Tag: apartment living

Categories
Arts

Downtown warehouse has a colorful history

Since the 1980s, the Pink Warehouse on South Street has been home to local artists of many kinds. Staff photo

Sandwiched between South Street and some train tracks, the Pink Warehouse has stored various things throughout its 105 years: wholesale food for the Albemarle Grocery Co.; tools for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; imagination.

In 1983, Roulhac and Ben Toledano—an author of architectural history books and a Southern literature-loving lawyer—bought the abandoned building. They renovated it, raised four children in it, and eventually, accidentally, transformed it into a storied creative mecca.

Today, the building holds a few different apartments and offices, and Roulhac says that while she has no rule about renting to artists, “they just come.” And if they’re not creative when they move in, they are before they leave.

The building is perhaps most famous as the site where, in 1991, the newly-formed Dave Matthews Band played its first official gig on the warehouse roof to a couple dozen people.

Matthews’ manager, Ross Hoffman, rented the bedroom next to Roulhac’s, and Matthews used to sit on the floor with his guitar and play his songs. Roulhac heard him through the wall.

Artist John Owen lived there, too, and, reportedly threw memorable parties after Live Arts productions.

C-VILLE Weekly rented space in the Pink Warehouse in the 1990s. Roulhac has written a number of books there, and she’s exhibited Edward Thomas’ paintings in her living room. In the late 2000s, John Noble and Dee Dee Bellson opened BON Café, a music venue/art gallery/coffee shop in the building. Bellson is the daughter of actress and singer Pearl Bailey and Louie Bellson (Duke Ellington’s drummer), and a well-known jazz singer in her own right. The Tom Tom Founders Festival offices are in there now, and a few apartments remain upstairs.

Until recently, Lauren and Daniel Goans of folk duo Lowland Hum lived in a studio that was once Roulhac’s library, and still contains floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with hundreds of books on every topic imaginable. Lauren says that living among these books fueled creativity, including the writing and recording of a new record, Glyphonic. “It was one of our favorite creative seasons to date,” she says. Due to the nearby parking lot and morning commute traffic, “we had to wake up at 4am to get in enough quiet hours for recording each day. I will never forget Daniel playing guitar in the pitch dark before anyone around us was up.”

“People thought we were crazy to buy the warehouse,” says Roulhac. But perhaps, in a stroke of inspiration that’s come to define the place since, the Toledanos saw something that others did not.

Categories
News

The student housing scramble: Two roommates find a good fit off-Grounds

Third-years David Gent and Drew Dudzig like being off-Grounds, where they have their own bedrooms and pay less than what they paid to share a room at UVA’s Lambeth Field Apartments last year. Photo: Eze Amos

By Shrey Dua

In Charlottesville, one of the largest populations of apartment dwellers can be found in the roughly mile-wide radius immediately surrounding the University of Virginia: students.

Every year, waves of UVA students abandon Grounds in favor of their own apartments, a process that quickly spirals into a mad dash to find the best, most-affordable living space as close to Grounds as possible. That means the search for housing often starts as early as September.

Third-year students David Gent and Drew Dudzig, who met in high school and became roommates in their second year at UVA, enjoyed some of the benefits of on-Grounds housing their first and second years, but decided to move off-Grounds for their third year. 

“We weren’t trying to live on-Grounds another year, just given what you get for how much you pay,” says Gent.

The two found a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment at College Court, a small, ’70s-era complex on 13th Street, after a nerve-racking house-hunting process. “It was actually incredibly stressful,” says Gent. “I went to Australia for a summer internship, and during that time the plans we had made fell through, so Drew and I were basically homeless around mid-June.”

Gent found an apartment while he was in Australia and had his mom contact the owner to work out the details. “It was a pretty crazy situation, but everything worked out in the end,” he says.

Dudzig and Gent’s story is fairly common among university students. The race to find housing often leaves many in a last-second panic just to find a place to live in Charlottesville, let alone one with the amenities students look for in an apartment, especially a room of one’s own.

“Honestly, I was so used to sharing a room at Lambeth last year, and the dorms my first year, as well as with my brother when I was younger, the fact that I got my own room this year alone made it pretty great,” says Gent.

“The apartment has its fair share of drawbacks, things like being in the basement, the occasional bug, keeping the small bathroom and kitchen clean, making sure the drain isn’t clogged, normal stuff like that we have to worry about,” Gent says. “But we’re both fairly clean so it’s really not much of a problem.”

Gent and Dudzig both think their apartment is a much better situation than living at Lambeth, where they were last year. Lambeth Field Apartments and GrandMarc on the Corner are both popular destinations for many second-year students, with fully furnished units and utilities included. But the downsides are pricey rents and often having to share a room. Gent and Dudzig paid around $800 a month each for a shared two-person bedroom. Now, “we each have our own room, and we’re paying less, around $750-775 a month, per person.” says Dudzig. “I also really like the location. Some people think walking to Grounds from the Corner can be a pain, but honestly it’s not very far at all from most of my classes. I probably even prefer the location to first-year old dorms.”

The two plan on living together next year, but this time they’re ahead of the game. They found an apartment months ago.

Categories
Living News

An abhorrent infestation, thousands of bullets, and a goat sacrifice

Art by Jason Crosby

While renters have it tough, managing an apartment isn’t a walk in the park either, and one local manager has truly seen it all. On the condition of anonymity, the industry professional of nearly two decades agreed to dish the details.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I could likely fill a large novel with good material on this topic.”

His “go-to” story starts about 10 years ago at an undisclosed three-story apartment in Charlottesville’s urban ring. A maintenance worker was befuddled when he opened the door to a ground-level bathroom and discovered a caved-in ceiling and “three inches of some type of mysterious fatty substance across the entire floor.”

He then tried the unit above it, where he found the same thing. Upon entering the third and final floor, “It looked like a scene out of a movie,” the apartment manager says. Streamers hung from the ceiling from a party the night before, but “it wasn’t a raging kegger, it was their child’s first birthday party—and they butchered a goat in the bathroom.”

That’s also where they cooked the four-legged mammal and poured its fat down the drain. (Much to their dismay, the pipes burst.) A neighbor recalled seeing someone enter the apartment with a live goat across his shoulders, and the animal’s carcass would later be found in a nearby dumpster.

The apartment manager says he also learned real quick that the best way to enter a home is to swing the door open and pause before proceeding through it. Why? Because if the place is particularly unkempt, cockroaches could rain down from the doorway.

In one instance, he recalls the shower of insects lasted for at least 10 seconds.

“There were so many roaches that the carpet was flowing like water.”

And last but not least, he remembers two young roommates, likely renting an apartment for the first time. They caused quite a scene on their move-out day, when inspectors found tens of thousands of BBs lodged into the drywall.

“Every piece had to be ripped out and replaced,” which came with a price tag just south of $10,000, he says. Pay up.

Categories
News

No room to grow: In a tight real estate market, a family of seven makes do with 860 square feet

Sheria and Sylvan Kassondwa in the living room of their Fifeville home, with (from left) Syvlie, 12; Cherubine, 9; Cecile, 7; Charline, 3; and Seloe, 1. Photo: Eze Amos

Sylvan and Sheria Kassondwa’s 860-square foot, three-bedroom apartment would be fine, they say, if they had one or two kids.

As it happens, they have five.

“In my country, time is not money like here, you can spend more time with your family,” says Sylvan, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “And then here you find that you spend more time with work. So when you have more kids, you find that you have a big problem here.”

He laughs—what can one do? On a rainy afternoon in early March, his children, ranging in age from 1 to 12, pop in and out of the tiny living room to greet their guest, then disappear upstairs. They are charming and well-behaved, but their parents lament how cramped they are at home.

“The kids, they don’t have space,” Sheria says. “They have nowhere to keep their shoes, it’s a mess.” She indicates an overflowing shoe rack on the stair landing and waves her hands dismissively. “This does not really look like a place where you can breathe, feel fresh air.”

When the Kassondwas moved to this apartment in Fifeville, in November of 2017, they’d hoped it would be a step up.

Sylvan and Sheria had fled their home in the Congo more than a decade earlier, seeking refuge from the war and violence there. They landed in Uganda and applied for refugee status in the United States. It took 12 years.

“We were struggling to live,” says Sheria. “But we had this hope, that one day we would be fine.”

They were thrilled to finally get to the United States, and the family (by then, the Kassondwas had four kids) came to Charlottesville in September of 2016. The International Rescue Committee helped them settle into an apartment off Hydraulic Road, and paid their rent for the first three months while they found work.

“Then, thank God, we met International Neighbors,” says Sheria.

Founded by local educator Kari Miller, International Neighbors helps support refugee families once the IRC is no longer involved in their cases. The organization connects new arrivals to local “family friends” and helps them navigate the complexities of American life, from school forms to local events.

“She helped us a lot,” Sheria says, “but she can only do so much.” The two-bedroom apartment was a tight fit for their family of six, with another baby on the way. So the couple took it upon themselves to try to find a bigger place, searching apartment listings online.

With their limited budget (Sylvan was working as a tailor, while Sheria cleaned houses and took classes to improve her English), there were few affordable options.

Eventually, they found a three-bedroom for $830 a month, only $100 a month more than their two-bedroom, in a complex aimed at low-income renters called Greenstone on 5th.

“It’s cheap for the area, that’s why we are here,” Sylvan says. 

They applied online, but after moving in, they realized how small each of the rooms was (the bedrooms fit little more than a bed and a dresser, with only a foot or two of space in between), and that there was no washing machine in the apartment.

Doing laundry in the complex costs $3.75 per load, Sheria says, and, “I have this many kids. It’s going to be five loads.”

As the children get older, having only one bathroom for all seven of them is also a problem, but apartments with two bathrooms and washing machines cost $1,200 a month, Sylvan says—out of reach for now.

The apartment has a roach problem, and maintenance is slow to respond to calls, Sylvan adds. But his number-one concern is the neighbors. He says people are often hanging around the complex smoking marijuana.

“This day, it’s good,” Sylvan says with a smile, indicating the gloomy weather outside the window.

“Cause it’s cold outside, everybody’s doing it in the house,” his wife explains. In summer, they say, it’s terrible.

“It’s not a good environment for my kids,” Sheria says. “But we don’t have a choice for now.”

She’d prefer to rent a duplex, but she doesn’t think it’s possible. “In Charlottesville, it’s very expensive,” she says. “We’d never afford that.”

“Every family here is squeezed,” Sylvan adds.

After taking English classes, Sheria trained to become a certified nursing assistant, and now works full-time at UVA. Sylvan hopes that, before his children become teenagers, they’ll be able to afford another place.

“I’m trying to plan, but I don’t know if I can afford to move,” he says. “Maybe next year, or two years.” He’s thinking about getting a second job. “But also, when you have a second job, you have little time with your kids,” he notes.

Still, the couple does not want to complain too much—their home is an improvement over what they left behind in Africa, and Sylvan takes a philosophical view. “If you can’t afford the house that is fitting your family, you need to [be] content with the one you have,” he says.

His wife, who would also prefer a roomier kitchen, interjects: “But you are not happy about it.”

 

Categories
Living

Rejected but not dejected: Imperfect renters hold out hope for a place in town.

By Rusty Gates

While swilling chardonnay at a party recently, I fell into conversation with a droll gentleman who had lived in Charlottesville for many years. A friend of my sister, he knew that my girlfriend and I had moved to the area within the past two years.

“Where are you living?” he asked.

“In a little cottage on a beautiful, historic farm in Gordonsville,” I replied, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

He stalled for a beat—comic timing—then said, “Oh, you’re country-curious.”

He smirked, and I chuckled, even though I felt daggers of desperation in my chest.

In Charlottesville, I learned, you either live out (in the boonies) or you live in (downtown or Belmont, for instance). Living in was starting to feel like joining an exclusive club. For months my partner and I had tried to find a place in town. We wanted to walk to City Market, see movies and live music on the Downtown Mall, and read heady books in fragrant coffee shops. We also wanted our trash and recycling picked up, and to do laundry at home.

We still want those things, plus a place with a second bedroom, or a third, for when my partner’s kids visit. But we’ll have to wait.

In the meantime, we spend weekends driving nine miles to the recycling center and dump, and six miles to the laundromat, which also happens to be a dump. We both work in town, and the daily 50-mile commute is wearing on us. It’s not all bad, of course. Deer scatter or stare curiously as we nose our car up the gravel drive and through the woods to reach our cottage. During the morning trip, the sun lights up the fields, where cattle and sheep graze. Mountains loom in the distance, so beautiful yet so far away—like Charlottesville. We read heady books in our bedroom, which is nestled in the trees and has a charming view of our busy birdfeeder. The woodpeckers! The cardinals! The damn squirrel who devours the sunflower seeds we buy at Tractor Supply!

Like the squirrel, we refuse to be denied. We are still looking for a place in town, trying to stay upbeat. It will happen. We’ll find a landlord who will ignore our mediocre credit scores and trust us to pay the rent on time, because we have full-time jobs and adequate income and impeccable personal references. When you live out, you find landlords like this, not to mention, cheaper rent. The honor system trumps FICO scores. And lessors understand that not everyone reaches their 50s with an unblemished financial history.

Of course, the story is different in town, where the apartment hunters are like schools of piranhas, gobbling up the available rentals. Some of these nasty little fish are students who have parents with money. And the landlords and property management companies cater to them. Oh, I could go on. And I will. Here are the lowlights of our apartment search.

• Great listing on Craigslist for a place in Belmont. Arrange viewing via anonymous email. Show up on time. Wait an hour. Realize the listing was a fake. Go to the nearest bar.

• View apartment in building with about 100 units, about a mile from the mall. Roomy apartment, but the “gym” consists of an infomercial elliptical trainer and a weight bench and dumbbells from the Salvation Army store. Agent hands us a form and says to fill it out, send it in, and she’ll be in touch. The form says we’ll have to submit a significant amount of information—including copies of our divorce agreements. We decide against it. On principle.

• Schedule appointment to see warehouse-y apartment near Circa—our favorite antiques/secondhand store! The deposit is reasonable, the place just right. Take time off from work to meet the rental agent, show up on time. Check voicemail while sitting in parking lot. It’s the rental agent, who called to say the place was already rented.

• Turtle Creek apartment complex. A little further from downtown than we want, but as we see during the tour with the owners, they’ve done a great job renovating the condo. Speaking with the owners, we realize that we have a very good mutual friend! Kismet! We laugh and share stories about the mutual friend. They seem to want us as tenants. But when they ask about our credit scores, we tell them the truth. They wish us luck, show us the door, and fail to respond to repeated text messages. Two days later, we see the apartment relisted—with a minimum credit score of 700 as a requirement.

• We respond to an ad for a “lovingly renovated” three-bedroom on West Cherry. It’s about $200 above our limit, considering that those couple hundred bucks were listed in the fine print as monthly utility fees. Still, we view the apartment. It’s a one bedroom with two converted spaces—a walk-in closet and a small living room—the landlord calls bedrooms.

• Landlord says, “I can show the apartment between noon and 3pm, Monday to Thursday.” But we have jobs. Could we see the place after work one day? “Sorry, no.”

• Listed rent is $1,800. Whoa. But we’ll look, because we’re curious. One place, in Belmont, is fantastically restored by an architect. For the same price, a cramped house just off of Ridge Street has cat-pissed carpets, a broken washer/dryer unit, and a 15-year-old interior paint job. The former place we might consider getting second jobs to afford. The latter? What has the landlord been smoking?

• Landlord says, “We have a lot of interest in this unit.” It’s the right size and the right neighborhood. It’s available six months from now. “The only way you’ll get this place is if you make a deposit, sight-unseen.” Um, no?

And so the search continues. For now, we have the lovely drive, deer, birds, mountain views, grazing livestock, and one relentless squirrel. We’re starting to like the little guy. He perseveres.

* Rusty Gates is a fake name. The experience the writer describes here is real.

Categories
News

What’s in the works

Photo courtesy Six Hundred West Main

It can be a long road between submitting plans and breaking ground on a project in both the city and the county. Maybe your apartment complex will be sued by neighbors, as is the case for 1011 East Jefferson with its 126 apartments. Or maybe the project is so complex, like the redevelopment of Friendship Court, that it takes years to get the go ahead.

There are nearly 800 apartments currently under construction in the city and county. That sounds like a lot, but Planning Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg points out that population growth in our area far exceeds estimates, and the new units won’t fill the demand for housing. A variety of factors is limiting the area’s supply of apartments, from a lengthy and unpredictable approval process to zoning that favors single-family homes. The end result? Rising housing costs. 

Charlottesville

Cedars Court Apartments 1212 Cedars Court 19 units

1725 Jefferson Park Avenue 1725 Jefferson Park Ave. 19 units

600 West Main 510 W. Main St. Starr Hill 56 units

William Taylor Phase II 523-529 Ridge St. 27 units

Albemarle County

Brookdale Mountainwood Road 96 units*

The Lofts at Meadowcreek Pen Park Lane 65 units

Old Trail Crozet 183 units

Riverside Village Pantops 24 units

The Vue Jarmans Gap, Crozet 126 units