The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Juandiego Wade & Lloyd Snook Joined Keith Smith & Jerry Miller On “Real Talk With Keith Smith!”

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Charlottesville Mayor Juandiego Wade & Charlottesville City Councilor Lloyd Snook joined Keith Smith & Jerry Miller on “Real Talk With Keith Smith” powered by YES Realty Partners and Yonna Smith! “Real Talk” airs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10:15 am – 11 am on The I Love CVille Network! “Real Talk With Keith Smith” is presented by Charlottesville Settlement Company, LLC, El Mariachi Mexican Bar & Grill, Fincham & Associates, Inc., Free Enterprise Forum, Intrastate Service Co, Pearl Certification and YES Realty Partners.

Good Friday morning, guys. My name is Jerry Miller, and thank you kindly for joining us on Real Talk with Keith Smith here on the I Love Seville Network. Our studio is smack dab in the middle of downtown Charlottesville, about a block from the Charlottesville Police Department, about a block from the courthouses of Albemarle County in the city of Charlottesville, I think maybe about 30 feet from one of my favorite attorney's law firms in Lloyd's Snook, which is right down the hall from us. Today's program, I think, is going to be absolutely dynamic. We have Mayor Juan Diego Wade in the house. We have Counselor Lloyd Snook in the house.

And, of course, we have the distinguished and well-spoken Keith Smith in the house. Judah Wickhauer, if you could go to the studio camera as I pass the proverbial baton to my friend Keith Smith. Yeah, how did it distinguish, the well-spoken part? I think it's questionable. How about frequently spoken? How about frequently spoken? Talks often. How's that? I should tell this. This is a true story.

You can't help it. I can't help it. God's honest, my lips to God's ears true story my grandmother on my mother's side was Irish I mean an immigrant directly from Ireland and she used to tell me when I was a young boy

Keithy me boy shut the bleep bleep bleep bleep up when they vaccinated you they used a phonograph needle instead of a hypodermic needle now for those of those out there who do not they used a phonograph needle instead of a hypodermic needle. Now, for those of those out there who do not know what a phonograph is, she actually used the term Victrola, so that you know. But look, I'm going to kick off with my brother from another mother, Juan Diego, the mayor. So tell me, how's it going, Mayor?

So it's been probably exactly six weeks to the day that I became mayor. It was January 2nd, but today is the 16th. So it's about six weeks. So it's been great. It's been awesome. Of course, Lloyd laid the footwork for me. And the last two years, I just listened and I learned how to run a meeting, how everything is to go as far as the meeting go. But outside of that, I probably have done, I would say, a dozen to 15 presentations and speeches and things already.

In six weeks. Yes, yes. And tons already kind of planned for the future as far as graduation speeches and things like that. And I know a lot is going to be going on this month. I've already planned because it's Black History Month. And it's great. I really want to be in that space as a leader in the community. So it's been great. But it, you know, Lloyd didn't tell me, you know, about all the buildings I bought. That's okay. That's okay.

You know, it's going well. I just literally wrote down, is it what you expected? Yeah. And more. And more. And more. Yes. So, Lloyd, you know, before the cameras went hot, I've said this a couple of times.

I'll say it again. Thank you for righting the ship. I mean, the two years that you were mayor, you know, you came out of a pretty, let's say, unconventional dais, and you've turned it around. So congratulations. Well, I appreciate that. I will say, as I've said often, that I believe I deserve exactly one-fifth of the credit. Well, it takes leadership, and you're a humble man, believe it or not. My wife would be interested to hear that.

But as one humble person to another, how about that? But, yeah, thank you for doing that. So this is a new life for you, right? You know, you're not the mayor. You actually get to do something. So talk about that. Well, I mean, the one thing I've done in the last couple of meetings is been a little less restrained in some of my commentary about a few things. First of all, traditionally the mayor is the last of the councillors to speak,

and we've sort of gone down the line, and then the mayor is supposed to be the last one to speak. And so I am now at the end where typically the conversation begins, and so I get to go a lot earlier in the discussion. And so Juan, on the other hand, is supposed to sit back and wait and let all the rest of us make fools of ourselves before he comes and smooths over the waters. But, you know, I joke that now I get to be just another backbencher.

And so I don't... When the mayor says something, even though the mayor is only one of five... Well, he's a chair of all. Yeah, but people seem to think that when the mayor has said something, it has more of a cach cache of the city is speaking. And so one of the things that I decided that I was going to have to do was to scale back the amount of speaking on issues during meetings, and for that matter, the number of times that I would make comments, even in emails and so on because there's sort of the expectation when

somebody sends an email to council somebody ought to respond and it probably should be the mayor although it doesn't have to be but I tried to do that a lot and I realized after doing it for a month or two that I had to be very careful about what I said because people started thinking, oh, the mayor has said this, that must be city policy. And I had to keep adding the caveat, I'm not speaking for the city, I'm not speaking for council, I'm speaking just for me. How has the workload changed for both you guys? Like Mayor Wade, going from councilor to mayor, what's the hours a week delta? Yeah. So before it was 22 to 25.

Now it's 25 to 27. Okay. And so a lot of that is responding to some of those emails that Lloyd talked about that you feel like is okay as mayor. We want to respond to that or direct. And right now, believe it or not, it's going to be a pretty tough budget cycle. It's not because we are in a deficit or we don't know where to get money from. It's, you know, part of it is dealing with Richmond, you know, less funds for the schools, and, you know, class and compensation and collective bargaining. So it's just a little bit extra this year than maybe in the past because of some new initiatives and things as it's coming on board.

And when we talk about the class and comp study, classification and compensation slang, and collective bargaining. I think the thing that we have to really realize is something that we on council realized going through COVID and we started seeing great difficulty in hiring and retaining people is that Charlottesville has been paying people under the market by 10 to 15 percent for many years. This is a problem that it took us years to get into, and it's going to take us years probably to get out of. But what we're really doing is we're not going to end up with a pay scale that is, you know, way over the market. We'll be lucky to get back to where the market is so that we can keep people and they don't end up going to Albemarle and get $5,000 more or go to, you know. VDOT or something.

VDOT or we even, at one point we had people leaving Charlottesville's police department to go work at the University of Virginia police department where they were getting $10,000 more. And that's the kind of thing that was just killing us. And we're going to remedy that to some extent this budget year. So how do we do that? How do we remedy that? Money? Yeah, well, obviously. With the union contracts that have been tentatively agreed to at this point with police fire and transit. The numbers that are being talked about are not numbers, as I said,

we're not going to make them the highest paid police officers around, but we will make them competitive with people, with neighboring jurisdictions. And then I hope that we can also, because we've got good leadership in those departments, that people will see I can do a good job, I can get paid fairly, I can be in a place that I want to be in and with people I want to be with, I'm going to stay here. This is a place to make a career. What we were seeing was people who had been in Charlottesville, I feel like the people in the police department

who had been in Charlottesville, like people in the police department had been in Charlottesville six, seven years, had really gotten to where they were really, really good at their jobs, and then they get hired away, $10,000 more to go someplace else. And that's just what was killing us for the last three years. Yeah, and just as we're speaking about the police department, Chief Koch has done a great job in recruiting. And now that they're here, we want them to stay and not realize that, hey, they can get more in another place. Or not leave for a few dollars more. And I like this department. I like working for the city. And a few dollars is not going to sway me. Well, I'm going to just kind of push a a little bit if it's okay with you guys the cost of living is

a little expensive here right yeah so you know this is a real estate show at some point we're gonna kind of talk a little bit about that but you know you can increase your salaries but they're not gonna live in Charlottesville yeah so Keith one of the things that and Lloyd, you can chime in, that I learned through the entire process of the last couple of years of working on the zoning ordinance is that Charlottesville is the most expensive place in the state to live. In Northern Virginia, the housing costs more, but they make more money. And a lot of people in these other places, they

have the opportunity, particularly in Northern Virginia, to work remotely. And so they can come here, buy a house, and still even if they have to go to D.C. one time a week, a few times a month, it's worth it. They're wild. And we're probably going to get into some of these numbers as to that has an impact on

our housing. Us being selected as number one wine region in the world has an impact on our housing. Us being selected as number one wine region in the world has an impact on our housing. The fact that we are high in the top five or whatever in wedding locations has an impact on housing. UVA has an impact on housing. I'm quickly going to give an example. Yesterday I had to speak to a group of students and faculty at UVA. And one of the questions I got after my presentation was, you know, is UVA, what's the impact of UVA? And they specifically looked at housing. You know, I mentioned that it does have an impact,

and I give myself an example. When I was a student here in 88, I was looking for a place to live, and I found a room right at the intersection of Cherry, right behind the corner restaurant. It's a little house there. And I think my rent was, I don't know, $300 a month. It was exactly what I could afford, barely.

But it was three or four office there so at the time the rent they were getting from the houses i don't know fifteen two thousand dollars a month but at the time they probably wouldn't have gotten definitely over a thousand dollars if it was just a house and not four or five students that's a thousand bucks a door now right it's a thousand dollars per door in a building like that, just to put it in perspective. Yeah. Yeah. And so I know that there was an M that, you know, students and things have an impact on the housing market in, and now you just can multiply that, you know,

that number by a four or five and the impact there, but it's some, definitely we wouldn't be Charlottesville without the University of Virginia, but we just have to work with the UVA and the community so that we can make this a place for everyone to live. Another example I gave was when I was a student here, of course I'm from Richmond, and at the time it was a lot of rough neighborhoods there. That's a great place to live and buy a house, and it's really going upscale.

But I was told there were certain neighborhoods in Charlottesville that was rough and you didn't want to live. I always heard about Dice Street and things. You look at those neighborhoods now, 10th and Page, Fifield, Star Hill, those are the most ideal neighborhoods that people want to move into in Charlottesville because you can live there and you can walk to downtown or UVA to a lot of places.

And so things have really changed in the last 20, 30 years. But we still want to make this as a community for everyone to be able to live, work, and to raise a family. Keith, about 1980, the Planning Commission, Satyendra Huja was Director of Planning at the time, and Huja had the Planning Commission think about this as sort of a thought problem. Supposing you woke up tomorrow morning and the University of Virginia had announced that they were moving to Culpeper. I'd be living in Richmond. What now? I'd be moving to Richmond. And I wasn't on the Planning Commission at the time.

But the point is that it forced everybody to think about how truly central UVA is to everything we do in Charlottesville. Much like what Albemarle County did with its DOD return on investment, right? It took a look at what impacts does the defense industry have on Albemarle County. Now, just to put a little bit out there, just a little fact out there, most of UVA is actually in Albemarle, right? Right. Than in the city of Charlottesville. But you're 100% right.

If UVA wasn't there, this funny Yankee voice wouldn't be sitting here, right? It just would be something different. I would never have come to Charlottesville. My father would never have come to the Darden School 60 years ago. But that doesn't change where we're at at the moment. I was on a group call doing some panel speaking next month and had fellow real estate agents from Miami. When I told them, to your point, Juan Diego, when I told them that our AMI is 123,300, they laughed. And that's going up.

That's 2022 number. Yeah. Well, it's 2023, but it's really 2022 math. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And in 2024, it's definitely. The 2023 number hasn't come out yet.

No. Correct. I think it's around April, if I remember correctly. But just, and I'm just looking at it right now, you know, a one-person household to hit 80% of that based on HUD's number is $62,200, right? Now, a police officer should be able to hit that range. Now, there's nothing to buy, right? You know, that's a whole different equation. But they were shocked. I think they're in the upper 90s, Miami, that, you know, that we were at this number.

They didn't quite, couldn't understand why we were there, but I've heard we were the second highest cost of living in the state of Virginia. The cost of living relative to the salaries people are making. Earning potential. Earning potential, yeah. This is a perfect segue into the conversation at a recent meeting over raising potentially the real estate tax rate. I think the conversation

was, what, 96 cents to an even dollar. And it seemed to be maybe some early consensus, or if I was reading the tea leaves, some agreement between the two of you and Councilor Pinkston to go to an even dollar. I know there's a process that has to be advertised. And just because the conversation is in the early stage doesn't mean we'll end there. Open-ended question for both of you. Mayor Wade, perhaps you start with this one. Yeah. What's the thinking? Yeah, tell us about this one.

Yeah, what kind of tea was that? You were drinking? No, I mean, I think that, you know He was smoking it. Yeah. So this is going to be completely political now. It's like, you know, everything is, all options are on the table. Sure. Because of those things that we had talked about, the class and comp, the, you know, trying to address the school problem, address the affordable housing. We have a lot of initiatives on the table that we have as a community as a council made a commitment to and so it is definitely going to be tough over the next few weeks on how to address that we we are getting

an additional income revenue from the increased tax rate they haven't i mean not the intent assessment but they haven't gone up as much as they have in the past, and people are happy about that, but we also have a lot of need. So that being said, we definitely may have to look at some options like that, but as far as what amount, we're going to be discussing that, you know, over the next month or so. So we have this conversation i can't believe that jerry and i were on our 50 or just about our fifth year of doing this we have this triangle conversation this time every year right so we're talking rate which is kind of one corner of a equal side triangle you've got your assessed values which hasn't come out yet or have they we got this we've got our total dollar bank

got it so that's the two corners of it the The top end of it is the budget, right? Because you guys got to balance, unlike other governmental agencies, right? So talk about the budget. Are we going to probably increase the budget, which means we're going to increase the amount of cash I'm paying? Or are we going to try to balance it out? What's our thinking on the diets? So to me, that's the same question that he asked. I just answered it a different way. Y'all are good. Y'all have been working together for five years.

Tag teaming. That was funny. So what do we really think about Taylor Swift and football? So is that a to be determined? Yes. Ned Galloway sat in your seat, and we'll say it again a couple times. We've got some supervisors watching us here. You know, if you really, really want to know how an elected official is going to vote for that year, pay attention this time of the year. Pay attention to budget season. You guys are right in the middle of it, right?

You know, we've got a lot of negotiations and stuff to go on. So I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but I was just trying to figure out, you know, is it possible, even is it possible to get to a revenue neutral perspective or is that not a realistic expectation? Well, revenue neutral. From me, from my tax dollars, my amount of cash I'm paying. Yeah. There is no way we are going to be able to cut enough out of the budget to get to balanced without some additional revenue. And let me say, I was the one who sort of initiated this topic.

The tax rate topic. The tax rate topic. The tax rate topic. When Charlottesville reduced its tax rate from $1.13 down to 95 cents over the course of about four or five years in the early 90s, I guess it was, I said at the time that I thought we were making a fundamental mistake because I thought we were undertaxing. We were not collecting enough to enable us to do the maintenance we needed to be doing. You can look around at the schools and a lot of other places and people will say, why isn't this being better maintained? Well, the answer is because we haven't funded things appropriately and maintenance is always the first thing to go.

You can always defer maintenance until the next tax year and the next tax year and the next tax year until finally you can't any longer. Another thing that happens is we defer salary increases because personnel is the largest single expense that the city has. And so if we don't give people raises or we give them a 2% cost of living instead of a 4% cost of living, it spreads wide and it makes a big impact. So the bottom line is we have been underfunding ourselves for a long time. If you look at

comparable cities, most of the, and it's important to distinguish between cities and counties here, because cities have expenses that counties don't have. Cities have to build and maintain their own roads. In the counties, those are typically handled by VDOT. Snow plowing is handled by VDOT. It's not handled by the, and the city handles it itself. There are other things like that. How you handle police departments versus fire departments. Do you have a 24-7 publicly funded emergency medical service of some sort? Things like that. So it's really, people like to say, well, how is it that Albemarle or these other counties can be under 96 cents, and why is it that the city is at 96 cents? And I said it's impossible to compare apples to oranges here.

That's a great point. I don't think too many folks actually point that out and talk about it. And the extra thing you can add to that, even though there's co-sharing and so forth and so on, you don't control your own water and sewer system. For all intents and purposes, that's a Ravana service authority, which you guys are part of, right? But you don't even, like the city of New York has its own water and sewer system. So you're relying on other people.

Well, and that's both good and bad. On the one hand, we don't, if there's a sudden increase in costs, I mean it takes a year or two for things to sort of get passed on to us. On the other hand, if somehow there's an opportunity for a little extra profit being generated, we don't get that. So it's sort of revenue neutral in that sense. But the point – when you start looking at the cities that we would like to think ourselves as being comparable to, and you're typically – if you're looking at who are we going to hire? cities that we would like to think ourselves as being comparable to. And you're typically, you know, if you're looking at who are we going to hire,

are we going to hire somebody who might have been coming from Arlington or somebody who might have been coming from Bristol? You know, we like to think of ourselves as competitive. I'd take the Arlington hire. Yep, as most people would. Yeah. And Arlington's a county, but even there, $1.03. If you're looking at Alexandria. I think you can't afford them.

You can't afford that person. That's right. And you can't afford them if you're not paying well enough. And if you're not paying well enough, it's because you're not, frankly, taxing enough. And so the bottom line is for most cities in Virginia, the average rate is about $1.20. If you look at it in terms of Charlottesville, again, trying to compare apples to oranges, we get about the functional equivalent of 17 cents on the tax rate in terms of revenue sharing. So if you wanted to try to balance the dollar 20 in in most of the cities

in virginia versus charlottesville a fair basis of comparison would probably be about a dollar three we're not there yet we're not talking and i'm i say yet i don't mean to imply that it's a goal that we get there but it it's a it's a point to start thinking about in terms of limits. And so I frankly think that the city can, in terms of trying to compare us to the rest of the state, we could be up to about $1.03 and still be in the lower portion of cities in Virginia. I'm not asking for $1.03. No, I get that. But just to kind of put a cherry on the top of this,

I'm the chair of the land trust, and I'd love to come to ask you guys for money, right? So that's got to come from somewhere. Well, and they also got a boatload of positions open that they need to fill. I mean, they got a deputy city manager that was on the job for a New York minute. They've got a city

engineer spot that's completely open. The deputy city manager salary range goes up to a buck and a quarter. Actually, it's higher than that. The city engineers goes up to a buck and a quarter. The deputy city manager is even higher than that. And they've got to fill these spots. These are key positions.

But this is not exclusive to the city of Charlottesville. No. Right? This is a common practice. I'm also the treasurer of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. We just lost our transportation person to VDOT. Who's that? Sandy?

Sandy? Yeah. It was in a public meeting, so I could talk about it. Okay. But now we've got a void we can't fill. And, you know, at the end of the day, it was more money, right, which we couldn't provide. I do want to, unless Jerry's got some questions. We do have questions, but we have to be mindful of Mayor Wade's time.

We're about 16 minutes here. I just want to throw a quick real estate information out there just for the city of Charlottesville. And I'll just spout out numbers and we can take it from there. Judah, we're going to start with slide number three. So slide number three is talking about the number of sales and four-year breakdowns between 2016 and 2023. Make a very short synopsis to that. The sales volume of homes that were sold in 2023 matched 2011. So we have not been this low in volumes of sales in the city of Charlottesville since 2011.

Let's talk about slide number four. That's where the numbers are, guys. So, you know, in 2023, the average sales price was $5.55. Back in 2016, it was $3.28. That's a 70% swing. I like to compare the market to 2019 because that's like before the unicorn years. So 2019, the average sales price was $4.15. That's roughly 33%. So between 2019 and 23, we went up a third in the actual average sales price. The only reason I'm throwing that out there is back to the assessment thing. It's kind of tracking that.

Jerry, one of the viewers put in an assessment on it that I think the 250 and below is like 11% jump, which I kind of have a problem with because the people that can afford it the less, the least are the ones that are going to go ahead and get it. So I just, you know, how are we going to reconcile this? How are you going to hire people, pay them well, and get them to move into our city? I know this is a very rhetorical question. Yeah, yeah. But other than use the land trust. Yeah, well, the land trust is definitely going to be one of the tools. Yesterday during the chamber state of the city and county address,

both Jeff Richardson and Sam Sanders addressed this in some form or fashion, the issue of housing. Sam has said that he has options, and he is still finding it difficult to find a place here in the city to live. And so he's looking for that. For himself personally? Yes, yes. We gave him a year to buy a house or to get a residence in the city. And this is a gentleman who's making total compensation, a quarter million dollars. Right.

Yeah. He had just signed a lease when we offered him, you know, for an apartment. So, but anyway, and if I have the numbers correct, I think, you know, if we have some Board of Supervisors officials, they can state it. But in the county, I think, you know, they were talking about the housing issues there. But that last year, they, between, it was 147, 100 units, homes sold between one and two million. If you tune on Wednesday, I've got Woody Fincham coming in and we're going to focus on the million and up market. We'll have specific data for that. A world with which I am unfamiliar. Yes. So I think that one of the issues that

one of the reasons that I really supported the zoning ordinance that we passed is that in my mind, in my belief that I think that it will produce not only more housing quantity, but different types of housing. And I think that that will have a big outcome on the prices, supply. And I think Monday is the first day it officially goes into effect. I'm excited to see that. Yeah, so I know it's going to be probably several months, maybe even a few years before we really see the impact of it. I can speak to this as the chair of the land trust.

We're excited, and we're trying to – I mean, I was teasing you guys about money, but we'll take some – to make some magic happen because we're kind of built to do that well on it. So we've got some properties that are designated. I'm excited that since you guys passed the zoning, we have property owners calling us, the land trust. We just need capital to make it work. But Juan Diego, you know, we're two brothers from a separate mother. And, you know, I've said publicly, this is a five to 10 year cycle before it has some serious impacts on it. Folks should be a little patient. And I'm excited about the, I mean, the devil's in

the details. And I'm excited to see what the details are. I'm curious of Councilor Snook's thoughts on all this, the zoning ordinance, market conditions that are out there, how we pay people more money without raising taxes on citizens. You mentioned you don't know much about the million-dollar market. I will slightly push back on that. There's a comp that's relatively close to you that's starting to flirt with a million dollars in the Greenbrier neighborhood. Well, that's right. And values have really just taken off. I mean, I use the Greenbrier neighborhood where I live as an example and, frankly, a rhetorical talking point about a number of things. One of the points that I make, excuse me, and have made frequently during the debate was to talk about the people who were moving into the Greenbrier neighborhood

who didn't really want to be in the Greenbrier neighborhood, but they couldn't find anything downtown. They couldn't find places, homes, condos at McGuffey Hill were basically the only option. Maybe one would come on a market a year. And so we've got folks in our neighborhood who didn't particularly want to be right next to the school. They're retired. They don't have school kids, but they were buying houses next to the school because they couldn't get anything what they really wanted

and taking off the market a house that some family with kids who were going to go to Greenbrier would love to be able to buy. They were coming in from out of town. They were coming in with the equity from the house that they were selling in Northern Virginia and they could pay cash over and above the listing price and could basically buy any listing that they wanted to buy. So I'm looking at available single-family detached in the city of Charlottesville. There's 24 units available, homes available.

The average sales price, list price, $928,000. That's the average. The median is $757,000. There's a couple. The median is $757,000. There's a couple of lows in there that, frankly, are teardowns in it. But as it's sitting right now, if you want to buy a single-family detached home, the average list price is, I'm going to call it $929,000. It's $928,914. I have strong connections to the Lewis Mountain neighborhood. In fact, my wife and I, and I've mentioned this on previous shows, are soon to list our home in Glenmore and Keswick to move either into the city or the Ivy Corridor for proximity for children and quality of life.

And Lewis Mountain is one of the neighborhoods we'd like to potentially target to move. And the association members of Lewis Mountain are a bit apprehensive. We saw this at council meetings. Some spoke, including the head of the association, Hillary Murray, before council, of upzoning. And these homeowners, there's a lot of them, are going to go active with listings in Lewis Mountain. There's one that's active right now at $2.1 million. Bob Hughes is about to bring one to market. It's coming soon at $2.4 million. It just hit the market this morning. I'm looking right at it right now.

So the Lewis Mountain listings are being influenced by upzoning for fear of what could happen with upzoning, for fear of that truest site with the tower that could come there. And these listings are going to go 1.5 to 2+. So that neighborhood right there is not going to be impacted by upzoning from added density because the cost to purchase is so high that it doesn't make sense for a developer to jump in there and create any

added density in that neighborhood. The only thing that might happen in there is like an ADU, that kind of thing. The bottom line, the median list price right now is $757. The average is $928. I just want to take a quick look at what

attached is available while Jerry chats. I do, and I know you guys had, and you guys can help me with the right terminology here. I know that there was some protection put in to protect, was it sensitive neighborhoods? Was that the moniker? We wound up not using that. We wound up using a designation, just RA is the basic residential, RNA is what we're calling the areas that are getting a little extra protection.

These are areas where we felt that, and not just we felt, but the economic analysis that was done was fairly clear that there would be much more pressure for teardowns, much more pressure for gentrification, and it's a combination of relatively low values, I say relatively because it's still absolutely a lot more than it had been five years ago, and proximity to the university,

being able to walk to the university and so on, that put 10th and Page and Fifeville very squarely in the bullseye of a lot of redevelopment potential. And so the feeling was that those are areas that we needed to give some additional help to. Sarah Hill Buchenski watching the program. She says, I want to give a shout out to Mayor Wade. My sister reached out to him with some concerns about the zoning ordinance, and he was the first person from the city to respond to her emails, phone calls. And not only did he respond, but made the effort to meet with them in person and talk to them.

She was very impressed with Mayor Wade and grateful for his time. So please tell him thank you. There's a boatload of comments, which I'm going to try to get to. Mayor Wade does have a hard stop at 11. We will continue with Councilor Snook on the program. However, I'd love to throw this to Mayor Wade. What's been the feedback

or the response that you've been hearing on the upzoning, the zoning ordinance, the draft zoning ordinance, whatever we're calling it here. I'm sure it's been significant. Well, you know, up until December the 18th, we were, we all received a lot of emails and comments and concerns

and fears of, and fears and joys of what it could be. But since then, you know, it's, you know, I think I can say we have been, you know, sued and that's going through the process. But you know, once it's been adopted, now that it's adopted, we really haven't heard as much. We've moved on to other, you know, issues. Like you're talking about, what they're going to release on Monday is really where the nuts and bolts are and how this is actually going to happen.

Right, and then I think you also said it's going to be five and ten years down the road. And I think that we as a council, we have committed that if we see something that is happening or didn't have the intended impact that we wanted. You would pivot. Yes. It's a living document. I think Lloyd said that once before. You use the ratchet. You ratchet some stuff up, ratchet some stuff up. Zoning ordinances are always kind of a living document. They do change. They change over time. Some media platforms have called it the most radical zoning change in the nation's history,

in the country. Some media platforms have called that. Yeah. I'm kind of... National media platforms. Yeah. It's definitely progressive. We have received samples of different other localities

that's trying to address the same issues. It's hard to compare different things, but we know that this is a radical change, and we have to, you know, do it to address what we believe help address the affordability issue. Just to put a perspective to that, currently right now there's only four attached. So these are townhomes or duplexes available for the city of Charlottesville. The average list price is $396. The medium is $392. So that's telling you that it's a pretty tight pricing thing.

Condos, which I thought was going to be better, there's eight. The average is $1.1 million. That is skewed by the Water Street condos. Very much so. And the average. Which are $1.9 and change. That's exactly right. And the median is $6.87.

So really, I mean, there's nothing to buy that is quote unquote affordable at this point. You know, I think this is a step in the right direction. It's definitively one of the probably most aggressive in the nation. But, folks, this is going to take five, ten years. Easy. And one of the things that we've talked about, and I have talked about, I guess I should, I don't know whether other folks have adopted my way of thinking on this or not, so I'll just call it me, is we have a goal of climate neutrality, pardon me, carbon neutrality by 2050. That's really the only goal that you will find in the city as far as long-term planning, which was one of my complaints about the comprehensive plan passed two years ago, but don't

get me started on that. So the question is, how are we going to get to 2050? How are we going to get there? Well, we're not going to get there tomorrow. We're not going to get there in the next five years. What we need to do, and what I think we did do, was to set ourselves on a path to get there. But we're not likely to draft an ordinance and pass an ordinance in 2023 that takes us without amendment to 2050. And so I think it's important that we reevaluate the overall structure of things. I have suggested every five years because that's how often we redo the comprehensive plan, and that over the course of the next 25 years, we can make a number of amendments that see how are we doing on those goals. Let's get us going.

Let's get started and just see where that takes us. I promise, Juan Diego, 11 o'clock, you've got about a minute or so. Anything you want to add, sir? So, no, I just wanted to add just generally speaking that as being mayor at this time it it is um it's good that we have in these conversations about how we can improve the city the community for everyone how we can address it and not you know dealing with the other things that we had in the past and and that Charlottesville and this community, I just really believe that it's on the upswing with the dialogue that we have with the university,

with the county. Lloyd and I had started to meet with the chair and the vice chair of the board of supervisors pretty much on a monthly basis. Brian and I have already picked that up meeting with Jim and Diantha, and I think that it's great that we are having this dialogue that we can converse to address these community issues, because if you look at other states like Florida and North Carolina, it's really not a big distinction between the city and the county. They all kind of

look at it holistically, and I think that we need to start doing that as well. Supervisor Pruitt watching you right now. In fact, there's two supervisors watching you guys. We're up the 11 o'clock gun here, the marker with Mayor Wade. I want to give him some props and highlight Black History Month, Mayor of Charlottesville, man doing things fantastically well for the community. We are very fortunate to have him. His time is precious, not only the mayor, but I would imagine a number of speaking engagements this particular month, sir.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. It is, again, I think that as elected officials, we want to be in this space. I was at the chamber event yesterday, and I had a banker. She's part of a program where they're hiring youth for the summer, and they're reviewing applications. And she told me that they were reading an application, and this young lady listed me as one of her role models for being a public servant. She didn't give me the names or the details, but I would venture to say that over the years, this one of the young ladies or groups that I spoke to, and I inspired her just like someone inspired me when I was growing up in Richmond. I think we need to be in that space. It's our duty to be in that space.

We have some tough meetings. Not that I don't like spending time with Lloyd and my other colleagues, but we need to be in front of our young people. So thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you, Mayor Wade. My quick wrap up on this, Juan Diego, Yona says hello. I would be in serious trouble if I did not say that. And she said, thank you for all you're doing. Thank you. So I told Keith previous that we both married way outside of our zip code. I think all four of us did. Well, I think I won, but anyway. It's not a competition. It's not a competition.

He wanted me to give you a hug, so thank you. Thank you. We appreciate that. If you want to go to the studio camera, so Mayor Wade can go off set, we can throw some questions to Counselor Snook, and there are a boatload of questions. Keith, I know you have one you can throw some questions to Councillor Snook, and there are a boatload of questions. Keith, I know you have one you want to rock for Councillor Snook,

or would you like me to go to the feed, sir? Go to the feed. I think I've been talking long enough. Let's the feed tell us what they're thinking. Okay. Thank you, Mayor Wade. We appreciate you very much. Thank you.

I'm curious of your take on this, and I very much enjoy when you guys come on set. Very much enjoy when you come on set. You're very straightforward with your answers, which is appreciated. What was your take on the CRHA, the sale of the properties? Was it one on Avon and one on Levy, to the city? I think it was in the $4 million price range. With a portion of those proceeds then being utilized by the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority for a 2.6 and change purchase, 2.6 million and change purchase on the downtown mall building that's been sitting on the market

for a little while? Well, the first thing I would say is that we have sort of an odd relationship with CRHA. We appoint the members of the board of CRHA. One of our counselors, Michael Payne, is on the board of CRHA, but we don't control them. We don't actually hire the director of CRHA, but we don't control them. We don't actually hire the director of CRHA, John Sayles, and so we're a little bit arm's length with them. I say a little bit because given the fact that we could in theory fire every member of the board and appoint a whole new board, we can't claim to be completely hands-off but the one of the

challenges we've had in dealing with crha over the years has been that their finances have been pretty rocky over the years and understatement and they were um they were under the gun from hud to have a long-term sustainability plan, what I think most businesses would think of as a business plan. What's your model? How do you expect to pay the bills? And one of the problems is, going back to the 1990s, Congress decided that they would underfund housing projects.

And so the amount that we were getting, that TRHA was getting in funding, was by law basically always going to be about 11% under what they needed in order to make their books balance. And that's what I said earlier when we talked about when a public entity is underfunded, they sacrifice maintenance first and salaries second. And that's exactly what has happened with CRHA over the years. And all of the problems that CRHA has had have been related to those two. And so they have come to the city every year and they want more money for operations

and they want more money to help do this redevelopment. And that redevelopment, they've had a plan that's been developed now that I think is probably a pretty good plan that actually seems to be headed in the right direction. And part of what they want to do is to get some other sources of funding, to have some properties that they can use for other purposes, maybe their market rate units or something. So they're looking in a different direction now from where they were five or ten years ago. And part of what, if we really want to look long-term,

the next long-term project for them is the redevelopment of West Haven, which is going to be extremely expensive, but it also has the potential to generate income from commercial applications and some of the properties that are, you know, for example, they could very easily have a building with retail on the ground floor and housing above and that sort of thing. So there is some potential there. This is a long way around to getting to this particular point, which is that the property at Avon and Levy was bought by CRHA many years ago, really not so much for the property that faces onto Avon,

but for the parking lot, what we now know as the parking lot, that was intended to be, in the original conception, a place where they would build some affordable housing units that they would move people into while they redeveloped West Haven or while they redeveloped South First Street or someplace like that. Well, over the years, they decided it was better for them, for everybody, for the residents certainly, to try to develop the properties in some fashion that didn't require them to be moved twice. You're talking the people. The people.

And so the need for that property, for the purpose for which they had originally bought it faded away. So they've got now this property that they're basically letting the city have a parking lot on, which is definitely not the best and highest use of that property. And so the question is, okay, what are they going to do with it? Well, if they're not going to put housing on it that they're going to put housing on, then what can they do? Well, one of the things they could do is sell it to the city, let the city develop it. Perhaps we're thinking maybe the property, the old gas station bike shop that fronts on Avon could be a commercial use. Community bikes.

Community bikes, which is now out. So that piece could be for a commercial use, and that would probably be a better and higher use than having something just affordable housing, for example. The other piece that we're looking at is, and this is what has generated the most attention, is the potential to use it for permanent supportive housing. Just to keep everybody's terminology straight, if we look at the building that's called The Crossings at 4th Street in Preston, where people who are long-term or had been unhoused

are able to get places that they stay in for months to years while they try to get their acts together and their lives together and be able to make something better for themselves. It is not a short-term transient two or three days, couple of weeks, and that's sort of an experience. It just creates a very different feeling for everybody. So I think that the people who are in the area of the permanent supportive housing at Crossings

would say that that's a fairly stable population. It's not a crime-ridden kind of a facility, and that if that's what we end up doing, having a crossings to, so to speak, on the Levy site, that that might be a very good use for it. I say it as very hedged and conditional and so on because we don't really have a full study done of exactly what the nature of the problem of the long-term unhoused folks really are. How many are there? How many are we planning for? How are we going to do this? Now, to get to the question, so we had some things that we think we might like to do,

emphasize, think. It's a long-term planning process we haven't started. So we've got $4 million, which is like exactly the appraised value. We're not overpaying CRHA for it. Can I throw this to you? As the deal has matured and we've gotten more details, the city got a steal here. CRHA had a third-party consultant assess these properties on potential market value and it was in the neighborhood of 10 or 11 million dollars. They hired a third-party consultant to give them a plan or a value of what to do with these properties and instead of going to market and selling potentially to a private buyer at 10 or 11, they went to the city and sold for four,

and they took a portion of those proceeds to buy a building on the downtown mall that needs significant work that was really long in the tooth with the days on market, has an elevator building. We know about elevator buildings in the Macklin. Elevator buildings have maintenance exposure associated with them. And you and I both know about this firsthand with our businesses being here. I think it was a phenomenal deal for the city. I don't think it was a fantastic deal for CRHA. That's right. And people have asked me a lot about this and particularly asked about

whether it was a good idea for CRHA to buy that building for $2.7 or whatever the price is going to be. I don't have a good sense of that. I share the concern. A lot of people think, well, the city went and bought the Milgram Center or Vita Nova, I guess. Vita Nova, yeah. We know it more. Apparently, CRHA's goal is they want to have basically their offices consolidated from a number of other places. They would like to have their offices closer to City Hall for a number of reasons, just politically and practically. They've got apartments on the top floor. I frankly, although they have talked about maybe making some of those into affordable units,

I frankly think that that's probably not likely. I think there's going to be market value apartments. I think there are going to be market value apartments, too, and that will help CRHA's bottom line. Potentially. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is on the bottom level, which had been a restaurant, they're talking about more along the lines of... Incubator is the term they use. retail food operations where we've already got a kitchen that's being established with city funds to be an incubator for these food service businesses. And so if we can keep with this business incubation model,

it's an opportunity for the business incubation on the basement level, offices in the middle levels, apartments, perhaps market rate apartments on the top level, generate a little income, be able to support the incubator model for the businesses and consolidate their offices. So I understand the theory.

I'm not going to defend it particularly because I don't know enough about it, but it seems facially to make some sense. And I know you want to jump in. I'll throw a last thing for me here. It would seem that, and this is just one man's opinion, pay a lot of taxes in this city.

It would seem to me that selling Avon and Levy at market value for $10 or $11 million as opposed to selling Avon and Levy to the city for $4 million and then taking a portion of that $4 million to buy a building on the downtown mall at $2.6, $2.7 million that they straight up have said needs another million dollars in remodeling to get up to speed.

They straight up said that. They said that. Dave McNair did a fantastic report on this on the DTM. I read it three times. It would seem to me, and he quoted an unnamed source that was previously on the board of directors of CRHA. I did a little crystal balling. I think that unnamed source is Dave Norris. That is super tight with Dave McNair.

So I'll throw this to you, and I'll close, and I'm curious of what Councilor Snoke has to say. Why not sell for $11 million, take that $11 million in the private market, and then just go and build housing with that $11 million to put people in it. So let me jump in because that's where I wanted to go with this. I've been staying away from this topic specifically. But, look, this was just a bad business move. I guess that's the point I've been making on this network for two weeks. I'm just going to be a little bit more direct about it. I don't get it.

It's a great business move for you guys. That's what I've been saying. Great business move for you guys. I'm a recovering developer and builder. I kind of know this world. This is my world. And I know John well. John sells well. He's a good man. I know him well. I don't know what they were thinking. I don't know either.

Because they could have got 10... They could have walked away with an extra 5 million in their pocket. Wow. And I would have asked for it as a land trust. No, no, no, no. I'm talking about by the time that they sell it, they carve off the cash to buy it, renovate the building, they would have netted about 5 million. I just did some quick math on it. Believe me, we just sat down yesterday with some folks from the city,

the city manager and folks, we meaning the land trust, trying to work on getting some capital to make some happen. I can't tell you what good we would do with $5 million on the land trust in this town. And I just don't understand the thinking. Now, maybe we don't have, I don't know the folks that are on the board. Maybe there's not enough business people on the board or people that have my experience on the board. But that's always been my booth. How does the city navigate being a fiduciary for, what's the word, the city's relationship with CRHA? It's not a fiduciary. It's a separate body.

There's some skin in the game the city has with CRHA. How does it manage being a parent to a child, if you may? If I'm using a metaphor. Well, there are a lot of residents of the public housing projects on there who do not have business expertise who uh and i don't i've never been to one of their board meetings i don't know what's what goes on there exactly i've watched a couple of them on Zoom and I have tried on a number of occasions to try to get people with some actual

business experience to be involved in some way so far that hasn't panned out the missed opportunity is enormous and it's unfortunate it's great for you guys they'll get a building

but they will not have revenue to deploy to make a difference. And an incubator in the restaurant space is almost an oxymoron, especially on an eight-block epicenter that's saturated with restaurants. What's the highest failure rate of any business? We're business people here talking. We're looking at this as business. Then here's another follow-up to this. And there's so much we've got to cover with you. I love when you come on the show, Mayor Snook.

It's just a fascinating discussion. Former Mayor Snook. Excuse me. Former. Counselor Snook. I'm sorry. Counselor Snook. Or Lloyd.

Either way. My friend. My friend. The follow-up would be this. How does having a CRHA headquarters fit with the vision and mission of the downtown mall? That is clearly hurting, which we both know, right? Yeah.

If I were God here, I would probably not be having CRHA buy that property. Please, please, let him finish here. Well, I'm concerned for a number of reasons from CRHA's standpoint. I'm not sure that I... I know that one of the things that they're concerned about in terms of space is that they think once we get around to redoing West Haven, we're going to need room for a lot of people. Operations are going to have to move out of West Haven. The West Haven Community Center is

no longer going to be there for at least during the construction process. Who knows what it's all going to look like. They've got a lot of work to do. I don't know what all their pressures are, but I agree with you all. I mean, I'm sitting there looking at the money and trying to figure out what makes sense for them. I have to assume they know their affairs better than I do.

I think who's on the board is the problem. Which is tough because we have a counselor on the board. And a former counselor is the chairman. We have other people on the board who are nice, good, liberal people. And I tried a couple of years ago to see if we could get some people, to go recruiting some people to be on the board. And it was very difficult to get people

with some actual knowledge of how the world works to want to get to be on that board. I totally understand. So many top, John Blair's giving you props. He's saying Charlottesville's lucky to have you be on that board. I totally understand. So many top. John Blair has given you props. He's saying Charlottesville is lucky to have you, Councilor Snook. Multiple media outlets watching Councilor Snook on the show right now.

So I do want to tie something a little bit because as you guys have been talking, I'm on to my 12th text here. So the land trust, I want to kind of get back to housing a little bit and then just back to the point, if there was an extra $5 million to deploy, I'd be able to answer these tasks better. The land trust just listed 20 lob lolly out on Lake Monticello.

It's a $215,000 land trust thing. I've got, I'm up to 12, 13 texts from real estate agents going, what do you got in the city? That $5 million, that $5 million could have been deployed. We could have went out and bought something for $350,000, $450,000, put a little bit of that $5 million to it, turn around and flip it for $200,000 and kept somebody in the city, one of your cops in the city. And it just was a – I kind of stayed away from it, but it's pretty hard for me to do it at this point because it just was a bad business move, just a bad move.

Well, and there are other situations similar to that. And I like the people. Everybody that's on there are very good-hearted people. It's just they didn't reach out to somebody who does this for a living and go, is this a good move? very good-hearted people. It's just they didn't reach out to somebody who does this for a living and go, is this a good move? The question came up recently, both on December 18th and, again, in the last meeting, what to do about the retroactivity of the new zoning ordinance. I'm getting more.

And the issue comes down to the folks who have projects in the pipeline that they don't want to have to pay the Payne and I were in the two, but they voted three to two to extend the time for the retroactivity date, I guess is the best way to put it, so that more of the projects that are in the pipeline would be done under the old rules rather than under the new rules in the process i believe if those projects were to be built we could have another 20 million dollars for the affordable housing fund which we are now kissing off yeah we're not going to get yeah and so there are a lot of other decisions like that that we have made that I don't think were wise in that respect. Again, the question is, well, why would the developers who wanted this different retroactivity date, why would they want the old ordinance? The new ordinance is more pro-developer. It depends on where they're in the pipeline of their development.

Thank you. Because they have their pot committed to certain plans is what he's going to say. These are people who do not yet have an approved site plan. No, sir. I'm going to jump in a little bit. This is definitely my sewer. They've spent hundreds and hundreds of

thousands of dollars before they even submitted. We got information from them, from CADRE, on the five projects that were discussed, and the actual cost of development that they've already incurred works out to an average of $300 per dwelling unit that was being constructed. Well, how many dwelling units are we talking? Supposedly 1,000. So there you go. 300 times 1,000? Well, the point is that $300 out of a construction cost

of however many millions... Well, this is pre-construction expenses. Okay, but their complaint was, we're going to lose the money we've already invested. The problem is, the problem with that logic is that every dimensional constraint, every planning constraint, is more developer-friendly in the new ordinance than in the old ordinance. I would not disagree with that. And the only actual cost that is meaningful is the additional cost of the affordable housing. So what I will do, I will invite you back on in about a month, and I'll actually have one-on-ones

with these folks and see if I can get a little bit more details. One of the things you may find as you look at the five units, the five proposals, some of them can't be built anyway. We'll see. There's always that. That's right. But I'll dig into that a little bit. I mean, we're definitively way over our time, and I know you've got a busy day. How are you on time? I don't even remember. I think, let's see, it's, you know, I'm good for at least another few minutes. Yeah, he's, I'm fine. I love spending time with. Good. I'm here. I love spending time with... I'm here. I love this conversation,

but I wanted to be respectful to you. Absolutely. I just had a couple questions on what his thoughts were on how do we revitalize and get the mall back to speed, downtown mall back to speed. Well, I'm on one of the committees

that's trying to make some headway on that. The first thing... Is that the Friends of Seville? No. The first thing we're trying to do is to figure out what the physical plant of the mall needs. Trees. What are we doing about the trees

that are dying? How are we going to replace them? I think the trees are an absolutely essential part that we going to replace them? I think the trees are an absolutely essential part that we have to figure out some way to deal with intelligently. One of the things we learned in Central Place is maples are a lousy choice. We also learned years ago that willow oaks were a great choice. And in fact, somebody came back to see them all after not having been here for a while and were amazed at how large those willow oaks had grown and and they they refer to the little groves of five or six trees as bosques and how the bosques had turned into such such

great places to have you know have your outdoor cafe and so on. And it really adds a lot to the ambiance. The problem with it, of course, is the trees are dying. Willow oaks don't live forever, and there are a lot of problems with it. So we've got to work on that. We've got to work on, I don't think we need to re-brick the whole mall, but we need to re-brick portions of it. We need to have a concerted effort on that. One of the proposals that was made last year, this I think was a proposal from Friends of

Seville, and we kind of put it on hold because we're waiting for all these other things to kind of come together, is to maybe decide that we want to have somebody who's kind of permanently on a payroll to just go around and fix the bricks in certain places. And there may be some places where you need to fix the bricks over a 10 or 20 by 20 foot area. In some places you only need a few bricks here and there. We've got the granite that designates the

squares that in many cases the framework underneath it has collapsed. And so you've got a lot of things that need to get rehabilitated. So the city is trying to look at that. And, frankly, our goal there is that by 2026 to have everything fixed, first of all,

because we hope that in 2026 there will be a lot of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Charlottesville is an important part of that. It's also going to be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Charlottesville is an important part of that. It's also going to be the 50th anniversary of the mall, basically. And we want it back to where it's supposed to be. Now, the second piece is not physical, but is sort of cultural. Right. That's the one I'm concerned about. And I think that... And actually, here, let me distinguish between the cultural piece and the economic piece, though they are related.

I think we need to, and I don other than people sleeping on the mall, sleeping in the nooks and crannies and things like that. And that's something that requires some funding from the city. It requires a commitment. It's really an emotional commitment, sort of a spiritual commitment, that we're not trying to criminalize the behavior. We're trying to help people get into better places. Most of the people, if you talk to them, they say, I don't want to be homeless.

I want to be someplace else. There's no place else for me to be. And we need to find, whether it's the permanent supportive housing option or whether it's a number of other possibilities, we need to find those places. $5 million went a long way to help that. Just saying. But the $5 million,

Councillor Snook and his colleagues made the right decision. Oh, without a doubt. It was the other entity that made the bad decision. Anyway, so and I think there's a piece of the economic problem that is

so affected by the cultural thing. People who are not basically scaredy cats who say I don't really want to be on the mall after dark. And we can poo-poo that and say, oh, that's ridiculous, but it's real. It's so real.

That's my wife and her friends. Yeah. With disposable income, women in their 30s who you want on the mall. I know women in their 60s and women in their 50s. So it's a problem that we have ignored the problem for a number of years, and we can't ignore it. I'm going to add to that. I'm in the real estate business. People call me.

They want to move down from whatever or move up from wherever. We started the show talking about the import of UVA. The second one is downtown mall, right? And I get these questions. Is it okay to go down there at night? Is it safe to go down there at night? So I hope the rest of the city councilors understand the economic impact and the cultural impact of that. But those are the big questions. I don't have any formal study to do that, but we get enough phone calls, right?

And to add to that the office of economic development recently released its vacancy reports for the city and the um thesis or the theme of the report was the vacancy reports have rebounded the vacancy levels have rebounded since the pandemic and that was the theme that was being pushed, that we're at the most filled storefronts since COVID. And I push back on it on our 1230 show with, if we're filling the vacancies with big box brands that are not tied to the community, is that really a healthier economy?

And I also push back on it by saying, you and I are on the downtime wall every day. I see you every day. I'm literally on the downtime wall every day. I don't see the same zest or energy or buzz or positivity or foot traffic as we saw in 2019 on these eight blocks. I would agree with that.

And as someone who's got a lot of skin in the game, and I know you do too, I just would love to see that energy return. And I look up to you here. I'm curious to see how we return that energy. I mean, this is why you get paid the big bucks. The $18,000 a year as a counselor. How do you return it to 2019 buzz and energy?

And zest. And the simple answer is, I don't know. As a counselor, how do you return it to 2019 buzz and energy and zest? And the simple answer is I don't know, and that's not my expertise. What I would like to do, we have a sense of what we can do on the physical side. It's a question of getting the right plan and then implementing it. On the sort of the social side and crime and all that, on the perception of crime anyway. I think that's what it is. Yeah, because realistically, I don't think that Charlottesville's downtown mall is any more crime-ridden than any other place, but everything that happens, there are thousands of witnesses to. We had the shooting at Lucky Blues a year or so ago. Still in the news.

It's one of those things where that could have happened at literally any place in Charlottesville. There's nothing unique about the mall that caused it to happen there, but it's part of the perception. It's where the tourists go. It's where the out-of-towners come. We also have like a dozen, for lack of a better phrase,

soup kitchens that are providing meals each day to the houseless population, and the houseless population is hanging around the mall because you have free internet, you have passerbys that may contribute money from a panhandling standpoint to the houseless, and then you just need to wait a couple hours until your next meal is ready to go at one of the soup kitchens around here. And I've been stigmatized from a portion of the population locally by saying this. I think we need to move the support services for the houseless population off the mall,

elsewhere, and it's not because I don't want to support the houseless population. I still want to offer the hand up, but keeping the services around the mall is going to create a lingering impact or effect with the houseless population around what is certainly the epicenter of Charlottesville. And back to the five million. That's what seems... But it's money. It's all about... It takes dollars to do this, and it's just beyond me why

we didn't capitalize on that. But Jerry's pretty spot on on this. I want to be able to bring my six-year-old and our 14-month-old here until I'm 80 years old. I wanted to take my mother out, my 85-year-old. We're going to get in trouble because she watches the show. 39-year-old.

39-year-old. I don't understand why I'm 60-something. She's 39. But anyway, out for dinner. And I said, hey, let's go down to the downtown mall. She wouldn't go. This is a woman that grew up in Brooklyn, in the city. When the city wasn't such a great place to live, she won't come down, just won't do it.

And, you know, that's just a sad state of affairs. Any closing? One thing I wanted to just mention, and this is something that I think Sam Sanders is trying to work on. We don't have a good network of how we're responding to the problems of the unhoused. We have some patchwork going on. We have some organizations that don't necessarily like each other and don't necessarily talk to one another very well. And one of the things that I think we may need to do, and if we end up doing a project of some sort of our own, we may end up bringing in somebody to sort of be the coordinator of all of these different organizations and services.

That's a great idea. So that we get away from everybody in their own little silos. Because that's been part of the problem. I'm so glad you brought that up. And it should almost be done in conjunction with Albemarle County. Well, and Albemarle County, to be fair, has been quite helpful in this respect. I mean, Charlottesville and Albemarle have cooperated on, for example, the Premier Circle project. It happens to be in the county, but the city is supporting it, and we have been led to believe that we can expect some city,

some county help for whatever we do in the city because we are one economy. We are one population. We are one society. And I'm just so delighted that we've got a board of supervisors, although they're coming from slightly different angles, as individuals, they perceive the problems in similar fashion. So Lloyd's on the regional housing partnership, right? That was several years ago that that was created to help with this, to be more of a regional perspective. But I'm so glad you brought this up it it my first foray into uh the affordable housing space on it um

i thought i came from a pretty ruthless business until i started working in the non-profit affordable housing space in volunteer time they are you know it's just everybody's chasing the same dollar uh in it but you're 100 right different organizations don't talk to one another and we're just never going to get this better unless we start speaking to each other collectively. That's what the beauty, I think, is of the regional housing partnership, and thank you for being part of that. It's been an interesting experience. Counselor Snook, you're an interviewer's dream.

I think you make the job easy. I've said that to you multiple times. I mean that. His name is Lloyd Snook. He is, I'll say this again, and not to embarrass you because you're right here. I think your legacy is firmly cemented in Charlottesville's history books, and it's a legacy of impact and significance and positivity. Thank you.

I sincerely, sincerely mean that. You were the right person at the right time to get the ship righted. Thank you. I sincerely, sincerely mean that. You were the right person at the right time to get the ship righted. Thank you. I had a lot of help. Yeah, Keith Smith, Lloyd Snook, Judah Wickauer, Real Talk with Keith Smith, Archive, wherever you get your podcasts.

We're going to play back some of this sound on the I Love Seville show, guys, at 1230, because I think it was extremely newsworthy today. We appreciate you guys joining us, and have a good weekend. Take care. .