Today, the city of Roanoke is once again auctioning off properties on which there are unpaid local real estate taxes, assessments for weed and trash abatement, and demolition or board up costs. They do this once or twice a year. More than 30 properties are on the auction block this time, a number of which are vacant lots.

You can see the list on the city's department of billings and collections website, and there are photos on the Woltz and Associates site.

But I wondered where they were, so I tossed the list onto a map:

No surprises here, really. It's the more depressed parts of town where the pinpoints fall. But part of the story might be in where there aren't any pinpoints.

As Roanoke blogger and neighborhood activist Chris Muse points out, the presence of delinquent properties "a fairly good sign of the progression or regression of a neighborhood."

Chris is rightly proud that there's a single delinquent property on the list this time in his part of Old Southwest. I know that property, and while I haven't asked Chris, I wonder if some aren't glad to see that vacant property seeing some action and the potential for a new owner to make it a credit to the neighborhood, and not a blight on it.

That, after all, is what the city says it's up to with these tax sales. It might be a bad sign when your neighborhood is host to landowners who can't or won't pay their taxes or maintain their properties. But everytime one of those properties is turned over to a new owners, it's a new chance for the land, the house, and the neighborhood.

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• Posted by Matt Chittum in ::
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That Dad was having a heart attack, well, that was not really a shock. He was 81, and had averaged one every ten years or so since I was in college.

The shock was that, even with a pacemaker to keep his ticker ticking, his life as an independent man was over. His health was disintegrating, and the heart attack had triggered a landslide decline in his cognitive ability. He was very suddenly a dementia patient, too.

All at once it seemed, he had to leave the VA Medical Center in Salem, but he couldn’t go home. To our great relief, social workers at the VA excel at getting patients like Dad placed in nursing care. Though the first place he landed was a nightmare, and he returned to the hospital within a week, the second time he was released he wound up at the Virginia Veterans Care Center next to the VA. To his family's comfort, that became his home for the rest of his days.

Everything worked out as well as it could for Dad, who died in November. But looking back, I wonder, what if we’d had to go into the marketplace for nursing care on our own? I wouldn’t have known where to start except the yellow pages, and they don’t give you much but boasts and phone numbers.

I hope you never find yourself in the position my siblings and I were in last year, but if you do, you now have a place to start your search for senior care resources.

Continue reading "I could have used this when my Dad needed a place to go" »

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• Posted by Matt Chittum in HealthHealth ::
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Another view of that liquor sales data. Alert reader Jay wondered what this liquor sales for Virginia look like when you rank our favorite distilled spirits by gallons sold, rather than dollars spent.

Unfortunately, I haven't found the 2007 data by gallons yet, but I do have 2006. What you'll quickly see is that the picture's different when you look at it by volume. We might spend more on good whiskey, but what we drink the most of is good ol' knock you on yer butt and wake you up with cotton mouth cheap-o vodka.

See for yourself. The numbers represent thousands of gallons sold. Yep, that's 450,000 gallons of Aristocrat vodka, comrades.

So, if you were an enterprising feature writer for a big city rag like The Roanoke Times, what's the "Hey, Martha!" tidbit you'd pull out of this data?

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The answer to that one is Jack Daniels. As in Old No. 7. As in Tennessee whiskey.

Virginians spent over $21 million on Jack Black last year, making it the favorite distilled spirit in the Commonwealth in terms of dollars in sales. You can see the top 50 for 2007 in a new bubble graph I just posted. (I know this is only two, but I'm already in danger of becoming obsessed with these bubble graphs.)

Turns out we have some pretty refined taste in spirits. Grey Goose vodka. Crown Royal. Jim Beam.

But not everything we bought in quantity goes down as smooth. Well up on the list is Aristocrat brand vodka, which, well, doesn't exactly live up to the image suggested by its name. We bought more bottles of Aristocrat than any other liquor. As a former bartender, my guess is that's because it's the house vodka in all manner of bars from Richlands to Reston.

The one that surprised me is Jagermeister at number 6 on the list. This is a dirty-motor-oil dark liqueur that tastes like black licorice soup and brings on a kind of intoxication that feels more like a narcotic than a drink. (Or so I've been told.) Popular with the regular bar set, which is to say younger folks. Generally swilled as a shooter, and lately mixed with Red Bull energy drink. The kind of thing everybody buys you on your 21st birthday, as if you weren't already on your way to embarrassing behavior without the help.

Most of these top shelf liquors, you buy because they are smoother and more drinkable. Jagermeister, that stuff ain't about the taste. It's about the punch.

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