Good morning, RVA! It's 27 °F, and highs may creep above freezing for a few hours this afternoon. Due to the thin sheet of ice covering every surface, things are canceled, closed, or delayed! This means schools and governments, too. Be careful if you’ve gotta leave the house.
Water cooler
This past Friday evening, police arrived to the 2400 block of Carmine Street and found Timothy Garnett, 28, shot to death.
City Council meets today, assuming they don’t cancel due to the weather. You can find their ever-malleable agenda here, which is chock full of ordinances to approve special use permits and accept funds from various sources at the beginning of the new year. Don’t get your hopes up for fireworks, because the Scooter Ordinance (ORD. 2018-288) has been continued to January 28th as has most of the regular agenda. Something to keep in mind is Councilmember Robertson’s RES. 2018-R082 (also continued), which requests that the Mayor include an affordable housing division within the new, as-yet-to-really-take-shape Department of Housing and Community Development. But really, does this department exist in any form yet? As far as I can tell, the director position is still open and available on the City’s website.
Gregory J. Gilligan at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a bunch of really interesting details about the Port City development—aka the former American Tobacco complex. The development, which is massive, will hold hundreds of apartments all available to folks making 60 percent of the Area Median Income or less (that’s $34,980 for one person, $39,960 for two people, and $44,940 for a household of three). Port City is right smack on the #3 bus line, a route with 15-minute frequency into downtown, which, turns out, is an excellent place to build affordable(ish) housing. One thing, though: The City will definitely need to improve the pedestrian infrastructure on Route 1 so folks taking the bus can safely cross the street.
Here is the General Assembly’s ABC Update from Mechelle Hankerson at the Virginia Mercury. Any plans to get rid of or change Virginia’s archaic food-alcohol ratio law that effectively bans bars and makes me sad have died. I’m not a lawyer, lawmaker, restaurant owner, or ABC agent, but this year’s attempt to loosen the laws for big restaurants seems like the wrong way to approach this thing. I’m out here trying to encourage small, neighborhood bars with fewer than two dozens seats! OK?
What kind of person removes a ghost bike memorial because they don’t like how it looks 💸?
I’m not sure why or how, but the Friends of the Lower Appomattox River will host Adriaan Kok, the designer of the famous-at-least-in-my-circles Hovenring. What is a Hovenring? Oh, just a suspended bicycle roundabout, aka a circular cable-stayed bridge, no big deal. The afternoon discussion takes place on January 21st and costs $10. Register over on Eventbrite if you’re interested, because I imagine tickets for this will go fairly quickly.
This morning's longread
This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like
Remember the BuzzFeed article from last week—an article with which I agree and am still thinking about—on How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation? There were many takes and response, but here’s a good response from a black author. Btw, I think it is possible to agree strongly with both of these pieces!
If the stakes and obstacles to the elusive American dream are different for black millennials, then isn’t it reasonable to assume that our brand of burnout would be different, too? So many of us are weary and worn down. Burnout is not a new concept; we just have a new way of describing, or rather marketing, the particular anxiety of our age. I wonder if this zeitgeisty phenomenon — this attempt to define ourselves as the spent, frazzled generation — has become popular because white, upper-middle-class millennials aren’t accustomed to being tired all the time? Aren’t used to feeling bedraggled, as blacks and other marginalized groups have for a long time?
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