Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today's highs will scooch past 60 °F. Sounds lovely!
Water cooler
Police are reporting a double homicide that occurred on Sunday afternoon at Bunche Place in the City's East End. Officers arrived and found Dwayne F. Frazier, 21, and Anthony J. Jones, 20, shot to death.
FYI! We are officially in the Annual News Deadzone, where interesting things creak to a halt and reporters take much-deserved vacations while Year-in-Review pieces run at scheduled intervals. As a result, for the next two weeks, our time together each morning may be brief!
The Governor has released his budget and Michael Martz at the RTD has some of the details and quotes from lawmakers. If you'd like, you may read comments straight from ol' T-Mac's mouth or just dive right into the budget document itself (shoutout to Virginia's online budget website—this thing is banging!). Big winners in the proposed budget—which still must make its way through the General Assembly—are education, transportation, and Medicaid expansion. The republican lawmakers quoted in Martz's piece are very skeptical about all of these things. I'm sure we'll know more about the viability of these budget requests as advocates dig into the details over the next couple of days.
Richmond Magazine has chosen ten local folks that are "striving to make this a better place to live, work and play"—five who made an impact in 2017 and five to watch in 2018. I love lists of awesome Richmonders that aren't just a retreading of the same old names and faces.
If you're following the political and civic fallout from the White supremacist rally in Charlottesville this past summer: Police Chief Al Thomas resigned yesterday.
The Seattle Times has a What We Know And What We Don't Know about yesterday's fatal train derailment. Two things of note: 1) This was the first run of a new piece of infrastructure, and 2) Investigators have not yet announced the cause of the derailment, although at least one expert says the train was moving too fast through a turn.
Sports!
- Rams welcome Winthrop to the Siegel Center tonight at 7:00 PM.
- Spiders host Bucknell tonight at 7:00 PM as well.
- Hokies and Presbyterian tip off at 7:00 PM.
- Wahoos get set for Savannah State at...you guessed it, 7:00 PM.
This morning's longread
Fostering Inclusion: Whose Problem? Which Problem?
From Patron Heather comes this piece about how time is a flat circle when it comes to segregation.
Much of the wealthy world has modest to zero population growth, but America is different: We are a large and still-growing nation, thanks mainly to immigration, which is, in turn, driving greater racial and ethnic diversity. In the 1990s, for example, the population of most American cities would have shrunk if not for immigration. What is more, as of the 2000 census, an estimated one-third of the built environment needed to accommodate population growth in America over the next generation did not yet exist. It represented projected new development. This underscored the huge stakes associated with how we grow, particularly the prospects for inclusionary growth. It also underlined the fact that our debates about persistent segregation cannot be limited to public housing in inner cities or to other long-established fixtures of our current spatial footprint. We always need to be asking about what's next too—about the course of new development, both infill and at the edges of urban regions. And of course, we need to pay attention to how these development trends influence each other and influence our politics and sense of what's possible.
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