been great “judicial buy-in” during this emergency, that won’t necessarily be true in the future.

“I do hope that this will change the system,” Folley says, “but it takes a number of people with courage.”

 

Updated 4/8 to reflect the number of confirmed cases in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women.

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Zoomers Anonymous: Addiction recovery groups adapt to a digital world

Addiction recovery meetings, normally built on finding human connection, have moved online. Staff illustration.

 

Normally, Charlottesville’s Alcoholics Anonymous members sit in chairs in a circle. Now, they appear as squares in a grid. 

Coronavirus has forced much of American life online, and addiction recovery groups are no exception—they’re now holding meetings over Zoom instead of in their usual church basements. But social distancing is a tricky proposition for groups that are built around finding human connection.

“One of the things in our literature we always talk about is how you don’t want to isolate, because it leads a lot of people to using, to relapsing,” says Brian, a recovering addict and a member of the Piedmont area’s Narcotics Anonymous public relations team. “And here we are in this situation where we’re told to isolate.”

To combat that feeling of helplessness, the local NA chapter has been holding at least two online Zoom meetings every day. AA has started a similar program, with many meetings available every day.

A local AA leader, who wished to remain anonymous, says Zoom meetings have the same structure as regular meetings, with some small exceptions: “Well, you can’t hug each other. We’re a very close-knit group. So it’s true that you can’t do that,” he says.

In general, though, “Attendance is excellent,” the AA member says, “and we’ve had newcomers who have come to their first meeting virtually.”

People without internet access can call in and participate via landline, he says.

Brian is similarly enthusiastic about NA, saying that the meetings have been going smoothly, once everyone got accustomed to proper “Zoom etiquette.” NA has also been conducting occasional in-person outdoor meetings, limited to 10 people per meeting.

Despite the early success of the online meetings, this indeterminate period of distancing could be a difficult time for many in the recovery community. “I have a sinking feeling that some people are going to drop out of contact,” Brian says. “This is an opportunity that some people may take to go, ‘Oh, I’m going to close down completely.’”

Joanna Jennings, Region Ten’s community relations coordinator, says that the women in Region Ten’s Moore’s Creek residential substance recovery program have shifted to videoconferences, too. They often attend SMART recovery meetings, a newer program that removes the religious overtones of groups like AA and NA. 

The Moore’s Creek facility generally has around a dozen residents, but that number has decreased as admissions were halted and some residents moved elsewhere due to the virus. The remaining women have been participating in virtual meetings, and “really enjoying” them, says Jennings.

“One of them described this experience, where she had an idea about how the meeting should be run, and they went with her idea,” Jennings says. “That made her feel really good, that someone across the country—that they were connecting in that way.”

In a time when everyone’s social routines are coming under new stresses, having regularly scheduled check-ins with familiar faces isn’t the worst thing in the world. 

“I think it’s wonderful that we have the virtual meetings. I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have that,” says the AA member. “This is certainly a wonderful way to keep in touch with people, to see each other two, three, four times a week.”

Brian agrees. “My girlfriend is not an addict, and I have talked to her about, like, ‘It’s too bad you don’t have this,’” he says. “I have this avenue, that at least twice a day, I can go online and talk to people that I actually know, to talk about how I’m feeling and not be judged. I think it’s really helping a lot of people go through this time.”

 

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Whiskey, guns, and SpongeBob: The University of Virginia goes digital

Colleges around the nation have switched to online instruction, with some hiccups along the way. Illustration: Jason Crosby

 

“I’m going to kill a fifth during this lecture,” announced one student, holding a bottle of whiskey aloft as his classmates tuned in for a Zoom meeting of a UVA data science class.

“I can hear you,” the professor said back.

As coronavirus has swept the nation, universities across the country have had to go digital, ditching in-person class meetings in favor of video conferencing. The transition has come with plenty of thrills and spills: Clips have circulated of college students confidently striding naked through the frame, getting their hair braided, or taking bong rips while the professor rambles on. As the above anecdote from recent grad Alex Hendel suggests, UVA students and faculty have taken their fair share of digital pratfalls in the two weeks since online classes have begun.

Politics professor Allen Lynch sent an email to his class on Thursday afternoon, admitting that he had delivered his entire 75 minute lecture without pressing record. Only the first six seconds made it online. When a student pointed out the error, “my heart sank,” Lynch says.

He forged ahead and delivered the lecture again the next day—but once again, after concluding, noticed he had failed to hit record. “One more time tomorrow!” said the respected Russian politics scholar, before finally managing to upload the lecture on his third try.

Second-year engineering student Nora Dale says the distance makes her advanced math classes harder. “I can’t show someone my screen easily, to show them my code or a math problem, in an online format,” Dale says. “A lot of the time I would swing by office hours to ask one question, but now office hours—you have to meet over video, you have to join the queue, it just takes so much longer.”

“The golden lining is that sometimes people show their pets on camera, which is always cute,” she says.

Participants might be scattered thousands of miles apart, but in a sense, online learning provides an unparalleled intimacy. Sometimes these glimpses into the lives of colleagues are lovely. “I learned my English professor color codes her bookshelf!” says fourth-year Gracie Kreth.

Other times, such peeks are unsettling. Third-year Emmy Monaghan says that in her anthropology class, a student was disassembling and cleaning a gun on screen during the lecture. “It was so wild…it seemed very intentional.” Monaghan says. “My professor sent out an email yesterday telling us that we need to have our cameras off from now on.”

Some students have taken it upon themselves to provide a bit of levity in these difficult circumstances, with pets or otherwise. First year Aidan Reed noticed a Zoom feature that allows users to project a digital background on their calls, and attended his English seminar from a pineapple under the sea—projecting the inside of SpongeBob’s house behind him as he sat in class.

“One of my favorite shows of all time is “SpongeBob,” and I thought it would be funny because everyone’s in their house right now,” Reed says.

With the world in disarray, and everyone forced to learn a new system on the fly, it’s as good a time as any to relax the rules a bit. “I wanted to make people laugh,” Reed says, “because I’m sure everyone’s pretty miserable going through all of this.”

 

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Horrible history: New report details racist past, next steps for Charlottesville housing

Activists hope Charlottesville will build new public housing, like Westhaven, pictured above. Photo: Jack Looney

 

Charlottesville has an affordable housing crisis: that’s not exactly breaking news. Local activists have been working for years to elevate the issue, and the city government has become more and more responsive. The most recent city budget devotes $31.2 million over five years to various affordable housing initiatives. (The city has announced it will have to delay the budget process and find $5 million to cut to account for the economic effects of the coronavirus.)

The work is far from over, though, as evidenced by a new report from the Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition. The Impact of Racism on Affordable Housing in Charlottesville chronicles the past, present, and future of this crisis. (The full 93-page report can be viewed here.)

“More than 50 people have touched this report at some point,” says Elaine Poon, an attorney with the Legal Aid Justice Center and one of the document’s co-authors. “It’s been a pretty big labor of love for the group.”

The report’s most moving component is an extensive survey of residents of historically black neighborhoods in town. Their testimonies lay bare the causes and effects of gentrification: “I work three jobs every day, pay taxes, and can’t seem to purchase a home in a place that is supposed to be an affordable housing area,” one anonymous respondent said.

“The waiting lists for housing are really long. Me and my baby were basically homeless, even though I was working full-time. It took a really long time for us to find anything,” says another.

“The Black population has to move because they don’t make enough to sustain themselves in the city,” says another commenter.

“Sixty years later we are still being treated like we’re prisoners. But our only crime is that we didn’t invest our money, because we didn’t have any money to invest.”

The list of quotes like these goes on and on.

Gloria Beard, who has lived in 10th and Page for 46 years, echoes the anonymous comments in the report.

“You know the price that they put on these houses once they remodel them? If I left today or tomorrow, I could never come back to this neighborhood—which I called mine at one time,” Beard says. “Now it doesn’t even feel like a neighborhood. I come from a time when we knew our neighbors. We sat on the porch and hollered at each other. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

The report includes a section that traces the racist history of the housing crisis over the last century. Charlottesville voted to legally segregate the city in 1912. Once that was declared unconstitutional, individual deeds prohibiting the sale of houses to non-caucasian people became the norm. An early Charlottesville zoning map, which has not changed much in the last 60 years, was drawn by the design firm of Harland Bartholomew, a well-known and influential city planner whose strategies legally entrenched segregation in cities across the nation. In 1964, the city razed predominantly black Vinegar Hill, citing “slum clearance.”

“Charlottesville has a long history of intentionally zoning neighborhoods to segregate based on race and class and to limit the ability of low-income people of color to build wealth through property ownership,” the report says.

“[10th and Page] became a black neighborhood because the white people didn’t want us to live in their neighborhood,” Beard says. “Now here they come, all of them coming, from miles around, out of town, buying these houses.”

Poon says the report will be handed over to the consultants who have been charged with rewriting Charlottesville’s zoning code, and she thinks it will show them the “journey we’ve already been on as a city.” She also says aspiring local activists have often asked her group for “somewhere I can look to catch up to speed” on the thorny and complicated issue, and thinks this report will provide a good starting point.

“People know this information. At this point it’s really just a compendium, just putting it all in one place,” Poon says.

The report’s final section suggests steps that Charlottesville can take to continue to address the issue. Some of them are relatively straightforward—it re-emphasizes that members of low-income communities need to be involved in decision-making about low-income housing. The report also says the city ought undergo an internal staff review of all new projects from an equity lens, and include that information in councilors’ packets about new projects. In addition, the city is urged to define “affordable” more narrowly, targeting relief to those most affected.

At the same time, this huge problem will need huge solutions, and the report asks for those, as well. It advocates for various forms of reparations for black families. It says the zoning code rewrite should include “restricting by-right development to affordable units for extremely low-income people,” meaning in most of the city, all new construction that wasn’t low-income housing would need council approval. The report advocates for pro bono representation in eviction hearings as a way of combating homelessness, and pushes Charlottesville to institute rent control.

Some of these policies, like rent control, will not be possible without state approval or a repeal of the Dillon Rule. “Enacting rent control might be possible in Charlottesville someday, though it will take an immense amount of advocacy,” the report says.

Poon thinks this document can be part of that advocacy. “The community at large needs to understand the why, so that those big picture issues are more understandable,” she says. “When someone reads some of the history, it’s very difficult for me to imagine not wanting dramatic change after reading that.”

 

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How to take down a statue: Legislature’s busy final days include passage of bill allowing localities to move monuments

Charlottesville's Confederate statues continue to attract nighttime activity.

 

On March 7, Virginia’s legislature passed the Conference Substitute to House Bill No. 1537, which will allow localities to control the placement of their war memorials. In other words, our city will soon be allowed to remove the statues of Confederate generals from our parks.

After the violence of Unite the Right in August 2017, cities like Durham and Baltimore took down Confederate statues almost immediately. But because of Virginia’s war memorials rule, Charlottesville has had to wait.

Don’t bust out the blow torches just yet, though. The bill lays out a few provisions for the removal of these monuments. Here are the steps the city will have to take:

1. Publish a notice in a local newspaper advertising the city’s desire to “remove, relocate, contextualize, or cover the monument.”

2. Hold a public hearing, at least 30 days after the newspaper advertisement, where “interested persons may present their views.”

3. Upon completion of that public hearing, at least three of five city councilors will have to vote to move the monument.

4. After the vote, the city will have to offer the monument to a “museum, historical society, government, or military battlefield” for 30 days.

5. Finally, the City Council will have “sole authority to determine the final disposition of the monument or memorial.”

A Senate version of the bill would have forced localities to jump through a number of additional hoops, but many of those requirements, like a historical review led by a state agency, were removed in the final version, which passed the House 52-43. In the Senate, Republicans Bryce Reeves (who represents parts of Charlottesville and Albemarle County) and Emmett Hanger joined the body’s 21 Democrats in voting in favor.

Governor Ralph Northam has expressed support for the bill. If he signs it, the new law will go into effect July 1, and the above process can begin. Market Street Park could look very different as soon as this fall.

That doesn’t mean we’ll be celebrating in the streets. On Saturday, members of the Blue Ribbon Commission, the group that produced a 2016 report highlighting the problems with the statues, convened at a Central Library panel to discuss next steps.

“In my opinion, it would be prudent to not schedule” the statue’s removal ahead of time, said Don Gathers, former chair of the commission. Gathers said he expects blowback, and thinks it would be safest to quietly take the statue down in the middle of the night, so that “when folks wake up in the morning, it’s a new skyline to the city.” (Baltimore and New Orleans successfully used this strategy in removing Confederate statues in 2017.)

UVA history professor John Mason, another commission member, said it’s important to consider where the statues go. “We don’t want these statues to become pilgrimage sites somewhere else,” he noted.

Delegate Sally Hudson joined the panel on a video call, and Gathers praised her efforts to push the bill along in Richmond. “We love you, and we thank you for all your hard work, and as a community we’re truly blessed to have you,” Gathers said.

Hudson, in turn, reminded the room of the commission’s work. “We all owe them so much,” she said.

“It is a, dare I say, monumental moment,” Gathers said. “It’s really important that we understand it doesn’t stop here.”

 

Sex, drugs, and voter ID laws

Statues aside, Virginia’s legislature passed dozens of transformative bills during this session, which wrapped up on March 8. The following selection of new laws will help the Old Dominion lurch into the present.

Virginians will once again be allowed to purchase only one handgun gun per month, a prohibition that was repealed in 2012. That’s just one of many new basic gun safety measures, such as mandatory background checks, which passed. (An assault weapons ban was defeated after four Senate Democrats, including local representative Creigh Deeds, broke ranks to block the bill from advancing out of committee.)

Insurance companies will be forced to charge patients no more than $50 per month for insulin, which people with Type 1 diabetes rely on to survive and which can cost as much as $1,200 per month. Virginia is the third state to pass such legislation, and the new price cap is the lowest in the country.

Sports gambling will soon be legal, and five cities, including Richmond, were given a green light to hold referendums on whether or not to build casinos. Betting on Virginia college sports teams will still be illegal.

Those convicted of a drug-related felony will become eligible to receive food stamps. Current law requires those with drug felonies to pass drug screenings in order to receive benefits.

Marijuana will be decriminalized, meaning possession of the drug will be treated like a traffic ticket, and result in a $25 fine, rather than an arrest.

The minimum wage will gradually increase, jumping from $7.25 to $9.50 an hour on January 1, and eventually reaching $12 an hour by 2023. The slow increase falls short of the $15 an hour that many advocacy groups have called for.

Virginians will no longer be required to show photo ID to vote, a restriction that was implemented in 2013. Any government document with the voter’s name and address will once again be sufficient identification.

The legislature also repealed old laws banning swearing and fornication that had long remained on the books, despite rarely being enforced. Fuck yeah!

 

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‘A neighborhood thing’: The ghostly past and uncertain future of Woolen Mills Chapel

Historic Woolen Mills Chapel stands on shaky foundations these days. Photo: Skyclad Aerial

 

Down at the narrow end of East Market street, past the eclectic, slanting houses of the Woolen Mills neighborhood, there’s a little white chapel. It’s been there since Christmas of 1887, perched on the bank of the Rivanna River at the very edge of the City of Charlottesville.

The history shows: the white paint is peeling off the clapboard siding. There’s a splintered green shutter dangling off the front of the building. The wooden foundations have been melted away by rainwater, and the stones on the back are loose. The gothic, octagonal bell tower has started to lean precariously towards the road.

According to the city’s records, the building is currently owned by the Woolen Mills Chapel Board of Trustees. But if you want to get in touch with them, it’s going to be difficult: Every official member of the board is long dead. (No wonder they haven’t done any painting.)

Over the years, neighbors have stepped up to make minor repairs on their street’s signature building, though it’s been hard to keep the decay at bay. Five years ago, a group of volunteers created a nonprofit to take control of the building and fundraise for more serious restoration work. They’ve been wrestling with ghosts for control of the chapel ever since.

The situation is complicated because, as chapel neighbor Laura Covert explains, “There’s no procedure to follow to get dead people to sign stuff.”

The chapel’s foundations show the building’s decay. Photos: Louis Schultz

‘Tragedy of the commons’

The neighborhood’s titular woolen mill was built in the 1840s, and the mill soon became one of Charlottesville’s most productive industries, specializing in cloth for uniforms. The neighborhood grew with the mill. In the old days, Woolen Mills residents would go to different churches around town for morning service, but gather in the Woolen Mills chapel in the afternoon for Sunday school, announcements, hymns, and Bible readings. In the 1950s, there were 40 or 50 regular congregants.

The mill shut its doors in 1961, and the chapel’s period of limbo began.

“After the mill closed, fewer people that were part of that original community were here,” Covert says. “They were getting older, and so eventually, the congregation was breaking up.”

The aging board of the chapel informally enlisted new trustees, a selection of neighbors who were interested in maintaining the chapel. When the chapel needed a new coat of paint, or the roof reshingled, “people have gone around with a can and said, ‘hey can you make a donation,’” says Fred Wolf, an architect and neighbor who sits on the nonprofit board with Covert.

The new trustees never bothered to officially register themselves, instead just chipping in to help with the chapel when they could. In both a legal and a functional sense, the chapel came to be owned by everyone and no one; a community center with no official manager or patron.

Services are still held in the chapel on Sundays: The Rivanna Baptist Church has rented the building for more than 20 years. The congregation declined to speak on the record for this story; Covert says the group is elderly and small but that its members care deeply for the building, even though most do not live in Woolen Mills. Inside the chapel, the red carpets are clean, there are flowers on the tables, and the hymnals are stowed neatly among the pews. The congregation pays the electricity bill each month, but there’s plenty it can’t do, like fix the huge, visible crack running down the length of one interior wall.

Covert says she’s had a front door key for 20 years, long before any notion of a nonprofit ever existed. “Being next door, it’s a neighborhood thing,” she says. “If the light gets left on, who’s going to go over there and turn it off? Me, right? Gotta have the key.”

For years, her stepfather, Pete Syme, also a neighbor, had the chapel checkbook. He would deposit the congregation’s small rent and use the money to cover an insurance policy that Covert calls “insufficient.”

Another neighbor comes by periodically to tend to the plants in the flowerbed outside the chapel’s entrance.

The chapel “does church-related things on Sunday,” says Louis Schultz, Covert’s husband, who has lived in Woolen Mills for 35 years. “Other than that, people park there, people turn around in the parking lot, people have sex in the parking lot, people drink beer and throw it over the hillside, and all the other sort of stuff you do in a church parking lot.”

“I love the building,” says Covert. “I’ve lived here since I was in high school, and it’s always been a community center and I think it’s important that it remains that way. What you get, though, is the tragedy of the commons.”

An architectural surveyor’s 1973 rendering of the chapel. Credit: Library of Congress

Repairing the chain

“It was probably imagined that this would go on in perpetuity in some limbo,” says Wolf, but the building’s worsening physical condition means that informal arrangement has become untenable.

The chapel’s well-documented historic value isn’t enough to save it from ownership purgatory. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register, and is designated an Individual Protected Property by the city, but none of those essentially ceremonial listings allow or require the government to carry out maintenance.

Preserving the building, then, falls to the neighborhood. This is tricky because Virginia has specific laws governing religious buildings, and none of the chapel’s original trustees are around to sign the building over to Covert and Wolf’s nonprofit.

Covert, Wolf, and their lawyers have had to provide affidavits from the church’s few living original congregants and show evidence that the community has had input in the decision-making process in order to convince the city’s courts to allow the transfer. Wolf says he expects the process to be finalized any day now, after years of back-and-forth.

The chapel nonprofit has existed since 2015, but it hasn’t continued the informal fundraising that long kept the place afloat—the group hopes to set up a more official system.

There’s serious work to be done. An exterior paint job can run up to $15,000 or $20,0000, says Covert, and that’s not to mention that the bell tower is leaning and the foundation is sinking. A previous renovation gone awry has sent years of rainwater trickling down into the building’s bones.

“I could walk into that building with my bare hands by tearing the stone foundation out,” says Schultz.

The group hopes to give the chapel new life, return it to the thriving community center it once was, and keep the building in stable hands for its next century and beyond.

“Obviously, there’s been a broken chain,” Covert says. “The question is how do you repair that for the future.”