SPORTS: Girls soccer, girls lacrosse, boys lacrosse coverage. PAGES 12, 13, 15. April 10, 2024
Our 207th year | Vol. 207, No. 15 | www.Fauquier.com | $2.00 VIRGINIA PRESS ASSOCIATION: BEST SMALL NEWSPAPER IN VIRGINIA 2017-2022
Home sweet home: A reach for many
Housing insecurity triggers stress, risk, despair for Piedmont residents By Tim Carrington For Foothills Forum
People who are financially secure and people who are financially strained both consider housing central to their well-being. But beyond that baseline, their experiences with house and home diverge radically. The affluent find security in a home, while low-income workers encounter insecurity. For well-off families, a house functions as an address and an investment, one likely to appreciate if owners can ride out the economic cycles. For lower-income families — forever-renters or owners chronically worried about foreclosure — housing is a vulnerability, a provisional arrangement poised to unravel as circumstances shift. The housing budget for lower-income renters can claim as much as 50% of their income, so that other priorities such as health, nutrition and education are crowded out.
Scanning the last four decades in Piedmont Virginia, the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit that supports affordable housing in rural areas, found a quadrupling in the number of Culpeper and Fauquier renters paying over 30% of their income for housing, which is the generally accepted threshold for being cost-burdened. In Rappahannock, the number of cost-burdened renters tripled. When a cyclone of bad luck comes via an illness, an injury, a layoff or a change of landlord, there are few shock absorbers to stave off a continuing spiral downward. Mortgage or rent payments falter; eviction notices follow; and home mutates into a noisy shelter or a car tucked into a Walmart parking lot. Mental and physical health deteriorate; job performance suffers; and families and social structures fray. See HOUSING, page 4
PHOTO BY IRELAND HAYES/FOOTHILLS FORUM
Community Touch Housing Locator Angela Robinson helps a young mother fill out paperwork to secure housing for herself and her small children at the organization’s office in Warrenton, which doubles as a transitional home.
‘Right place at the right time’: Thousands turn to the skies for solar eclipse By Hunter Savery Staff Writer
On Monday afternoon in normally quiet Delaplane, Va., traffic backed up for half a mile as hundreds of skygazers descended on Sky Meadows State Park for the last glimpse of a solar eclipse in Fauquier County for more than 50 years. By the official count, 745 visitors had swarmed the bucolic hillside well before the eclipse reached its 3:19 p.m. apex. And when it did — the crowd was jubilant, bursting into hoots and hollers as the eclipse approached its 89% peak. “We’re so happy to be the place where people can see this once-in-several-decades event and to be able to foster not only their love of the outdoors, but astronomy, too,” Chief Ranger Erin Clark told the Fauquier Times.
TIMES STAFF PHOTO/HUNTER SAVERY
The 2024 solar eclipse as seen at its peak from Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane, Virginia on April 8.
The experience of a total solar eclipse is a totally unique one within our solar system, according to Dr. Woody Davis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is based in Pasadena, California. “When it does happen, it’s a dramatic event,” said Davis. “And it only happens because we’re in the right place at the right time. It’s all about timing and because the moon is the right size relative to the Earth and Sun.” Davis explained that in the past, eclipses were even more common, but the moon is slowly drifting away from the Earth. As the moon slips away, eclipses will happen less and less often. “Current calculations say that the moon will say goodbye and leave us,” Davis said. “So, if anyone’s still up in a billion years, they can look up one day and see that there’s no moon. But right now, we’re in the spot where we can see the moon obscuring the sun.” See ECLIPSE, page 5
The Warrenton Town Council got its first look at next year’s budget, page 3
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