‘People are afraid’: Charlottesville businesses call on city to round up homeless

The only item on the agenda: the impact of the city’s homeless population on the “cleanliness,” “safety” and “charm and vitality” of the city’s iconic pedestrian thoroughfare, the Downtown Mall.

Ellie Picard, one of the co-owners of the Mall’s queer bookstore the Beautiful Idea, was in attendance that night. She later told The Daily Progress she was disturbed by the calls from her fellow business owners to “more aggressively police and expel people from the Mall, remove people from the Mall, looking for whatever legal pretext they could find to do that.”

In the weeks that followed that meeting, some of those same business owners, alongside a nonprofit organization called Friends of Cville Downtown, have lobbied City Hall to crackdown on the homeless population. They’ve spoken at public meetings, collected signatures on a petition and published a 20-page document titled “Impact of the Unhoused on the Charlottesville Downtown Mall,” which includes 23 anonymous testimonies alleging that the Mall has become “unsafe,” “an unregulated park” that has been “negatively impacted by the unhoused population” — essentially, they say, “The Mall is struggling.”

“People are afraid to come to the Downtown Mall because they have had too many negative experiences due to the unhoused, and this affects the businesses, the residents and the community of Charlottesville as a whole,” reads one of the testimonies.

The number of people in Charlottesville who fell into homelessness grew by roughly 25% between 2018 and 2023, according to the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, which coordinates and leads collaborative efforts to address homelessness. As a result, visitors, business owners and residents of the Mall have been forced to witness and deal with public disturbances, public intoxication, panhandling and harassment, Friends of Cville Downtown Executive Director Greer Achenbach told City Council at a July 15 meeting. 

“They don’t feel like the police have the authority to help them,” Achenbach said.

“It’s past time for studies and commissions,” said Blair Williamson, co-owner of the Magpie Knits yarn shop, at the same Council meeting. “It’s the time to enforce the law and ordinances that we have, bring them all back to life, and hold everybody accountable to the same level.”

One such rule she has pushed the Council to enforce was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Grants Pass v. Johnson case this past April. The decision held that local ordinances with civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people. It is largely seen as giving localities carte blanche to fine and arrest the roughly 250,000 people who sleep outdoors every night.

“To not take this opportunity at this time would be poor stewardship of a valuable regional asset,” according to one of the anonymous testimonies.

However, the city of Charlottesville does not yet have such an ordinance that the police department could enforce in order to exercise the full potential of the Supreme Court ruling; and that’s according to Police Chief Michael Kochis.

Not only that, but Kochis maintains: “We are not the solution to homelessness.”

“It’s a complex issue that is much deeper than just, ‘Hey, let’s just go arrest everyone,’” he told The Daily Progress. “If you look at the failures of the systems that continue to fail our communities, specifically our unhoused community, when these systems continue to fail, then the police department is left holding the bag.”

Though the chief has assigned one officer to monitor the Mall throughout the day and increased nightly patrols of the area, he said there is very little violent crime occurring on the Mall. Kochis did mention there has been an “uptick in calls for service on the Mall,” beginning in early May not long after the Grants Pass case was brought before the Supreme Court. From May 1 to July 31, city police received 91 calls for trespassing on the Downtown Mall and 98 calls for service for disorders.

Kochis is not the only person who believes it isn’t the place of law enforcement to tackle homelessness in the city. Many who share that belief arrived at an Aug. 5 City Council meeting to express that view.

One of those speakers was Natasha Scott, a Charlottesville local going on her third year of homelessness, who spoke out on behalf of herself and the roughly 200 other homeless people living within city limits.

“We don’t have any privileges. We are not animals. We don’t deserve to be pushed to the side,” she told Council.

Scott said she’s lived and paid taxes in Charlottesville for most of her life. 

“I don’t deserve to be outside,” she said. “I don’t see anybody out here really trying to help us.”

Eight other Charlottesville residents — Emily Dreyfus, a community organizer for the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center; Michael Parisi, a member of the city’s Housing Advisory Committee; and Don Gathers, a local activist and former member of the Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board — stood before Council to express their disappointment and horror at the “inhumane” rhetoric being espoused against “our homeless neighbors.” They pointed out that, though the 48-year-old Mall is considered the “gem of Charlottesville” — added to the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register just in the past year — it is also operated as a public park by the city of Charlottesville.

They urged members of Council to instead invest resources in more affordable housing options as well as a year-round, low-barrier overnight shelter, which the city still does not have — in no small part because city residents have historically pushed back against such a development.

“The Mall is for everyone,” said Ian Baxter, a senior associate at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Engagement and Negotiation. “I’d ask the council to reject the fantasy that criminalizing homelessness will solve this problem and instead strive to find new ways to support our unhoused neighbors and all current and future users of the Mall.”

A petition, now with nearly 300 signatures, organized by Friends of Cville Downtown identifies some possible solutions to better service those in need: a low-barrier shelter, a free public health clinic, a designated campsite with bathrooms, showers and storage units, more lighting and additional seating on the Mall.

“We love Downtown and want to see it reach its full potential,” Achenbach told The Daily Progress. “We are trying to find thoughtful solutions that get to root problems.”

While Picard and many others in the community have expressed their support of the language and calls to action in the petition, that was not always the case — because that is not what the original draft of the petition called for. That original draft did not include the same consideration of the myriad challenges facing the unhoused population and instead requested the city “implement robust measures promptly aimed at improving cleanliness and safety in downtown Charlottesville.”

Some community members were uncomfortable with framing the issue of homelessness as a “cleanliness” and “safety” problem and felt such words were rather “thinly veiled euphemisms,” as Baxter put it, used to remove homeless people from public sight.

“Talking about human beings as a cleanliness problem, that’s real problematic language,” said Picard, who mentioned she and her colleagues were in the process of drafting a “stern letter” to Achenbach before the petition was revised. “Hopefully that’s starting to shift, but I think it takes folks like us. It takes folks who are actually going to be like, ‘Hold on. That’s not the way to talk about this, not the way to think about this problem.’ There need to be other perspectives and other solutions.”

The petition is not the only thing Friends of Cville Downtown has changed. Its director’s tone and tenor before City Council has too. Standing before councilors at the Aug. 5 meeting, Achenbach said the organization is “not anti-homeless.”

“It seems there’s been some miscommunication regarding the intentions of Friends of Cville Downtown,” she said, adding that the group is only advocating for a clean and safe Downtown and it is willing “to provide philanthropic support where we are able” to achieve that.

While the Friends have softened their language about the homeless, Achenbach still stressed that Downtown is in danger, citing a statistic that, over the past six years, the Mall has lost about 1 million of its annual visitors, dropping from 3.5 million in 2017 to 2.5 million in 2023.

“If that trend continues, the Mall will not survive,” she said. “We are struggling to convince people to spend their money on the Downtown Mall.”

While Achenbach and likeminded business owners have described a once-bustling market square fallen into disrepair, others tell a slightly different story, citing slightly different numbers.

In a recent report conducted by the Charlottesville Office of Economic Development, the retail vacancy rate on the Mall in July decreased by a little more than 2% year to year. Nine new or upcoming businesses have moved to the Mall since this January. Seven storefronts are vacant today across the Mall’s eight-block span. The regional Chamber of Commerce also calculated that Charlottesville’s retail sector increased its intake of sales tax, which includes online sales, by 4.92% year over year in 2023.

“Things are positive, things are good, this is just sort of the natural course of business,” Matt Johnson, assistant director of the city’s Office of Economic Development, told The Daily Progress. “We remain an attractive place for retail businesses to locate. … We’re seeing a lot of strong interest in Charlottesville overall. I think that our reputation as a locality where you can have some very unique and different things is something that is a draw for businesses.”

Charlottesville’s retail vacancy rate of 3.66% in July is below both the state and nationwide rates, according to Johnson. While those numbers bring him pleasure, he is keenly aware of the rising discontent among the Mall’s commercial class.

“I’m not trying to downplay their concerns or anything at all because they are legitimate concerns that they feel,” he said. “I think the Downtown Mall is a place that remains strong but still has opportunity ahead of it as well, and so we have things as the city that we can do to work towards that in conjunction with the businesses.”

While the vacancy rate did slightly tick up from the last report in January, Neil Williamson, executive director of the local public policy nonprofit group the Free Enterprise Forum, believes this is likely because of slower foot traffic in the summer months, when UVa students are not in class and locals are on holiday. Charlottesville residents and business owners need to remember that there was a pandemic that devastated American retail — not to mention American lives, particularly the lives of those living on the streets. The Charlottesville market, he said, is recovering well from the pandemic years, even if the overall vibe, for lack of a better word, feels off for some.

“When I look across the gamut, there are some retailers doing gangbusters,” he told The Daily Progress. “I don’t join in the pessimism for retail in total. It is hard work, and harder in summer months.”

One trend that could be leading to some vacant storefronts, he said, is commercial companies engaging in “pop-up” or short-term leases, which were on the rise before the pandemic but have exploded since.

In order to better use vacant spaces in neighboring Albemarle County, he has advocated for the board of supervisors there to loosen zoning ordinances to allow empty office and retail spaces to be converted into residential units. This would create more affordable housing for the region’s ever-growing population, homeless and otherwise, he said.

Shayla Washington recognizes that building affordable housing in the second-most expensive real estate market in Virginia or opening an overnight shelter large enough to accomodate the city’s homeless but not offend its visitors isn’t going to happen overnight. At the same time, the executive director of the Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, knows that incarcerating people for not having a home is not the answer.

“It’s just disappointing to hear that they’re going to City Council to complain. I think there’s probably a number of reasons why their businesses aren’t doing as well as they would like; I think inflation is a huge one,” Washington told The Daily Progress. “People are losing their housing in various ways, and I would love to partner with them to figure out how we can handle the situation better. Going to City Council to complain, I don’t think will help anything.”

As for why the Mall attracts so many homeless — over the city’s other hubs such as Court Square, West Main Street or the University of Virginia — Washington pointed out the most of the resources the homeless need are there: the Haven day shelter on West Market Street, bus stops and City Hall where EBT cards are available. It not only has the resources those people need, it is also one of the few remaining safe public spaces in the city for those who have no other place to go, she said.

“It’s a space for people to just exist without being harassed, in its present form,” said Washington.

There is yet no formal proposal for an ordinance allowing the police to round up the city’s homeless or funding an overnight shelter.

Ironically, Picard said she believes downtown businesses who say they are struggling now will likely struggle more if they keep broadcasting to the world that the Mall is unclean and unsafe because of the homeless.

“I would just plead with the Downtown Mall business owners to understand these are human beings,” said Washington. “This could be your brother, your sister, your mother, and they’re just insecure about housing, and it’s hard. It’s hard out here, so don’t take it out on them. Try to figure out solutions to help them.”