A crane looms over a huge glass rectangle. The shiny office block, just completed, sits behind Preston Avenue’s old Monticello Dairy factory, where renovation work has been underway since 2018. When the new Dairy Central corner is fully operational next year, the complex will boast state-of-the-art office space, swanky apartments, and a “Brooklyn-based coffee roasting company.”
Just across the street, slate shingles have cracked and fallen from the steep roof of an old church. The thick glass window panes have yellowed; some windows are boarded up. Green and white paint has flaked off the wooden siding, and ivy has completely enveloped one wall of the church’s small side building. Next to a mud-caked basement window is a cornerstone inscribed with the words “Trinity Church 1939.”
It’s easy to miss amid all the construction, but the ramshackle little building, at the edge of one of the city’s last remaining historically black neighborhoods, has a story far richer than the exterior might suggest.
Our sleek future lurks across the street. But if you want to understand Charlottesville’s last century—and get a clearer glimpse into the fate of the rapidly developing city—start with the story of the 10th and Grady church.
Running from ‘renewal’
One-hundred-and-one years ago, Charlottesville’s Trinity Episcopal congregation first worshiped together. Soon after forming, the group found a home in a small church on the corner of Preston Avenue and High Street, at the base of Vinegar Hill, the black neighborhood where many of their congregants lived. They wouldn’t be there long.
“When I was a youngster, people lived on Preston Avenue down by where Lane High School is now,” recalls George Ferguson, in the oral history collection Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville. Ferguson was a prominent undertaker who served as the head of the local NAACP chapter in the 1950s.
“There were some stores down there,” he says. “There were some barbershops. There were some residences…Those were taken over by eminent domain—the city—when they built that Lane High School back down there in the ’30s.”
Throughout the 20th century, the City of Charlottesville has invoked eminent domain to seize and destroy the land and homes of black people, in the name of a loosely defined public good. The construction of whites-only Lane High School in the late ’30s was the city’s first major urban renewal project. (The stately building, with its spacious green lawn, now houses Albemarle County’s administrative offices.)
Trinity Episcopal’s original church was among the buildings destroyed to make way for the segregated school. After 20 years, the congregation had no home.
Undaunted, the group moved down the street a few blocks, purchasing the land where the 10th and Grady church now sits. Today, that land is right in the heart of the city, pressed up against one of Charlottesville’s busiest roads. In 1939, it was a vacant lot.
This is where the church building comes in—literally. The church itself was built 20 miles away in Palmyra, in Fluvanna County, in 1910. The Episcopal congregation in Fluvanna disbanded in the late ’30s, and gifted its church to the Episcopalians in Charlottesville, who dismantled the building, moved the parts into town, and rebuilt it completely by the spring of 1939.
Poetically, the last service in the old High Street building, before it was destroyed, was held on Good Friday. The first service in the new Trinity Church on 10th and Grady was held on Easter—Resurrection Sunday.
Resisting massive resistance
“The old Trinity Episcopal church there on 10th and Grady was a benchmark church in Charlottesville,” says Richard Johnson, who has lived in Charlottesville on and off for his whole life.
“Most of our members were very outgoing people,” Johnson says. “Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, the whole nine yards.”
Richard Johnson and his mother Lelia Brown have been members of the Trinity Episcopal church since the days when the congregation met in the 10th and Grady building. Photo: Eze Amos
Trinity’s leaders became the city’s leaders. In 1935, Reverend Cornelius Dawson helped found Barrett Early Learning Center, which still exists today. Henry Mitchell, the vicar in the ’50s, served as the second black member of Charlottesville’s School Board. And Ferguson, the NAACP leader, was an active member of the congregation.
These leaders were poised to confront the next crisis that would transform life in Charlottesville—school desegregation. Although Lane High had been built atop the wreckage of Trinity Church, the City of Charlottesville wouldn’t let the congregants’ children attend the segregated high school—even after Brown v. Board mandated integration.
In 1958, Charlottesville became one of a handful of localities around Virginia to engage in “massive resistance.” The city closed its schools rather than allow black students to learn in all-white classrooms.
During the shutdown, the congregation organized classes in the 10th and Grady church.
When the schools were closed, Johnson recalls, “The white kids…formed something called Rock Hill Academy at the old school. So Trinity said, ‘Well now we got a lot of these kids here that need to get educated.’”
“We had classes at the church until the governor and the state could get their act together to make sure the integration finally happened,” Johnson says.
Over the years, the congregation grew too large for the 10th and Grady building. In the mid-’70s, Trinity Episcopal sold its church to the owners of the dairy factory across the street, and moved to a new building a little further down Preston, where it still meets today.
For Johnson, though, the memories of the 10th and Grady building run deep.
“My parents were married in that church,” he says. “I am a third generation Episcopalian—my grandparents were members of that church…I was christened there. I was confirmed there.”
“I know a little bit about that building,” he says. “I’m very proud of my church.”
Sing along
“I don’t know where you come from, amen,” proclaims Pastor William Nowell. “But I declare, amen, we are to know where we’re going.” He’s in full flight, dressed in a sharp white suit, shaking and shouting and preaching to a packed house of finely dressed congregants. Blues guitars and a tambourine and dozens of voices provide the gospel score for the old man’s sermon.
The performance is recorded in the 2011 documentary Preacher, which focuses on Nowell and his New Covenant Pentecostal church. When the Trinity Episcopal congregation moved down the street in the ’70s, Nowell’s people moved in. They sang their songs from those red-felted pews until 2018.
William Nowell preaches in his congregation’s new home on Free Union Road. Photo courtesy New Covenant Pentecostal Church
Nowell’s church engaged with the surrounding community through music. “We did a lot of marching, singing, up and down the street,” the pastor now recalls. “We used to play for the Ten Miler [runners] every year. We would be on the sidewalk as they would go through.”
“It was a very special place,” Nowell says of the church. “We accomplished a lot of things while we was there. We had a daycare. We had an outreach ministry. We fed the homeless.”
As Charlottesville’s homeless population grew through the aughts, Nowell’s congregation made providing food a focus of its work. Preacher shows the preacher leaving Harris Teeter with a car full of food to be distributed by the church.
In the film, Nowell does other work, too —he choreographs a wedding for two young congregants, and performs a lively service at the local jail. Many of the church’s members lived in the nearby 10th and Page neighborhood. “That kind of impact on the community really did something for me,” he says.
After more than four decades, though, the congregation moved on. Making rent had become difficult. “Small congregation, we had a lot of people on fixed incomes,” Nowell says. And in the creaky old building, “Our heating bill was whoo.”
When Mount Amos Church offered Nowell rent-free use of its building 10 minutes outside of town, the preacher accepted, and the congregation left the 10th and Grady building behind.
Just as they moved out, the Dairy Central developers moved in across the street, but Nowell says the two aren’t related.
“We miss it, though,” Nowell says of the church. “We got a lot of history in there.”
Don’t have a cow
“The whole city is gentrifying. Every single neighborhood is gentrifying,” says Jeremy Caplin.
For decades, Caplin has been trying to staunch the bleeding—he owns dozens of houses in the 10th and Page neighborhood, which he rents at low rates to families that have lived there for a long time. But he can only do so much.
Shiny, boxy, modern homes now break up the rows of old bungalows with white front porches. Luxury apartments on West Main Street tower over the southern edge of the neighborhood. And the Dairy Central project chugs along.
The column-fronted Monticello Dairy building on Preston Avenue housed a functioning dairy factory—and sold much-loved ice cream—from its construction in 1936 to its closure in 1985. Since then, it’s been a martial arts studio, a paintball arena, a music venue, and more.
The Monticello Dairy factory, pictured around the time the 10th and Grady church would have been constructed next door. Photo: Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
In 2017, Stony Point Development Group purchased the derelict factory for $11.9 million. The parcel of land Stony Point acquired includes the lot across the street, where the 10th and Grady church sits.
The Dairy Central project sets gentrification alarms blaring. It’s a posh apartment complex next to a historically low-income black neighborhood. Large tech companies with names like Dexcom and CoStar Group have already signed leases for office space, and so has Starr Hill craft brewery.
Caplin says it could be worse, though. “It was just a lot of surface parking lots that weren’t being used,” he says. “So they haven’t taken away from the neighborhood. They did a nice fix up on the original dairy…It’s murky but I’m cautiously optimistic.”
However, “I’m not sure the people in the neighborhood will go to the restaurants there,” Caplin says. “Whatever apartments they have there aren’t going to be affordable for blue-collar working people from the neighborhood.”
“We have taken a lot of pride in connecting with the community, trying to pay tribute to the history that’s on the property,” says Jodi Mills, the marketing and PR director at Stony Point.
Early attempts at community engagement have had mixed results. The developers have just begun painting a 61-foot-long mural of a cow on the side of their building, in homage to a large metal cow statue that once stood outside the dairy factory. Mills cites the cow mural as an example of the “historical reference” that the developers have prioritized.
“Talking about putting a cow on the wall. Please, give me a break,” said Gloria Beard, a longtime 10th and Page resident and community advocate, in March. “It’s supposed to be a historically black neighborhood. Put somebody that did something constructive in the city.”
The cow mural was approved by a narrow 3-2 City Council vote.
Mural aside, the Dairy Central developers are doing one thing right: They’re keeping the church.
Some residents have voiced their opposition to Dairy Central’s cow mural. Staff photo
The preservation situation
On the edge of town, the precious Woolen Mills Chapel has a bell tower that’s started to lean towards the road because the foundations are in such bad shape. In Fifeville, the home of important black educator Benjamin Tonsler sat with an unfinished porch and overgrown front lawn for years, ignored by owners who lived elsewhere. Both properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but that didn’t stop the decay. Many of the town’s most important historic properties from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have recently fallen through the cracks.
In Charlottesville, the burden of historic preservation most often falls on the owners of the property, which becomes problematic when those owners don’t care about preservation or don’t have the resources required for upkeep (or, in the extraordinary case of the chapel, don’t exist).
“Unless it’s Jeffersonian, Charlottesville’s not that strong on preservation,” Caplin says.
It seems like the 10th and Grady church will have a different fate. Tearing down the old building has “never been a consideration whatsoever,” says Mills.
Pastor Nowell corroborates that claim—he says the Dairy Central developers met with his congregation when they bought the property, and offered to help with upkeep. Caplin says that some early, casual remarks from the developers left him on “high alert” about the church’s prospects for survival, but he’s happy to see that renovations have now begun.
The church needs serious work. Stony Point is replacing the roof and gutters, fixing foundational issues, removing lead paint, and more. The renovations will remain true to the original design of the structure—and cost more than $600,000, says Mills.
Johnson and Nowell are thankful that the church buildings will be preserved. “I understand they’re going to use them for educational purposes for the neighborhood,” Johnson says.
Destroying the building “would have been hateful,” Caplin says. “It’s a sweet little church.”
Now, renovations are underway, and the interior of the building is empty. Photo: Stephen Barling
In Charlottesville, an old building getting such a comprehensive face lift is unusual. The 10th and Grady church has been saved by a specific and fortunate set of circumstances.
The Dairy Central developers own the church because it happened to be connected to the property they actually wanted to buy—the empty factory next door. If it had been a separate parcel, it wouldn’t have been their problem.
And, while the $600,000 required to repair the church is far more than past congregations could invest, it represents a tiny percentage of the money Stony Point is pumping into the neighborhood.
“Believe me, we’ve had lots of people say to us, ‘that would make the coolest restaurant, that would make the coolest bar,’” Mills says, emphasizing Stony Point’s love of history. “That’s not what we’re looking to do.”
It’s not clear that Stony Point could put a restaurant there even if it wanted to. The property is zoned for residential use only, in an area with specific provisions in Charlottesville’s comprehensive plan. Converting the church into a restaurant would require a formal petition, a series of meetings, review from the planning commission, and an affirmative vote from City Council—hardly a sure thing.
This situation is an outlier: Charlottesville’s historic properties would look very different if every old building was serendipitously acquired by a wealthy developer who faced an extended back-and-forth with the city before the place could be turned into a bar.
So, when Stony Point is done, the church will look much as it does now—but with a fresh coat of (unleaded) paint. As for the tenants, Mills says, “there are absolutely no plans at this time.”
Whatever the church’s future holds, it’s clear that the building’s past has made an indelible impression on the people who have spent time underneath its slender, gabled roof.
This building doesn’t look like much—especially now, with the chipped paint, and the wild ivy, and the construction crew’s port-a-potty out front. But its history reflects the history of the city, to a marvelous degree. The 10th and Grady church has been a place of worship, but also a place of refuge, resistance, and music. Now, the building is a symbol of the gentrification transforming the city, and a test case for a town trying to figure out how to preserve its past. Charlottesville’s black history has been buried far too often, but this monument still stands, an example of all the history we have to preserve.
No one spent more time in the church than Nowell, who first entered the building in 1975 and kept going back nearly every day for more than 40 years.
He’s in his 80s now, but still preaching, and he still wants to help the little church any way he can.
“I would still like to get involved in something, [like a] community center,” he says. “We learned to know everybody in the neighborhood. Everybody knew us. Lot of them cried when we left.”
“It was just like a family,” the preacher says. “Keep me in touch…It still has a place in my heart.”
Longtime 10th and Page residents say the culture of the neighborhood is changing, and that their new neighbors keep to themselves more, creating divisions where before there was a shared sense of community. Photo by Eze Amos
Sharon Jones’ childhood home no longer exists. It was in an area of Charlottesville called Gospel Hill, which also no longer exists. “My two brothers and I were born there,” says Jones, who was born in 1962. Around that time the rapidly expanding University of Virginia bought the dozen or so houses in the predominantly African-American neighborhood, and bulldozed them. The UVA Hospital stands in its place now. The family moved less than a half mile away to Page Street, one of the only areas in the city where white people did not use racial ordinances, neighborhood covenants and zoning laws to prevent them from living there. The neighborhood, known as 10th and Page, is the city’s largest continual African-American community.
Now, as Charlottesville faces a city-wide housing crisis, 10th and Page is reckoning with a massive tide of gentrification. A 2016 comprehensive housing analysis by Robert Charles Lesser & Co. found that Charlottesville’s upper-income earners are buying houses at lower prices than they can afford, preventing middle-income people from buying those same houses. It creates a trickle-down effect, where middle-income earners buy houses that lower-income residents can afford, leaving the lowest income earners with few housing options.
Over the last decade, dozens of white middle- and upper-income people have bought homes and property in 10th and Page. Many erect fences around their yards, tack on expensive additions or tear down houses entirely and build anew, driving up property assessments and taxes. Longtime residents say the culture of 10th and Page is also changing, and that their new neighbors keep to themselves more, creating divisions where before there was a shared sense of community. And for some African-Americans who have lived most of their lives here, the echoes of a not-so-distant past, when white people told black residents where to live, are very present. That history has largely been ignored and forgotten, leaving behind much of the nuance that helps explain why the city is the way it is—and the future that is possible.
Resident concern
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Tate Huffman has just returned from the gym to his home in Fifeville, a neighborhood that, for most of its history, has been predominantly African-American. “It is definitely shifting,” says Huffman, sitting at his kitchen table. “In the seven years we’ve lived here, I’ve seen a lot of gentrification.” Against the advice of his brother, who called Fifeville “sketchy” after moving to Charlottesville to work at UVA, Huffman and his wife, Faith Levine, who are white, bought the house in 2010. “I like the location more than anything,” he says. Huffman grew up poor in West Virginia, he says, and used government grants for college in Utah and a chiropractic degree in Oregon. He owns a chiropractic business in Belmont, while his wife works as a dance instructor.
Two years ago, the couple bought their second home, this time on Page Street, across the street from Jones. And, as city residents are increasingly doing, they rented it for added income on Airbnb, where they wrote the following description: “The neighborhood of 10th & Page is predominantly black, lower-middle class with a quickly shifting demographic of 20-30 something middle class professional and grad students (aka it is in the process of gentrification, I am obviously contributing to that by renting my place on Airbnb). Physically the neighborhood is a mix of rundown houses and newly built/remodeled. My end of the street is not that pretty, nor is my house from the outside (inside is clean, comfortable, generally quiet, and spacious).”
Jones and several of her longtime neighbors were “livid” when they saw the description. Jones took to Facebook and replied: “As a life-long resident of Page Street, I am very offended by this description. Page Street has had its issues, just like any other neighborhood, but to purchase a house and use it for an Airbnb, and describe the neighborhood in this derogatory manner, hurts. Maybe the owner should have purchased in a different neighborhood.”
Huffman and Levine hadn’t realized they had offended their neighbors, and have since changed the wording and stopped by Jones’ house to apologize. She wasn’t home, but she says she appreciates the gesture. While Huffman and Levine are two of only a few Airbnb renters in 10th and Page, their arrival followed nearly a decade of upper-middle-income white families moving in. “Growing up, everybody knew everybody,” Jones says. “But now you don’t know who’s where.”
Huffman says he and his friends grapple with being gentrifiers. “It is tough,” he says. “In a way we feel like we’re doing a disservice, but at the same time…I really feel like it’s a mixed bag, I do. There was a time when this neighborhood was extremely unsafe.” He pauses, trying to choose his words carefully. “Yeah, I do feel guilty about gentrification of course, but I also–it’s that whole thing: If I don’t do it, is somebody else going to?”
Market price
In 2004, when Brian Haluska was hired as a city planner, Charlottesville’s housing market was booming. Young white middle-upper-income folks were buying, renovating and selling houses in Belmont left and right. “Once the housing stock in downtown Belmont had been flipped over, and it was all $300,000, the buying opportunities were gone, so where are they going next?” says Haluska. Starr Hill was already in flux, as was Fifeville. Haluska oversees the city’s planning of 10th and Page, and recalls that the low cost of houses there put the neighborhood in the spotlight. But there was a problem: Many houses were in disrepair.
John Gaines, lifelong Charlottesville resident and former principal of the Jefferson School, was president in the late 1990s of the neighborhood association for 10th and Page, where he grew up. “At that time there were a lot of dilapidated houses in this area,” says Gaines, who lives in his childhood home on Ninth Street NW. “There was a lot of drug dealing going on right on this street. I’d get out of my car when I’d come [home] from work, and guys asked me, ‘You want anything?’ There were a lot of shootings and killings that occurred in this area.” In the mid to late ’90s, Gaines saw the Piedmont Housing Alliance rehabilitate rundown houses in Belmont, so he asked the nonprofit to do the same in 10th and Page.
Altogether, in the early 2000s, PHA constructed or rehabilitated 31 houses in 10th and Page, most in the heart of the neighborhood. Sunshine Mathon, the new executive of PHA, says that 71 percent of them were sold, using subsidies, to people earning an average of $28,925 a year (about 52 percent of the area median income at the time), while the rest were sold at full-market rates. Fifty-six percent of the homebuyers were people of color, says Mathon.
Gaines says he thinks it was good for the neighborhood, though he acknowledges some residents were upset. “A lot of people hollered because they felt people in the neighborhood couldn’t afford them, which probably was true in some cases,” he says. Jones was upset. “When PHA said they were going to purchase the houses and build low to moderate income, I got excited,” she says. “Because I’m thinking, somebody from Garrett will move in, somebody from Prospect, somebody who works and makes a low to moderate income, they’ll be able to own their own home. But that’s not what happened.”
While PHA’s project was underway, something else did happen, Haluska says. The city’s housing market boomed, and PHA sold some of the more central houses in 10th and Page at market rates to middle-upper-income white people. “By the time they had been built, already things had shifted,” says Haluska. “And now suddenly it was, okay, PHA just put a bunch of white people in 10th and Page neighborhood, and is this the beginning of a trend?”
The new PHA houses were intended “to attract a mix of incomes back to the neighborhood” and increase net asset growth for longtime residents, according to a PHA project booklet. Since then, neighborhood home assessments have risen, as have the number of white homebuyers. One of the most expensive new homes is a two-story house on Ninth Street NW built in 2015. It’s a modern design with gray Hardie board siding and a natural wood accent striped down the middle. Four raised wood garden beds sit next to an off-street parking spot, and an older concrete single-story accessory unit is in the backyard. It was recently assessed at $769,300. The older two-story house next door was built in 1900 and recently assessed at $202,691. Another new two-story modern design house was built in 2014 on 10 1/2 Street NW. It has a small front deck in place of a porch, and the exterior is made half of corrugated rust-colored metal siding and half of yellow and gray painted Hardie board. It was recently assessed at $422,000. The two-story house next to it, built in 1920, was assessed at $178,970.
Jones says increasing property assessments wouldn’t be so bad if she could afford to use her home as collateral to borrow against. But she can’t, and her property taxes keep increasing. “My biggest fear is that the property taxes are going to price us out,” says Jones. “We’ll lose our house, and then where do we go?” Gaines too has been hit. “Come next month, I’m going to have to shell out $1,400 to the city for property tax,” he says. The city offers tax relief for the permanently disabled and those over the age of 65, but only if they earn less than $50,000 a year and have a net worth below $125,000.
James Bryant and Sharon Jones, both longtime 10th and Page residents, sit on the Community Development Block Grant task force, which funnels small pools of federal money into neighborhood infrastructure. Jones and Bryant say the neighborhood is not the same one they lived in growing up, when you knew and interacted with your neighbors. Photo by Eze Amos
Longtime 10th and Page resident James Bryant says there’s another, more subtle, change occurring. “As white families move into the neighborhood they put up fences around their property,” says Bryant, who moved into his house on 10th Street NW in 1981. “To me, when you put a fence up, it says, ‘I don’t want to be bothered.’ To me, that’s a barrier.” Bryant says it makes him feel like a stranger in his own neighborhood. Most of the original houses in the area have front porches. Bryant and many others remember the old days when neighbors sat on porches and talked across their yards. “Neighbors knew each other,” he says. “But with the new folks coming in, they don’t introduce themselves.”
Bryant and Jones remember the days too when crime spiked in the neighborhood, and they’re thankful things have become safer again. But they note that it took white people moving in for that change to occur. “It’s not like we haven’t spoken up for ourselves over the years,” says Bryant. “It’s that, for the city, this wasn’t a priority neighborhood. I can remember a time when people wouldn’t even touch 10th and Page.”
In 2008, Lyle Solla-Yates and his wife bought their house on 10th Street NW. It was a PHA home, first sold to a young woman in 2006 whose parents ran a winery in Nelson County. “When we looked at this house, a lot of people told us, ‘You can’t live there, it’s not safe’,” recalls Solla-Yates, who is white. “And I think there was a lot of veiled racism in that.” He says he thinks it used to be a crack house before PHA took it over. The house next door was as well. That house sold in 2006 for $224,900. Five years later, a Texan bought it, after making $15.1 billion on the sale of an oil company. Solla-Yates says it was for the oil baron’s son, who was attending UVA.
Solla-Yates also attended UVA and now works for the Nature Conservancy. Lately, he’s been tracing how zoning policies established by Charlottesville’s white government were used to cut off African-Americans. (For example, in the 1950s the city government widened Preston Avenue to allow more traffic, splitting the largely African-American neighborhoods of Rose Hill and 10th and Page in two.) Solla-Yates unearthed the 1957 report that first makes the case for urban renewal, and found the City Council minutes from 1974 that closed the road connecting 10th and Page to the east—Vinegar Hill, the Jefferson School and downtown. Around this time, Page Street was cut off on the west side as well, where before it connected to the predominantly white neighborhoods of John Street and 14th Street NW.
Lyle Solla-Yates and his wife moved into the 10th and Page neighborhood in 2008, after purchasing a Piedmont Housing Alliance-renovated home. Solla-Yates has been tracing the zoning policies Charlottesville’s government has historically used to segregate African-American neighborhoods. Photo by Eze Amos
Solla-Yates sits on the 10th and Page Community Development Block Grant task force, which funnels small pools of federal money into neighborhood infrastructure, such as new sidewalks. Solla-Yates sees that a lot of white families have moved in recently, but thinks it could be a potential force for good, a force for dismantling white supremacist zoning structures. “My theory is that if we have a certain amount of white people talking and angry, we can fight for social justice,” he says. “I’m angry about segregation. I’m angry about urban renewal. I’m angry that we’ve been intentionally segregated from the rest of the community. I’m angry that we’re underserved on infrastructure. I’m angry that we don’t have any trees. That’s all on purpose.”
A history of uprooting
Many in the city now point to mixed income housing as the potential solution to Charlottesville’s housing crisis. This follows several decades of studies showing that concentrations of poverty in neighborhoods lead to vastly disproportionate rates of crime, violence, drug use, health disparities, infant mortality rates, malnourishment and nearly every other key aspect of life.
Sharon Jones remembers the ’80s and ’90s quite well. It was a scary time, she says. The 10th and Page neighborhood had been labeled a Stay Out of Drug Area and she worried her oldest son would get caught up in the drug dealing and violence. “She was always at the door when I went outside,” recalls her son, Rickquan Jones. “I couldn’t go past the corner.” Rickquan is currently getting his master’s in sport and recreation management at George Mason University. His mom was part of a neighborhood coalition that attempted to take back 10th and Page. “We marched through the streets chanting and letting the drug dealers know we’re not going to let you take over,” she recalls.
The city’s crime spiked during this time, as did the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans. In 1992, the Daily Progress published a year-long, six-part investigative series that found three out of four people convicted of a felony from 1989 to 1991 were black. The series pointed to two causes: the racially targeted crack-cocaine sentencing disparities, and a lack of adequate legal representation for people in poverty. The investigation led to the creation in 1998 of a public defender’s office in Charlottesville, which had not existed.
A generation earlier, in the 1960s, Charlottesville’s white city government pushed to create a housing authority in the city to not only raze Vinegar Hill, one of the largest hubs of African-American life, but to also place the city’s new public housing site in 10th and Page, concentrating one of the largest pockets of poverty in a mixed-income, predominantly African-American neighborhood. White city residents successfully lobbied to block it from their neighborhoods.
James Bryant’s family was one of the first to move into the Westhaven public housing project. While it improved some families’ living conditions, most African-Americans opposed it. In 1999, Christopher Combs writes in the Magazine of Albemarle County History: “Blacks increasingly expressed their concerns that public housing represented an attempt by city planners to create ghettos and continue the practice of residentially segregated housing.” A white public housing project was also proposed at the time, Combs writes, but the city opted instead to subsidize poor white families in private housing throughout the city, thereby deconcentrating their poverty. Years later, Bryant served for three years as a commissioner on the Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority. “The whole concept of public housing was transitional housing in the ’60s,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to be permanent.”
White people too voiced opposition to public housing’s creation in the area, Combs writes, because it could have increased the number of African-Americans at the all-white Venable elementary school. Today, while children in the surrounding 10th and Page neighborhood walk to Venable, children who live in Westhaven ride a bus across town to Burnley-Moran, an elementary school opened in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school integration.
Displacement
Every week for more than 20 years, Jones has been part of a group of local African-Americans and University of Virginia students that tutors young children, many from low-income families, at Zion Union Baptist Church on Preston Avenue. In the face of centuries of discrimination, education is often seen as the greatest tool for economic mobility.
Jones’ family has gone to Zion Union Baptist, originally located in Vinegar Hill, for generations. In the early 1960s as part of the city’s urban renewal project, the white Charlottesville government voted to demolish the church along with the largely African-American neighborhood. The destruction of Vinegar Hill uprooted more than 600 renters and homeowners, along with 29 African-American businesses, which had a collective income of $1.6 million in 1959, according to the book Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia by James Saunders and Renae Shackelford. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of $13.6 million today. “The all-white downtown businessmen association were complaining that they were losing customers to the negro businesses on Vinegar Hill,” says Richard Johnson, who lives in 10th and Page, where he grew up. “They basically told City Council, if you don’t do something about this, we’re going to do something about you.”
“It destroyed black people’s pride,” recalls Eugene Williams, 90, who was recently honored by City Council for his civil rights work, especially around affordable housing.
Vinegar Hill is the most well-known example of the city’s white government moving African-Americans, but it is not the first. About 20 years earlier, in the late 1930s, the city razed African-American homes and an Episcopal church on the north side of Vinegar Hill. In its place, it built Lane High School, where white people prevented African-Americans from attending until 1959; the school shut down for months beforehand in protest.
Twenty years earlier, in 1919, many African-Americans were forced to move from McKee Row, a collection of downtown row houses sold to the white city government so it could clear them and build a park where, less than two years later, it placed a large statue of confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
This was two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1917 Buchanan v. Warley decision, which effectively overturned an ordinance approved by Charlottesville’s white City Council in 1912 that made it illegal for black residents to live in white neighborhoods, and vice versa, while also requiring home builders to state the race of the intended occupant in their permit applications, writes Karen Water-Wicks in 2014 in the Magazine of Albemarle County History.
Income and opportunity
The current situation in 10th and Page is different, of course. Longtime African-American residents are selling their homes willingly to young white buyers. They’re not being strong armed, or pushed out in an overt fashion. Rather, there’s a deeper, more systemic, factor at play—one in which race and economics intersect.
In 1994, Gloria Beard bought her Page Street house, where she raised her three sons. When she started as a patient care assistant at UVA in 1978, she earned $3.09 an hour. When she retired as a certified phlebotomist in 2004, she says she earned $12 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a $3-an-hour raise over the course of 25 years. (In 2015, with inflation, Beard would have earned $15.14 an hour; the national average for a phlebotomist in 2015 was $15.21 an hour.) But in Charlottesville, that’s not enough. Beard worked two additional part-time jobs on weekends to support her family, all of whom have now moved.
“Do you know this town ran all my kids away?” says Beard. “Many young people, this is their home. My kids left because there’s no jobs. Who wants to work at UVA when they don’t give you a sufficient raise? That’s not even fair. People who were born here leave because there’s no money to be made.”
In Charlottesville, from 2011-2015, the median household income for white families was $56,756. For African-American families it was $32,816. That’s a $23,940 gap, according to the Weldon Cooper Center. “Nine out of 10 of my classmates who graduated in the class of ’73, who are African-American, moved and never came back to Charlottesville,” says Richard Johnson, a 10th and Page native. “They couldn’t get a job after they graduated. I’m talking about lawyers, doctors, dentists, preachers, teachers, business people. White people wouldn’t hire them.”
A recent study on income mobility by Stanford economist Raj Chetty and Harvard economist Nathaniel Hendren found that Charlottesville ranks near the bottom, at 2,700 out of 2,885 jurisdictions, meaning that if you’re born poor in Charlottesville, you are very likely to remain poor, and that there are 2,699 other cities and counties where you’re more likely to gain wealth.
The consequences of these realities also play out in numbers. According to Weldon Cooper, over the last 115 years, the number of white people in Charlottesville has grown by 28,053, while the black population has grown by just 6,060. In 1900, there were 3,834 white people (60 percent) and 2,613 black people (40 percent) in Charlottesville. In 2015, there were 31,887 white people (80 percent), and 8,673 (20 percent) black people. Much of life in Charlottesville has been designed for and by white people, say many African-Americans. This plays a large role in why African-Americans are selling their homes when the elder generation passes away.
Lorenzo Carter grew up on 10th and Page Street in the ’60s and ’70s. He left town 10 days after he graduated from Charlottesville High School in 1976. “I wanted out of Charlottesville,” he says in a phone interview. “I didn’t feel there would be anything there for me. It just wasn’t a place I enjoyed or had a lot to offer.” Similarly, Sharon Jones’ older brother Leonard Medley moved when he turned 17, in 1963, and never came back. He’s now 72 and lives in Oakland, California. “Charlottesville had nothing to offer other than working for UVA hospital,” says Medley. “The jobs for the blacks were mediocre. For the whites, they could go to the top of any corporation there was.” Medley grew up in Vinegar Hill and moved with his family to Gospel Hill when he was 11. He recalls that banks would not loan his mother money when they lived there, a practice known as redlining. When she moved to 10th and Page, he says, they did.
This past September, the Federal Reserve Board found the median net worth of white families in 2016 was $171,000. For African-Americans, the median net worth was $17,600. A closer look at the statistics reveals that home ownership has proven to be the No. 1 way, outside of employment, that families increase their net worth. “There is a very deep national and institutional history of racial discrimination and disenfranchisement that has made it far more difficult for families of color to build wealth through home ownership specifically,” says PHA Executive Director Sunshine Mathon in an email.
Jeremy Caplin has been buying houses in the 10th and Page neighborhood for the last 30 years—he owns nearly 70—in order to provide affordable rental options for low-income residents. Photo by Eze Amos
Before his parents owned it, the brick house John Gaines, 80, grew up in was owned by a white policeman, and Gaines remembers another white policeman living across the street as well. The neighborhood was transitioning at that time from being racially mixed to becoming predominantly African-American, in large part because it was one of the few neighborhoods where white people did not prevent them from living there. It was the height of Jim Crow, and racial segregation was rampant.
Many of the city’s housing deeds at that time contained the clause: “This property is sold subject to the restriction that it shall be used for residential purposes only and that it shall not be owned or occupied by other than persons of the Caucasian race, family servants and servants quarters excepted.” These racial covenants existed in North Downtown, Locust Grove, Belmont, Fry’s Spring, Jefferson Park Avenue, Johnson Village and Rugby Hills.
In the decades following Emancipation, African-Americans had a number of their own neighborhoods as well, until the city began using eminent-domain, zoning policies and urban renewal to push them out. In 1930, about 50 percent of African-Americans owned homes in Charlottesville, the same percentage as white families, according to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. But over the last 80 years, that has decreased, and now about 27 percent of African-Americans own homes, while white home ownership in the city remains at 50 percent.
Affordable housing —at a cost
Over the last several years, two giant student housing structures have been built along West Main Street, along the neighborhood’s south side, with a third building currently under construction. The massive towers loom over 10th and Page, and add nearly 900 units to the city’s housing market. But instead of making any of these apartments affordable for families making less than $50,000 a year, and creating a mixed-income housing complex, the developers and property managers—based in Georgia, Florida, Chicago and Singapore—opted to pay into the city’s affordable housing fund.
Now, all eyes are on the north end of 10th and Page after the old Monticello Dairy building and the surrounding 5.7-acre plot was sold earlier this year for $11.9 million. Chris Henry is the general manager for developer, Stony Point Design/Build, LLC, and says it aims to build a 50-to-80-foot-tall structure for 200 to 300 new multi-family units, some of which will be “affordable.” Henry says he wants to work with residents to find a common ground for the new structure. “We’re going to butt heads on some things, not everybody’s going to get what they want, including me,” says Henry. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to be a better process.” Henry’s company commissioned the design of a walking green space in the center of Preston Avenue. “Maybe this could be a way to try and heal some of the damage that was done,” says Henry. The company also owns the building across 10th Street NW where, until recently, the New Covenant Pentecostal Church worshipped. Henry says the congregation moved on its own accord to a new location in the county. One possible use of the church, which is historically protected, is turning it into an affordable daycare for nearby residents, he says.
Stony Point Design/Build LLC purchased the 5.7-acre plot on the north end of 10th and Page, the site of the old Monticello Dairy building, for $11.9 million earlier this year, with plans to build a 50-to-80-foot-tall structure housing 200 to 300 multi-family units, some of which Stony Point General Manager Chris Henry says will be “affordable.” Photo by SkycladAP
City planner Brian Haluska says this project comes as Charlottesville is breaking free from its old ways of developing neighborhoods. “Planning is beginning to focus a lot on people who have traditionally been left out of the process—marginalized groups that our processes are very much geared towards not serving or not notifying,” says Haluska. “They’ve been designed historically for people who have resources and can engage in that process. How do you reimagine these processes so everybody can be included?”
Jeremy Caplin, however, is worried that the added housing will tilt the market while also increasing traffic through the neighborhood. For the last 30 years, he’s quietly bought nearly 70 houses in 10th and Page, renting them out at deeply affordable rates to extremely low-income residents.His lowest rent is $200 a month, he says, and his highest is $990 a month for a five-bedroom house. He estimates the majority of his renters are African-American. “I try to preserve what’s left of the black culture in this neighborhood and to preserve these houses,” says Caplin. “This crowd never got any respect or any financial breaks or any help. I’ve had a lot of breaks, a lot of help. I see how the world works, and it’s just unfair. The deck was stacked. You get a deal of cards in life, and many people in this neighborhood got no high cards.”
Caplin first started by securing a loan to fix up the house of an African-American man who worked for his family. The man had an existing loan at 30 percent interest and he was set to default, which would have cost him his house. “I said, ‘This is not happening; I’m going to be the guy who fixes this,” says Caplin, who got a loan from his father and saved the man’s house. Caplin looked around the neighborhood and saw an increasing number of boarded-up houses. “Why isn’t anybody paying attention?” he wondered. One by one, he started buying houses, fixing them up and renting them through word-of-mouth. In the beginning, Caplin says, realtors wouldn’t even take a listing in the neighborhood. “They would scoff at the idea of having their sign in this neighborhood,” he says.
Wallace and Antoinette Dowell have preserved six affordable housing units in the 10th and Page neighborhood, directly across the street from their Tenth Street Bed and Breakfast. Photo by Eze Amos
Caplin follows in some large footsteps. From 1960 through 1980, Eugene Williams, a civil rights activist and former president of the local NAACP chapter, amassed more than 60 properties that became Dogwood Housing. Though not exclusively within 10th and Page, some of the houses were in the neighborhood, and have long given residents affordable rents, along with any needed financial literacy and workforce training to help ensure income mobility. Wallace Dowell too has preserved six affordable housing units, directly across the street from the 10th Street B&B, which he runs with his wife, Antoinette.
Caplin says he’s keeping his profit margin small and reinvesting earnings into property maintenance, which more developers and landlords could do. “It gets into [the] ethical question of how much profit is reasonable,” he says. “How much can you live with? Are you happy making 5 percent? Or do you feel you have to make 20 percent?” Caplin mostly hires neighborhood residents to do the work on the houses, he says. But no matter how many properties he buys—and he is heavily leveraged—he knows he can’t get them all.
Often, when considering a new tenant, Caplin will seek the input of lifelong locals like Jones, who says, if not for Caplin, “everything would be bought, remodeled and sold for $300,000 to $400,000. He’s keeping affordable housing in the neighborhood.
“If I hadn’t bought my house when I bought it, and if the lot didn’t belong to my grandmother who died and then passed it down to my dad, and if they hadn’t given me the lot, God knows where I would be,” Jones says. “Because I couldn’t afford to buy a house in Charlottesville anywhere now.”
