Good morning, RVA! It's 62 °F, and we've got another warm day ahead of us. Keep an eye out for possible thunderstorms this afternoon, though.
Water cooler
After yesterday's Michael Paul Williams piece about Mosby Court, WRIC is reporting that a person was shot a block from the neighborhood last night and that police found a man with two gunshot wounds walking through the neighborhood early this morning. As far as I know, these two incidents are unrelated.
With the budget work sessions complete and Council's budget amendments due yesterday, we're nearing the end of this year's budget process. Sad, I know! We won't get a good look at the amendments until later this week (or on Monday when Council has a public meeting to discuss them), but Ned Oliver went out and talked to all the councilfolk to see what they'd like to put more money towards. Where will the money come from to fund all of these amendments? Especially the hefty ones dedicated to police and fire? Only time / Legistar will tell!
Speaking of, Richmond Magazine's Don Harrison has a nice piece about the budget challenges facing the Richmond Public Library. As with almost all city departments, the library is making due with limited staff and an ever decreasing pot of money. Also, A+ headline.
This week Style Weekly dropped their 2017 Richmond Music Issue, and they've talked to a dozen women about the local industry. Read them all, but especially read this one about Sarmistha Talukdar. This quote! Ah! "She labels one of her original compositions a 'data sonification soundtrack' because it converts into music amino acid sequences from the molecules from cellular signaling that play an important role in development." 😍
Katy Burnell Evans of the RTD answers some of the questions I had yesterday about what would cause a post office to immediately close—sounds roof related. There's also some ominous language in there about if the post office will even ever reopen, but it seem like, yes, it will. However, should the East End branch close, the next closest full-service post office would be the one at 7th and Main.
A grocery story industry magazine publisher confirms what we all know: "The (Richmond) market is so over-stored...Really, in the entire Eastern Seaboard, there is no market that has more competitive activity, both in sheer number of stores and diversity of retailing styles, than Richmond." AHHHH. WE LOVE GROCERY STORES. Tammie Smith at the RTD has some news about the Giant / Martin's / Publix situation that you'll probably want to read due to your regionally-induced obsession with grocery stores.
Sports!
- Squirrels tied up the Altoona series with a 4-3 win. The final game is tonight at 6:35 PM.
- Nats beat St. Louis, 8-3. They'll wrap up that series today at 4:05 PM.
This morning's longread
How not to create traffic jams, pollution and urban sprawl
So many folks sent me this longread about parking. I love that y'all did that!
Free parking is not, of course, really free. The costs of building the car parks, as well as cleaning, lighting, repairing and securing them, are passed on to the people who use the buildings to which they are attached. Restaurant meals and cinema tickets are more pricey; flats are more expensive; office workers are presumably paid less. Everybody pays, whether or not they drive. And that has an unfortunate distributional effect, because young people drive a little less than the middle-aged and the poor drive less than the rich. In America, 17% of blacks and 12% of Hispanics who lived in big cities usually took public transport to work in 2013, whereas 7% of whites did. Free parking represents a subsidy for older people that is paid disproportionately by the young and a subsidy for the wealthy that is paid by the poor.