Author: Billy Hansen

The City Builder When Ray Booth drives around Lynchburg, he sees things that are invisible to the rest of us. Like a man with X-ray vision, Ray sees annexation lines, underground pipes, utility lines, hidden infrastructure, and the decades of work it took to come to fruition. Ray truly knows this city because he spent 25 years building it as Lynchburg’s director of public works. Ray grew up in Campbell County in the 1960s and remembers seeing English Construction build the road by his house and the road to school. As a bright, young student at Rustburg High School,...

Did you know that Lynchburg City Schools has a full-time position entitled “Homeless Education Liaison”? I didn’t either until I met Judy Brooks. Earlier this year, we were paired together during the Point-in-Time Count done by the Central Virginia Continuum of Care. As we spent a few pre-dawn hours walking around downtown surveying Lynchburg’s homeless population, I learned that her full-time job was serving homeless or “displaced” students, ranging from pre-K to 12th grade. Her role as Homeless Education Liaison is mandated by the McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law designed to protect those students who lack a permanent fixed...

In my last column, I advocated for asking good questions and shared a few of my own questions about affordable housing in the Lynchburg area. These questions were sparked by a small sign in the Lynchburg Redevelopment & Housing Authority (LRHA) office that read “SECTION 8 WAITING LIST IS CLOSED” and “PUBLIC HOUSING WAITING LIST IS CLOSED.” Since then, I’ve been out meeting with housing experts to try to find answers to those questions. I recently sat down with Dawn Fagan, the executive director of LRHA, to learn about these two housing programs, their waiting lists, and the complex...

People hire me to become extremely curious about a topic of their choosing. Whenever I start an assignment, my first step is to sit down and create a wish list of all the things that I’d like to know about the subject. I try to brainstorm as many questions as possible without editing myself. I know that the list will be full of questions that are simplistic, off-topic, uninteresting, irrelevant, impractical, or just plain unanswerable, but I do this practice with the hope of eventually arriving at just a few good questions that truly get to the heart of...

This fall, I’ve been teaching the Personal Finance course at Longwood University in Farmville. I want to equip these 22 undergraduate students with the knowledge, tools, principles, and perspective to win with their finances. To prepare for class, I’ve been going back to the fundamentals and rereading classic books on personal finance, which has had the added bonus of sharpening my own thinking and attitudes about money. So, what does this have to do with real estate? Well, I’ve often been struck by how closely the essentials of personal finance match what it takes to succeed in real estate...