Good morning, RVA! It's 79 °F, and I'm sure you can predict today's weather: Real hot, sunny, and a chance of heat-related illness and injury. Looks like this weather pattern will hold over the weekend with a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday.
Water cooler
You should read this piece in Style Weekly by Tom Nash about the RRHA's plan to switch Richmond's public housing stock to Section 8 housing. There are some great quotes and thoughts in this piece about how the City executes (and fails to execute) public outreach, but I'm still confused about what this conversion actually means for humans living in public housing. Surely we're not talking about a massive reshuffling of everyone currently living in these neighborhoods, right? What about existing Section 8 voucher holders that are at the top of the (years-long) waiting list? I have a lot of probably dumb and very basic questions that I would love to have answered!
Today, Michael Paul Williams writes about the lack of public transportation on Jeff Davis Highway. He talks to Carrie Aus, one of the women leading the movement to expand GRTC service into the county so that people can access jobs, food, education—you know, regular life stuff. He also digs into the Northern Jefferson Davis Special Area Plan's recommendation to look into a historical replica trolley saying, "But it seems to me that the county is needlessly complicating this issue while striving to type the word 'bus' as few times as possible in a 155-page document." Hey, he said it, not me! I do eventually say some stuff further down in the article, though, including a quote where I use the word "system" three times in a row. 😕
I'm interested in this new RTD column that'll feature regular writings from Congressmen Brat and McEachin. The first edition comes out in this Sunday's paper—let it be more interesting than two sets of boilerplate campaign-website language!
Richmond Police Chief Alfred Durham will drop his report on 2017's first six months of "crime trends and homicides" today at 10:00 AM. Usually this comes with a chartsandgraph-laden PDF, so keep an eye out for that later today.
The Virginia Bar Association will host a gubernatorial debate between Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie this Saturday at 11:00 AM. You can watch it live over on the PBS NewsHour YouTube channel.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Akron, 3-4. They'll continue that series at 7:05 PM tonight and through the weekend.
- Kickers host Bethlehem Steel FC on Saturday at 7:45 PM. You can get your tickets online.
- Nats begin a series with Arizona tonight at 9:40 PM.
This morning's longread
If Hillary Clinton Had Won
I'm normally not into breathless BUT IF HILLARY WOULD HAVE WON conversations, but this multiverse take by FiveThirtyEight is entertaining. Hat tip to Twitter user @andersonmt09!
Greetings, citizens of Earth 1! I’m filing this dispatch from Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton got just a few more votes last November than she did in your world. And I really do mean just a few more: On Earth 2, Clinton won 0.5 percent more of the vote in each state, and Donald Trump won 0.5 percent less. That was just enough for her to narrowly win three states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — that she narrowly lost in what you think of as “the real world.” Races for Congress turned out exactly the same here on Earth 2, so Clinton is president with a Republican Congress.