Sometimes it feels like public comment vanishes into the ether, even if it is ultimately preserved in minutes and video records. I wanted to share what I said at the March 4, 2026 meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, the first public hearing for the FY27 budget. My
As with so many data stories, it started with a chart. The May 2025 Annual Affordable Housing report for Albemarle County includes a chart showing the estimated number of Affordable Housing Units needed by 2040 by income level. Overall, the total number of affordable housing units needed by 2040 is
At last! Route options for the Three Notched Trail are out now for public feedback. I've had a few days to mull on them since the public meeting where they were presented. You can view the maps in the wacky virtual room space here: https://app.seekbeak.com/
As of writing this (August 31, 2025), the City of Charlottesville is poised to hear a proposed ordinance from the Chief of Police. The ordinance - to be evaluated at the September 2, 2025 Charlottesville City Council meeting - would criminalize "camping" and the "storage of personal
As previously mentioned, I get together once a month with some neighbors and sing folk songs. Second Sunday Sunroom Singers had our August concerto this past weekend; our playlist was as follows: This Land is Your Land (our ritualistic opening song) She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain -
Housing
This post uses a Tableau data story I created. The data story is linked throughout, but you can follow along with it here. How many new homes have been built in Albemarle County in the last decade? There's a lot of ways to answer that question - a
In January of this year, I started a new monthly neighborhood activity: Second Sunday Sunroom Singers. It's what it sounds like. On the second Sunday of the month, a couple of us get together for about an hour in a sunroom and sing some folk songs together. With
Quick Note
[the title of this post is meant to be read to the tune of "Rock the Casbah"] If you're reading this post, you probably know the following accursed series of clauses: Elon Musk's personal Large Language Model-built chatbot, Grok, which operates as a user
Housing
Whenever "affordable housing" comes up at a community meeting for a rezoning/new development, you can pretty much always expect to hear one particular refrain: this isn't real affordable housing! It's still pretty expensive! "Affordable housing" is a catch-all term for a
Quick Note
This morning, while waiting to see if Republicans strip the life from millions of Americans, I watched news coverage from Al Jazeera revealing video of U.S. contractors firing on Palestinians seeking food. BlueskyBluesky SocialBreaking News, World News and Video from Al JazeeraNews, analysis from the Middle East & worldwide,
News
This is Which Side Are You On. I'm Michael Monaco; I'm just some guy with more to say than fits conveniently in a microblogging platform. So I'm trying Ghost out. I expect posts to be primarily about hyper-local (Charlottesville area) housing market stuff, plus