Let’s hope the yurt works

The Charlottesville Daily
Published: June 1, 2008

Providing an inexpensive yurt for a woman now living in a tent is a compassionate proposal.

Workable? We’ll see.

Charlottesville has offered to work with local charitable groups to buy a yurt for Pauline E. Mallard, who currently lives in a tent on her overgrown property on Angus Road.

A yurt is a kind of a tent — although more substantial than the type Ms. Mallard is living in now. It would sit on a platform and feature electricity and running water.

The city proposes to buy the yurt with Habitat for Humanity, which would retain ownership of the home and be able to reuse it when Ms. Mallard no longer needs it. A local church group has agreed to set up the yurt (the same group donated the tent she now lives in).

The city hopes this will address neighbors’ concerns about the now elderly, disabled woman living on an unkempt lot amid trash.

The neighbors have had concerns for 30-plus years. Ms. Mallard’s house burned decades ago, under suspicious circumstances. For part of the ensuing time, she lived on her property in old vehicles, tents or other camp-like conditions.

The city once required her to clean up her property and also compelled her to have her vehicles removed, and she lived for a time in public housing — where the first unit she occupied then had to be condemned for vermin infestation and unsanitary conditions. Since then she has rotated from rental housing to shelters, with long stretches in between spent on her Angus property.

City officials hope the yurt, which is more spacious than her tent, will allow her to bring more of her possessions, which are now scattered around the property, inside under cover. That would please the neighbors, while also providing better accommodations for Ms. Mallard, and for her health and safety.

“It’s a great idea, it’s not a lot of money and, hopefully, it will solve the problem,” said Jim Tolbert, Charlottesville’s director of planning.

It is a great idea, partly because it doesn’t cost a lot of money.

The proposal is also commendable — and very Charlottesville — because of the way it brings together many groups in cooperation both to solve a problem and serve a resident in need: Habitat, city government, the church group, as well as PACEM, an organization involved in homelessness issues.

The one person whose cooperation is most necessary is Ms. Mallard.

Representatives of PACEM and the church group have said they talked with her about the yurt proposal. She, however, told The Daily Progress, “[T]his is the first I’ve heard of it” (“City pitches a solution,” May 24).

Ms. Mallard will need more than a yurt — she also will need continual help in maintaining her property, if she will accept that help.

In the meantime, the city and its partner charities are clearly trying everything they can to be compassionate and fair.

We’ll hope for the storybook ending, with neighbors living happily together ever after.