Joe Cobb, Roanoke Mayoral Candidate, on Tackling Gun Violence, Boosting Housing, and Why He Owns 54 Bow Ties

Ahead of Roanoke’s municipal elections on Nov. 5, The Rambler once again sits down with each of the candidates — this time with a twist.

Three candidates for mayor and seven City Council candidates agreed to videotaped chats as we probed them on Roanoke’s past, present and future. To distinguish our questions from those frequently asked of the candidates, we focused on budgets, segregation, climate, housing and more. (Of course, we also had to touch on where they like to dine out.)

For mayor, Vice Mayor Joe Cobb is running as a Democrat, Councilwoman Stephanie Moon Reynolds as an independent and former mayor David Bowers as a Republican. For City Council, the candidates are Democrats Terry McGuire, Phazhon Nash and Benjamin Woods; independents Evelyn Powers and Cathy Reynolds; and Republicans Jim Garrett and Nick Hagen. Voters can choose up to three Council candidates.

This interview features Vice Mayor Joe Cobb, the Democratic nominee for mayor. Cobb, 62, was elected to City Council in 2018 and again in 2022. A resident of Old Southwest, Cobb works as a chaplain at Hermitage Roanoke, a senior living center in Northwest Roanoke.

Candidates did not receive copies of the questions beforehand. Transcripts of the interviews have been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

View the candidate's full video interview here:

Why do you want to be Roanoke’s next mayor?

Having been on City Council and seeing how well this city works together, when it wants to work together, has really been inspiring to me. I have found in the course of my years on Council that we have citizens, we have community partners, we have local government departments, we have businesses, that all want to make Roanoke better. 

And the welcome that I have received in the 23 years I've been here, and how that's created a pathway for me to become a leader in a way that I never anticipated or expected, is a real honor for me. And as Roanoke's next mayor, I want to help our city get even better, in every facet of what that looks like. Whether it's our quality of life or our education, whatever your age, our public transit system, a reduction in the social challenges that we struggle with daily, whether it's gun violence or homelessness or the opioid fentanyl epidemic. 

I work well with people, and I think Roanoke does our best when we're working together on finding creative, courageous solutions to some of our greatest challenges. And I believe I'm the best person to do that and equipped to do that, and believe in the power of relationships to get that done. So I'm excited about running for mayor. I think it's an extension of the commitment I've already conveyed and do every day when I'm working for and with the city, and I'm excited about the opportunity to be able to do that as mayor.

Let’s talk policy priorities. If you’re elected, what’s one of the first actions you would push for City Council to take?

Because housing is such a critical issue right now — and we're on the cusp of actually crafting our legislative agenda for the next General Assembly — I'm very interested in what we can do to create an easier pathway for housing in two regards. We're already a land bank community. We work with TAP [Total Action for Progress], but I discovered this fall that the threshold for assessed values of properties to become or to be transferred into the land bank, have to be $75,000 or less. And there are several properties that I have thought we could transfer to the land bank through that process, but their assessed value was above $75,000. So I think advocating for a change in the guidelines that allows a higher threshold, particularly as property values have gone up, I think that will allow us to put more blighted, abandoned houses that have been foreclosed on or owe back taxes, that we can transfer the land bank and convert those relatively quickly into single-family homes or into multifamily homes. 

The second thing is, House Bill 802 allows localities to have more authority to charge landlords for damages on properties that they're not caring for. And I think we as a city have not felt for a long time that we had enough teeth in code enforcement to be able to require more specific upgrades to properties that could make them more livable. Some would argue we have enough housing, which we know we don't, but when a lot of the housing is substandard and it creates health risks for the families who are living in them, we need to be able to address that. So those are two policy issues that may seem minor, but when you're talking about creating more housing, those are major things that I think would help us get there faster.

That would require state level support, right? Is there anything particular that Council itself you think could do on this issue, or something else that you would push for right away?

I feel pretty good about our policies here. I think we're currently reviewing code enforcement to see what kind of levels of authority we have. Because we get a lot of requests from citizens about, and concerns, about blighted properties. So I think to the degree that we can affect policy that allows us more authority that we may already have, that we haven't tapped into, I would want us to explore that. 

The mayor is only one vote of the seven-person City Council. How do you persuade other members to agree to your proposals? 

Through conversation, through relationship. I think the mayor really helped set the tone for how we do that. One of the things that I would do as mayor is meet with each City Council member once a month, just to check in with them, see what's on their mind, what they're hearing from constituents in the community, talk about some of the issues that are coming up, and really have more of a thoughtful process.

The other reason that's important is because, come January, we will have at least three new Council members, and there's a possibility that we'll have three new Council members who've not had any local government experience. And we'll have a new city manager, hopefully. So that's a lot of new and particularly as we are seeing a lot of our collective wisdom leaving Council with the mayor stepping down after 20 years, [Councilwoman] Trish White-Boyd after six years. And you know, previously, we had [former councilmembers] Anita Price and Bill Bestpitch, there's not only a lot of new wisdom and insights coming on board, but there will be likely a generational shift to, in some ways, a younger Council. And so how we shape that Council, how we work together as a team, with each other and with the city manager and the city manager's team, is going to be absolutely critical to moving the needle and keeping Roanoke moving forward.

Roanoke’s residential neighborhoods remain highly racially segregated. What role should city government play in dismantling that legacy? 

Well, with our recent zoning amendments, we took a big step in doing that by removing exclusionary zoning, which was predominantly created through single-family zones during Jim Crow and as part of segregation policy. We've essentially taken that off the books. Creating more opportunities, of housing options, throughout the city where people can't afford to live, where they want to live. We're a very diverse city, and yet sometimes when we look at the demographics of where our citizens live, it still reflects some of that sense of segregation. 

So housing is a big piece of that, but I also think focusing on the neighborhood centers and having gathering places within our neighborhoods, for food, for health care, for recreation, for community centers or recreation centers or small business incubators. These are the kinds of things that are built into our neighborhood central plan so that a neighborhood center in Grandin Village, or on 11th Street, or on Ninth Street in the Belmont Fallon area, or all of Williamson Road, these are the places that we want people to be able to gather and to see the diversity of our city reflected in their neighborhood. 

You have served on City Council for six years. Looking back over your time in office, what is your proudest accomplishment and why would that not have happened had you not been on City Council?

So my proudest accomplishment, and probably the most difficult work, has been addressing gun violence. I was barely into my first year, and I was listening to the public safety report given by our then-police chief, Tim Jones, and there were a couple of things that struck me about it. One was that we were starting to see an increase in injuries related to gun violence and homicides. And I remember feeling this compelling passion, perhaps, to talk to the mayor and the city manager about creating a task force to reduce gun violence. And they both supported it, and the City Council at that time supported it, and we appointed citizens who did a really amazing job of identifying five key areas for prevention, intervention and response. 

And then over the course of the years, we've developed that, and we were able to secure the first grant through the state. The police department actually secured a grant to create a RESET team, and then we secured a grant to create a youth and gang violence prevention team. We built this framework of community partners that were focused on mentoring, on education, on after-school programs, on recreation programs, on arts programs, to connect with youth and with families, because we were seeing a higher incidence of youth violence that we wanted to begin to reduce.

And as the numbers just continued to rise, we kept at the work. Building those relationships, sustaining those relationships, continuing to seek funding. And all of that hard work got the attention of the attorney general. Both Mark Herring and Jason Miyares. Got the attention of the governors Ralph Northam and Glenn Youngkin. Even got the attention of First Lady Suzanne Youngkin, who as fentanyl has come to Roanoke and caused way too many deaths, she recognized the infrastructure work we have done on gun violence, and said, you know, ‘Roanoke knows how to do this.’ And we had established the Roanoke Collective Response to address the opioid epidemic. 

So Roanoke does this well, and all I did was take the seed of an idea that I believed was critical to the health and well being of our future as a city. And through that hard work, and working with commission members and community partners, we were able to be named a Safer Community and receive $2.9 million. And I truly believe we were able to receive that funding because of the work we've done the last five years. And I also believe that the results we're seeing, 67 percent reduction in homicides this year and 53 percent reduction in aggravated assaults is a testament to how this community has worked so hard together. And we'll continue to work hard, because we know we don't want to just see this as a blip. We want to see this as a long-term solution. 

And I was really pleased when our new police chief, Scott Booth, one of the first things he said when he came here was that, as someone who does his homework, he acknowledged and is grateful for the hard work we've done over the last five years, and acknowledged the work of the Gun Violence Prevention Commission. And knowing that work we've done, was able to come in and build on it and help direct the police department in doing their essential work of building on those relationships in the community. So that's the thing I'm probably most proud of and the thing that has been absolutely the most difficult work that I may ever do in my life.

This is a perfect segue to my next question, which is about gun violence and the commission. We saw gun violence spike after the pandemic, and as you pointed out, in the last year, police reported a 67 percent decrease in gun violence homicides. You touched on this, but to what extent do you attribute that to the work of the commission?

I attribute a large percentage of that to the work of the commission. If we didn't have the commission that had spent the time to focus on building these community partnerships. If it weren't for the fact of our support of the police department and the Star City Task Force — it's a combination of not only our police but the ATF, the U.S. Marshals office, the U.S. District Attorney and the Commonwealth’s Attorney — because of that relationship, we've been able to seize more guns from the streets. We've been able to make more arrests this year. In fact, we've had more cases closed by arrests than we have historically in previous years, and I think a lot of that is due to this collaborative effort. 

Everything we do, it's not just about the commission, it's not just about the police, it's not just about the Commonwealth’s Attorney, it's not just about Star City Safe, which is expanding hours in the libraries and activities with Parks and Recreation, training teen apprentices to get HR skills through our HR department and then work in city departments. It's all of that together, and the consistency of that and the sustainability of that that keeps this on the forefront of people's minds. And in addition to that, the care we take in acknowledging people who have lost loved ones to gun violence, whether it's the work of FEDUP, whether it's the work of Carillon and their hospital-based violence intervention trauma program, whether it's the RESET team, following up with families with resources or the youth and gang violence prevention team, connecting with youth who don't have a mentor in their life and making sure they have a mentor and making sure their families have support. The heart of this is building relationships and helping people see a different path for their future than one that may cause harm to themselves or to someone else.

As you know, the commission has been subject to some city audits and has faced some scrutiny from Council members. That scrutiny led some commissioners to resign. What is your response to criticism that some of the commission's work has gone towards supporting so-called feel-good efforts that do not directly correlate to impacting gun violence?

Everything we've done has been focused on prevention, intervention, response or justice. And every initiative we have focused on has had one of those elements of focus. People have different opinions about what they think works and what they think doesn't work, and that's fine. They can have their opinions. But ultimately, we have wanted to test a variety and pilot a variety of things to see the sorts of connections we would have with people in the community. 

We've piloted a lot of programs that are recreation-based, and for kids for whom sports is their key connection, it's fantastic. For kids whose key expression is more artistic, we've tried to create pathways for them to find expression in doing that, and that's life-saving for them. Much like recreation is life-saving. We piloted a conflict resolution program that I had hoped we would be able to pilot for a couple of years to really see the breadth and depth of that, and I hope we'll be able to return to something like that, because last year, a majority of the homicides that we recorded were due to conflict in relationships and beefs that people have with other people. 

You're the only candidate who supports recent policies that ended exclusively single family zoning. Why are your fellow candidates wrong on this issue?

They may have various reasons for not supporting it. I supported it for a number of reasons. One is that Roanoke has been working really hard, particularly in the last 10 years, to change the narrative about being one of the most segregated cities in Virginia. Five years ago, when we received a grant from Virginia Department of Humanities to work collectively as a community to address this history of segregation, Points of Diversity became the lead agency, and they created a series of seven events called Changing the Narrative. It began to bring people together in such a thoughtful way to explore, What is our history? How did we get there? What was the role of urban renewal in that process? What is our role and responsibility now?

And at the same time, I was doing a study of Old Lick Cemetery and the removal of 900-plus remains to Coyner Springs cemetery to make room for an interchange. It wasn't directly related to urban renewal, but it was related to the Interstate Act, which was also connected to going through the heart of what were historically Black, African American neighborhoods. So it's all interrelated and connected. And as I began to research, reading the book The Color of Law and learning the history of redlining and how through zoning, people were excluded from living in certain places under single-family zoning, it just didn't feel right to me. It didn't set right, and it still doesn't. And I still believe we as a city have worked to do in reckoning our past and moving forward. 

I was so pleased when Councilman [Bev] Fitzpatrick shared what he did about, ‘It's just common sense.’ If you have the opportunity to right or wrong historically, do it. That's why it makes sense to me. And it's one piece of the puzzle, and I will continue to work, as I said before, social justice, equity and equality are absolutely critical to me and my values, and they're critical to the future of our city and the well being of our city. And sometimes we have to reflect on policy in a way that not everyone understands or can relate to but that ultimately is in the best interest of the city. This doesn't take anything away from the beautiful, diverse flavors of our community and our people. It only adds to that in a way that I think can only make our city richer in that regard.

You’re going out to dinner in Roanoke. Name one place — where do you go?

Aww, just one? Oh man. It kind of depends on what I'm in the mood for. So bloom is one of my favorites, because I think the small plates, the array of options that they have. Having traveled in Spain, walked the Camino eight years ago, firsthand got a look at tapas, and they do it so well. 

What books are on your night stand? What are you reading currently?

So I just picked up a book, it's a biography of Audre Lorde, who was a queer writer, poet and prose. Some of her essays have been really transformative for me in my journey. I'm reading The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez as part of the book club I'm in. It's Rainy Day Reads, but we need at Crystal Spring Grocery, and I picked that up from one of our libraries because it is reflective of the dissertation I did on really capturing some of the historic narratives of ancestors whose remains were removed to Coyner Springs, but also talking to their descendants and their own discovery about where their loved ones may or may not be buried, and telling their stories. So that's another one. I'm also reading a book related to housing and homelessness that that really talks about, the biggest problem, and the biggest solution, to homelessness is housing. And for me, it's all intertwined.

Well, while I have you, I just have to ask one more thing for the record. Why the bowties? 

When my daughter Emma and her now-husband Connor were getting married [in 2014], the theme of their rehearsal dinner was bow ties and barbecue. And so I decided I was going to learn how to tie a bow tie. And I watched a YouTube video for about an hour, and I was so aggravated with the video that I threw my phone down and I walked away and just took a breather, came back in about a half hour, went through it one more time. 

I thought, I went to all that effort to learn how to tie a bow tie. I'm going to wear them as often as I can. And it's been fun to give expression through color and designs, through my bow ties. And I hope in some way, it's kind of helped me bring a resurgence to them. I counted them the other day because somebody asked me, How many do you actually have? And I actually have 54, which is small compared to a lot of people I know, who have hundreds. But they're often a conversation piece, and some of them have a particular story. Some of them I just like because of their color scheme. But I like them. What I do is important to me, and how I dress, how I am present in the community. And if I show up at an event where I’m in a T-shirt or just an open collar shirt, people are like, Where's the bow tie, Joe?

But I will say, the other night, I was at the Greek Festival with my kids, and somebody said, You know, it's nice to see you just relaxed, having some good Greek food, without your bow tie on. And I said, Well, thank you for that.