Author: jayson-whitehead

One outcome of the July 21 City Council vote to move forward with the $7.5 million rebricking of the Downtown Mall was the mandate from Councilor Holly Edwards to Neighborhood Development Services Director Jim Tolbert to explore ways to incorporate local residents into the renovation workforce.

“I would hope there are employment opportunities,” she said, urging the creation of a “true sense of economic justice throughout the city.”

Moments earlier, Edwards teared up as she discussed the recent killing of a 19-year-old on Sixth Street SE, near public housing. “We have to get back in touch with what’s important and what we value, but we seem to miss that until there’s a loss in the community,” she urged. “I want us all to take advantage of this moment to decide what we all can do, what we all can do to create a sense of community in every neighborhood.”

Karen Waters, executive director of the Quality Community Council, pushed Council to request local workers for the Mall rebricking.

Edwards’ comments had followed those of community activist Karen Waters. “It’s easier to get a gun than a job in this community,” she said to Council. “Let’s find a way local people can do the work—young people, homeless and felons.”

While she has just finished up a term on the city’s housing commission, Waters is also the executive director of the Quality Community Council, an organization founded in 1999 that is a “citizen-driven community coalition dedicated to improving the quality of life in Charlottesville’s most challenged neighborhoods,” according to its website.

“I’m in the community every day and I see the needs every day,” Waters says. “I get asked at least once a day if I know where there’s a job.”

So the notion of using locals in the rebricking effort “seemed like a no-brainer,” she says. “We have a vacuum in terms of well-paying blue collar jobs.”

The Downtown Mall will keep 4"x12" bricks, as shown on the left, but lay them without mortar, as shown on the right.

While her suggestion may appeal to common sense, it is not necessarily easy to implement. Concerns about meeting the Mall’s five-month construction schedule led Council to pull back from requiring contractor Barton Malow to implement workforce development. Still, Tolbert says he will formally ask the construction company to try and hire as many locals as they can. “We want to make sure that the contractors explore using a local workforce,” he says. Barton Malow declined to comment for this article.

“Shame on you if you don’t make it accessible,” Waters says of the rebricking effort. A mere instruction to explore the option will not satiate community advocates like her who want concrete action now, and are holding city officials, Barton Malow and the entire community accountable. “At a certain point, it’s on us as citizens not to accept excuses,” she says.

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On Saturday, July 19, the Barack Obama campaign opened 20 offices around the state of Virginia—including one on the Downtown Mall in the old A&N building—as it prepares to wage battle against John McCain for the presidency of the United States. A win in the normally red state of Virginia would go a long way in returning the nation to the Democrats, and thus salvation.

Barack Obama’s Charlottesville office is full of passionate volunteers. “If something doesn’t change, we’re going to go the way of Rome,” says Shannon Adams.

“He’s got the intelligence to know where to change things,” says Shannon Adams, a volunteer at Obama’s Charlottesville office who has coordinated a lot of the painting to get the Downtown outpost ready. “Sometimes those little changes will sink in and change things down the line. If something doesn’t change, we’re going to go the way of Rome.”

By that logic, McCain would keep the country not only Republican but on the path to decay and ruin. It is apparently an effort he will not depend on Charlottesville to contribute heavily to. While McCain recently opened offices in Richmond, Fairfax, Fredericksburg and Virginia Beach, he has yet to open an office here in the Charlottesville area.

Nevertheless, “the McCain campaign is planning to have a strong presence here,” says Albemarle GOP head Christian Schoenewald. While he could not confirm a date, Schoenewald says that a McCain office should be opening here in upcoming weeks. However, unlike Obama’s local headquarters, which operate independently of any local candidate, McCain’s will likely be run by Schoenewald, who also oversees the local efforts for Republican candidates Jim Gilmore for the U.S. Senate and Virgil Goode for re-election in the House. (Schoenewald also recently greeted NOVA anti-immigrant stalwart Corey Stewart to this area for the regular Albemarle GOP breakfast.)

John McCain’s campaign has opened offices in Richmond, Fairfax, Fredericksburg and Virginia Beach, but not yet in the Charlottesville area.

Perhaps some of McCain’s delay in expanding his offices through Virginia, as Obama has done, is a result of recent news that the Virginia Democratic Party has a 9-to-1 advantage over the state Republicans in money that can be used to influence the outcome of the presidential, Senate and congressional races. Even more disconcerting for the Virginia GOP had to be the recent revelation that Gilmore is at a 44-1 money disadvantage in his Senate campaign against fellow former governor Democrat Mark Warner. According to campaign finance reports released on July 15, Gilmore had $115,000 in the bank, while Warner has $5.1 million heading into the next phase of the campaign.

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Between 2000 and 2006, the median sales costs of houses doubled in the Charlottesville metropolitan area, and the county nearly kept the same pace. As a result, housing became affordable only for the few with enough money to spend on escalating properties. Your average family was practically priced out of town. 

“I was at a party about three and a half years ago talking about how hard it was for my children to find a home,” says area mortgage lender Frazier Bell. Shortly thereafter, he ran into an old frat brother from his days at UVA named Bill Edgerton. The old friends’ conversation drifted to a topic fresh on both their minds. As a member of Albemarle County’s Planning Commission, Edgerton is constantly confronted with the area’s housing dilemma. He had a suggestion for Frazier Bell. Had he ever heard of something called a community land trust (CLT)?

Frazier Bell, chairman of the interim Board of Directors for the Thomas Jefferson Community Land Trust, says the TJCLT is “just one mechanism” in the effort to bring more affordable housing to the area.

A few years and a lot of research later, Bell is now the chairman of the interim Board of Directors for the Thomas Jefferson Community Land Trust (TJCLT), the latest area effort to help provide home ownership to those in need of a little boost. An idea first started in the 1960s, a CLT works simply by setting up a nonprofit that purchases property that it owns for perpetuity. The nonprofit then sells the houses on the property but retains ownership of the land that it’s on, thus keeping the overall housing costs down. “We act as a steward of the land,” says Bell.

The TJCLT is currently filing for incorporation as a nonprofit and hopes to be formed by the end of the year. At that point, they will have to start looking for land to purchase. “It’s a good time to start one of these,” says Bell, explaining that the current downturn in the housing market will make property cheaper.   

Money will also be a chief concern. TJCLT’s current plan calls for the development of 110 units over a five-year period at the cost of $8.5 million. Right now, they have little of that capital, but Bell says there are many potential sources of money, both federal and local funding, as well as any help they can get from private and other nonprofit groups.

“We’re just one mechanism,” Bell says, in the effort to bring more affordable housing to the area.
 
“It’s a piece of the puzzle,” says Theresa Tapscott, executive director of the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program. “A CLT would put people into home- ownership-type situations that otherwise wouldn’t be.”

Of course, not everyone is a fan of the idea of community land trusts. One of the main criticisms levied against it is based on the fact that, because land is not involved, it is only a limited type of home ownership. So while a CLT keeps housing prices down, it also significantly reduces the amount of money made on resale. “They get a fair return on their investment,” says Tapscott, noting that a buyer turned seller does reap the appreciation the actual house accrues for the time they lived in it. That and the prospect of keeping housing affordable are enough of an argument for the TJCLT, as far as Tapscott is concerned. “They can grow their personal wealth later on.”

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In 1994, future UVA religion Professor Peter Ochs started an unusual but simple practice of having academics from the three religious traditions that share the Bible as a fundamental text gather to read scripture, whether it was the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran.

“On a basic level, Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is an experiment where Jews, Christians and Muslims get in a room and start reading together and see what happens,” says UVA religion grad student Jacob Lynn Goodson. “It’s a basic but important level because historically it just hasn’t happened.”
 

Religion grad student Jacob Lynn Goodson appreciates how the Scriptural Reasoning program “forces me to be in conversation and dialogue with those outside my tradition.”

A lifelong Southern Baptist, Goodson encountered SR at a conference, and then was immersed in it when he came to UVA a few years ago and studied under Ochs. “One of the first things Peter did was force me to read the Bible,” Goodson says. “I saw through him a completely different way of reading and it really started to heal my own spiritual life.”

Now the grad student is the editor of the student published Journal of Scriptural Reasoning and one of the organizers of a four-day training session in SR taking place at UVA from July 20 to 23.

“My dad likes to tell me there’s probably an FBI file on me since I do this,” he says joking over coffee and a muffin at C’Ville Coffee, where I met him to talk about the practice that seems to offer a way to heal some of the divide between three of the world’s most powerful religions. The following are selections from our conversation.

C-VILLE: Is the point of SR to bring these normally divisive belief systems together in hopes of ironing out their differences? 

Jacob Goodson: We’re getting together to read scriptures together not to force everybody to get along, but to force a new kind of peace amongst the three. But I’ve never been to a session where the three groups agreed. There’s usually four arguments, not just between traditions but within. Yet, friendship is always the result.
 
As a theologian, that’s a real gift because it forces me to be in conversation and dialogue with those outside my tradition who at the same time remind us to stay grounded in our tradition—also reminding us of what that means.

I always read the New Testament differently after I’ve read it with a Muslim. It’s not that they’re right or have the reading, but the text becomes more living for me.

Have you found that engaging in SR tests your own beliefs by having you consider others’ interpretations?

At first it became less of my own because someone else is making a claim on it, so I depossess it. But then it becomes more my own because in that depossession it becomes more living and active for me because I see it being taken up by someone else who in my world is completely other to me. I grew up in Oklahoma. Not many Muslims in Oklahoma. 

In that sense the test is not one of challenging my faith and beliefs but rather it’s seeing that I no longer have possession of the Bible. Which is an evangelical tendency—this is our book, we know what it means. When I see it in the hands of someone else it becomes different for me.

It seems like SR would make it hard to exist in sectarian divisions, like in your own Southern Baptist faith.

For me, it’s been a healing process. I felt like the Bible was always kind of used against me, and not redemptively but correctively as kind of a rule book. I didn’t see where the spirit was a part of it. My reaction was to not read the Bible because I just couldn’t imagine reading it in a different way than I’d been taught. Then I got here.

SR was a return to scripture for me in new terms. I try to use those terms when I’m in church now. Let’s try to reread scripture rather than assume it means what it’s always meant for Baptists. Let’s see what a new result might be.

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