Uncommon – C-VILLE Weekly

Studio IX welcomes The Carpe Café; Hardywood opens taproom

For a while now, Matt Rohdie has wanted to grow his Carpe Donut business into something beyond his bakery and shop on Allied Lane and the truck that’s a regular fixture at Fridays After Five (and plenty of parties and weddings). So when Studio IX owner James Barton approached him with the possibility of joining forces to open a café in the spot formerly inhabited by Shark Mountain Coffee Co., Rohdie was game.

The Carpe Café, which had its soft opening a couple of weeks ago and will open officially on Friday, February 17, “is an aggregation, a team effort from the Charlottesville [food] community,” says Rohdie. It touts Carpe Donuts in addition to food from local makers such as Revolutionary Soup, Hudson Henry Baking Co., Farmstead Ferments, BreadWorks, Mad Hatter Foods, Ula Tortilla, NoBull Burger and Speedie B’s Energy Bars. Eggs (used for breakfast sandwiches) will come from the Local Food Hub, and drinks include Mudhouse and Trager Brothers coffees, Snowing in Space cold brew nitro coffee and Blue Ridge Bucha.

Rohdie and Barton are working with the creators of The Festy Experience to bring some music into the mix, too. On Saturday, February 18, the café will hold a bluegrass brunch put together by The Artist Farm (the folks responsible for The Festy Experience).

Rohdie says the café, which will be open from 8am to 5pm Monday through Saturday, uses certified organic ingredients whenever possible, but he acknowledges that often the organic certification (which costs tens of thousands of dollars) is too expensive for a small local purveyor. A benefit of working within a local food scene like Charlottesville’s is that Rohdie often knows the producers well enough to know that their processes are organic, sustainable and trustworthy, even if they don’t hold the USDA organic certification. “With a small business, it becomes a relationship of trust between the owner, the purveyor and the customer,” says Rohdie.

On tap

The Hardywait is over. At noon on Saturday, February 18, Richmond-based Hardywood Park Craft Brewery will open its pilot brewery and taproom on the ground floor of the Uncommon building at 1000 W. Main St.

According to a Hardywood press release, the taproom is a research and development center that will help Hardywood choose new signature beers via an “immediate feedback loop.” In short: Try one of the experimental recipes concocted by lead brewer Kevin Storm and assistant brewer/apprentice Anna Warneke in the on-site 3.5-barrel brewhouse, then tell them what you think via a comment card or one of the iPads located throughout the 150-person capacity taproom. Popular recipes will be considered for wider production.

During the grand opening, they’ll broadcast the UVA men’s basketball game against UNC on the taproom’s big-screen TVs while JM Stock folks cook burgers and sausages from noon to 4pm. Pilot batches of the Shipman’s Porter, Arschandler Weisenbock and the Byki American black IPA will be on tap.

The taproom will be open from noon to 10pm Tuesdays through Sundays. As for food, they’ll have fresh-baked pretzels made with Hardywood’s signature Singel Belgian blonde ale served with beer cheese and beer mustard, as well as other snacks from Virginia-based purveyors.

Unaffordable housing: Developers pay to not build affordable units

Sharonda Poindexter-Rose is a 24-year-old single mother who works as a server at a local restaurant. She lives in a one-bedroom home, and as she’s looked for a two-bedroom place over the last several months, she’s discovered a harsh reality. “It is so expensive out here, it’s ridiculous,” says Poindexter-Rose.

In the last six years, 1,530 new housing units have been created in the city, but only 73 of these—fewer than 5 percent—are priced to be affordable. “Affordable” means that a two-person family making $52,650 a year or less could afford to rent it. In Charlottesville, 1,800 families—25 percent—make less than $35,000 a year, according to the Orange Dot report released last year.

The city has set a goal to have 15 percent of its housing be affordable by 2025. Overall, the percentage of affordable units in Charlottesville has declined from 10.5 percent six years ago to 10.06 percent.

In large part that’s because so many new high-priced units have entered the market. More than half of these are coming from three apartment buildings on West Main Street. Between The Flats at West Village, The Uncommon and The Standard, which is currently under construction, a total of 861 units will have been created. None of them has been priced as affordable for lower-income families. Instead, with rents ranging from $1,500-$3,200, the target tenant has been students.

“Everywhere you go in Charlottesville, it’s always about UVA students,” says Poindexter-Rose. “Look at all the people who work at UVA, look at all the people who work at hotels. Where do you want us to live? It comes across as if they don’t care about us. That’s what the message comes across as.”

Instead of lowering rental rates, each of these out-of-state developers has paid into the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund. If a developer seeks a special use permit to increase the number of allowable units in a development, a local ordinance lets companies pay the city a lump sum rather than designate “affordable” rents for a small percentage of units in the building.

But since the CAHF’s creation in 2007, every developer required by the ordinance to contribute to affordable housing has paid into the fund instead of providing affordable units. The Flats paid $487,491; The Uncommon paid $331,450; and, most recently, The Standard paid $664,777. None of those developers responded to a request for comment.

“Obviously we would have preferred to have the units,” says Stacy Pethia, the city’s housing program coordinator. “But we’ll take the money. We will find a way to spend it.” Coming from Pittsburgh’s housing authority, Pethia was hired by the city in August to oversee the CAHF. “I think it can be used more effectively, we just need to find a way to do that,” says Pethia. The fund currently has a $2.3 million balance.

Pethia says it does a great job of preserving and rehabilitating existing affordable housing—by funding projects with nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity, Piedmont Housing Alliance and Albemarle Housing Improvement Program—but she thinks the fund needs to do more to add affordable housing to the marketplace.

Acreage in the 10.2-square-mile city is scarce and expensive, which is why Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, says the city should use the CAHF to strategically buy land for affordable housing. Habitat for Humanity has used CAHF money for nearly all of the more than 160 homes it’s helped families build.

Rosensweig says the current affordable housing system is “broken.” For starters, he argues that the city should ease its density restrictions.

“There’s no substitute for an increase in inventory,” says Rosensweig, adding that since the West Main Street developments, he’s heard that rents elsewhere in the city are falling “ever so slightly” for the first time in years.

Pethia is also making a push for increasing residential density levels in some areas of the city. If a developer is permitted to build two additional stories on a building in exchange for making 15 percent of the units affordable to lower-income families, that would go a long way, she says.

But increasing density is not always popular. The local Great Eastern Management Company is vying to be the first to include affordable units—at least four—in its proposed 126-unit apartment building on East Jefferson Street, but has received pushback from some area residents who say it’s too large.

In November, increased density was one of 35 recommendations Pethia and the Housing Advisory Committee delivered to City Council. They also recommended doubling the amount of money developers pay into the CAHF if they opt not to build affordable units, while calling on the city to increase its own funding of the CAHF, about $1.3 million annually.

“That’s simply not enough,” says Brandon Collins, an organizer with the Public Housing Association of Residents. Providing more affordable housing, Collins says, is key to preserving the fabric of neighborhoods by helping ensure existing residents don’t get priced out.

Pethia is hopeful the city will reach its affordable housing goal in eight years. “If we look at different ways to use the housing fund and to approach affordable housing development and preservation in the city, we’ll get there. The affordable housing fund has done a lot of good and has grown, but I think it’s now time to really grow.”