According to this Atlanta-Constitution Journal story, the city of Atlanta and Charlottesville appear to have the same John Dewberry problem.

Both cities have multi-story downtown buildings owned by Dewberry that have sat unfinished for years. Dewberry bought Atlanta’s Campanile office tower at Peachtree and 14th streets in 2010, and Charlottesville’s unfinished “Landmark Hotel” building in 2012, after CNET founder Halsey Minor abandoned the project. To put that in perspective, Savannah Sicurella, one of the ACJ reporters who wrote this story, was in third grade when Minor broke ground on the hotel.

I reached out to Atlanta and Charlottesville city officials in a group email recently, hoping they might communicate and brainstorm with each other about their shared problem.

“I am sorry this issue has connected our two cities,” Charlottesville Mayor Juandiego Wade responded. “Charlottesville would like to see the site redeveloped and hopes Mr. Dewberry would agree to an offer to purchase if he does not intend to invest in the property.”

”I’m happy to help however you think we could,” said Atlanta City Councilor Matt Westmoreland.

As this ACJ story mentions, Dewberry did put the Charlottesville property up for sale in 2024, received offers, but declined them.

However, while Atlanta official are trying to apply a hefty “blight tax” to the building, hoping to compel Dewberry to finish the building, Charlottesville city officials have mostly given up on efforts to get him to develop or sell the building. And they have not been willing to take action against Dewberry by deeming the building unsafe or blighted.

As councilor Lloyd Snook points out, applying a blight tax is something council doesn’t have the legal authority to do in Virginia.

“We can't tax property on the basis of what is planned — only on the basis of what it is actually worth right now,” he says. “ And at the moment, the fact that it is a half-built shell is actually holding the market value down, and therefore holding down his taxes.”

Still, as Snook points out, the tax assessment on Dewberry’s property has gone up 24 percent since 2020. He currently pays just over $90K in annual property tax.

As for taking action against Dewberry based on the condition of the building, Snook says the city “looked with some energy” at the question of whether Virginia law authorized them to take such action a few years ago.

“The problem was that the Dewberry didn't fit the definition in the Code of "blighted" or "derelict," he says.

The city can take action against a “derelict” building, as defined in §15.2-907.1(1):

The owners of property therein shall at such time or times as the governing body may prescribe submit a plan to demolish or renovate any building that has been declared a “derelict building.” For purposes of this section, “derelict building” means a residential or nonresidential building or structure, whether or not construction has been completed, that might endanger the public’s health, safety, or welfare and for a continuous period in excess of six months, it has been (i) vacant, (ii) boarded up in accordance with the building code, and (iii) not lawfully connected to electric service from a utility service provider or not lawfully connected to any required water or sewer service from a utility service provider.

“The structure has certainly been vacant, and it is boarded up, and while I think that it is connected to electric and water utilities, I don't know,” says Snook. “Most importantly, though, it is not a danger to the public's health, safety or welfare, again because it is not falling down.”

Actually, last year, Charlottesville’s Utility Billing Manager Richard Palumbo told me that the city didn’t have an existing utility account for the Dewberry property.

I’ve wondered if the city code used to determine blight hasn’t been used broadly/aggressively enough. While the building isn’t crumbling apart, hasn’t there been “deleterious land use” that has been “detrimental to the safety, health, or welfare of the community”? I’ve seen definitions of blighted that include buildings that “attract crime, illegal dumping, or vermin.” As you may know, the building has been infested with rats. I’ve also seen definitions that say “boarded-up structures that threaten public safety or lower surrounding property values” are considered blighted. I’m sure the property owners at 109 Second St. SE and 115 East Water Street would say it adversely affects their property values. Indeed, it adversely affects the downtown mall’s general attractiveness/value.

Also, what about the weed ordinance? There are trees literally growing out of the side of the building!

I asked Councilor Snook and Mayor Wade about this but have not heard back from them.

Many people like to blame 2017’s newly elected Charlottesville City Council, and councilor Michael Payne specifically, for reversing and voting down a plan to offer Dewberry tax incentives and guaranteed parking spaces to build the hotel project, but Dewberry was given a tax incentive deal in 2017 for his Atlanta project and that still didn’t get built. Also, Dewberry bought a building in Charleston, NC for a hotel project (which was finished in 2016 but took 8 years to build) and the Atlanta building before he bought the Charlottesville building, so the Charlottesville building is still waiting in line. And as the ACJ article says, the pandemic halted the Atlanta project, as it did many developments. Might have Dewberry built the Charlottesville hotel project if the tax incentives weren’t voted down? It seems unlikely.

Lastly, I love these photos in the ACJ article by Kirsten Luce, a photojournalist who grew up here, and has since returned, and whose work has appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic. They really capture the dark, dilapidated, and foreboding presence of the building on our downtown landscape. And one properly illustrates the sad attempt to cover it up with an artistic wrap and call it a music box.

Also, nice to see that my use of the term “Rat Hotel” and the ticker clock I created got some attention!

As two great local investigative stories have now shown, there’s a dirty little secret about building affordable housing — building them is one thing, and should be celebrated, but caring for and maintaining those properties is another thing.

“I think it (C-Ville’s article) points to one of the shortcomings in our affordable housing finance system, in that there’s relatively little money provided for long-term maintenance and upkeep of properties,” says former Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who spearheaded the effort to create the Crossings, our area’s first supportive housing project at Fourth Street and Preston Avenue. “Unlike Charlottesville Tomorrow’s excellent recent reporting on Park’s Edge, here’s a case where the landlord is responsive and trying to do right by their tenants despite a shortage of resources.”

Indeed, both pieces in C-Ville and CT give voice to low-income tenants living in housing facilities with mold, bugs, and chronic maintenance issues. Often, tenants in this situation don’t saying anything, happy to have housing at all, so the problem goes unreported. But even the best-intentioned affordable housing organizations are dealing with this problem, never mind the private real estate developers trying to turn a profit.

Of course, the Crossings and Park’s Edge are two completely different affordable housing facilities, and while those living at Park’s Edge might be struggling financially, many of those living at the Crossings are or were struggling simply to stay alive. The C-Ville article focuses on recent deaths at the Crossings, hinting at something scandalous, but as I’ve reported here, that’s not uncommon — it’s the result of the damage people who are chronically homeless have endured by the time they arrive at the Crossings.

“The mortality rate among people who’ve been chronically homeless or living on the margins of society is shockingly high,” says Norris. “ I’ve never been to more funerals than when I was Executive Director at PACEM. Living on the streets takes its toll.”

Indeed, back in 2023, I learned that of the 144 people served at the Crossings since it opened (103 homeless and 41 low-income), 19 people returned to homelessness and 30 people died.

“By the time a chronically homeless person moves into the Crossings, so much damage has already been done,” said Norris back then, unsurprised by those numbers. “I personally knew several Crossings residents who died within two or three years of moving in.”

Liz Yohn-Nyberg, then operations manager at PACEM, also knew a man who moved into the Crossings and died several years later.

“It was a perfect situation for him, a great location, exactly what he needed,” she said, “ but there’s a physical cost to being homeless, to being in a shock state all the time, with no access to basic needs. As they say, the body keeps the score.”

As I mentioned, CT did some important work on the situation at Park’s Edge in their recent investigative series, but I was surprised there was no information about the ownership history of the property, which actually is pretty scandalous. Unlike the situation at the Crossings, while tenants suffer at Park’s Edge, a lot of money has changed hands buying and selling the property. Here’s a brief rundown:

The Albemarle Housing Improvement Program (AHIP) bought Park’s Edge in 2002 for $4.2 million.

In the late 1990’s, Albemarle County encouraged the local non-profit organization to take on the property, as the federally subsidized housing credits were set to expire.

“At that time, a lot of apartments were converting to condos in that area or into student housing,” Jennifer Jacobs, AHIP’s executive director, told CT in 2020. “The county didn’t want that to happen. At the time, the property was troubled. It was distressed and had an absentee landlord. It was affordable, but not a nice place for the residents who lived there. [Albemarle County] wanted not only to preserve it but get it in the hands of an organization that would handle it and keep it local.”

In 2018, the Piedmont Housing Alliance (which managed the property for AHIP) approached AHIP and the County with a proposal to buy the property, in hopes of maintaining its affordability and keeping control of the property local, but in 2020 AHIP decided to offer the property for sale for all interested parties.

At the time, CEO Sunshine Mathon worried that some of the potential buyers wouldn’t have the best interests of the tenants in mind.

“We are highly cognizant of how the sale can impact the residents in the long term,” he told CT. “The more we put in a sale price, the less there is for the ability to maintain the property over the long term. If you have more debt on the property, the rent is going towards that and less towards maintenance.”

AHIP ended up selling the property to a mysterious LLC based in Draper, Utah for $7.4 million. TRC Parks Edge LLC then turned around and sold the property to a Maryland-based investment and asset management firm named Railfeild for $11.7 million just two years later. Today, the property is managed by Gates Hudson, a privately-owned real estate management company based in Fairfax.

As for the Crossings, while C-Ville said the return on that supportive housing investment “looks uncertain,” Norris disagrees.

“Despite this one family’s hardships, permanent supportive housing is a remarkably successful model and SupportWorks Housing has a long and commendable track record of managing these kinds of properties - including a number of properties in Richmond and Hampton Roads that have been around much longer than the Crossings,” he says. “If anything, I think this is a call to action that funders need to make sure that dollars are in place to maintain low-income housing and not just build low-income housing.”

I rented a room in a house on Holkham Drive in Ivy when I first moved to Charlottesville in the 1990s and on my first walk around the neighborhood I stumbled on an old rectangular, creek-fed swimming pool in the middle of the woods that was as long as a football field. At the time, I learned, the extraordinary pool had been there for nearly 80 years and was home to the member-owned Blue Ridge Swim Club. In 2011, Todd Barnett bought the historic property, where he hosts his Blue Ridge Field Camp, and continues to offer pool memberships to the public. Here’s something Barnett recently wrote about his experience caretaking the pool. Enjoy! — David McNair

Read more

Journalists and media professionals across the state of Virginia were honored at the Virginia Press Association’s annual gala on April 11 in Lynchburg, an occasion that shines a light on the fine work that is still getting produced despite considerable challenges. Publications tend to tout only their own awards, and the various categories and competing divisions are so confusing that it’s hard to get a good view of how our local media performed collectively. So I created a list of local winners below. It’s also a chance to review all the important stories that were covered over the last year.

For the third year in a row, The Daily Progress was selected as the best daily newspaper of its size in Virginia, taking home 33 awards at the Virginia Press Association’s annual gala on April 11, including 14 first-place awards, eight second-place prizes and 11 third-place honors…

Read more

A recent story in the New Yorker by journalist Charles Bethea [“The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male”] caught our attention because of the setting.

“On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “change your story & unf**k your life.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, rise’s founder, told me.

Then it got more spec…

Read more

It’s an odd name for a restaurant. But the owners of Cumbre Bakery, who are planning to open The Enemy in April in York Place on the Downtown Mall, say it stems from a simple idea.

“Often, our greatest enemy isn’t outside, but within ourselves,” says Augusto Rodriguez Araoz, who, with his partner Juan Brandan, transformed a barber shop on East Jefferson Street into an Argentine bakery and cafe in 2023, then opened a second location in the Dairy Market. “Fear, doubt, and the limits we sometimes set for ourselves. We wanted the restaurant to have a strong identity and a name with meaning.”

Cumbre, too, served as a metaphor, meaning in Spanish the highest point of something, like the summit of a mountain, or the greatness of something.

“The idea is to create a place that feels special, warm, and memorable from start to finish,” says Araoz.

As for the food, Araoz…

Read more

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has announced that three design firms competing to recast the two tons of bronze ingots that remain after Charlottesville’s monument of Robert E. Lee was melted down will present their proposal to the public on Saturday, March 14, at the center.

The three finalists were selected among 32 entries in the “Swords into Plowshares” project, launched after the 2021 removal of Charlottesville’s Confederate statues, which is “devoted to creating new public art in the city of Charlottesville to advance multiracial democracy in relation to global sites of memory.”

Read more

The Charlottesville Police Department released a report Monday congratulating itself on “reducing gun-related incidents” in 2025, saying they decreased by 51% from 2024 to 2025, “marking one of the most substantial public safety improvements in recent years,” the report said.

“Reducing gun violence remains one of our highest priorities,” said Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis. “A 51% reduction in gun-related incidents represents real lives impacted and real harm prevented. This progress is the result of our dedicated staff, strong partnerships with our community, and data-driven strategies that focus on both accountability and prevention.”

Of course, while those are stats to be happy about, they can be an abstraction that really doesn’t allow for reflection on the trauma that gun violence has caused over the last year. And the many ways and places t…

Read more

From the Washington Post: Snow and ice will start on Friday across the Rockies and Plains, push into the South, Midwest and Appalachians on Saturday, then reach the East Coast on Sunday. To make matters worse, the storm will usher in record-breaking cold, with frigid temperatures lingering at least a week…

Impact on Southeast and Mid-Atlantic

Winter storm-impact rating: 9 out of 10.

Cities that will be hit hardest: Athens in Georgia; Columbia in South Carolina; Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham in North Carolina; Richmond, Charlottesville and Fredericksburg in Virginia; D.C. and Baltimore.

Worst of the storm: Saturday night through Sunday.

The Southeast and Mid-Atlantic will be blitzed by heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain from late Saturday through Sunday.

Freezing rain and sleet is forecast to break out across the Carolinas, northeast Georgia and southern Virgini…

Read more

When Shirley Ehrhardt took over her sister’s little thrift store on Preston Avenue in the late 1980s, changing its name from Yesterday’s Clothes to Twice is Nice, she likely never imagined it would one day be generating over $1.5 million in annual revenue or moving into a new $5.5 million building.

But thrifting has changed dramatically.

In 2001, Ehrhardt brought in $122,000 at Twice is Nice, enough to cover her $29,000 salary and $31,000 to her favorite charity, the Jefferson Area Board on Aging, or JABA. At that time, the store was basically operating as a non-profit serving JABA, which serves area seniors, and after several more years of expenses exceeding revenues, JABA took a more active role in its operation. In 2015, Ehrhardt finally retired and handed the store over to JABA, which used revenues to support its affordable senior living facility in Croze…

Read more

As you might recall, an attempt to find out what happened to The Hook newspaper’s online archives was featured in a 2022 Washington Post story, “A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?.” After that story ran, an anonymous benefactor restored the website, but eventually that disappeared as well, along with the anonymous benefactor. Links to Hook stories have always existed on the Internet Archive, though they aren’t searchable and don’t appear in web searches, and so I took the time over the last few months to create a website that links to those archives at hooknewsarhive.com.

Read more

You won’t be hearing much about it — because local media companies are reluctant to report on each other — but there’s been some pretty big news concerning the Daily Progress.

After reporting a net loss of $36 million this year, including $4 million for restoration services after a cyber attack/ransom in February by Russian hackers, which prevented them from printing newspapers for a time and compromised the personal information of approximately 40,000 people, the parent company of the The Daily Progress, Lee Enterpises, finally gave into Florida billionaire David Hoffmann, who inked a deal on Tuesday that will give him a controlling stake in the newspaper chain. As part of the deal, Lee CEO Kevin Mowbray, who has been at the helm for 39 years, will be retiring and collecting a $1.5 million payout.

Read more

Late Friday, Charlottesville announced that its downtown parking garages on Market and Water Street would be switching on Tuesday to a video license plate reading system to collect parking fees.

Wait, what? Didn’t the city just decide not to move forward with the Flock camera system over concerns about data collection?

“There are really two companies, one’s Palantir and the other Peregrine, which is an offshoot of Palantir, that seem to be developing techniques for synthesizing literally millions of data points about millions of people,” Councilor Lloyd Snook told WINA news radio. “We don’t need that kind of centralization of the data.”

However, a company called Metropolis Technology, which uses AI technology to collect da…

Read more

When Christopher Darnell Jones, Jr. was sentenced in the evening on Friday, November 21 for killing three UVA students and wounding two others in 2022, the Washington Post didn’t turn to our 133-year old daily newspaper, our 36-year old local weekly, or our 20-year old non-profit news website — they turned to a news feed that was launched on a local radio station’s website only a year ago.

Perry’s sister said the killing “shattered” their lives. “Accountability matters,” D’Shandra Perry said, according to Cville Right Now. “My brother’s life matters.”

Oh, USAToday, ESPN, and the Virginian-Pilot also used Cville Right Now for coverage of the sentencing.

Cville Right Now editor Mike Barber admits that his experience writing for the Post, ESPN, and the Virginian-Pilot might have helped, a…

Read more

C-VILLE Weekly, which has been a free, for-profit newspaper for 36 years, recently began asking for donations. It started during the pandemic and last year they launched an official fundraising campaign called Save the Free Word. As the campaign reveals, its cost $26,245 to produce a single issue of the paper, and while the $20K they raised last year was a good start, they’ve got a long way to go. By comparison, the non-profit news website Charlottesville Tomorrow raised over $1 million through donations and grants in 2023, according to tax filings, and CEO and Editor-in-Chief Angilee Shah says they are on track to continue that trajectory.

Still, it’s remarkable that so many people having been willing to donate to C-VILLE Weekly. So far this year, they have raised just over $26K from 381 donors, including one personal donation from Shah.

“I think it is vit…

Read more

Local news outlets dutifully reported that Jeffery Wayne Shifflett, 58, was arrested following a brief police chase on Saturday, according to a release from the Albemarle County police department. The pursuit ended somewhere in Earlysville shortly after Shifflett lept from his moving vehicle and tried to flee on foot. Shifflett was wanted for shoplifting and eluding police, which he had already done twice before on September 3 and October 13. He now faces multiple felony charges.

Why, I thought, did this sound familiar? And then it hit me. I’d written about Shifflett and his brother running from the police nearly two decades ago.

Nineteen years ago today, Shifflett’s younger brother, Elvis Gene Shifflett, then 38, was shot by police following an intense, military-style manhu…

Read more

Oddly enough, the best local reporting so far on this lawsuit announcement comes from this Houston Chronicle story about former UVA medical school dean Dr. Melina Kibbe, who took over as president of UTHealth Houston just last month. Kibbe was among the former UVA medical school leaders named in a page-turner of a lawsuit filed last week in a Virginia federal court by four former UVA doctors and the families of two people who died after being treated at UVA.

“This case arises out of a hostile takeover of a revered medical system,” the complaint begins, “ by a cadre of individuals determined to maximize revenues and rankings, thereby inflating their own career prospects and financial gain, through concerted, repeated, and consistent illegal acts.”

Unfortunately, Daily …

Read more

Last July, Friends of Cville Downtown had to do some damage control after launching a petition that one critic said amounted to “not very subtle dog whistles about making sure the unsightly unhoused people were not to be seen on the Downtown Mall." Friends of Cville Downtown quickly changed the language of the petition and added some thoughtful suggestions for the Downtown Mall, including “a Downtown ambassador program such as Block by Block to take over cleanliness and maintenance for the Downtown district.”

Recently, Friends of Cville Downtown again found itself the target of critics, this time for their support of a hastily introduced “camping ban” ordinance, which those critics called “inhumane,” a “boot to the face” of homeless people, and an “abomination.” City Council quickly voted 5-0 to table the idea indefinitely.

Read more

In 2024, over 4,000 people came downtown for Cville Sabroso, the local Latin American cultural festival now in its 13th year, and organizers are hoping this year’s September 20 celebration will be even bigger.

But they are also a little worried.

“For sure, the current climate is challenging for the Latino community," says Dan Doernberg, a board member and spokesperson for Sin Barreras / Without Barriers, an immigrant advocacy group, "and we're certainly watching developments carefully."

Recently, the Supreme Court gave federal agents the power to detain people in Los Angeles for speaking Spanish or appearing to be Latino, which critics of the ruling are calling legalized racial profiling. Last weekend, a Mexican Ind…

Read more

According to Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis, the process of coming up with a "camping ban" ordinance began in April with individual conversations with city councilors, the formation of a working group of city officials, and a directive for the city attorneys office to draft the ordinance, but as Councilor Lloyd Snook said during a reading of the new ordinance before City Council on Tuesday evening, he'd only seen it for the first time over the Labor Day weekend. Indeed, there was no public announcement about the proposed ordinance, and the first local news report about it appeared on Saturday. Still, that was enough time for opposition to the proposal to gather steam, and City Hall chambers was packed with people almost entirely opposed to the new ordinance.

"The way this proposal came about was incredibly disres…

Read more