Good morning, RVA! It's 65 °F now, but you better bring some layers with you because temperatures will drop into the 50s today. Time to break out those flannels! Finally!
Water cooler
City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet today at 1:00 PM in City Hall, and they have a packed agenda: The ordinance banning the Brook Road bike lane (ORD. 2018-194), renaming Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard (ORD. 2018-228), the dockless bike and scooter ordinance (ORD. 2018-262), and a handful of affordable-housing-related ordinances from Councilmember Robertson. That’s a lot of things to work through, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them get continued down the road a bit. Here’s my list of micro hot takes: the anti-bike lane ordinance is terrible, let’s go ahead and rename the Boulevard, the scooter ordinance needs a few tweaks (but scooters are rad), and we probably should wrap our collective minds around a regional affordable housing strategy before passing all of these one-off laws (not that I’m specifically against any of them).
And about the Boulevard, Michael Paul Williams has a good piece in the paper today 💸, writing “We keep saying the answer to the outsize presence of Confederate commemorations here is to add diversity to our historical commemoration landscape. But presented with yet another opportunity to honor Ashe by shedding a generic street name for a distinctive and respected brand, opponents cite inconvenience and changed letterheads.”
Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch was at yesterday’s Planning Commission meeting and says the rezoning of Monroe Ward is moving right along.
Karri Piefer, also at the RTD, has this excellent description of The Locker Room: “The drinks are strong and cheap, the regulars are plentiful and loyal, and a food menu (as required by Virginia law) exists.” The owners of one of Richmond’s most serious of dive bars will open a new spot, The Pitts, later this month that hopes to be just as divey. That’s setting a high bar, but serving breakfast all day is certainly a start.
RVAHub’s Richard Hayes has a bunch of great photos from this past weekend’s Folk Festival—including several of a wee small child playing an accordion.
Abigail Spanberger debated Rep. Dave Brat last night and WTVR has the video if you’d like to watch the entire thing. It’s an hour and 28 minutes long, but I bet you can mostly predict what both of them will say.
I’m still looking for a sufficiently readable and sufficiently dire explanation of the new IPCC report on climate change, but until I find one here’s a Twitter thread from Vox’s David Roberts on carbon taxes. It’s super interesting and a bit over my head, but this part resonates with me: “The climate policy rule is: do whatever can get done.”
This morning's longread
When Women Demanded Pay for Housework
What a fascinating look at the history of the pay-for-housework movement. There are tons of excellent primary sources linked in this piece as well—set aside some serious time to dig in.
Yet housework—the tasks that Angela Davis deemed “neither stimulating nor productive”—stubbornly remained. Despite Davis’s view that housework might be replaced by “new social institutions to assume a good portion of the housewife’s old duties,” like universal and subsidized childcare, there’s been little progress in the liberation of everyone from household drudgery. Although countries such as Sweden and Denmark have found success with universal child-care most housework has not been successfully addressed anywhere by a “new social institution.” To the contrary, when housework is escaped or avoided, it’s often by outsourcing to a low-paid (and usually female) worker. And when it’s not avoided, it still falls to women to do the lion’s share of the labor, in addition to whatever work they do outside the home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average day sees 84 percent of women and 68 percent of men doing housework, with women spending almost an hour more doing household activities than men.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.