Author: Scott Weaver

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News

City assessments level out…for some

Well, assessments are out once again, though this year, city and county residents may not need their real estate-related defibrillators. Assessments have finally caught up with the market, rising only 4.2 percent in the city and less than 1 percent in the county—three county districts actually saw assessments fall. All of this comes after years of double-digit assessment increases and as local real estate markets continue to remain, at best, sluggish.

According to the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR) [pdf], home sales in the city and surrounding counties on average dropped 19 percent from last year—a 20 percent drop in Albemarle County and an 18 percent drop in Charlottesville. Median sales prices in Albemarle also dropped to $310,000 from $320,000, after four years of steady increases. Flattening assessments in the county reflect this.

“[Assessments] were pretty much right where we expected,” says Dave Phillips, CEO of CAAR. “The market had shown that the median price of homes that had sold in Charlottesville had risen, and that Albemarle’s had declined. And that is pretty much what bared out in the assessments.”

But while assessments reflect this across all six of the county’s districts—there was no increase or decrease larger than 1.5 percent—assessment growth in the city showed a less democratic increase. The median sales price for homes actually rose $40,000 in the city to $280,000. Charlottesville City Assessor Roosevelt Barbour, Jr. says that the more pricey city neighborhoods such as North Downtown, North Avenue and Meadowbrook Hills saw healthy sales but little to no increase in assessments.

However, neighborhoods like Belmont and Ridge Street—places in the city where housing is a little more affordable—are likely to see jumps in assessments between 8 and 14 percent. “The reason for that is they are the most affordable houses, so they’re selling,” says Barbour. “You get more sales, and those sales are escalating, and thus the assessments follow suit.”

So while city residents in certain neighborhoods may be breathing a sigh of relief that their property taxes have finally leveled off, others aren’t so lucky.

And the rises in assessments in affordable neighborhoods contrasted with relatively stagnate assessments in wealthier ones begs a question: Is the bottom of the Charlottesville real estate market—you know, the affordable part—coming up to meet its pricier middle, pricing lower-income residents out in the process? Barbour can’t say.

“I don’t know,” he says. “We don’t have a crystal ball, and we’re just here to interpret what the market’s doing.”

Barbour says that the market has caught up with the most expensive homes in the city, as seen in the flat increase in assessments. If the rise in assessments and in median prices are any indication, the markets in more affordable neighborhoods such as Belmont aren’t done rising. And if that’s true, then a stock of housing for lower-income or first-time homebuyers within a city with a shortage of affordable housing is in danger of further shrinking.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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News

Becoming Dr. Rock

Who says that graduate-level research is a drag? Carey Sargent, a UVA sociology grad student and local musician, has been working long hours on her dissertation about local music scenes…by going to hear good music and talking to really interesting people.

“For a long time I’ve been thinking about ways to talk about music in a sociological framework,” she says. “Why do people make music? What’s the role of music in U.S. society?


Move over, Jack Black: Sociology grad student Carey Sargent is studying how local musicians connect with each other.

“With this project, I’ve been interested in musicians’ lives, especially musicians working at a local level. They’re not professionals. They don’t have a record deal. In Charlottesville and Richmond, there’s such a rich music scene going on, and it’s all because of people doing it because they want to.”

A video of Carey Sargent talking about her studies.

As those scenes evolve, expand or flatten out, as they inevitably do, media technology has emerged as a large driving force in how local bands get their music out and connect with fans and each other. This is what interests Sargent. In the era of MySpace and mp3s, how are musicians creating new forms of social organization?

With these online tools, says Sargent, a band can begin to build a scene around themselves immediately and collaborate with other musicians. Slowly fading away are the days when you and your friends loaded in at a bar where nobody knows you or your songs and only wants to hear Maroon 5 covers.

“The people who are younger totally take it for granted that of course they need to be doing this scene-making, to be networking with people, to be promoting themselves,” says Sargent, who at 29 years old is positioned almost perfectly between Generation X and Generation Y. “They’re already doing it. They don’t talk about it in the sense like, ‘You know what I just figured out?’ The Gen X folks are like, ‘I’ve been struggling with this for years, and now I know what I’m supposed to do.’”

Last semester, while teaching her Culture and Power class, Sargent brought in two Charlottesville hip-hop musicians to perform. While researching the local scene for her dissertation, which she expects to complete next spring, Sargent says she had a hard time finding any local hip-hop acts. Then she logged on to Soundclick.com, a dinosaur of downloading.

“That was where I first found that there’s tons of hip-hop artists here,” says Sargent. “There’s just not that many venues for them to play in, and not enough of an infrastructure. There’s nobody here that’s got a big distribution deal or a label. There’s nobody here with the institutional power to create a scene here.”

The recent shutdown of hip-hop shows at the one venue that supported local artists, The Outback Lodge, was essentially the death knell for any open hip-hop scene. The situation is complicated, Sargent says.

“It’s hard not to think there’s something going on there. It’s not like there’s a specific person or policeman or ethnographer—me—or the press, who’re also white, are trying to suppress the scene or control it. But there’s something institutional going on. There’s a lot of things that are going on there where race and class intersect.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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News

Know your presidential primary

Depending on just how super Super Tuesday turns out to be, the Virginia presidential primaries might just become meaningful. On February 5, Super Tuesday, 24 states hold primaries that will go a long way in determining presidential candidates for both parties. But maybe not all the way.


Barack Obama will be on the February 12 Democratic primary ballot, but so will also-rans like Bill Richardson and Joe Biden.

If Super Tuesday fails to cement both a Democratic and Republican candidate, then Virginia’s February 12 primary suddenly gains more importance than originally thought. The national spotlight will be on you, Virginia! With that in mind, keep your fingers out of your nose, smile and try not to screw this up. Here’s what you need to know.

Polls in the city and county will open at 6am and close at 7pm. Because Virginia, unlike most states, is an open-primary state, anyone registered to vote in Virginia can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary. But be prepared to pick. Election officials will ask whether you want a Democratic or Republican ballot, something that doesn’t happen in local and statewide elections.

“Some people are going to feel like that’s an invasion of privacy,” says Sheri Iachetta, the city’s general registrar. “But if they want to vote, they’re going to have to say ‘I want the Democratic [or Republican] ballot.’”

A word about those ballots. They aren’t exactly what you’d call “up-to-date.” Each ballot has six candidates, most of whom have dropped out of the race. Virginia, the nation is watching. Don’t vote for these losers. Your vote will be wasted. Thank you.

Here are each of the ballots, with the names in the order you will see them, with viable candidates in bold.

Democratic Primary: Barack Obama, Dennis J. Kucinich, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, John Edwards.

Republican Primary: Ron Paul, John McCain, Fred D. Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney.

While you can only vote in one primary, it doesn’t matter if you belong to that party. Unlike in most states, you don’t register with a party; those who consider themselves Republicans can vote for the Democratic candidate and vise versa.

So this is it, Virginia. All eyes are on you…if Super Tuesday doesn’t produce clear-cut winners. If it does, well, just go out there and have some fun.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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News

Assembly can’t kill HPV vaccine

Last year, Virginia joined Texas as the only states to require sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated for the human papillomavirus (HPV), a move that outraged social conservatives in both places. Now Texas has backed out of its requirement, and in Virginia, legislators are trying to push back requirement’s start date, or kill it altogether.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 10 of the 30 strains of HPV can lead to cervical cancer. The HPV virus is contracted through sexual contact.

The required HPV vaccination’s term in legislative purgatory has left local schools in a wait-and-see mode. Beth Baptist, the director of special education and student services for Charlottesville City Schools, says that the school system is holding off on giving parents vaccine information until a date is set for its requirement.

“Some parents have gone ahead and given us documentation,” says Baptist. “But we were really waiting until it was definite as to when we would be required to do it before we started sending out information about it.”

Two bills that would have removed the requirement for the vaccine have been killed in committee. A third bill would extend the starting date of the requirement from its original date, October 2008, to October 2010. The House passed that bill on January 21, referring it to the Senate Committee on Education and Health.

Since the General Assembly passed the law, it has received a vicious backlash. Of course, requiring 12- and 13-year-old girls to be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease was akin to sticking your arm in a political woodchipper. But there is also the issue of the vaccination itself.

In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration approved Merck’s Gardasil, the first vaccine to gain approval. That February, the Associated Press reported that Texas Governor Rick Perry, who had just required HPV vaccinations for all girls entering sixth grade, had accepted $5,000 from Merck’s political action committee the same day that Perry’s chief of staff met with key aides about the vaccine.

Perry’s office has denied any wrongdoing. This May, Perry declined to veto a bill that reversed his earlier order to require vaccinations.

Virginia, however, has not yet reversed course. And with both bills calling for reversal killed in committee, it seems that if any changes are made to the vaccination requirement, they will only extend its start date. This leaves school administrators like Baptist in what she calls a “holding pattern.”

Baptist says she knows that if and when the requirement goes into effect, it will be a sensitive issue, and that she will be saddled with the large task of informing parents about the vaccine and how they can opt out of the requirement.

“It is looking at a long-term prevention for students who become sexually active,” she says. “When you add in that piece of it, that is something the parents need to look at and talk with their children. It’s a whole different philosophy base than some of the other shots.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com

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News

UVA Institute finds lessons in Tech shootings

Roger Depue, former FBI agent and member of the Virginia Tech shooting commission, stood in front of members of the mental health officials and talked about “leakage.” In Depue’s view, everyone has a fantasy life. When a person has a particularly intense fantasy, hints of it seep out. For some, said Depue, “it is impossible not to leak what they hold dear.”


“People hide behind the law and stop thinking about what the right thing to do is,” said Richard Bonnie, director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy.

He turned to a Powerpoint slide projected on an 8′ high screen. On it was the now infamous image of Seung-Hui Cho pointing two handguns at the camera, an image that had flashed across millions of TV screens in the days after the April 16 Virginia Tech shootings.

“Leakage,” Depue said in his understated tone, “sometimes takes the form of warning signs.”

The Friday morning panel featuring Depue was part of a two-day conference presented by the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at UVA. James Reinhard, commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Mental Health, and Richard Bonnie, director of the institute, joined Depue in a panel called “Reflections Upon the Virginia Tech Tragedy.”

Depue, who was called in as a consultant to the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, asked the audience regarding Cho, “Where were the opportunities for intervention?” He then went into a detailed history of the troubled teenager’s background, listing points in time where such opportunities, either by the state or the school, were missed. At the time of the shooting, Depue said, police, professors, students and the college all had important information about Cho.

“But there was little sharing,” Depue said.

Later, Bonnie laid a significant portion of the blame for the lack of sharing squarely at the feet of overly complicated laws. Worried about privacy concerns relating to the Family Educational Right and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), colleges like Virginia Tech choose to err on the side of personal privacy.

“It’s just easier to say it’s against privacy rules than to think about whether it’s actually against the rules,” he said. “People hide behind the law and stop thinking about what the right thing to do is.”

The Tech shootings, said Bonnie, are bringing up echoes of a debate that has continued since September 11th: the struggle between public safety and private rights.

Bonnie argued that the complexity of privacy laws has lead to institutional paralysis in colleges and universities.

“I do think the law is at fault here,” he said. “[Universities] don’t think about what the right thing to do is. They look at the law to what they can do.”

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News

Stacking, stepping, selling and shooting

Todd Lucas is a natural public speaker. With his close-cropped hair and nearly perfect sense of timing, he talks with an aggressive brand of humor that isn’t so much of the in-your-face variety as it is a “Get a load of this” inclusiveness. With his arms waving, chin jutting out and his ever-present laser pointer always at the ready, he is nothing if not engaging.

And judging by his rank of detective with the Charlottesville Police Department, Lucas is a pretty good cop to boot.

Lucas is one of a pair of local detectives who gives gang-awareness presentations to local community groups and schools. Detective Jim Hope of the Albemarle County Police Department rounds out the duo, and on Monday, February 4 they were at the Senior Center to run through the presentation for local senior citizens.


Detective Todd Lucas, shown here at a September gang presentation, had some awkward moments explaining terms like M.O.B. (“Money Over Bitches”) to a group of seniors.

It was essentially the same presentation that the two detectives gave in September to city and county residents. That night, the mood was heavier, more formal. Both Lucas and Hope wore jackets and ties.

Monday’s presentation was more freewheeling, with moments of levity between troublesome pictures and brow-furrowing information. It was, however, not without its awkward moments. The tasks of explaining the abbreviations M.O.B. (“Money Over Bitches”) and C.M.F. (“Crazy Motherfuckers”) to a roomful of grandparents fell to both Hope and Lucas. Each explanation, where uncustomary words were reluctantly, if clinically, employed, felt weirdly reminiscent of a coming-of-age sex talk, only with the roles reversed.

The audience of roughly 30 people watched a video clip of a man in baggy jeans and a loose t-shirt walk up to a table. His face is out of the frame, but his hands aren’t, and they begin pulling various handguns from his pockets and waistband. There were small gasps from the audience as he set the first five guns on the table. They turned into giggles as the guns kept coming, all 11 of them, until the man in the video came to his coup de grace, pulling a 3′-long rifle from his right pant leg.

Like the presentation in September, this one consisted of various photos of graffiti and tattoos, all of which were gathered from the city and county. When it came time to explain the two sides of the gang world—the People and Folk nations—Lucas played to his crowd.

“Who hasn’t seen West Side Story?” he asked. No one raised a hand. Hope got a similar reaction to the white supremacy section of the presentation, in which he showed a forearm tattoo with the words “April 20.”

“Who knows what April 20 is?” he asked the group, which contained its fair share of World War II veterans. Two voices replied in unison: “Hitler’s birthday.”

Lucas leaped up from his chair. “I told you they would know!”

After the presentation, there were looks of disbelief as people filed out or made their way up front to talk to Lucas and Hope. One woman, who didn’t want her name used, said, “It scared me to death.” She has two grandchildren, ages 9 and 12, and said she’s worried about how everything that she’d seen might affect them. “I’m so overwhelmed.”

Al Highsmith, a jocular World War II veteran who’s lived in the Charlottesville area for 15 years, said he was surprised to see the level of gang activity hidden around the city and county in plain sight.

“It almost makes me want to stay home at night,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about it for a few years, then BANG, here it is. I remember seeing the side of Circuit City painted up. I thought if there were going to be gangs, they’d be down at Garret Square, but boy, that’s scary.”

He paused a second and looked up at Lucas and Hope, two men in their late 20s or early 30s, breaking down the laptop projector and winding up cords. “It’s just downright scary.”

Categories
Living

February 08: Value shuffle

The new year is here, and with it comes the arrival of certain yearly items for which we each give a shout of joy. Usually, real estate assessments aren’t of this particular group. But for those of us wishing, hoping, trying (and, depending on your faith and/or desperation, praying) to sell our houses in this unpredictable market, annual assessments might just offer some guidance in finding the perfect price to move your home.

Right?

Well, if Realtor Charles McDonald’s two tales of assessments offer any indication, not really.

McDonald, a Realtor for Remax Assured Properties, tells the story of recently receiving an e-mail flyer for a property. This particular house was listed over $100,000 below the assessed value.

“On a personal note,” says McDonald, “if somebody were to offer me the assessed value for my personal residence today, I’d have a contract in their hand in 15 minutes. It is so far out of whack right now. [Assessments] are riding way too high.”

But with the market aggressively softening in the last six to nine months, expect this year’s assessments (which, for Charlottesville and Albemarle, come out at the beginning of February) to reflect the market’s downturn. And with the market as shifty as it is, just how much should you and your agent rely on the newest assessments when tackling the most important step in selling your home—pricing it correctly?

First, it’s important to know the difference between an assessment and an appraisal. An assessment is the price the city or county uses to figure your real estate taxes. They are done yearly by assessors working for each locality. An appraisal is a different monster. Independent contractors do appraisals at the request of real estate agents, usually just before a sale is closed.

City and county assessors both try to determine the fair market value of a property—the land and any structural improvements. They use many of the same market-analysis data that agents use, such as recent sales of comparable houses. An appraiser, though, is able to do a more thorough job. He or she has full access to the property and house and detailed knowledge of any improvements. Assessors don’t.

County Assessor Bruce Woodzell says that each assessor is assigned a certain number of properties, and goes out to each during the day. But many times they don’t have the opportunity to go inside each house and have to make an educated guess at what they are pricing.

“It’s the first thing they teach you when you sit in the classroom,” says Woodzell. “Day one: It is not an exact science; it’s an opinion of value based on some good techniques.”

So does it make sense to use your new assessment in setting a listing price?

“It used to play more of a role, but I look at it now and it does not seem to make sense,” says McDonald. “Honestly, I can’t use [assessments] right now.”

What McDonald suggests, though, is to jump ahead in the process a bit and have your house appraised before setting a price.

“Normally I would just do a CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) on a new listing. Recently I have been advising my clients to also get a professional appraisal from a (licensed) appraisal company. This gives the homeowner a true picture of their home’s current market value when determining list price.”

So while your home’s assessed value is a best guess, you may want to get a second opinion before listing it, especially as yearly assessments struggle to keep up with this rapidly changing market.

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News

Fixing Virginia, one strange bill at a time [with audio]

Quick, name Virginia’s state song.

If you think you know it, you’re wrong. Since 1997, when “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was officially “retired,” Virginny…er…Virginia has been a state sans song. But there are bills raring to go in Richmond that will fix this—and a myriad other pressing problems on which senators and delegates have seen fit to get their legislation on.


If HB1544 is passed, leave your piece behind when you go boozing: It prohibits a person carrying a concealed weapon from consuming alcohol in restaurants or clubs.

Listen to "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny":


powered by ODEO

There are four bills in the state General Assembly to get Virginia a new state song—among them “Virginia: Where Heaven Touches Earth,” “Cradle of Liberty” and a revised version of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” that, the bills states, can be “sung with affection and pride” (if not with cognitive dissonance regarding the Fugitive Slave Act).

But state songs aren’t the only major issues garnering political attention. There’s a bill that would make English the official language of Virginia (note to self: Stop conducting official interviews in Kurdish). There’s another that would provide damages to you if someone used your name in an unauthorized website address. There’s what can only be called the Poltergeist Bill, legislation that requires disclosure of whether property is, or has been, a cemetery.

And then there are the concealed weapons bills. Imagine, if you will, a scenario that goes something like this: You’re a UVA faculty member who’s got a hankering to carry a concealed handgun while teaching. If HB424 passes, you’re in luck: It allows for just that, assuming you have a permit.

But teaching while not being able to legally shoot students could get Prof Doe down, so he ducks into Michael’s Bistro for a quick couple shots of the hard stuff. Well, if HB1544 is passed, no luck: It prohibits a person carrying a concealed weapon from consuming alcohol in restaurants or clubs.

Now let’s say you lose your concealed carry permit. Things happen. People get fired. Tempers flare. And now you have this urge to drive aimlessly around with your gun, by now your only friend. If SB436 passes, you’re in the clear. It would allow for any person who can legally own a handgun (this is Virginia and you haven’t sunk that low yet) to carry it in a car or boat if the gun is locked in a container or compartment. Maybe even someplace nice and handy, like some sort of compartment usually reserved for gloves.

Of course, the parsing of this new legal language becomes unnecessary if, prior to your teaching days, you were a member of the Capitol Police or have just landed a job as an attorney for the Commonwealth. If two other bills pass, neither retired Capitol cops nor state attorneys will need concealed carry permits to pack undercover heat.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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News

Admission numbers up, but why?

For the second year in a row, UVA set a record for the number of admission applications it received. Not that you’re unimpressed by such a record, because clearly UVA exudes impressiveness, but this was also the first year since the 1960s that the University hasn’t had an early decision program.


Administrators are happy that undergrad applications are up 4 percent after ditching early admission, but C-VILLE wonders if the writer’s strike or the “off-the-grid” movement might play a part as well.

Impressive, no? UVA officials anticipate that the University will receive 18,776 applications when all is said and done, a 4 percent increase from last year when applications jumped by more than 12 percent.

So what’s behind the steady increase of wannabe Hoos? The answer to that is unclear, and when answers are unclear,
C-VILLE does what the media does best: offer lame theories.

Theory 1: Overwhelming number of newspaper readers have decided to track down this “Larry Sabato” figure to see if he really exists.

Theory 2: Increasing number of back-to-nature 18-year-olds who want to live “off the grid” flock to UVA for chance at Lawn Room living.

Theory 3: In midst of writers’ strike, hordes of undereducated TV writers with loads of time on their hands decide to go the Tina Fey route.

Theory 4: With 97 percent of applications coming in online, kids finally catching on to this “Internet” phenomenon.

Theory 5: Finally attracting the large, ultradesirable contingent of rich fundamentalist Christians who have found a public place in which to embrace each other and shout, “Not gay!”

Categories
News

Gun show loophole bills far from slam dunk

Two weeks ago, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, surrounded by the families of Virginia Tech shooting victims, announced his support for legislation to close what has come to be known as Virginia’s “gun show loophole.” Creigh Deeds, state senator representing Charlottesville, who recently announced his run for governor in 2009, has opposed such legislation in the past.

Though a story in The Roanoke Times reported that Deeds has not changed his mind on closing the loophole, Deeds has backed away from such a firm stance on an issue that is one big potential shit storm in a statewide election.


State Senator Creigh Deeds has “an open mind” on whether the gunshow purchasing loophole should be closed.

“I’ve got an open mind on this bill,” says Deeds, a member of the courts of justice committee, slated to vote on the bill January 21. The bill, introduced in the Senate, requires private sellers to run criminal background checks on buyers. “I’m going to listen to the testimony and gather information to learn as much as I can.”

The bill, sponsored by Democratic Senator Henry Marsh, also further defines a firearm show vender as anyone not licensed as a Virginia gun dealer who sells, offers to sell, transfers or trades any firearm at a gun show. A similar House bill was killed in committee January 18.

The gun show loophole gained national attention after the Virginia Tech shootings, even though Seung-Hui Cho didn’t purchase his guns at gun shows. Deeds says that he is worried that closing the loophole would miss addressing the problems of gun violence and crime while setting a dangerous precedent.

“What I worry about is that we will do something and not actually accomplish much,” says Deeds. “I worry about something that’s more smoke than fire.

“My concern is that if we establish a precedent for private transactions requiring a background check, we set a precedent. And unless we have the data to support that a significant number of these transactions occur at gun shows and a significant number of those guns are linked to crime…we’ve got to have the data to back it up.”

Though the bill defines transactions within a “firearms show,” including parking lots, Deeds wants to find out how many of the 40 to 45 percent of firearm transactions involving unlicensed sellers actually occur at shows.

“I’m not sure intellectually there’s much difference,” between deals made inside and outside a gun show, he says. “If we’re going to make that distinction, I want to make sure we’re being intellectually honest about it.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.