The City of Charlottesville has set a plan in motion to reduce its carbon footprint—and it’s not messing around. On June 24, City Council unanimously approved a proposal to curtail carbon emissions by 45 percent over the next 11 years and achieve an end goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. It’s an aggressive plan, one […]
James Alex Fields Jr. sat before the judge, his thick, black hair grown just long enough to touch the collar of his black-and-white striped jumpsuit. The 22-year-old wore glasses, and spent most of Friday morning and early afternoon staring at the wall in front of him as the victims who were harmed when he plowed […]
The reliably Democratic 57th District rarely makes for an exciting horse race. Once a delegate, always a delegate, as David Toscano and Mitch Van Yahres before him proved, each easily holding on to the seat representing Charlottesville and the Albemarle urban ring as long as he chose. Not this year. Newcomer Sally Hudson upended the […]
They appeared overnight the first Monday in December of 2018, long-necked robots on wheels, lurking in neat rows of three or four on street corners all over town. Within a few days, the motorized scooters, which don’t have designated docking stations, were everywhere, and wherever. Now, about [...]
After nearly nine months of work, the Police Civilian Review Board is finalizing its initial bylaws. The proposed model would require the city to hire up to two full-time professional staff members to assist the board in processing and independently investigating complaints against [...]
By Bonnie Price Lofton If rainwater doesn’t seep, sponge-like, into the soil around us, it runs away somewhere. In Charlottesville, where much of the ground is covered with impermeable asphalt, it runs into stormwater drainage systems, ditches, and streams that eventually lead into the Rivanna [...]
In the words of Kermit the Frog, it’s not easy being green. Though the Muppet references the color of his amphibian skin, the famous line is a sentiment that also rings true for Charlottesville, where carbon emissions per household are more than a ton above the national average. With 10 tons of [...]
Our voices bounce back at us as we speak. I’m one street over from the Downtown Mall in Megan Read’s studio, and it, like her paintings, has an uncluttered spaciousness about it. Older finished works line part of a wall, and paintings in progress are set up at various heights on another. But [...]
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 [...]
It’s budget season. For four months every year, council and staff hold public meetings about the coming year’s priorities. For four months, I sit through what I am absolutely certain is the exact same PowerPoint at least a dozen times. Much of it remains inscrutable to me. I am growing [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sitting on a bench full of pillows at a large, round wooden table she made with her own hands, Bolanle Adeboye smears veggie cream cheese on both halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel. The visual artist is fighting a cold, and her housemate, cellist and songwriter Wes Swing, asks if she’d prefer a [...]
A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since [...]
Before August 12, 2017, many people thought of America’s Confederate statues as harmless pieces of history—if they thought of them at all. Then the hate groups came to Charlottesville, ostensibly to protest the monuments’ removal. The violent clashes that led to the death of Heather Heyer and [...]
As he prepares to step down, the founder of the Southern Environmental Law Center looks back on three decades of defending the region’s natural treasures Ambitious and naive. That’s how Rick Middleton describes himself 33 years ago, when he founded the Southern Environmental Law Center, [...]
A 75th wedding anniversary is so rare that the U.S. Census Bureau keeps no statistics on it, Mary Jane Gore tells us. Estimates are that fewer than 0.1 percent of marriages make it to 70 years or more. So this Valentine’s Day week, we tell you about Bill and Shirley Stanton of Afton, who [...]
February is Black History Month, a time when schools across the country dutifully trot out lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. In 2015, a minor firestorm ensued when Orange County High School students connected the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives [...]
New Year’s resolutions losing steam? (Or maybe you didn’t make any to begin with?) As we come to the end of a long, cold January, it’s not too late to make a fresh start. From ways to be brave to where to find support, here are 25 simple, mostly-local tips to help you look, feel, and […]
“If Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,” my 7-year-old asked me the other day, “why did he have slaves himself?” The notion that “all men are created equal” was a radical and noble idea, and it still is, if you take “men” to mean “human beings.” But back then, as I struggled [...]
In the early 1970s, City Council adopted a plan to turn Grady Avenue into a four-lane road running all the way from downtown to the bypass, with the goal of providing quick and easy access to I-64. Venable residents worried that the move would ruin their quiet neighborhood, and banded together [...]
Nothing puts a spring in the step of legislators heading to Richmond to do the people’s business like the fact that it’s an election year, and all 140 members of the General Assembly are up for reelection. Oh, and it’s the 400th year since the colonies’ first legislative body, the House of [...]
Charlottesville resident Jordan McNeish knows the perils of opioid addiction first-hand. Three years ago, he was on an East Coast road trip with his ex-girlfriend, and the plan was to end up in Maine. But their first stop was Baltimore, to buy heroin. McNeish, 29, says he had gone from using [...]