C-VILLE Weekly

They called it an incubator: the upstairs of the Charlottesville Tomorrow building on West Main Street, space leased to University faculty whose ideas no longer quite fit the contours of academia. To move into one of the six offices subsidized by UVA’s Patent Foundation signaled progress for a new biotech company. It meant that early-phase experiments had flourished in their Petri dishes. They called the space an incubator because, here, ideas conceived in a University research lab took another baby step on the long march to becoming products.

That was just a few short years ago, but if you want to keep pace today you don’t walk, you run. Somewhere along the way, the incubator became an accelerator. The offices are vacant now. The new start-up space is a “wet lab” complete with plumbing. It’s situated nearer to the University’s main research labs, sharing the Corner Building on West Main Street with the Patent Foundation’s venture capital arm, Spinner Technologies, Inc. From here it’s just a stroll to campus, and with time and luck, the beaten path from University to accelerator may now become the fast track to the Research Park.

Completed last spring, the 530-acre North Fork complex, also known as the Center for Emerging Technology, is proximate to the airport, suggesting even further possibilities.

From humble office incubator to a $4.4 million research center, UVA has clearly set its sights on becoming a big biotech player. Broadly, biotechnology refers to any technique that uses living organisms or parts of them, such as DNA, to make products. In fact, some believe UVA could jumpstart the whole region, bringing jobs and new companies—if it only had the labs to attract the researchers to draw the investors. When the single UVA start-up to hit the NASDAQ skipped town, it was time to add some real estate.

 

If that sounds a wee commercial for the ivory tower, in fact an entrepreneurial spirit is “the new model” for universities everywhere. It’s been 23 years since Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave universities the right to patent Federally funded research, and the vision continues to expand. As one speaker advised at the Governor’s Biotech Advisory Board meeting last fall—attended by many UVA employees—the goal of a university is no longer “just the creation of knowledge, but creating potential spin-offs.”

To that end arose Spinner in 2000, meant to aid faculty in all facets of starting a company. General Manager Andrea Almes explains why the term incubator has given way to “accelerator,” saying that in the 1970s, when the first wave of biotech rippled through the universities, incubators became synonymous with “cheap lab space.” Getting ideas into the commercial pipeline, or what’s called technology transfer, hinges on more than just real estate, she says.

Finding affordable lab space is one of many hurdles along the road from campus to market. First, a researcher has to pop the question to the Patent Foundation: Will it fly?

Many of the biotech discoveries that find their way to the Patent Office can be categorized as engineered proteins destined to become drugs. Diagnostic tools and kits, like a home fertility kit, for instance, make up another segment, according to Foundation Director Bob MacWright. The Foundation’s breadwinner, Adenocard, is used to stabilize heart attack victims.

But of the 135 ideas proposed by faculty last year, according to MacWright, only about half will ultimately receive patents. Even then, not all patented discoveries lead to a start-up, and not all start-ups will produce a “real revenue-generating platform technology.” Finally, no matter how good the idea, it still takes about seven years to get to market.

Of the drugs that go into clinical trials, for instance—and the biomedical portion of the bio-pie makes up the largest share of inventions—most don’t make it, according to Michael Wormington, director of UVA’s human biology program.

Clearly, biotech—a term coined by The Wall Street Journal some 20 years ago—is a high-risk venture. True, say supporters, but it can also carry a high pay-off: nothing venture capitaled, so to speak, nothing gained.

Many shoulder the burden, banking on the benefits. There are the various investors and drug companies, faculty and universities, the Federal government, which underwrites much of the research—and taxpayers, whose funds, after all, support potential cancer and arthritis drugs, as well as dogs like the deadly diet drug combo Fen-Phen.

Whether Central Virginia will reap great rewards from this risky business is debatable. Even as biotech is on the rise in urban areas, it’s still in its nascent stages here.

In the meantime, committees and organizations from Virginia Gateway to the Virginia Biotechnology Association monitor vital signs. There’s promise locally, they say, but there are also many roadblocks. It was noted during the fall Governor’s biotech advisory board meeting that the State’s colleges and universities are lagging in several areas. A long list of shortcomings was drawn: There’s too little research space, faculty attracts less funding than their national peers, more venture capital is needed, and so on.

Obtaining venture capital is one of many of Spinner’s goals, and the waiting list of faculty seeking services leaves Almes confident that one day Charlottesville will experience the surge of biotech.

MacWright is more skeptical. “It’s a worldwide market,” he says. “Charlottesville is a small town. What happens here won’t be as dramatic.

“But I look forward to the day,” he continues with a laugh, “when I can license every technology without making a toll call.”

These days just about every research university has a technology licensing office, as well as funds set aside to bankroll commercially promising projects. For the most part, the profits of the enterprise—if there are any—further the enterprise.

“The bulk of it goes back to the inventor’s lab,” says Dave Hudson, associate vice president for research. That is, after the inventor has received his share as personal income and the Patent Foundation taken its slice, most of the revenues go back to the inventor’s lab for another round of R&D.

While a percentage of profits is earmarked for an inventor’s particular school, that doesn’t kick in until after the first $100,000 in royalties come in, and it’s a system of diminishing returns overall.

In all of this, the nonprofit Patent Foundation remains outside the University’s budget. It’s one of 24 foundations launched by UVA with the expectation that they would become self-supporting (the Patent Foundation has done that). Both UVA and the Patent Foundation are shareholders in its for-profit subsidiary, Spinner.

And while the revenues can be substantial in some cases, the costs are steep: between $30,000 and $50,000 just to acquire and maintain a single patent for its 20-year lifespan.

Yet the purpose of the Bayh-Dole Act was to enrich a wider sphere than the university. The point of commercializing university inventions was to boost the economy.

To a certain degree that has happened with UVA’s biotech operations, except the economy that has been assisted is not Charlottesville’s. Even though roughly 200 patented inventions have poured forth from UVA labs and 30 start-up companies are listed with the Foundation, much of the biotech money is being made—or collected—elsewhere.

 

One UVA faculty start-up, now in the Corner Building, is ContraVac, Inc., a company started by cell biologist John Herr. Herr emphasizes the role of biotech in creating jobs here, yet big pharmaceutical companies outside the area primarily fund ContraVac, which produces a contraceptive vaccine, among other things.

“When you license to big pharma,” says Herr, using the industry slang for pharmaceuticals, “someone else benefits.”

The limiting factor here, according to Wormington, who was once involved in a biotech start-up, is a skilled work force, that is, the kind of technicians who can do everything from setting up lab equipment to collecting data. “We’re, in essence, an academic town. It’s difficult to see biotech expanding here,” he says.

Techies might be missing, but since the Patent Foundation came into being in 1978, business savvy is not. The Foundation was established specifically to address the lack of business know-how among academics.

They needed a lot of help, according to MacWright. After all, most had never developed a business plan or filed for a patent.

There were other problems, too, says inventor Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf, an engineering physics professor who joined the faculty in 1963. Now 80, Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf is one of the few women who have ventured a start-up (Although they comprise more than half the University’s full-time teaching and research faculty, women are noticeably absent among UVA’s biotech entrepreneurs).

With several successful inventions to her credit, she calls herself “a habitual offender.” One of the biggest challenges she faced with her early innovations involved Small Business Innovative Research grants.

“There was not a mechanism in place then,” says Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf, her German accent precisely honing each syllable. Laws favored the small company that had applied for the grant and subcontracted work to the University. When the job was done inventors were left with nothing, while the company assumed the rights to their inventions. “I call it the so nice to have known you syndrome…” says Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf.

Herr expresses a similar sentiment. “You write a paper, you pour yourself into it, and the lifespan of that impact is a decade or so—but all the knowledge becomes incorporated into others’ work,” he says. “One soon realizes the paper is not the end.”

Herr belongs to a small number of faculty, maybe 15 percent, involved in “translational” research. This entails designing proof-of-concept experiments and other methods that further basic ideas down the road to application.

But nothing can be applied to anything else without basic research. In short, basic research asks how something works, while the applied realm asks how it can be made to work. The two may cross-pollinate, but applied research generally refers to the development of discoveries arising from basic investigation.

“If we only did applied research, we would still be making better spears,” says George Smoot on the website of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to Smoot, the importance of basic, undirected research is that “People cannot foresee the future well enough to predict what’s going to develop from basic research.”

This is why universities are regarded by investors as “idea factories,” which keep the well from drying up. While today, some scientists say the line between basic and applied research is blurry, other critics go further, calling it “muddy.”

 

One concern that scientists talk about off the record is that with increased industry sponsorship, University research will become increasingly product-driven. In other words, it will be limited to the research questions likely to get the greatest funding.

The majority of funding now continues to flow from Federal sources—UVA receiving about 66 percent of its research budget from the Federal government—but these grants are often shared with industry. Additionally, corporate sponsorship is growing.

The government has also allotted considerable funding for product-geared study, and enabled it with tax breaks, strong enforcement of intellectual property laws, and a heavy reliance on self-regulation over state intervention.

Self-regulation, as has become apparent in other lines of business, is something industry should not be left to handle alone. It could mean the house will burn while no one’s looking. Regulation interferes with profit.

A March 2000 article in Atlantic Monthly attributed the same sorts of problems to institutions of higher learning, saying, “Universities have been very unsuccessful in developing conflict of interest policies.”

With the passage of Bayh-Dole, a myriad of problems has arisen that could be subject to so-called self-regulation. They include factors such as faculty entrepreneurs’ financial interests in their companies or the companies sponsoring their work; the university’s related investments; potential for bias, and so on. But neither the state nor the Federal government has come up with uniform policies that would apply to universities across the board. Instead, there is ample room for case-by-case consideration.

Dave Hudson, who is the Chief Compliance Officer for research at UVA, says, “I would agree that there are problems coming up with great, concise policies, but we’re aided by a carefully crafted State statute. It clearly speaks to issues of contracts in which faculty have direct financial interest.”

Yet Virginia imposes no absolute limits on the amount of equity faculty can have in a company. In some cases, it’s 100 percent; in others, merely 3 percent will trigger the review process. That process calls for disclosure of the financial interest and then approval from various committees.

Since the university’s interests can be financial, you might say there’s another layer of potential conflict; an incentive to allow exemptions.

According to Jennifer Washburn, reporting in the Atlantic article, only 55 percent of self-regulation policies nationwide even required disclosure of conflict-of-interest from all faculty. The piece concluded with a series of recommendations for safeguarding objectivity. One of these was that universities be “banned from investing in companies sponsoring their professors’ work, as well as other start-up companies founded by their professors.”

 

When the whole biotech craze began, faculty members who started their own companies left the academy. This is far less likely today. Wormington is one of those who took a yearlong leave of absence in order to pursue a start-up venture. Some colleagues at other universities have done the same, he says.

While Bayh-Dole gave universities new incentive to hold onto their researchers, some in biotech feel the incentives could be better. They believe there should be new standards of promotion and tenure based not on scholarship—the number of papers published, for example—but the number of products that reach the marketplace.

Others are concerned that teaching has begun to suffer due to changing priorities.

In a UVA Online interview last spring with AIDS Clinic Director Brian Wispelway, who is widely considered a great teacher and clinician, he said, “I have a genuine concern about how we’re going to pay for the commitment to teaching when everything else is being rewarded.”

In the 23 years since Bayh-Dole opened the doors of the ivory tower and The Wall Street Journal named a new branch of scientific commerce, the University is still sorting it all out…how to preserve academic freedom, how to be an economic engine, and now more than ever as it faces the worst State budget crisis in Virginia’s history, how to fund itself in the entrepreneurial age.

The resulting contradiction couldn’t be sharper: While developers and their supporters on Council hammer a “Wealthy Buyers Only” sign on the top of the City gates, a new breed of disenfranchised City dwellers is sprouting below. Lynn Wiber is among them. Educated and employed, she has no home of her own and few prospects of getting one. Hers is the new face of homelessness.

As night falls and the wind picks up in Charlottesville, a local radio station broadcasts the weather report: Lows tonight will be in the single digits, with highs tomorrow in the teens.

Lynn Wiber always pays close attention to the forecast, especially in winter, and meteorologists predict tonight, January 17, will be one of the coldest nights on record. To keep warm, Wiber wears a substantial portion of her entire wardrobe, which she keeps in four shopping bags stacked atop her employee locker at Barnes & Noble in the Barracks Road shopping center.

“I’ve got a place to stay tonight,” Wiber assures her co-workers, who have heard the forecast and worry for her safety.

But she couldn’t divulge many details about her shelter for the night. She had recently arranged to pay an acquaintance $90 per week to sleep in the woman’s apartment (her part-time job nets Wiber about $127 a week). Since the subleasor’s primary income is from disability payments, she and Wiber have to keep the arrangement hush-hush. Otherwise, the woman’s government assistance check could be cut.

“She needs the money and I actually have a bed,” Wiber says. “It’s great for both of us… as long as nobody rats us out.”

To avoid arousing suspicion, Wiber doesn’t want to go to the apartment near Downtown until late. She will kill time with one of the few entertainment options available to Charlottesville’s poor and homeless—walking the streets.

Outside Barnes & Noble, people grimace in the bitter night air, scurrying from their cars toward the warm, glowing shops. Wiber starts walking south toward UVA. Tonight she hopes to meet some friends, a couple expecting their first child. Since they’re also homeless, they likely will spend the evening as Wiber does, walking around trying not to freeze.

As Wiber passes Harris Teeter, she mentions that before she found regular shelter she would often spend the night sitting in the 24-hour grocery’s café, reading one of the more than 400 books she has borrowed from Barnes & Noble since she began her employment there in August 2000. Checking out books is an employee perquisite Wiber says has proved invaluable in the fight against boredom that comes with homelessness.

“I can just get into a book and ship my mind off to somewhere else,” she says. She’s currently reading The Mouse that Roared , a 1955 allegory about the United States going to war that Wiber, 46, first read when she was a child in Richmond.

A black Ford Explorer pulls alongside her. The tinted window drops halfway, and a pink-cheeked face yells out something unintelligible. The truck roars up Arlington Boulevard.

“The best and the brightest,” Wiber says. She laughs with a tinge of bitterness. “They’ve been given everything, and they think they’re entitled to it.”

Wiber professes no resentment towards the well off per se, but she is offended, she says, by those who feel entitled to wealth and view poor people as failures. As traffic rushes by along Emmet Street, she reflects on money’s place in society. In a City with so much wealth, why must some people scrape and struggle just to keep a roof over their heads?

Wiber is no materialist, claiming that by choice she limits her possessions to what can fit in a car. A trained nurse, she never expected to get rich. Nor did she figure she’d ever be homeless; that is, until she moved to Charlottesville.

“I’ve made it on minimum wage before, I thought I could do it here,” she says. “Maybe I was blind or stupid, but I didn’t realize how expensive it is to live here.”

As part of its long-range planning, City Council is now forming a task force to examine Charlottesville’s housing market. Included in the task force’s mandate are instructions to consider protecting “diversity” and “vulnerable populations.” Wiber doesn’t believe these phrases apply to her.

“Diversity isn’t just ethnic, it’s economic,” she says. “Council’s motto is ‘A World Class City,’ but they really just want Charlottesville to be for the nice people, the rich people.”

 

Conclusive data on the composition and trends among Charlottesville’s homeless population do not exist, but anecdotal evidence suggests Wiber’s situation is not uncommon, says Reed Banks. As co-chair of the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless, Banks says he wants to refute common myths about local homelessness.

“These are not transient drunks,” says Banks. “For the most part, the homeless in Charlottesville are people who have lived here all their lives, and they’ve fallen out of the community because they can’t afford housing. They are working people. They are families with children.”

In January, workers from the Coalition and volunteers from the Salvation Army combed the City and surveyed more than 100 homeless people. According to Evan Scully, who is directing the information-gathering project, the survey reveals that:

•62 percent had been homeless for less than six months;

•36 percent said they were currently employed; and

•39 percent were homeless with their families.

“It appears that the number of homeless families in the area is on the way up,” Scully says. “It fits what you find nationally, but it’s a surprise to many people.

“By far,” he says, “the biggest problem in this area is affordable housing.”

Scully says the market for Section 8 rental assistance is one measure of the low-income housing crisis. Section 8 is Federal money that helps low-income people pay for housing. In Charlottesville and Albemarle County, there are approximately 613 and 458 housing units, respectively, where poor people can use Section 8 vouchers.

Yet demand far outstrips supply. In Charlottesville, for instance, there are more than 1,000 people on the waiting list. In the County, about 475 people are waiting. A person applying today for Section 8 rental assistance can expect to wait between one and two years or more before getting help, Scully says.

“In a crisis situation, that’s too late,” says Scully. “By the time help reaches someone, they’ve had to go on to some other desperation move.”

The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development funds Section 8 housing and emergency homeless shelters. But HUD won’t fork over money unless local governments endorse the projects. Banks says the City has consistently refused to endorse developments that would benefit the poor, such as a homeless shelter Banks recently pitched. By contrast, Albemarle County agreed to endorse the shelter, says Banks.

“We’ve consistently run into problems trying to get the City to endorse these kinds of projects,” he says. “The jurisdictions don’t work together as well as they could in providing housing for the indigent.”

City Strategic Planner Satyendra Huja says it’s up to developers, not the City, to build low-income housing. But the City can use its clout to fight proposed low-income housing, as it did several years ago when a developer wanted to build 200 units on Elliot Avenue. “We thought that was unreasonable,” says Huja. “Now, that land has 36 units available for home ownership.”

Huja acknowledges that the City’s housing strategy is focused on helping people buy homes, not easing rent burdens.

“Charlottesville has 22 percent of the region’s population, and 50 percent of the region’s subsidized housing,” says Huja. “Affordable rental housing is a problem, but we have more than our fair share. The surrounding counties should take their share of the burden.”

The problem is simple economics. For developers, affordable housing in Charlottesville isn’t as lucrative as higher-end units. In the City’s view, rent assistance is an ongoing financial commitment, while helping a new homeowner is a one-time expense.

Also, says Huja, lots of low-income renters in the City put a greater strain on the City’s budget in areas like police protection and social services.

High rents may discourage poor people from moving to Charlottesville, but for the working poor who already live here, the housing market is what drives many to seek social services for the first time, those providers say.

“The assumption is that people in poverty are not working, and that’s simply not true,” says Jon Nafziger, Vice President for Community Initiatives at the local United Way. “Many are working full time or working two jobs, and they’re just not making enough money to completely support themselves.”

 

For Wiber, Charlottesville was supposed to be the perfect place to begin life again. She arrived here in June 2000 after a lifetime of starting over. At 17, she had left her home in Richmond to join a kibbutz in Israel, where she worked as a physician’s assistant. There she married a man named Ari who died six months later when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine. She traveled across Europe working as a nanny. Eventually, she borrowed thousands of dollars to attend Virginia Commonwealth University in her home city. While working in the emergency room at the Medical College of Virginia, she completed degrees in English literature and psychology in 1993. She worked in an emergency room in Richmond. She was a nanny in Colorado and Pennsylvania.

When Wiber’s mother died in 1997, she returned to Richmond again and moved in with her brother, David. She planned to stay in Richmond, but in April 2000 David died while rock climbing in West Virginia. She claims his last gifts to her were a $900 phone bill he incurred ordering expensive digital options for his computer and a depleted bank account. Wiber says David had used his Internet savvy to steal most of the $10,000 Wiber had socked away in a Pennsylvania bank.

“He was your classic sociopath,” she says. “He stole from our parents, from his jobs. I didn’t think he’d be able to get into my bank account, but I guess it’s not that hard if you know how to use computers.”

Wiber declared bankruptcy and left Richmond. “I always thought my family was cursed,” she says.

After surviving Beirut, the Golan Heights and Denver, Wiber saw Charlottesville as a small-town utopia, judging by its “10 Best” ranking among U.S. cities from magazines that calculate that kind of thing for golfers, tennis players and retirees.

“This community has everything I want,” she says. “There’s things to do, there’s good conversations, there’s music.” Alas, Charlottesville isn’t a very good place to be poor.

Wiber came to town with $600 and the Acura Legend she inherited from her mother. She got a full-time job at Barnes & Noble, but says she soon realized her $7.50 per hour salary, most of which went to pay her $400 a month rent, wasn’t enough to make ends meet. In February she moved into the Salvation Army’s transitional housing.

About that time she started frequenting the Army’s cafeteria, which provides free meals every day, as well as soup kitchens run by various local churches. “One good thing about Charlottesville is that, no matter what, you can always get fed,” says Wiber.

She lived at the Salvation Army for about one year before she started suffering mysterious seizures.

“The doctors told me I might be losing my mind. I wasn’t too happy to hear that,” she says.

She spent a week at Martha Jefferson Hospital undergoing tests. Doctors told her she had a lesion in her brain. Barnes & Noble cut her hours and her pay because, she says, the company felt her medical problems made it too difficult for her to reliably work full-time. With the demotion, she could no longer afford to pay the Salvation Army’s $255 monthly rent. In late March 2002, on her first night “outside,” she was robbed.

 

During this, her first winter as a homeless person, Wiber says she’s learned a few things:

•Layers are the key to warmth;

•Many people are just a bad decision and an unlucky break away from losing their homes;

•People sincerely want to help others, but…;

•Money almost always trumps morality.

After her first night on the street a year ago, Wiber called Barnes & Noble district manager Bob Crabtree to complain about the demotion that put even the Salvation Army’s transitional housing out of reach. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought I’d probably get fired,” she says.

Instead, the company put Wiber up for a month at the Red Carpet Inn on Route 29. After that, she found a room at a reduced rent from a woman who worked as a touring musician during the summer and needed a house sitter in her absence. After a few weeks, however, the woman’s daughter decided to move into the house, and Wiber had to leave.

She moved into the Drop-In Center on Fourth Street. Also known as On Our Own, the house provides transitional shelter and other services for people with mental illness. Wiber traded shifts as a night monitor in exchange for rent. That arrangement came to an end in October when Wiber suffered a bad burn, caused, she says, by accidentally igniting her blouse with a candle.

Wiber spent several days at UVA Medical Center. Before her discharge, On Our Own Director Will Gallik told Wiber she could no longer live there. Wiber and Gallik agree that the outcome was her return to homelessness. Citing confidentiality, Gallik would make no further comment on Wiber’s situation.

She could not return to the Salvation Army, she says, because she was in arrears there. She was discharged from the hospital in the leopard-print pajamas she had worn when she was admitted. So she just walked to Barnes & Noble in that outfit to retrieve her paycheck.

“I was astounded she was out on the street,” says Mike Thompson, retired director of human resources for Albemarle County and now one of Wiber’s co-workers at the bookstore. He let Wiber sleep on his couch that night and for a few days afterward. He says he’s troubled by the City’s lack of emergency shelter, especially for single women. He’s also troubled by the paradox of Charlottesville.

“There’s a lot of wealth in this community,” says Thompson. “But the cost of living is high and the wages are low. That hurts a lot of people, and creates some social service problems that I don’t think many people are taking seriously.”

Wiber’s co-workers sincerely care about her hardship, she says, but they aren’t sure how to help. One day, for example, she joked about having holes in her socks. During the next few days, she received “an avalanche” of socks from her co-workers.

She says she never asks to stay in people’s homes and is reluctant to accept their offers for temporary shelter. “I don’t like asking for help,” she says. “And it’s awkward taking someone into your house who you don’t really know.”

For the desperately poor and homeless in Charlottesville who have no family to turn to, there are myriad social service agencies offering help with everything from rent to transportation to child care. The City’s Department of Social Services gave Wiber a list of dozens of local agencies. Wiber says she’s tried them all.

But in a City that allocates only 6 percent of its annual $94 million budget to social services, there almost always is someone who needs the help more than Wiber does. She’s neither mentally ill nor addicted to substances. She has no children and is not a victim of domestic violence. So aside from Federally funded food stamps, she’s not eligible for many local social services.

“Everywhere I go, people told me that I was one of those that fell through the cracks,” she says.

Patching the cracks evidently is not on the City’s agenda. The cracks are only getting bigger. Local agencies say, for instance, that their list of new applicants is growing.

“We’re seeing an increase in Food Stamps, and in general case-load relief. All the financial programs are showing growth, whereas all of them had been declining during the ’90s,” says Buzz Cox, director of the City’s social services department.

Cox says many agencies are hamstrung by State and Federal regulations that dictate who they can serve. People like Wiber, the working poor who are needy—but not the neediest—are out of luck.

“The bad news is that people who need these programs don’t qualify, and the amount of assistance the agencies provide may not be enough to really help,” says Cox. “The so-called safety net isn’t what you may hope it would be. For the people in [Wiber’s] situation, it’s going to be difficult for them to get help.

“In the big picture,” he adds, “the real issue is the lack of jobs that pay enough to afford the housing. If you’re not making enough money, emergency services won’t really help you.”

 

People in Charlottesville worried about how rising rents will affect the working poor won’t find much comfort in City Hall. When City Council talks about protecting “vulnerable populations,” they’re talking about middle-class homebuyers, not low-income renters. Indeed, rental assistance was not even in the FY 2004 budget that City Manager Gary O’Connell presented to City Council on Monday, March 3.

The City’s housing strategy is to replace renters with owners. Charlottesville contracts with the nonprofit Piedmont Housing Alliance to buy and refurbish run-down rental homes in low-income neighborhoods like Starr Hill and 10th and Page. In the past five years, the City and PHA have sold about 20 homes, according to PHA director Stu Armstrong. The homes sell for about $100,000, and Armstrong says more than 100 people a year sign up for PHA’s help in buying a house. Generally, prospective buyers must earn less than 60 percent of the area’s median income, which is $63,600 for a family of four. The County operates a comparable service, called the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program.

While City Council preaches the mantra of “diversity” and “mixed-incomes” in its housing strategy, housing activists say those are merely code words for gentrification. The City seems willing to subsidize the flow of middle-income residents into low-income neighborhoods, but not the flow of low-income residents into middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

“The plan doesn’t seem to include lifting our own working class up into the middle class. The idea seems to be bringing white, upper-middle class folks in from outside,” says Ben Thacker-Gwaltney, a housing activist at the Virginia Organizing Project. “The renting population has pretty much been left high and dry.

“The City is using public dollars to accelerate the gentrification process, which is chugging along fine on the strength of market forces,” he says.

From the City’s perspective, renters are a risk. They tend to utilize social services, for example, but contribute less to the tax rolls than homeowners do. Furthermore, police say that replacing renters with homeowners has a positive effect on crime. Owners have a vested interest in neighborhood stability and are more likely to report suspicious activity to the police. (The one area where the City makes exception for these perceived liabilities is a University renter. Indeed, the City hopes to capitalize on the massive influx of UVA undergraduates expected in the next decade. The City’s rezoning proposal currently under consideration would create University Precincts in the midst of owner-occupied single-family neighborhoods where density could reach as much as 150 renters per acre.)

Among Charlottesville’s non-University dwellers, however, the people who most feel the pinch are those who do the City’s dirty work for low wages and few benefits—operating cash registers, cleaning toilets, serving dinners. They are the working poor, says Joe Szakos, director of the Virginia Organizing Project.

“Most of the people working minimum wage jobs in Charlottesville are not teenagers looking for spending money,” says Szakos, a “Living Wage” activist who follows local labor trends. “They are people working two or three of these jobs trying to make a living.”

In the long run, Wiber predicts, pricing out poor people may backfire on the City’s economy. “I think Charlottesville still has vestiges of a plantation mentality. The attitude is, you should work for subsistence wages and you should be happy about it,” she says.

“But if you get rid of all the poor people, who’s going to do all the grunt work?”

Wiber compares poverty to a steep slope. The further you fall, she says, the harder it becomes to climb back. Because she once declared bankruptcy, for example, landlords ask her to pay as much as three months’ rent up front. “I can understand it. I’m sure they’ve been scammed,” she says. “But if you’re homeless and you’re just trying to get through this week, it’s hard to get that money together. When you’re poor, you have to worry about what you’re going to do right now.”

Being poor means having no choices, she says. It means playing by other people’s rules in a game that is often unfair and humiliating. Living with little control over your own life has, in Wiber, fostered an unexpected combination of feelings.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m paying off bad karma from a former life,” she says. “But you have to have a sense of humor about it.

“When I first came to town there was a homeless camp behind the Monticello Visitor’s Center. I thought that was hilarious.”

There’s a truck with a trailer driving in the deep end!” says Pat Healy, looking out from a window in the clubhouse at Fry’s Spring Beach Club at the crater where a 100-meter swimming pool used to be. On this bright February day, it looks more like a giant, muddy hole, shored up with remnants of blue concrete walls and crawling with hard-hatted workers and heavy machinery.

But Healy is beaming. By Memorial Day, the view from this window should be very different: a brand-new pool, and a solid future for both the club and its surrounding Jefferson Park Avenue neighborhood.

Fry’s Spring is an exception to many Charlottesville rules. In an era of development that voraciously devours green space to put up apartment buildings and parking garages, Fry’s Spring is a woodsy oasis that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. In a town where many historical buildings now house upscale boutiques and lofts, Fry’s Spring is an uncluttered portal to the past. And, in a neighborhood suffused with an ever-shifting—and soon-to-burgeon—student population, Fry’s Spring is a family place where long-term relationships are the norm.

All this was at stake when the members of Fry’s Spring Beach Club voted last year to completely rebuild the 82-year-old swimming pool. Martin Chapman, president of the club’s board of directors, says the $765,000 project was clearly necessary. “Nobody’s ever stood up and said ‘We shouldn’t do this,’” he says. “The only question was ‘How can we do this?’”

This year marks the biggest watershed in club history since the pool was built in 1921. Yet it’s certainly not the first time these 10 acres near the intersection of JPA Extended and Old Lynchburg Road have passed through a moment of redefinition. Time after time, the property and its stewards have resisted development, even as it’s defined the evolution of the neighborhood that surrounds it.

 

Once part of a 305-acre parcel owned by Albemarle County co-founder Joshua Fry (for whom the neighborhood is named), the club’s site was largely woodland as late as 1890. In that year, Steven Price Maury bought it and set about building a grand 100-room hotel on the current site of the Jefferson Park Baptist Church. Native Americans had long used natural springs on the property for their curative powers (attributed to the water’s high iron content), and Maury hoped the waters would attract guests. A wooden Victorian confection draped with 400 feet of porches and festooned with gables and cupolas, the Albemarle Hotel (later renamed the Jefferson Park Hotel) charged $3 per room. The hotel originated the spot’s long tradition of live entertainment, with dancing in an open-air pavilion down the hill from it.

Though it was never a moneymaker, the hotel did fuel interest in the Fry’s Spring area. Its heyday coincided with that of the streetcar, which ran orange-and-blue cars along what is now Cherry Avenue, bringing City dwellers to dance and take in the waters. Charlottesville’s first movies were shown near the hotel, projected on bed sheets strung between trees, and there was even a theme park next door called Wonderland. Featuring a menagerie, roller-skating and horse shows, Wonderland was a project of the Charlottesville and Albemarle Railway Company, meant to entice riders at 5 cents per head. The hotel was the end of the line then, and some of those riders eventually built houses in what became Charlottesville’s first suburb.

The hotel was dismantled in 1914 after being badly damaged by a fire. Other changes were coming too: G. Russell Dettor, a businessman who bought the property in 1921, was about to propose a very big idea.

“To dig a 100-meter swimming pool, when most people went swimming in the creek, was quite forward-looking,” says Healy, a club board member, remarking on Dettor’s radical notion. In the early 20th century, very few people even knew how to swim. That didn’t stop Dettor from designing his pool with a 9’ deep end, or from charging money to swim in it. He also enclosed the old dance pavilion that had been part of the hotel, forming the nucleus of what is today the clubhouse.

 

Thus began nearly a half-century of jazzy, glamorous, all-American fun: Big-band entertainment, competitive swimming, and a social scene so hopping that at one point, in the late 1950s, Charlottesvillians could go out dancing at Fry’s Spring every night of the week.

“It was the place. It was the social club,” says club manager Greg Hussar. “We’re gradually building that back up again.”

The constant merriment prompted one observer to remark that “Charlottesville is divided into two parts—Charlottesville proper and Fry’s Spring improper.”

These days, the clubhouse has the feel of a comfortable, storied retreat, retro in the most unself-conscious way. Art Deco-style doors lead into a dark lobby with a large flowery pattern on the red carpet. In the ballroom, which holds 500, semicircular booths flank a sprung wooden dance floor, each with a number tiled right into the linoleum in front of it. Obviously partial to the setting, Chapman says that, compared to Fry’s Spring, other ballrooms in town feel sterile. “You have this relatively low ceiling,” he says. “If you have enough people in there, it creates a nice little party atmosphere.” The ballroom still hosts plenty of weddings and other parties.

By 1970, Dettor was ready to retire, and Fry’s Spring was at a crossroads. “There were plans on the table for a duplex community with 128 units,” says Healy. “Some of the people whose families swam here got together and said, ‘We would like to preserve this. This is an important part of this community’s social history. You can always build more houses, but where are you going to get this again?’”

The families formed a corporation, Fry’s Spring, Inc., and bought the property from Dettor. The pool had temporarily escaped the threat of development, but in 1991 the cycle repeated itself: With the children of the Fry’s Spring, Inc., members having grown up, the club’s owners were again ready to sell. This time, a broader members’ group came together. They put down $1,000 each, and formed a new, more cooperative corporation: Fry’s Spring Beach Club, Inc. Healy says this group, though it could barely keep up with maintenance on the aging pool, somehow managed to preserve the club’s venerable family feeling.

The pool, says Healy, also a longtime member, is a “monument to deferred maintenance.” He watches the ongoing construction with a mixture of rueful affection for the old and enthusiasm for the new. “That has a real post-World War II look to it, doesn’t it?” he remarks, peering into the pump room behind the pool’s deep end. Five “Space Age” sand filters lurk in the darkness—rusted, rotund tanks that have been cut open to reveal chunks of what looks like sawdust.

When these filters were new, in 1948, they brought a key change in Fry’s Spring history. Up to that time, the water source had been Moore’s Creek, which Dettor dammed up and pumped into the pool. “The sanitary system was that you got new creek water every day,” Healy says. With the addition of sand filters and water pumped from City reservoirs, “It stopped being olive-colored creek water, and it started being a sparkly blue, chlorinated, modern swimming pool.”

Revolutionary though they once were, the filters are now in desperate need of replacement. “We’re going to have high-tech, turn-that-water-over, lots-o’-gallons-a-minute kind of sand filters,” says Healy. Decks, too, were on the verge of collapse. Altogether, says Chapman, “We really didn’t know whether the pool could actually survive another year.”

The new pool will be superior in many ways. For one thing, it will perform a basic swimming-pool function the old pool couldn’t quite handle—holding water. Chapman says the old, leaky pool required untold hours of labor.

“Each year, somebody had to clean it all out with bleach, flushing out all of the drains, then getting it filled and making sure the water was getting recirculated properly,” he says. “There’s only so much time you can ask people to volunteer.” The new pool will be easier to maintain and use significantly less water.

A new design better allocates space for lap swimming and casual splashing around. Wider decks will better accommodate swim meets (the Dolphins are the Fry’s Spring swim team, part of the Jefferson Swim League) and private parties on summer evenings—which, in turn, may generate revenue for future projects, namely additional renovation of the clubhouse.

 

Club members acknowledge a certain melancholy in seeing their funky old pool demolished—even with a new one on the way. Jeanne Siler has been bringing her two daughters to Fry’s Spring since they were little. One daughter, a former swim team member and lifeguard, is now off at college. Siler recently emailed her photos of the project. “She sobbed as she opened up each new picture,” Siler says.

Siler’s daughter isn’t alone in her attachment to the place. The construction plans, Healy said, are meant to carefully preserve the club’s signature ambience, largely dependent on the century-old trees making a canopy over the pool grounds and the wooded acres separating the club from nearby houses.

“Yes, we want a state-of-the-art swimming pool,” he says, “but not at the cost of what really makes us special. We don’t have a vast chunk of concrete absorbing radiant energy all day. When you step through that gate, it is literally 10 to 15 degrees cooler than when you were out at your car.”

Miraculously, the project will sacrifice only one tree, a hickory leaning precariously over a corner of the pool.

By all accounts, the summertime scene at Fry’s Spring is one of good clean fun, where families form long-term friendships. Green and white lawn chairs are scattered around the pool; kids throw down towels on the grass and run off to play Marco Polo or water basketball. Three separate pools accommodate kids of different ages. “Typically, people join and start in the wading pool,” says Healy. “Your kid’s 2 years old. Then ‘he’s a big boy! A big girl!’ and you’re here in the middle pool. Then they want to join the swim team. Then by the time the kids are all teenagers and they’re up here playing Hearts on the patio, you’re down here at the deep end with your old buddies you’ve been sitting with every summer for years, reading the Sunday Post.”

Though as late as 1970 Fry’s Spring was a whites-only club, the only requirement now is the cost of membership, which at $650-750 per family, makes the club relatively affordable to everyone.

Funding for the new pool is coming largely from its members. Four club families, making donations or loans in $25,000 increments, formed the Friends of Fry’s Spring—altogether providing $200,000.

“Really that’s provided the impetus to make the project realistic,” Chapman says. Another chunk is coming from an increase in membership dues and other member fundraisers. The remainder is covered by a loan. Todd Bullard and Marty Rowan, both architects and board members, helped alleviate costs by donating their services to the design process.

Members hope the new facilities will help build up membership and maybe, eventually, bring back the glory days for the clubhouse. Chapman says the ballroom could help fill a year-round void in the Charlottesville social landscape. “When I was a kid in England, every Saturday night there would be a big dance,” he says. “We used to see some big rock groups in a place not dissimilar to Fry’s Spring Beach Club. That seems to be missing in Charlottesville.”

 

Healy stands over the natural spring downhill from the clubhouse, using a stick to stir leafy water. Fry’s Spring bubbles forth even on a freezing morning and paints a red streak down the rocks—a mark of its iron content. Healy says that, though the springs are no longer the focal point of activity as in the days of the Albemarle Hotel, they still symbolize the importance of preserving green space within City limits.

Ultimately, the decision to preserve Fry’s Spring Beach Club means not only more fond memories, but also a stand against the increasing population density in the surrounding neighborhood. Madeleine Watkins, Chapman’s wife, acknowledges that “It’s the kind of facility that, if it ever went up for sale, obviously it would sell very quickly and you could make lots of money for lots of people.”

Unlike in 1970, there were no specific proposals this time around to bid farewell to the pool and cash in on the property, which was assessed last year at $1.43 million. But there were a few ideas floating around that were not entirely out of the preservationist playbook.

“There were some proposals that circulated last year for building houses all the way around the club, to raise money to build the pool,” Chapman says. “But I don’t think from a community point of view that would be a good thing, because we have this really nice open space. Lots of people in the community use it for walking the dog, running, walking in the woods.”

Woods, in this neighborhood, are fast becoming scarce. Just outside City limits, three new apartment complexes—Sterling University Housing, Collegiate Hall and Jefferson Ridge—are going up on Sunset Avenue and Fifth Street Extended. Sitting on formerly undeveloped pieces of County land in what’s regarded as the urban ring, the City’s immediate outskirts, the majority of the 658 apartments will be occupied by UVA students. Closer to the beach club, a wooded area on Belleview Avenue may eventually be sacrificed for even more housing. Jim Tolbert, City planner, says developers have expressed interest in the 40 duplex lots (though construction is still a long way off).

Inevitably, traffic is the area’s biggest problem, says Mike Farruggio, president of Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, and it’s not going to get any better with the new housing. County-dwellers in the new apartments will be using already busy (and sidewalk-less) streets to enter the City. “We have children, mothers, joggers and bicyclists riding up and down Old Lynchburg Road, competing with cars that are going to the County,” Farruggio says. “It’s going to increase dramatically when these apartment complexes are filled.”

Further up Jefferson Park Avenue, the City has recently drawn University Precincts as part of its rezoning process, and in those density is slated to skyrocket. In the next half-decade, an additional 3,000 to 6,000 UVA students will be shoehorned into buildings as tall as seven stories, for which developers won’t be required to provide on-site parking. Though Farruggio says Fry’s Spring and JPA are two distinct neighborhoods, he is already plenty aware of UVA’s presence.

“We have people driving to our neighborhood to park to walk to school,” he says. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

The City claims that putting students close to UVA will eliminate the need for students to own cars, and Farruggio hopes they’re right (other observers are skeptical as long as UVA refuses to ban or severely limit car ownership among students). With County housing on one side and University Precincts on the other, the Fry’s Spring neighborhood is bound to feel the effects of a rapidly growing ’Hoo population.

In this pressurized climate, Fry’s Spring Beach Club is an important holdout. “As a neighborhood association, we love the beach club,” Farruggio says. “It is an anchor to the community.”

Since the first cave dwellers plunked a rock against a wall for purely expressive reasons, music has been social—even sometimes political. Like any art form, music offers an individual’s take on the surrounding world, one that is in turn absorbed and cast back into the world by an audience. Every song, no matter the subject, is a statement of sorts.

In Charlottesville, where a wide range of musicians make their home far from the contemporary perils of life in New York City, Jerusalem or Kabul, it’s fitting to wonder what the music of area artists is telling us about our little world and its values.

 

“Charlottesville is a good place to do anything you like, so it’s easy to be inactive or lazy, and the sad thing is that things then get swept under the rug, like the fact that we have such an extreme racial division,” says singer-songwriter Karmen Buttler, who records as Karmen. “Whether it’s Downtown or Belmont or the University, the communities in Charlottesville are so separated from what is going on with one another that people, artists or no, aren’t thinking about what is happening, myself included.

“And that’s really too bad,” Buttler says, “especially with so much going on here as well as in the world around us.”

But isn’t that just human nature? It’s much easier to turn a blind eye to the problems around us, especially in prosperous times, than to undertake the arduous and messy task of resolving them.

“As people, we have a tendency to gravitate toward the easiest thing to digest, especially when things are good,” Buttler says, pointing to the mass popularity of Britney, Justin and their ilk. “Unfortunately, the picture that is painted is that there aren’t critical, politically conscious people doing anything when times are good, but it’s really that the media isn’t looking at them and showing people that, even though it is going on.”

That might be an overstatement when it comes to Charlottesville, however, where musicians on the Downtown Mall are plentiful, for instance, but soapboxes are scarce regardless of media presence. Besides, when was the last time you went out to a performance by a local musician and were exhorted to get more involved in the community?

Despite its reputation elsewhere around the State as a liberal base camp, Charlottesville is not, many local musicians say, a home to musical activism. The reasons for that are many.

 

“Write what you know” is the adage guiding successful writers of every stripe. Unsurprisingly then, those musicians writing about issues that resonate strongly within themselves tend to strike the deepest chord with their audiences.

“The greatest songwriters write about what moves them and are able to make you feel what they feel,” says Geoff Sprung of the Small Town Workers. “A songwriter’s first obligation should be to be true to oneself. If that means writing about ‘partying all night’ or about ‘saving the children,’ so be it.”

Maybe it’s more laudable to write about downtrodden kids than all-night raves, but musicians almost universally recognize that music doesn’t succeed if it isn’t honest—whatever the message.

“One thing that I’ve learned as a songwriter and musician is that you just can’t fake it,” says Vandyke Brown’s George Lakis. “Passion and effectiveness are inextricably linked.”

In other words, even music that successfully tackles headier themes and is predictably tagged “important” can fail its audience and fall short as art when it is written out of obligation.

“Music suffers most under the strains of unnaturally forcing something into a work—political activism, false projections of an unfamiliar situation, anything that the artist doesn’t at that time need to write about,” local folk artist Paul Curreri says. In his music, Curreri avoids out-and-out political or social statements, choosing instead to wax personal with the “faith that certain emotions and interests are doubtlessly shared by others.”

The personal, it would seem, is political. Songs woven from personal tales and observations inevitably reflect back on the world from where much of their inspiration is drawn.

Few artists today express this as poignantly as local blues luminary Corey Harris. On his latest album, Downhome Sophisticate, Harris grapples with emotionally and politically charged issues. In “Frankie Doris,” Harris tells the story of a Welfare queen out to get what she considers her due. Harris doesn’t condemn Doris for her actions, nor does he celebrate them, giving the story a greater context and a certain moral ambiguity by levelly exploring the rationale behind her actions. Similarly projective, Harris’ “Money Eye” tells of the undoing of a relationship under cultural and materialistic pressures, while his “Santoro” addresses the simmering hatred and mistrust that underlies relations between African-Americans and police.

“I’m just trying to tell a story, and I realize that whatever story I have to tell is connected to the story of humanity. So, I’m trying to tell a story that is an individual story but at the same time others can relate to,” Harris says. “And I think that’s a part of art: I mean, you want to communicate, whether or not other people are always understanding your language—not everyone will always get everything, but you still want to communicate.”

In that give-and-take between artist and audience lies the real means for efficacy. When the listener has a stake in the interpretive process, in determining what a song or lyric means to him or her personally, the music takes on an internal life of its own.

The personal communication of music is especially good at giving listeners a look at others’ lives. Through a song, you can reflect on certain realities that you otherwise might ignore.

“We all flip flop and get down to the floor/Face down in the ward, ducking strays and afterwards the slaves, crack dealers and whores/ Can you adapt to that?” asks BEETNIX hip-hop frontman Damani Harrison in the song “Brainwash Syndrome.”

“If what a person portrays in their music is from their true self they can perform it anywhere, and those that need a message will get a message,” says Harrison. “Only then will the real meaning behind the music be understood.”

Local musicians like the fact that the personal allegorical tale more easily strikes a nerve with its audience, and for many it is the only way to go. They say that songs given to a specific and obvious end too easily come off as contrived or bogus.

“The seat-of-the-pants topical song, sincere as it may be, can backfire and even turn off a listener if one is not careful,” says folk artist Devon Sproule, who records under her first name only.

In a sense, subtlety and sincerity can effectively work in concert to give music greater resonance with an audience, she says.

Nickeltown’s Browning Porter agrees. “I’ve always thought that [local singer-songwriter] Brady Earnhart’s beautiful love songs from the point of view of gay men are political in an indirect way, and this really makes them much more profound and successful than a song that bluntly preaches tolerance,” Porter says. “And I think if you can identify with someone, then ‘tolerance’ is too pallid a word for what you feel towards them. ‘Solidarity’ is a better one.”

Presumably local musicians listen to tunes from all over the country and world, including songs from the Overtly Political school, such as N.W.A.’s “F*ck the Police” or the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” Both of those groups explicitly courted their audience’s alienation with the sheer force of their respective messages. Even if they’re familiar with the technique, though, musicians in Charlottesville don’t seem intent on shocking an audience into submission or rejection.

Buttler says the subtle approach is more effective “because it’s not about wearing it on your sleeve. It’s about relating to people, and getting people to relate to you, without the subject matter being your sexual orientation or political position or ethnicity,” she says.

“I think music is such a wonderful thing for that, because so many people don’t realize how open they really are to do or think things that otherwise they would avoid if it were labeled.”

Indeed, perhaps a middle-aged, conservative man might really dig a k.d. lang song he hears on the radio. He’ll buy a couple of her albums, only to realize that she is a lesbian. In this scenario, he’s more likely to re-evaluate his beliefs than if lang hollered “Gay pride!” from the mountaintops and over the airwaves, in which case he would have just turned off the radio without giving it a second thought.

 

Maybe this is starting to sound like an elaborate apology by musicians for not taking a more active role in the advancement and well being of the community. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

For the most part, local musicians are aware of the power they hold to convey social ideas. A photograph, painting or novel can be incredibly moving, but the audience is often only able to know the person behind the piece indirectly. With live music performances, at least, the musician is the art made flesh. As artists, they walk, talk and feel. They are one of us.

“I remember one of my teachers in high school once told me that he cried more when he heard that John Lennon died than at his father’s funeral,” says former Charlottesville musician Ben Arthur, now living in New York. “The possibilities in music—particularly in popular song—for emotional communication are extraordinary and are why, I imagine, a lot of us get into this game.”

It certainly motivates Arthur, whose songs have a pointedly popular feel to them, and who connects with his listeners by means of a quirky, comedic and sometimes surreal take on the commonplace. In his album Gypsy Fingers, Arthur too places a special emphasis on personal tales in songs like “Sestina” or “This Hurts You (More Than it Hurts Me).”

Yet while their powers of influence are self-evident, do musicians have a responsibility to speak out? What about novelists, athletes or movie stars—anyone in the popular public sphere for that matter? Do they have a responsibility to their audiences?

“I feel that as a musician I have as much responsibility to be involved politically and socially in my community as any other person,” says Jessie Fiske of the Hackensaw Boys. “Musicians, however, are in a unique position to submit their ideas to the general public on a larger scale than the average individual.”

To an extent, Harris agrees. “I feel individually that I have a responsibility with my music, but I think it’s just an aspect of being a human and sharing the planet with other people that you have that responsibility, whether or not you play music,” he says. “I don’t know if you have any more responsibility as a musician, but it’s definitely a tool in some way to educate people or to get people excited about certain ideas.”

If our musicians feel no greater responsibility to act than should we, they at least understand their unique position of influence. As such, Harris, for one, today feels a growing sense of urgency in acknowledging and using that power.

“Artists should speak out on things they feel strongly about, because we can still exercise that right and it might not always be like that,” he says. “There is already a constriction of the First Amendment. It’s not as robust as it once was, and a lot of other basic freedoms are being questioned in the name of fighting terrorism.”

 

Thomas Jefferson once wrote of the American Revolution, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” But in his hometown, revolution, even within the music community, seems a far-off prospect.

“The fact of the matter is that the state of the world has little bearing on the music scene in Charlottesville,” says Eli Simon, of Bottom of the Hudson. “And that’s not because we’re insulated by a thriving community of music supporters. There is no scene. There is no venue to support socially conscious music. There are no promoters to push that kind of music.”

The forum is important, too. “What the Charlottesville scene really needs is more and better venues that are friendly to local music,” says Porter. “I’ve been playing in this town now for 12 years, and my greatest frustration has been with the slow attrition of good places to play.” Porter is hardly the only musician to voice such a complaint. Beyond a scant handful of quality places to play, there is little aside from bar/restaurants offering crusty cover acts that pass for live entertainment.

Even those who remain optimistic see that much is lacking. “I think Charlottesville is a liberal, open-minded town, and fertile ground for the rock-and-roll revolution,” claims Ostinato drummer Matthew Clark, who plays in a number of Tokyo Rose-based side projects, most notably the openly political Frank Zapatistas. “We just need more local support, venues and motivation.”

For some though, fear is an issue. “I think the ‘Ville has an incredible music scene, but most people wouldn’t even know it was there. And some of the best artists and musicians I have met in this town remain underground because they are afraid,” says Harrison. “Face it. We are in a conservative place that is controlled by conservative government. If the true feelings of the people I know and hang out with were made known to the mass public, there would be straight pandemonium.”

And like Buttler says, Charlottesville is an easy place in which to forget your troubles, never mind those of others. Whether it is fear, a lack of motivation or something else entirely behind it, there’s no question that organization and activism are absent on even the most grassroots level. “You can usually gauge a scene by the amount of benefit shows that are coordinated,” Small Town Workers’ Mike Meadows says, pointing to Charlottesville’s relative paucity of such events.

Almost universally, those dissatisfied with the lack of social and political vitality in the Charlottesville music scene, or in the lack of a scene period, argue that the roots of malaise run deep. Music here is what it is because the City itself is a sleepy suburban dream.

“The name of the game here is survival, and if that means two cars, a Federal style house in Afton, horseback riding for little Suzie and hockey downtown for Billy, so be it,” says Simon. “What are we worried about? Not a lot, and that seems to be what we’re singing about.”

Harris thinks the problem is even more deeply entrenched.

“I don’t really think that Charlottesville, bottom line, is a very socially conscious place. It has affluence, and people have leisure time and there are some liberal-like attitudes, but this was a plantation town for a long time, the same town where Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and said we were animals,” he says. “So, I don’t think this is really the place to look for social consciousness. That isn’t to say that there aren’t people who are conscious, but I don’t think there is a tradition of that, and likewise I don’t think too much of the music is socially conscious.”

Harris adds, “There are still such huge inequalities in this town and the greater community, economically as well as racially, that there is a lot yet to be done.”

If there is one constant in life though, it is change. As Charlottesville wrestles with the pains of a rapidly expanding and diversifying community, so too will its community of musicians grapple with the new and unfamiliar.

“The political and social issues of our time will always be addressed as long as there are creative minds making music, and music will continue to evolve with society and culture,” says Darrell Muller of Old School Freight Train. “Music will always reflect what is going on in the society it comes from as well as the world that encapsulates that society.”