The reservoirs are full, after being below capacity since last spring. But the streams are still way below normal. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith
Page 319 of 744
In today’s Daily Progress Brian McNeill writes that the area is weathering the foreclosure crisis better than most, but it still looks like a bad situation. 0.5% of area homeowners are facing foreclosure, compared to 0.8% for the whole of Virginia and 1.3% for the whole country. Piedmont Housing Alliance reports a 174% increase in people asking for help between ’05-’07. But the most clever figure comes from the Progress itself:
Meanwhile, the number of notices of foreclosure published in the Daily Progress’ classifieds section also jumped significantly. Last year saw a 30 percent increase in the notices over 2006. Moreover, there were 47 percent more foreclosure notices in January than in the previous year.
Why the comparatively low numbers here?
A key reason Charlottesville has fewer foreclosures is because the region has far fewer subprime mortgage loans than elsewhere in the state and region. Roughly 2.43 percent of the Charlottesville area’s owner-occupied homes were financed by a subprime loan, while that figure was 5.66 percent in Richmond, 4.14 across Virginia and 5.62 percent for the nation.
I assume we’ll know if the numbers spike, because foreclosure scam signs will spring up in the median strips like mushrooms after a spring rain.
NBC 29 explains what happens to the stuff we take to the recycling center. No surprises, but interesting. #
Mark Tenia at WCAV called up a Craigslist hooker, who offered him a “Greek” or a “French” for $150/hour. He called back and said he was a reporter, and she did a phone interview, saying the usual things prostitutes say when they’re interviewed. Tenia even called up the Albemarle Police, who said they they’d never even heard of Craigslist.
French? Greek? Am I so unhip I don’t even know the slang anymore?
In an effort to worsen traffic on Pantops (one assumes), a Pennsylvania businessman has proposed building an indoor sports complex there. Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress about the $9M, 125k ft.2 soccer, tennis and basketball facility, which would be built on land that the guy already owns. He’s looking to work with the guy who owns the land adjacent, too, for an even larger project.
Pantops is probably an appropriate place for this sort of a thing, but without doing something radically different with the transportation network there, things are only going to get worse.
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