A second stab at satire from The Hook, this time about smoking in restaurants. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith
Page 163 of 744
The Rutherford Institute thinks that Rep. Tom Perriello should move his office to a more protestable location, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Progress.. As Lisa Provence explains in The Hook’s cover story this week, angry protesters are intimidating patrons of neighboring businesses, insisting that they have every right to protest on private property, and complaining that the sidewalk next to the building isn’t close enough for their liking. (Let’s all pause to consider the irony of property rights advocate insisting that they have a right to protest on private property.) Rutherford president John Whitehead says that when the congressman’s lease expires on the space in a year, he should move to a location that is friendlier to protestors. Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression president Bob O’Neil thinks that it’s possible that it would be a good thing for Perriello to do that, but has to wonder what location this could possibly be.
So, let’s figure this out. Who can think of a privately-owned building that leases a space appropriate for a congressman’s regional district office, that’s surrounded by public land, located in a more popular and well-trafficked part of the city than this one (two blocks off the Downtown Mall), but has no neighboring offices, businesses, or residences, and has rent that’s low enough that anti-government protestors won’t complain about it? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?
A UVA project has virtually recreated Vinegar Hill in its heyday, the university writes in a press release. (If you’re not from here: Vinegar Hill was a large, mostly black neighborhood around the McIntire/Main intersection that was demolished by the city for “urban renewal.” The city relocated people from their own homes into public housing.) Undergraduates researched archival records to look at who owned property, when and how it changed hands, what it was appraised for, where people went after they lost their homes, and lots of similar information, combining it all into a series of visualizations fronted by a website called The Vinegar Hill Project. I’ve spent a while exploring this website, and it’s just a treasure trove of data, veritable infoporn for local history buffs. Set aside an hour to pore over this site.
It’s a shame that the historical society is too stuffy to do this kind of thing. They prohibited their last executive director from blogging.
Biscuit Run may become a state park, Brian Wheeler writes in the Daily Progress / Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Hunter Craig paid $46M for the 1,200 acre property in 2005, which he intended to develop as “Fox Ridge” (somewhere, I know, there’s a software program that just spits out random names for “upscale” housing developments). He’d planned on somewhere between 900 and 5,000 houses. The Planning Commission unanimously opposed it, but the Board of Supervisors OKd it anyway, allowing 3,100 houses, despite the $222M that you and I will have to pay in tax dollars to subsidize it. The project was put on hold in January, an unsurprising move in the face of a total collapse of the U.S. real estate market.
Presumably seeking the least financially harmful way to dispose of this property (because, really, where is the demand for 3,100 new houses?), Craig is talking with the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation about donating the whole affair to the state to join the network of 35 state parks. With the land assessed at $44M, presumably that could afford Craig a unique financial opportunity to write down those losses; a governor eager to increase protected land before his term expires in a month’s time may be able to offer some state tax incentives. Albemarle County isn’t thrilled at the prospect of losing the $325k in annual property taxes that Craig pays on the land now, which would be the effect of moving it into state ownership, but since the project is a significant net financial loss for the county, Biscuit Run as a park would seem to be a good outcome. The only other snag is that chunk of land is in the growth area, which doesn’t make sense as a location for a park. But that’s the land that Craig owns, that’s the only offer on the table, and it’s not clear that Albemarle County has any say in the matter, anyhow.
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