A Future We Can Live In

Our next Climate Connection is with Kraig Chapman. Kraig is a local veteran who volunteers at the Office of Human Rights in Charlottesville. His favorite part of this work, he tells me when we both seated at his kitchen table, is “helping someone find that missing piece.” 

For the majority of people who come to the office, that ‘missing piece’ is affordable housing. “Demand far exceeds supply for something in the city that costs less than 1,000,” says Todd Niemeier, the community outreach and investigation specialist at the Human Rights Office. “You’re legally protected from racial discrimination under the fair housing act,” Todd tells me with his chipper candor when we meet at the C3 office downtown, “but you’re not protected just because you’re poor.”

When Kraig first moved to Charlottesville, he found that many landlords would not accept his Housing Choice Voucher (which was converted from a Veteran’s Housing Voucher), even though it was the full rent, guaranteed. More than once, he had the experience of being told to come look at a place over the phone and then being turned down in person. “They don’t want to take the vouchers because they don’t want the people attached to them,” Kraig tells me when we meet in his home, a small apartment out on 29 North which he rents for $980 a month.

Due to a Traumatic Brain Injury incurred while in active duty, Kraig has lost 20% percent of his short-term memory. He can’t drive and frequently has to record elements of conversation with a chrome, hand-held gadget provided to him by the VA (Veterans Administration). During the course of our conversation, his phone rattles a few times, reminding him to take his medication.

Although Kraig is able to work, he cannot be employed while receiving the Housing Choice Vouchers benefits. “I was hired at a nearby CVS, told them ‘I can walk there and be the first one to open in the morning,’ until the Housing Authority of Charlottesville told me: ‘You’re not working anywhere.’”

So he volunteers. “I’ve always wanted to help people,” Kraig tells me, and it’s easy to believe that he does, as we fall into an easy hour of conversation about his life growing up on the South Side of Chicago; how the same pastor that married Michelle and Barack Obama “married my sister and her brother and buried my mother;” how after serving in the military he worked as a flight attendant; and how much he enjoyed “landing a plane while wearing a suit.” When I ask him if he gets out much, he laughs his enormous laugh and answers, “You’re the most company I’ve had in a week!”

If Kraig were to give up his housing voucher in order to work, he wouldn’t be able to afford living alone in Charlottesville, which would put him in the surrounding counties, making transportation much more difficult, and social isolation more extreme. Yet Kraig’s dilemma is emblematic of the choice that many American’s face concerning where they can afford to live vs. how far they can afford to travel. In this Washington Post article, a 2019 Census Bureau reported that the average American spent a total of 9 full days commuting to work per year, a record high in our nation’s history, amounting to $166 billion fuel costs due to traffic congestion alone, according to a Texas A&M study.

But the question of carbon emissions due to longer commutes isn’t just an environmental one. As Todd tells me towards the end of our interview, “Segregated housing stems from racist and unequal policy over the long haul. We’re not fixing that if we’re systematically pushing poor people away. And that bothers me.”

Several times a week Kraig makes an appointment with public transit and travels downtown, where he tries to help people find the missing pieces; those small, but vital shifts that might make their lives feel a little more easeful, manageable, sane. 

And what are those missing pieces, those small shifts that could help us create more housing and climate equity in Charlottesville? The next several Climate Connections pieces will continue to explore this question. For Kraig, part of that answer involves listening more closely to young people. When he turned on the TV and saw local high schoolers walking out of their classrooms to protest climate change, he was speechless. “I side with the youth,” he tells me, placing his palm softly but emphatically on his kitchen table, “because clearly there’s some things that we adults just ain’t been paying attention to.”