According to Sunshine Mathon, “Permanent supportive housing is intended to be a permanent housing solution for folks seeking a permanent home.” Supplied photo.
Construction is on the horizon at Premier Circle. The former Red Carpet Inn was transformed into an emergency shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic, and helped nearly 100 people exit homelessness. The facility closed in June of 2023, leaving a gap in Charlottesville’s network of shelter services, but construction on the next phase of the project is expected to begin by the end of September.
Virginia Supportive Housing will start work on 80 units of permanent supportive housing at the site this year, followed by 40 to 50 units of low-income housing constructed by Piedmont Housing Alliance. The 80 housing units are slated to open in the first half of 2026, with the low-income housing expected to open two years after, in 2028.
The housing project has taken the combined effort of a number of cooperating partners. Piedmont Housing Alliance purchased the property in 2021 with a $4.25 million grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation. A commitment of $700,000 from Albemarle County and $750,000 from the City of Charlottesville allowed Virginia Supportive Housing to begin construction this year.
Although Premier Circle initially was a low-barrier overnight shelter, the long-term goal has always been to transition the site into permanent housing.
“So the operative word is permanent,” says Sunshine Mathon, executive director of Piedmont Housing Alliance. “Emergency shelters really are that, they’re for emergencies. Permanent supportive housing is intended to be a permanent housing solution for folks seeking a permanent home.”
Permanent supportive housing is an approach to alleviating homelessness that falls under the housing-first model. The idea is that stable housing is the first requirement and foundation from which individuals can address other causes that may have led to a period of homelessness.
“It’s not a panacea for every person,” Mathon explains. “There are people for whom the PSH [permanent supportive housing] model won’t be the perfect fit, but it is widely regarded across the nation as the primary tool to provide that stepping stone for people to transition from being in an emergency context into longer term permanent housing.”
In its strategic plan to end homelessness, the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless says a lack of affordable housing is one of the primary problems in the community, and recommends new permanent supportive housing units as a solution.
As a long-term approach, permanent supportive housing is geared toward those for whom homelessness has been persistent, long-lasting, or recurring. Last year, on January 25, 2023, the area’s point-in-time count recorded 191 people experiencing homelessness in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties. About a quarter of them (53) met the criteria to be counted as chronically homeless.
On its website, Virginia Supportive Housing says Premier Circle aims to functionally end chronic homelessness in the community. That means there would be enough housing units available for all of those who need one.
Numerically, while that goal seems within reach, things can be more complicated, and the need is often more than predicted. However, Virginia Supportive Housing does have a model to demonstrate the kind of impact this project can have. The organization also manages The Crossings on Preston Avenue. That 60-unit facility opened in 2012 and for the next four years there was a downward trend in the number of people experiencing homelessness in the area. The region’s PIT count reached a low point in 2016, with many pointing to The Crossings as a key factor.
Premier Circle hopes to repeat that success. The 80 units of permanent supportive housing will be studio apartments supported by a voucher system. People with vouchers pay 30 percent of their income in rent, allowing a sliding scale based on what individuals can afford.
“Our preference would be to lease to chronically homeless individuals first, those most likely to die on the streets,” says Julie Anderson, director of real estate development with Virginia Supportive Housing. “But also, we can lease to individuals who are experiencing sporadic homelessness as well as low-income individuals.”
Low-income apartments, both in the 80-unit development and the subsequent project, are separated into income brackets based on the area median income. There will be apartments reserved for incomes that are 30 percent of AMI and below, some for 50 percent, and some for 60 percent, with the aim that each of those brackets would pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent. In Albemarle County, the median income for households is $97,708, according to data collected by the U.S. census.
The model also includes wraparound services for accessing other supports that residents may need, whether it’s acquiring disability benefits, medical support, substance abuse counseling, or reconnecting with family and friends. The building will have two case managers that residents can go to for help navigating the supportive services available.
“One thing that’s important is that our average length of stay is four to six years for everybody, although we don’t have a timeline, [and] residents can stay as long as they need to.” Anderson says. “Ninety-five percent of our residents don’t return to homelessness.”
Permanent supportive housing projects demonstrate a real and lasting impact, not just for those experiencing homelessness, but also for those at risk of entering homelessness. It’s a long-term safety net.
“This might seem obvious,” Mathon says, “but I think it’s important to state it. The solution to homelessness is homes. And sometimes we struggle, in our society and in our communities, to really make that direct line of association.”
2023 grand-prize winner Janasha Bradford of Mahogany and Friends. Photo by Alisa Foytik.
April is here and so is Charlottesville’s annual Tom Tom Festival, flooding the downtown area with events, music, and people. The festival has grown substantially in its 12 years, and is slated to span five days, from April 17-21, with a medley of different showcases including panels on technology, entrepreneurship, social justice, and consciousness.
With such a broad docket, visitors may wonder, is it a music festival or a conference? Is it a conference or a block party? Is it a block party or a showcase of projects happening in Charlottesville?
“How about, yes and?” says Tom Tom founder Paul Beyer. “It’s both, and. I think people tend to think of things in binary terms, like this is music or this art or this is a conference. But I’m hoping people see Tom Tom as a both, and.”
Beyer welcomes the macroscopic view. He says when people come together from different areas and interests, they start having conversations and building together.
2022 grand-prize winner Cynthia Kankeu of Dr. Kanks. Photo by Anna Kariel.
“One of the core insights to me, when the festival was started, was just that there were a lot of areas of the city where people were in silos, they just weren’t talking to each other. In a city like Charlottesville, it’s just crazy, we’re not that big of a town.”
The festival has ballooned with all those conversations, inviting in over 250 speakers this year. And one word this year’s festival-goers will hear repeated frequently is, “future.” With panels discussing the future of AI, the future of financial freedom, the future of DEI, and the future of community, Tom Tom’s conversations are sure to focus on looking forward.
“The core ideas, I think, are future and community. Those are the two beating hearts of the festival,” Beyer says. “What does a shared future look like for the community?”
With a heavy emphasis on business development and investing, Tom Tom’s answer to that seems to be rooted in entrepreneurship, innovation, investment, and startup businesses in Charlottesville.
Over half of the festival’s panel discussions address startups, innovators, and investing, while over half of the festival’s steering committee comes from investment backgrounds.
Kate Byrne, a Tom Tom board member and staff member, has decades of experience in impact investing, the practice of investing in businesses for their social and environmental effects. She says business can be a catalyst for social change.
2022 crowdfunded winner Sarah Sweet of The Scrappy Elephant. Photo by Anna Kariel.
“I think what we’re trying to do is see how we can make business be a force for good and help entrepreneurs through creating jobs,” Byrne says. “So, we’re helping the workforce, we’re helping, not just a company, but the entire ecosystem that supports a company.”
Some of the major sectors Tom Tom plans to highlight include digital technology, biotechnology, medicine, and education, but smaller, solo entrepreneurs will have some of the spotlight as well.
A highlight of the Tom Tom Festival, and a chance to hear about and directly invest in some of those innovative ideas, is the annual Crowdfunded Pitch Night. Considered one of the fest’s signature events, the evening exemplifies some of Tom Tom’s goals of bringing together community and ideas to generate shared support.
The event is held in the Code Building, where 11 contestants pitch their idea for the support of the crowd.
“The pitch nights are a packed, energetic room filled with really vocal supporters,” Beyer says. “It feels almost like an athletic event because people are so engaged with what’s happening onstage, and so supportive.”
There’s a bar and a DJ, and competitors have a chance to mingle with the crowd before and after taking the stage. When their turn comes, participants are ushered on stage by a song of their choosing and have three minutes to deliver their message to the audience. Audience members then vote for the idea they want to support with tickets, each worth $5, that can be bought online or in the back of the room.
“The pitch night is like a highly engaging way for the entrepreneur to share with the community what their business is,” Beyer says. “They get to distill down their vision and why it matters to that one sentence. That is one of the most essential things that any entrepreneur needs to do is to really understand how to share a vision with their community.”
The evening is sponsored and hosted by the Community Investment Collaborative, a nonprofit that helps under-resourced entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. Many of the participants are previous graduates of CIC’s 16-week entrepreneurship workshop.
“Our program is focused more on the kind of local mom-and-pop businesses as opposed to kind of high tech, high growth businesses that are also a big part of entrepreneurship,” says CIC President Stephen Davis. “We’re focused on the folks who might start as a catering company, become a food truck, become a restaurant. Or we’re focused on the hair salon.”
Some recognizable CIC grads include Mochiko, FARMacy, Wich Lab, Alakazam Toys, High Tor Gear Exchange, Rivanna River Company, Gryphon Gymnastics, and Althea Bread.
“In our 12 years, we’ve had over 560 graduates of our workshop,” Davis says. “About 150 to 160 new businesses have launched through that and a lot of existing businesses have grown.”
In addition to the crowd’s votes, CIC offers a $5,000 grand prize to a winner selected by a panel of three judges.
“I think all in all last year there was probably about, I think, close to 1,000 votes overall,” says Davis. “It was probably around $5,000 to $6,000 in prizes from the crowdfunding part, besides CIC’s grand prize, so all in all it was over $10,000.”
Each participant gets to take home the money from the votes they earned, but there are other rewards, like exposure.
According to Davis, “the people who win aren’t always the ones who get the most out of the competition. Just about every year there have been folks who, as a part of the competition, met people who became investors or big supporters that helped the launch or grow their business. It might not be all they need to start but it might help them with the next step or one part of it.”
Davis says the strength of small businesses is integral to the strength of the community.
“Not only because those businesses are all the collective livelihoods of its owners and employees,” he says, “but in general, small businesses entrepreneurship is creating value in a community. You’re selling that value but you’re creating value whether it’s fun, food, services that are needed, anything that’s quality of life.”
Past Pitches
Mahogany and Friends
Janasha Bradford won the grand prize in 2023 for her financial literacy brand, Mahogany and Friends, which produces fun, imaginative children’s books geared toward educating kids on the topic.
“I was very nervous,” Bradford admits. “This was my first pitch ever. My business, at the time, I don’t think it was even a year and a half old.”
Bradford, a financial advisor, says that “in my career, there are not a lot of women advisors and definitely not a lot of minority financial advisors. I wasn’t introduced to that information early on. And studying, I noticed a lot of my counterparts didn’t have to really break down what some of the terminology meant, so there was an extra layer to my studying.”
Bradford started her pitch with her story. “I just said, ‘How many of you wish you’d learned about money growing up as a child? And if you did, do you think you would have made some different choices?’ Then I kind of told them why, for me, that’s a yes to both.”
With the grand prize and some working of the crowd, Bradford estimates that she raised about $10,000.
“Oh it had a major impact,” she says. Anything helps a small business, but the money from that pitch allowed her to apply to and attend Essence Fest, a cultural festival where she was able to introduce Mahogany and Friends to a crowd of over 50,000 people.
Dr. Kanks
Cynthia Kankeu is a biomedical scientist, and even when she was pursuing her Ph.D., she was working on producing her line of natural, plant-based skin and hair care products.
“I was actually struggling with dry hair myself. Whenever I wanted to define my curls, I was using products that would just leave my hair very dry,” Kankeu says. “I was wondering why I couldn’t find a product for my hair and because I couldn’t find that product, I started wondering, how could I actually make one.”
Kankeu won the grand prize in 2022. The money allowed her to take the leap, quit teaching, and move her operation to a warehouse in Richmond. Now her business is her full-time job. Dr. Kanks products can be found at the Ix Farmer’s Market, Integral Yoga, and in the Charlottesville Wegmans.
The Scrappy Elephant
That same year, in 2022, Sarah Sweet was the crowdfunded winner, taking home the most votes for her business idea. The Scrappy Elephant is a creative reuse center designed to divert art and craft materials from the landfill. Located in McIntire Plaza, the shop offers art classes, studio space to come and craft, and bulk, recycled art material of every variety.
When Sweet came to the crowdfunded pitch night, her business was located in Palmyra and she needed to expand. She heard about the event through CIC.
“It was terrifying because I hate public speaking. But it was wonderful. I just rehearsed a lot and didn’t really talk to anybody because I was so nervous,” Sweet says.
Sweet managed to raise about $2,500 from the crowd’s votes. It was just enough to afford a deposit on her new space in McIntire Plaza. But that was enough to make a tremendous difference. Sweet says her business has tripled since opening the new location. She’s expanding the store and was able to go in full-time on her passion.
“I wouldn’t be here, I don’t think, if I hadn’t won that. Or I would be in a lot of debt and owing money. So it was wonderful, it was amazing,” Sweet says.
On April 17 at 7pm, 11 contestants will have the opportunity this year to sweet talk the crowd and the judges. The ideas range from the digital sphere to social activism, and sustainability to wellness. Like past contestants, some of these ideas could become treasured features of the Charlottesville landscape in the years to come.
After moving from the city to rural Rappahannock County, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has embarked on a journey of natural discovery.
supplied photo.
Every seat was filled Saturday, April 13, as Dana Milbank recounted what led him to be aiming a bolt-action rifle out of his bathroom window at three whitetail deer. The answer, besides good luck and bad timing, is that the population of whitetail deer has swelled to more than 14 times what the ecosystem can handle. The deer, Milbank says, have become “ecological bullies,” stripping the forest of leaves and unraveling the food web.
The Washington Post columnist has been writing about rural life and its proximity to environmental concerns, or one might prefer to say environmental degradation, since moving from the city to 60 acres in Rappahannock County. With a combination of humorous wit and self-mockery, Milbank has expanded on topics of light pollution, rural access to broadband, the march of invasive species, the decline of pollinators, and the consequences of an invisible insect genocide in between his usual political commentary for the Post.
Milbank approaches the environmental impacts and large-scale shifts of the Anthropocene through a lens of discovery, learning about life in rural America as an outsider on his property. Now living in an area more sensitive to those changes, Milbank recounts his struggles as he goes about trying his best to be a good steward of the land—planting trees, restoring riparian zones, and building pollinator meadows.
Summing up his labors on the farm, Milbank said, “You can sit here and be depressed about what’s happening to our planet, and there’s plenty of justification for that, or you can go out and plant a tree.”
And he has been planting trees on his parcel of land. Writing about his efforts in the garden, he’s said, “Years from now, those tender oak seedlings, now 6-inch twigs, will stretch as high as 100 feet, feeding and sheltering generations of wild animals struggling to survive climate change and habitat loss. I won’t be alive to see it. Yet even now, my infant oaks give me something the most stunning cherry blossoms never could: a sense of hope.”
Event moderator Rowena Zimmermann identified Milbank’s attitude toward hope as essential, equating the hope expressed in his writings on the farm with the hope expressed in his commentary on politics. He wrote of political engagement, “I think it’s important because we’ve got to try. We’ve got to do our part so we can say to our kids and our grandkids that at least we tried. That’s the reason to keep on doing this, even if it’s having no discernible effect and even if the people who most need to hear it aren’t paying the slightest bit of attention.”
It’s the attitude that keeps Milbank chipping away at the ailanthus, an invasive, prolific, and stubborn tree that dots the roadside in Rappahannock County.
“It’s like every other tree is ailanthus,” Milbank mused.
Invasive species in the environment is a rapidly progressing reality that the evening with Milbank hoped to raise awareness of. The talk was hosted by Blue Ridge PRISM, a volunteer-driven organization dedicated to reducing the impact of invasive plants. Seasonal workshops, assistance, education, and stewardship programs are available through the nonprofit, which works with landowners to manage invasive plants.
In fact, Milbank’s recently completed training as a master naturalist was partly facilitated by members of Blue Ridge PRISM. Though Milbank characteristically chooses to laugh at himself: “You have to put ‘master’ in quotes. It sounds cool to say you’re a ‘master’ naturalist, and it implies that you know what you’re talking about. But, as you’ve seen tonight, that’s obviously not true in all cases.”
The Laricobius beetle is small, but its impact on protecting the area’s towering hemlock trees could be large. Image by National Park Service.
On a warm day early in spring, a group of volunteers led by the National Park Service is surveying Sugar Hollow Reservoir, hoping to find a new resident living on hemlocks in the forest. They hold broad, white sheets under a tree and knock the needles with a long stick. What they’re looking for is so tiny that they need to use magnifying glasses to identify it.
Laricobius osakensis is a dark brown beetle between 2 and 3 millimeters long. It may be small, but its impact on the forest could prove to be quite large, particularly for the area’s towering hemlock trees. The beetle preys exclusively on hemlock woolly adelgid, an aphid-like insect that has been ravaging hemlock trees up and down the East Coast. The hemlock woolly adelgid has no natural predators in the area. So, in an effort to control the pest’s population, biologists with Shenandoah National Park released 500 Laricobius beetles at Sugar Hollow Reservoir in 2017.
“We call them Larry beetles for short,” says Rolf Gubler, a biologist with the park service. “As long as there’s hemlock infested with HWA, those little Larry beetles will disperse and find hemlock that’s infested. It has to be infested so they have a food source.”
Larry has been introduced to several sites in the park after being studied, and eventually reared, at Virginia Tech.
“We have over 13 different release sites throughout the park,” Gubler says. “We’ve released over 6,000 beetles since 2015, working closely with Virginia Tech and their entomology department.”
Scott Salom, director of entomology at Virginia Tech, first found and collected Larry beetles in British Columbia. Later, a Japanese source was found and started to be released in 2012. Salom says the Japanese version is preferred now to limit genetic variability in the area.
Larry’s prey, the hemlock woolly adelgid, also came to the area from Japan. It was initially found in an ornamental garden in Richmond in 1951. Shenandoah was the first park to encounter an infestation in 1988. A few years later, the park’s hemlock trees were rapidly declining and eventually dying.
“During that time, we lost a number of hemlocks,” Gubler says. “Hemlocks are typically found along streams, in riparian areas, or on northeast facing slopes, moister slopes, so they’re not that common. They were less than 1 percent of the cover type. But we saw this precipitous decline and mortality. By 2002, 2003, the park had lost anywhere between 90 to 95 percent of its hemlocks.”
Gubler says the decline looks like a gradual withering in the crown of the tree over the course of several years. If you stood under the branches looking up, over time you would see more and more light as the leaves turn yellow and fall.
The insect attaches to the base of the leaf where it meets the wood and penetrates the tree with a long, straw-like needle.
“The adelgid is sucking the sap, the sugars and the starches, out of the tree,” Gubler says. “It’s making it difficult for the tree to transport nutrients and water.”
Shade is actually a crucial ingredient that eastern hemlocks add to the forest ecosystem. Its tentlike cone of dense foliage creates a pool of shade around it.
“The hemlock creates this unique, cool microclimate that has a year-round canopy,” Gubler says. It creates cool, moist conditions that are important to the preservation of a number of different species.”
That includes the eastern brook trout, the black-throated green warbler, the red squirrel, and many others. Eastern hemlocks are considered a foundational species, meaning they occur in the mature stages of the forest, when the ecosystem is at its most complex and a wealth of species rely on ecological factors that have grown over time.
“They’re the mothership,” Salom says. “They’re the dominant species among a diverse collection of species. Another term would be a climax species. They’re the species that a lot of other plants and animals rely on, and they are critical in a lot of riparian habitat.”
Hemlocks can live for hundreds of years, which means they significantly shape the character of the forest around them, and their loss leaves a giant hole.
“We had 300- to 350-year-old hemlocks at Limberlost Trail,” Gubler says. “There were 100 old-growth trees in there, just beautiful trees that were 3-and-a-half, 4-foot wide at the base. We lost all of those due to HWA.”
The hemlock woolly adelgid is hard to control because its population can rebound quickly. In fact, extreme cold events in winter have killed up to 99 percent of the adelgid’s population in the past, but they built back up in a couple of years.
The adelgid population goes through two reproductive cycles each year. A spring generation hatches in April, matures in mid-June, and lays eggs. Those eggs hatch in early July, go dormant around August, and reactivate around the middle of October. That winter generation then lays eggs in March for the spring cycle to start again.
Larry beetles are active in the winter too and go dormant in the summer. “So, they’re really well adapted to their prey,” Salom says.
The beetles are effective in controlling the winter generation of adelgids, but since they’re dormant in the summer, that leaves a gap where the spring generation is able to rebound.
“Virginia Tech and others have always wanted to look for a complementary biocontrol to address that feeding gap,” Gubler says. Other potential predators are being studied to fill that gap, most notably the silver fly. But the park is looking to Larry as the primary biocontrol for the hemlock woolly adelgid.
Fortunately, there’s a good chance that Larry will make a home in Shenandoah as a protector of hemlocks. After examining the sheets, the group of surveyors counts 21 adults among their samples.
Gubler deems that a success. “We’re only sampling a small percentage of that hemlock tree’s foliage, so that’s pretty good,” he says. “If we’re recovering that many adults, that’s pretty decent.”
Longtime Charlottesville Area Transit driver Matthew Ray (center with sign) says the potential pay bump in a new contract between CAT and the city could help drivers commit to working for CAT full-time. Supplied photo.
Charlottesville’s unionized bus drivers reached their first agreement with the city after City Council passed a groundbreaking ordinance to allow collective bargaining for public sector employees. The focal point of the deal was a substantial wage increase for bus drivers.
Charlottesville Area Transit representatives, now members of the Amalgamated Transit Union, negotiated a tiered system of pay increases into the three-year contract.
In a statement, the local chapter said, “Before we won our union, there was no pay progression at CAT. Workers could spend decades at the city and make less than someone else newer than them. This deal fixes that and dramatically improves wages across the board for all job classifications.”
The new contract proposes a 2 percent pay increase for all job titles with an additional 2 percent increase for each year of service, up to eight years. That would raise the starting pay for an operator from $22.36 an hour to $23. But each year, the deal stipulates a wage increase for each level so that by 2026, starting pay would be $24.15.
The contract is now awaiting the City Manager’s signature and City Council’s April 9 approval of the budget, which would fund the pay raise. If approved, the new contract will go into effect on July 1, but wage increases won’t go into effect until January 1 of next year.
Both sides agree that bus drivers should be paid more—stagnant wages have forced many long-term drivers to need second jobs. Recruitment of new drivers has also hit a low point.
Matthew Ray, who has been driving for Charlottesville Area Transit for 10 years, says his pay will increase from $22.35 to $31 an hour. Ray’s wife has worked in the school bus division of transit for two and a half years. He says she will get a $5-an-hour raise.
“It’s definitely going to be life-altering money,” Ray says. “When you’re making five, 600 dollars more a paycheck, that is huge. For this area, that is getting people out of their second jobs where they only need one now.”
Ray has been involved in organizing the CAT workers under the Amalgamated Transit Union since the new legislation first came into view.
“Since the ATU’s first day showing up down here,” Ray says. “I was attracted to them instantly and got involved.”
Ray is now the shop steward of the Charlottesville chapter, which means it’s his role to represent the area’s bus drivers to city management. In negotiations, the union argued that bus drivers should be able to afford to live in the area where they are driving people around.
Ray says the number of bus drivers for the city has been declining for the past several years.
“We don’t have the people and we don’t have the buses to provide the level of service we did seven years ago,” Ray says. “At one time we were like 80-85 drivers. We’re down to like 50-55 drivers right now.”
That means CAT has had to reduce its routes and run routes less frequently. Currently, routes 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, and 11 run every hour and routes 2, 4, 5, 7, and 9 run every half hour. Route 12, a service that ran on Sundays, has been discontinued.
An hour can be a long time to wait, especially if you miss a bus or if the bus is delayed. As a result, Ray says, ridership has flagged.
“When you can’t provide the services to the public that you need to provide to get people to and from work, they stop riding your bus,” Ray says. “And that’s our current predicament. We don’t have the ridership we had five, six, seven years ago.”
CAT currently has 40 buses in its fleet, but only operates 17 and two trollies. In order for CAT to provide more service, the city needs more bus drivers.
The new contract could provide the push that the transit sector needs. Ray says the wage increase will put CAT among the most competitive transportation industry jobs in Virginia and turn the tide for the city’s bus drivers.
Before April of 2020, it was illegal for a municipality in Virginia to enter into collective bargaining agreements with employees. That year, a bill passed the Virginia House of Delegates repealing the prohibition on collective bargaining for public sector employees. The new bill left it in the hands of localities to decide if they would recognize labor unions as bargaining agents. In October of 2021, Charlottesville was among the first cities to do so. The city now recognizes bargaining units for the police department and fire department as well as public transit.
Matthew Ray is proud of what the workers have accomplished. “The City of Charlottesville is unionizing,” he says. “Not just us three, but everyone.”
On a cold morning following a night with temperatures in the teens, Quincy Scott and Cheryl Burroughs are among the first to gather on the benches that line the Downtown Mall. Tents, sleeping bags, and blankets are pulled snug against the transit center to take advantage of an overhang that juts out slightly and keeps the snow off. Both are glad they didn’t spend the night there.
Scott overnighted at the Baptist church on University Avenue, and has been staying at church shelters since he was released from Central Virginia Regional Jail on December 14. He was there for a probation violation, but in the bigger picture, he’s returning from 15 years in prison. He’s staying in shelters while looking for a way to get back a piece of the life he left.
“I’ve got people rooting for me,” Scott says. “Friends, family, judges, everybody.”
Burroughs stayed overnight at Crescent Halls, a public housing facility on Monticello Avenue. She says she was taken there by police at 3am, following an altercation. Burroughs gives conflicting dates about where she’s been staying. For some time, she had an apartment at The Crossings, Charlottesville’s supportive housing community for those facing homelessness, but left. She says she’s been on the streets off and on for 15 years with chronic drug addiction.
Overnight shelters in Charlottesville are just that, for night use only. Scott has a bed through PACEM (People and Congregations Engaged in Ministry), but at 7 every morning he has to leave.
People can find themselves without shelter for a variety of reasons. Many, like Scott, are going through reentry after a period of incarceration. In 2023, about 30 percent of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. reported having a serious mental illness with 24 percent being related to chronic substance abuse, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Approximately 10.4 percent of shelter services in 2023 were used by survivors of domestic abuse and their families, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
But experts on the topic agree that in Charlottesville, as well as in the nation, the single biggest issue causing homelessness is the lack of affordable housing.
In its three-year plan to end homelessness, the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless reports that the greatest barriers in the area are lack of affordable housing, limited economic opportunity, and few supportive services for mental health and substance abuse.
“I think the causes here are the causes everywhere,” says Michele Claibourn, who works in data science at the University of Virginia’s Equity Center. Claibourn co-authored the 2023 Stepping Stones Report that measured factors related to community well-being for the City of Charlottesville. “Our population has increased, we don’t have enough housing, housing prices increase as a consequence, and people are priced out of rentals and certainly home ownership,” she says.
The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness estimates that 40 to 60 percent of people experiencing homelessness do have a job, sometimes two, but housing remains unaffordable. A full-time worker would need to earn an hourly wage of $26.94 on average to afford a two-bedroom rental in Charlottesville, according to a 2023 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In only 7 percent of counties in the nation can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford a one-bedroom rental, the report says.
Affordable here means being able to pay rent without spending more than 30 percent of income on housing. Still, the wage needed to live in Charlottesville is almost four times the federal minimum wage, which means that households earning less than that could easily lose their housing if something unforeseen happened, such as a car accident, medical emergency, theft, or job loss. Households that spend more than 30 percent of their total income on housing are considered cost-burdened households, and in Charlottesville, about 50 percent of all households fall into that category.
Looking at the numbers
In 2022, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the area reached its highest point in the past 12 years at 266, according to the Point-In-Time count for that year. The area includes the City of Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson. However, that number on its own can be deceiving. The PIT count spiked in 2022, from 171 in 2021. In 2023, the count returned to about the same level, at 191.
According to Claibourn, the spike is related to COVID-19 relief funds. One of the limitations of getting data about unhoused populations is that many people go uncounted if they haven’t interacted with a service agency. Claibourn says that in 2022 there was more money for shelter services, so more people sought services and more people could be counted.
That high point is not indicative of a rising trend in people experiencing homelessness, Claibourn says. In fact, the trend in homelessness has gone down overall since 2010, when the PIT count was 228. Another thing the numbers show is that the vast majority of people who enter a period of homelessness are able to exit homelessness if they’re given sufficient resources. Anna Mendez, executive director of The Haven, Charlottesville’s downtown day shelter, says for most people who experience homelessness, it’s a period of a few months.
“Because of our data collection, we know that in any 12-month period of time, between 400 and 500 people in our community experience homelessness,” Mendez says. “So, what that means is that they have either slept outside or they have slept in a structure not fit for human habitation, like they’re sleeping in their car. Or they’ve slept in a shelter, because people who are merely sheltered are still people who are homeless.”
The PIT count, which counts the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single day, is much lower than that. That’s because the vast majority of people who enter a period of homelessness leave it within a year.
The PIT count also tracks the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness, which is defined as experiencing homelessness for at least a year or repeatedly over the years. In Charlottesville, that’s about a quarter of the overall count, numbering 53 in 2023.
Image: Virginia Equity Center
Claibourn says the numbers show us that homelessness is a solvable issue.
“It’s not such a huge number that you couldn’t imagine actually housing all of those people,” she says. “We’re not talking 10,000, we’re talking 150, right. The problem is there has not been enough political will to do so.”
The Haven
Both Scott and Burroughs start their day at The Haven, along with many others. The cafeteria, lounge, and lobby that comprise Charlottesville’s only daytime shelter is crowded and busy, especially on cold days. Because The Haven serves breakfast, it’s where the day begins for many of those seeking shelter.
People can also go to The Haven to take a shower, do laundry, store personal belongings, pick up their mail, and be safe. The day shelter distributes shoes, clothes, and other supplies that people have donated. It’s open every day year-round and is low-barrier.
“Low-barrier means that we do our best to welcome anyone who walks through the doors,” says Mendez. The rules are that guests can’t possess or use substances and can’t cause conflict. But people who are inebriated or under the influence or have a violent past are welcome to find rest at The Haven.
The shelter also functions as a kind of base camp where people can connect to the constellation of services available in Charlottesville, from housing to counseling. The Haven’s own housing department administers three programs that help over 200 households every year either exit homelessness or prevent them from experiencing homelessness in the first place, Mendez says.
Often, that work is preventative. If someone has an emergency and misses a month of rent, The Haven can help them. Or, if someone is facing an eviction that would result in homelessness, The Haven can help rehouse them.
“We really see a vision of Charlottesville where we are working toward eliminating homelessness,” Mendez says.
However, The Haven isn’t somewhere people can stay the night. The doors open at 7am and close at 5pm on weekdays and noon on weekends. After that, those seeking shelter have to find it elsewhere.
The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army on Ridge Street provides overnight beds, with 28 for men and 28 for women, plus a lobby with floor space for six men and six women in an emergency. But the Salvation Army employs a more structured approach than The Haven. Those seeking a bed have to go through an intake process and agree to the rules. The shelter opens at 4pm, with a break for dinner from 5 to 6pm.
“They are searched every time they go out the front door and come back in,” says Sandy Chirico, the Salvation Army’s social services manager. “So we look through their backpacks, turn their pockets inside out, and we do scan them with the metal scanner wand.”
Sandy Chirico says that about 75 percent of those who seek shelter at the Salvation Army have jobs. Photo by Eze Amos.
The search is to keep out drugs, alcohol, and weapons. Guests also have to pass a drug test and breathalyzer. Curfew for the shelter is at 9pm. Breakfast the following morning is at 8am and people have to leave by 9am.
The Salvation Army has a case-management program for those staying at the shelter that is aimed at rehabilitation and, eventually, stable, independent housing. One of the key points of that program is securing employment, so during the day guests must either be working or looking for a job.
After intake, those seeking shelter can stay at the Salvation Army for 21 days. If they are meeting the goals of the program, the stay can be extended. Many stay up to six months, if they stick with the program.
Finding employment comes with a number of barriers for those living on the streets. The Salvation Army helps with filling out applications, following up with employers, having access to computers, providing vouchers for clothing, and many of the little things that can become larger hurdles if you’re in a tough spot. However, employment alone often isn’t enough to get out of a period of homelessness.
“Right now, I would say 75 percent of our folks are working,” Chirico says. “I don’t think the public is aware of that. Some of them are maybe lower paying jobs. It’s hard to live in Charlottesville on $16 an hour, $17 an hour.”
If securing employment isn’t enough, Chirico says case workers can help people navigate social services, get vouchers to the Salvation Army thrift store, and, in many cases, get a second job.
The Salvation Army is the only year-round, overnight shelter in Charlottesville, but the capacity is quite limited. In the winter especially, the need for shelter is much greater.
PACEM
During the coldest parts of the year, generally from October to April, some local churches band together to provide overnight shelter where they have space. PACEM is a coalition that pulls together 80 different congregations and community groups to provide shelter, so the shelter moves from one location to another every two weeks. Officially, PACEM has a capacity for 35 men and 15 women, but it will find shelter for anyone who comes to the door.
On a night in January, PACEM had set up cots for 44 men in the basement of University Baptist Church, and provided hotel vouchers for 11 more. In the organization’s 20 years, “we have never had to turn anyone away specifically for capacity issues,” says Liz Yohn, PACEM’s operations manager. “Even when we are full, we make room.”
This winter, PACEM has seen more demand for shelter than expected. Yohn says the loss of supports that were in place for COVID has led to the increase.
“It supported so much,” she says. “It supported shelters and it supported individuals from ending up in homelessness. From things like additional food stamps and the unemployment insurance benefits to the eviction moratoriums, there were a lot of supports in place during the pandemic that aren’t in place anymore.”
PACEM doesn’t turn people away, but it does have limitations. The shelter is open from 5pm to 7am, and only operates for half the year. Because of its rotating schedule, the shelter can be hard to access, though for the more remote locations PACEM offers a shuttle that leaves from The Haven at 5:15pm.
PACEM is an emergency shelter for those who need it, but transitioning out of homelessness is a longer journey.
“We are the last rung on the safety net,” Yohn says. “In order to end up experiencing homelessness, there’s a lot of loss that you’ve probably experienced. It could be the breakdown of family and friend relationships, it could be mental or physical health that you’re struggling with.” Shelter in Charlottesville is a patchwork of overnight, daytime, and seasonal options. Without a 24/7 emergency shelter, it can be hard to hold it all together.
According to PACEM’s Liz Yohn, the group has never turned anyone away for capacity reasons. Photo by Eze Amos.
Yohn says it’s been a challenge to find space for everyone who needs it, but the group has always found a way. That said, the official overnight capacity in Charlottesville doesn’t come close to the demand, as shown by the PIT count. There are many people who never come to PACEM’s door. In January of 2022, in the heart of winter, Charlottesville’s PIT count found 26 people sleeping outside of any kind of shelter.
On the Downtown Mall
Roscoe Boxley remembers working on renovations to The Haven before it opened in 2010. He recalls painting the ceiling and floors and touching up the exterior. By 2019, Boxley was coming home from prison, and work became harder to find. In 2023, he returned to The Haven, this time seeking shelter.
Boxley says he had to leave an unhealthy relationship and that included leaving his home. “I had to get myself in a better place so that I could be more attentive to my child,” he says. “So, I ended up just leaving everything altogether to reestablish myself and start over.”
At the time, Boxley was working two jobs, earning $10 an hour at Taco Bell and $11 an hour at Burger King. But child support and garnished wages meant he couldn’t afford a place of his own. He says he met people on the street from every background imaginable.
“People that are unhoused are not what people who aren’t unhoused think,” Boxley says. “There are a lot of people with skills, a lot of people with intellect, a lot of people that can solve issues that we have as a society. But most people who look at homeless people look at them all as if they’re the same, people who decided to make bad decisions or decided to disregard the law, or things like that.”
The issue of homelessness has been one of particular contention on the Downtown Mall. Boxley says there are efforts to force the unhoused out of the area.
“There used to be benches on the Downtown Mall,” Boxley says. “There were benches and stuff all around, but because homeless people laid on them, they took them up. Then they locked the power outlets, so you’re not allowed to plug your phones and stuff up. And they put these spikes along the windows of the bank where the heat exhaust is so that homeless people wouldn’t sit there. In the winter it’s the only place that blows heat, so you’ll see homeless people kind of gather right there.”
Boxley had put his own work into the downtown area. Years ago, he helped build some of it. But now, it was a place where he was unwelcome. Boxley says police were regularly called to enforce the 11pm curfew at Market Street Park to prevent people from sleeping there.
“Before COVID, a lot of these people were holding this society up,” Boxley says. “And now, because they’re homeless, people just want to get them out of the way.”
Frustrated, Boxley refused to leave the park. He set up a chair, held a sign, and wouldn’t go. It was a one-man protest. He was arrested and charged with trespassing and violating probation.
“My sign,” he says, “said ‘Make Room For Homeless People.’”
Tents in the park
A September 16 incident in which a police officer was accused of kicking an unhoused man sleeping in Market Street Park, and public outcry at a September 18 City Council meeting, led City Manger Sam Sanders to lift the park’s 11pm curfew.
Boxley estimates that 60 to 70 people were staying in the park. What sprang up was a refuge, but it was also a community where people who needed support were able to support one another.
“One, it was easier to access the resources that we needed, that was the most important thing,” Boxley says. “Then, to be close to each other, community-wise, it was about having a support system.”
But friction between the housed and unhoused population only became more evident. Boxley heard complaints that the homeless people in the park were dangerous, that the residents felt unsafe. There was also hostility.
“People throwing rocks or fruit, yelling ‘Get out of my damn park,’” Boxley says. “You know how many fights I got in over that park?”
The calls to remove people from the park grew proportionately with the calls of support. On October 21, those calls were heard. The curfew was reinstated, and by 11pm all the tents were gone.
Reflecting on the episode, Mendez says, “For us at The Haven, what saddens us most, is that at times it seems like people are more upset about having to see people who are experiencing homelessness than they are about the fact that in a community as wealthy as ours, the experience of homelessness still exists.”
Permanent supportive housing
The ultimate goal of the network of services and nonprofits in Charlottesville is to end the experience of homelessness in the community.
For Jessica Moody, the programs worked.
Moody was 47 when she lost her job at a customer service call center. In the beginning, she moved in with her daughter in Buckingham, but eventually had to leave because of limited space and the commute to her new job in Charlottesville.
“So I ended up being homeless in Charlottesville, working in hotels,” Moody says. “I was working in hotels, so I was staying in the hotels at night.” Moody bounced around between her car and hotel rooms.
“I’d worked hotels before and I know how they work,” she says. “A lot of hotels, if you work for them, they’ll give you a discount on a room or they’ll give you a room, you know, they’ll work with you. That’s why I came to work in the hotels here.”
Moody also worked weekends at a domestic violence shelter where she was expected to stay overnight. No one there knew she was homeless.
That went on for over a year before Moody sought help. She was referred to The Haven and, through The Haven, found PACEM. There, she was able to get a room for a year at PACEM’s now-defunct emergency shelter, Premier Circle.
Though Premier Circle closed due to funding last spring, the program highlighted how effective stable shelter and long-term support can be in successfully helping someone get rehoused. The future of the property, which was formerly the Red Carpet Inn, will serve a similar purpose. A renovation project, spearheaded by Virginia Supportive Housing, aims to build 80 permanent supportive housing units where Premier Circle once stood.
Shayla Washington, executive director of the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless says that is the best tool for addressing homelessness.
“The most effective thing is permanent supportive housing. That comes with case management, it comes with rental assistance, and really just providing that strong case management piece that folks really benefit from.”
Like Premier Circle, permanent supportive housing offers a long-term room. Many, such as Moody, find the most value in the personal support and case management they receive at the facility.
“It’s great to have a good case manager, people who care,” Moody says. “That was very important to me. That’s what helped me.”
Typically, there are a series of losses that come before the loss of housing—loss of relationships, loss of jobs, loss of health. Resolving those issues is complex.
“We believe in a housing-first model, that you’re not going to address any other aims in your life until you have a stable house,” says Julie Anderson, director of real estate development at Virginia Supportive Housing.
Virginia Supportive Housing, which has operated at The Crossings since 2012, has 60 units available to those experiencing homelessness. The facility will add another 80 units by the spring of 2025, more than doubling Charlottesville’s capacity.
“The development will be 77 studio apartments, full studios with a kitchen and bathroom and living/sleeping area, as well as three one-bedroom apartments, and onsite supportive services, all for homeless or low-income individuals,” Anderson says.
The room isn’t free, but the cost is sliding to meet each person’s means.
“Residents sign leases and their rent is based on their income. They pay a monthly rent equivalent to 30 percent of their income,” Anderson says. “On average, our residents pay $200 a month. However, if you have zero income, the rent is just $50 a month and our services staff onsite can help the individual be connected with a church or somebody that will help them pay that rent every month if they need that help.”
That same system is what allowed Moody to finally find her own place last summer. Her case manager helped her get a voucher from the Charlottesville Housing Authority, which allows her to pay 30 percent of her income in rent. After a lot of searching, she found a room at Mallside Apartments.
“I’m in a place now and I’m so happy. I love it,” Moody says. “My apartment is nice. It’s small but it’s nice. I love the area. I’m happy to be in my own space.”
Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund board members Taylor Pisano, Melissa Gilrain, Austin Miller, and Olena Melnyk want to grow their organization to be able to pay bonds
at Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
The Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund is pushing to increase its funding. The nonprofit, started by students at UVA law school, puts up bail for those awaiting trial, without charging a fee. The bail fund has historically been active in Middle River Regional Jail. Now, the group seeks to expand its capabilities to cover Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail as well. In its three years of existence, the community fund has been able to pay $197,000 of bail from 85 total bonds. Volunteers say that’s much less than they want to see.
Bail bond comes into play after someone has been arrested and before a trial starts. The bond amount is set by a magistrate and is supposed to serve as insurance that the person will come back for their trial.
“So, in theory, the point of it is not to be punitive,” says Melissa Gilrain, who serves on the board of the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. “But if you don’t have money, it is punitive because you get stuck in jail, you lose your job, you lose your house, you lose your kids, you lose all these things.”
The consequence is that the freedom of someone awaiting trial often depends on their wealth. Nationwide, a third of defendants are kept in jail pretrial because they are unable to pay their bail bonds, according to Justice Forward Virginia, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform. Most of those being held are among the poorest third of Americans, the organization reports.
The other option for someone who can’t afford bail is to call a bail bondsman. The bondsman will pay the bail and charge 10 percent of it to the client. Bail bond is a business, but it’s a business that targets those who are poor and desperate.
The community bail fund serves as an alternative by posting bail when someone calls, and it recuperates the money when the person shows up for their trial. No extra charges.
Sometimes attorneys refer their clients to the bail fund, but more often, it’s word of mouth. Someone can call the bail fund anytime, day or night. The seven board members share the responsibility of answering. A network of volunteers take the money to the magistrate to post the bond.
Taylor Pisano, who also serves on the fund’s board, says the average bond they pay is between $2,500 and $5,000.
“It’s a lot of minor charges, like failure to appear, probation violations, drug possession, petty larceny, or credit card fraud,” Pisano says. Pisano says many of the cases he sees end in a null process, which means the charges are dropped.
“We just had one case, we posted this guy’s bond in December of 2022 and the case just got finalized and it was null processed, which means they were not guilty on that charge,” Pisano says. “So, that person would have been sitting in jail for a year for something that they’re not guilty of. And that’s a really common thing—it could be as short as two weeks and it could be a year or more.”
The fund’s $40,000 seems like a sizable resource, but even with that amount of money, it has a waitlist. The demand far exceeds the bail fund’s resources, and the majority of the money is almost constantly tied up in bonds waiting to be finalized.
“We get more calls than we can post bonds for,” Gilrain says.
The Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund has historically focused on Staunton’s Middle River Regional Jail, which holds people from Staunton, Waynesboro, Harrisonburg, and Augusta and Rockingham counties, and is over capacity with 629 inmates. But there are other jails in the area the bail fund could help. Closest to home is the 329-person-capacity Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, with inmates from Charlottesville and Albemarle and Nelson counties. Piedmont Regional Jail is larger, located in Farmville, and has a capacity of 600 people. Central Virginia Regional Jail is in the town of Orange, and holds about 400 people.
“What we would really like to do is to be able to pay bonds at ACRJ, the local jail,” Gilrain says. But compared to the number of people who need the service, the bail fund is too small.
A count on December 31, 2020, by the National Institute of Corrections showed that Virginia has 28,970 people in jail. Not all of them have the option of bail, but many do. There are other community bail funds in the state, the largest in Richmond. There’s also a fund in Tidewater and one in Roanoke. But for many who are waiting in jail, there’s no one to bail them out.
Ewa Harr says that, despite cuts in programming and staff, Ix Art Park is still a space for play in Charlottesville. Photo by Matt Dhillon.
Meet Ix Art Park’s full-time staff: Director of programming, Ewa Harr. Director of curation, Ewa Harr. Director of operations, Ewa Harr. Executive director, Ewa Harr.
Last year, each of those roles was separate, but now it’s a team of one. A financial deficit has forced the Ix Art Park Foundation to make some hard cuts. Put simply, the park has been spending more money than it’s taking in, Susan Krischel, Ix Art Park Foundation board president, announced last September.
“Ix Art Park is re-evaluating our current nonprofit business model,” Krischel wrote in the foundation’s 2023 Impact Report. “We want to ensure that we can provide a creative space that lifts our community for years to come. To accomplish this, we will dedicate 2024 to reexamining who we are as an organization and how we can best serve our community in a financially responsible manner.”
Most of the foundation’s income comes from events that are hosted at the park. That was 35 percent of overall revenue in 2023, according to the Impact Report. Twenty-four percent came from visitors to the Looking Glass, the park’s immersive museum installation; 20 percent came from donations; 11 percent from renting out the space; and 10 percent from camps and workshops.
Though locals generally think of Ix Art Park as synonymous with the 17-acre parcel, owned by developer Ludwig Kuttner, there are important nuances.
“I know there’s a lot of confusion about the whole structure in our community,” Harr says. “But the property between Elliott and Monticello is Ix, and that’s privately owned property. The Ix Art Park Foundation is a nonprofit that rents the property just like everybody else. Just like Three Notch’d or Brazos or Sake, we’re a tenant.”
Ix Art Park transitioned to nonprofit status in September of 2019, and opened The Looking Glass in January of 2020. Like many new and established organizations, Ix had to make radical changes while navigating the landscape of the pandemic.
“I think things would have looked a lot different for us financially had the museum not had to be closed for over a year because of the pandemic,” Harr says. “Then some of those emergency funds, some of those things that were allowing us to keep our staff on during COVID ended.”
The park has had to move to a more financially conservative model because of the gap in funding, according to Harr. “The hardest part of it was a reduction in staff. The people who really built up a lot of the magic that’s here are no longer here because of that funding gap.”
The programs we won’t see in 2024 are a lot of the free artmaking projects, says Harr. Summer camps and summer movie nights will also be missing. The Thursday night sunset market remains undecided.
Harr talks about these events as frozen, not eliminated. Her goal is one of recovery. She says her vision for the future is to bring back those community-oriented programs. “Bring back and develop and grow both educational and community programming, for sure,” Harr says. “We just can’t do it right now.”
Things we definitely will see in 2024 include the Saturday morning farmers’ market, which the 2022 Impact Report called the “crown jewel” of Ix Art Park, attracting between 2,000 and 3,000 people to an average market. Ix’s four signature events, the Charlottesville Arts Festival, Fae Festival, Soul of Cville, and Fantasy Festival will be sticking around too. Harr also intends to engage in as many partnerships and venue rentals as possible.
The park’s mission, as Harr sees it, is to be a space for play in Charlottesville. Last year, over 200,000 people came to play at Ix by attending some kind of programming at the park, according to the 2023 Impact Report. Harr is committed to maintaining what the park has meant for people.
“It’s such a unique place and that’s what it’s here for,” Harr says. “It’s a place to spark creativity, a place where people can come and set their imagination free.”
Important to that mission is inviting visitors to make art themselves. In 2024, Harr is planning to add more artist-led workshops. At the end of The Looking Glass tour a lounge invites visitors to make something of their own.
Despite the funding issue, Harr says the park remains active. Its events, sculpture garden and murals, children’s playground, and standing as a 24/7 art haven in the city isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, the next event is right around the corner. Ix will host a Valentine’s Day dance in partnership with Chinchilla Café on February 9. “It is going to be several fantastic DJs and the theme is going to be, ‘dress filthy, dress gorgeous,’” Harr says. Tickets are $10 presale and $15 at the door.
Jason Crane, who's been joined by several dozen locals for vigils in support of the Palestinian people, says he's heartened by the support he's received. Photo by Matt Dhillon.
As the number of Palestinian lives lost from the conflict in Gaza climbs to over 20,000, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, voices addressing the crisis are louder than ever. Local activist Jason Crane is one of them.
Since October 24, Crane has held a vigil every weekday morning on the corner of Rugby Road and Rugby Avenue in observance of the loss of Palestinian life. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, Crane wanted to acknowledge the unfolding crisis in the region, so, with a homemade sign reading “Stop Genocide, Free Palestine,” he walked to the busiest street corner accessible to him, and made it a daily ritual.
Crane says for the first week or two, he held the vigil alone. Then someone saw one of his daily posts on Instagram and joined him the next morning. A neighbor who saw him while driving by decided to stop and participate as well. Crane says there are now about 50 people who attend off and on. On November 9, a similar vigil gathered in front of the Northrop Grumman building on Route 29, and has continued from 4 to 5pm every Friday.
According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public service project that tracks non-violent protests, the majority of demonstrations in the United States expressed solidarity with Israel in the first 10 days following the October 7 attack by Hamas, with 270 recorded compared with nearly 200 in support of Palestine. But as the war continued, the nation saw a massive surge of support for Palestine. On November 28, CCC recorded 1,869 events showing solidarity for Palestine compared to 433 in support of Israel since October 7.
“The belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza appears to be an important factor in the growth of this movement,” writes Jay Ulfelder, program director of Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab, on the CCC blog.
“For me this is a daily show of solidarity,” says one attendee of the Charlottesville-area vigils. “What’s important is that we show people we’re still out there and remind people that this is still happening.”
Crane says their presence every day is helping those who feel the same way know that they are not alone, one of his primary motivations for holding the vigil.
“The way that I know that, is people do things like pull over and hand us a tray of muffins, or bring us coffee,” Crane says. “A very elderly woman came with a box full of pastries from Albemarle Baking Company, and she handed them out to us.”
But there are also the hecklers.
“The number-one reaction, far outstripping every other reaction, is apathy,” Crane says. “It’s just people who barely look at us or look and look away. Number two is positive, and there are a lot of positive reactions. And a distant third is negative, people who flip us off or yell.”
Sixty-one percent of Americans support a permanent ceasefire in the region, according to a poll conducted by Data for Progress and published December 5. The poll found that 74 percent of those surveyed support sending food, water, and medical aid to the people of Gaza. 49 percent support sending military aid to Israel, while 38 percent oppose it.
Though the U.S. has long been a staunch ally of Israel, President Joe Biden said the country was losing international support by its “indiscriminate bombing” of the area. Israeli airstrikes continue across Gaza, including the southern city of Rafah. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been injured, 300,000 residences destroyed, and 26 out of the area’s 35 hospitals are not functioning, according to data collected by Al Jazeera.
Yet the U.S. has vetoed three U.N. resolutions calling for an immediate end to hostilities in the region. Fifth District Representative Bob Good expressed “unequivocal support” for the war in Gaza during a December 20 pro-Israel event at the Fluvanna County Public Library.
On the topic of popular support for a permanent ceasefire, the congressman said, “the only solution for Israel is to eradicate and defeat Hamas to ensure [an attack] cannot happen again.” Good supported a $14.3 billion aid package for Israel that passed in the House at the beginning of November.
From Crane’s vantage, however, the vast majority of people are in favor of peace.
“I’ve been really heartened by the number of people who support us,” Crane says. “I think it’s not a hard concept to understand that genocide is bad. And I think we afford [people] a very small chance each morning to say that out loud in some way.”
October is the tail end of the harvest for Patrick Collins, the cidermaker behind Patois Cider. But the apples on one of his favorite trees are just about ripe.
“That guy there, with all the yellow orbs,” Collins says. “That tree is so delicious. See how it’s still full of leaves? It tastes fantastic, but the fact that it hasn’t defoliated means that it has a super strong immune system.”
Collins has driven his pickup truck to the top of a mountain pass in the Blue Ridge. There are other apple trees scattered in the area, but their branches are bare. This one, Collins notes, impressed and enthusiastic, still has dark-green leaves.
It’s been a dry summer, and drought stress can make trees let go of their leaves early. Even more challenging are the many pests and diseases that plague apple trees. There’s fire blight, cedar apple rust, blossom end rot, apple scab. They are such a problem that the general consensus among orchardists is, you simply can’t grow organic apples in Virginia. But these trees, left to grow untended for 100 years, are doing just fine.
Patrick Collins (right) and Danielle LeCompte formed Patois Cider just two years after meeting. While wild apples are at the core of their cidery business today, Collins and LeCompte began foraging because they had little in startup money and materials. Photo by Stephen Barling.
None of the apples here have names. Despite the saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” apples grown from seed famously have different characteristics than their parent trees. All of these have grown from scattered seeds. Collins speculates that the trees are descended from a former plantation nearby.
“Almost everybody back then, no matter if it was like a substantial landholder or just a homesteader, one of the first things they would plant would be apple trees,” Collins says. Apples have tremendous variety when grown from seed. “That would allow you to have a variety of different types of crop from the apple trees. Then you’d have fruit that was suitable for drying, fruit that would keep through the winter in your root cellar, and, of course, apples that were suitable for cider, or brandy.”
Now, they’re feral. Which is exactly what Collins is looking for. They’re the opposite of the giant, sugary apples prized in grocery stores.
“These apples are intense,” Collins says. “They’re small, they’re gnarled, the skins are thick, the flesh is substantial, and when you bite into it, you can get popped in the mouth. It’s also about the aromatics. Retro-nasally there’s all these leachy, rose-petal, or sometimes it can be really mossy.”
The things that have been bred out of commercial apples are exactly what Collins wants for cider. Tannins, which are bitter and astringent compounds, give the cider structure and body. High acid content helps control fermentation and adds an enticing flavor.
Collins and his partner, Danielle LeCompte, met while working in the beverage industry, thanks to their passion for cider and wine. They bonded over humble meals and bottles of wine.
“Working in restaurants kind of opened my world to wine,” LeCompte recalls. “There’s something special about a table ordering a bottle of wine instead of everyone getting a separate thing. There was this immediate sense of unity, of a shared experience.”
Photo by Stephen Barling.
Two years after meeting, the couple decided to launch a cider business. Collins read books on cidermaking while LeCompte held down a job as a wine distributor. At the time, foraging apples was a necessity. The pair had little more than their passion to work with.
“We started off with a couple thousand dollars in shared savings,” Collins says. “Enough money, essentially, to buy a press, some used barrels, and pay rent.”
Wild apples are a resource that is already out there, if you are willing to get them.
“Going on walks, we noticed an abundance of apples, the apple trees that are wild, on mountainside hikes and mountainside vistas,” LeCompte says. “And Patrick was super keyed in to just being able to look at topographical maps, finding out where some of these orchards are.”
Luck played a part too.
“In 2019, when we did our first fruit foraging run, there was a bounty of fruit,” LeCompte recalls. “Then 2020 followed and there was a late frost, so there was no fruit. If we had started the project in 2020, that would have been extremely discouraging.”
Slowly, Collins and LeCompte learned where to hunt for Virginia’s lost orchards.
“Most of them are around 950 feet on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, because that’s the frost line,” Collins says. “Everything above that, unless it’s on a really well-draining slope, will get frosted. If you see a road that goes to about that elevation and stops on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, there’s hopefully some trees there.”
Seedlings are better adapted to the climate, Collins says, and can be found by going up in elevation in an area where there have been apple trees.
“There’s probably a pretty good chance you’ll see at least one or two,” Collins says.
The pair found themselves retracing Virginia’s faded apple history.
Collins and LeCompte prefer to forage from wild apple trees, partly because they adapt to the environment over time, and genetic variability affects taste. Photo by Stephen Barling.
“Apples and peaches were a huge cash crop,” Collins says. “If you look at where the railroad goes, it sort of follows along where these old orchards were because it was exported across the Atlantic and to the West Coast.”
Some of those heirloom varieties, such as Winesaps and Albemarle Pippins, have lasted in abandoned orchards, and Collins and LeCompte still salvage them for cider.
“Albemarle Pippins were the export apple in the 19th century for Virginia,” Collins says. “It’s a keeper and it tastes like a pineapple dessert, but it has the complexity of flavor that you can make cider from it.”
For Collins and LeCompte, necessity overlapped with preference and, more importantly, values. The couple knew they wanted to make organic cider from unsprayed fruit, something that more acutely comes from the earth, rather than what a commercial orchard could supply.
Wild apples are organic as a matter of course, but they’re also uniquely sustainable. Because the trees are still entwined with the environment, they continue to adapt to it.
“Long term, it provides genetic renewal and suitability to the climate,” Collins says. “Genetic variability is not just about disease resistance, it’s also flavor. The apple has some amazing genetic variability and there’s so much potential for complexity of the flavors.”
That reward complements Patois’ forager spirit and the flavor of its cider. There is a sense of discovery, of finding out what nature has decided to make, adapting to it, and using it to its full potential.
Collins is the first to admit that he can romanticize cidermaking, but he enjoys the idea that someone is tasting the mountains and the year and how those regional forces have come together to form these apples year after year.
He contrasts that enjoyment to the enjoyment of commercial wine and its position as an aristocratic symbol.
“What are we celebrating when we celebrate wine?” Collins says, reflecting on the emphasis that is placed on styles made from a particular region or a particular grape variety. “There’s a lot that’s beautiful right here. We’re really motivated to make wine from the commons and celebrate nature as it exists. It’s not being formed or shaped or forced.”
Patois Cider’s 21 Bricolage, made from crab, heirloom, and seedling apples. Photo by Stephen Barling.
Collins says he would like to have an orchard of his own someday. Tending the trees year after year strikes him as a special and affectionate relationship. But even then, he says, he wouldn’t give up foraging.
“We’ll keep foraging for as long as our bodies allow,” Collins says. “I think there’s something very unique and special to the chance element of foraging. The fact that these just popped up. There’s something very special about them.”
Today’s apples from Jarman’s Gap will go into a particularly interesting cider from Patois, the Bricolage. Bricolage comes from French and denotes something that is built from the parts that are available. Patois Bricolage is just that—a mixture of the apples in abandoned orchards and feral woods crafted into the year’s unique taste.
“Whatever we have on hand, we try to make something beautiful out of it,” Collins says.
Other pressings available are bottled from just one area, one abandoned orchard, or one variety of apple. Albemarle Pippin is a heritage variety that Collins enjoys bottling on its own as an homage to the industry.
Most of their products go wholesale to small, craft wineshops as far away as New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Locally, they can be found at Greenwood Grocery, Market Street Wine, and Wine Warehouse. For those who want to meet the makers, bottles are also available directly from Patois via its website.
