Good morning, RVA! It's 22 °F, and today you can expect highs in the mid 40s and clouds in the sky. Temperatures could hit 50 °F tomorrow.
Water cooler
Down at the General Assembly, the Land Use Subcommittee of the Counties, Cities, and Towns Committee (which meets at 8:00 AM in “300-A Subcommittee Room” should anyone find themselves in a testifying mood) will hear Del. Samirah’s middle housing bill, HB 152. This bill would require localities to allow duplexes anywhere currently zoned for single family homes. If we’re serious about affordable housing, if we’re serious about public transportation, if we’re serious about combating climate change, we have got to come up with ways for more people to live closer together. Del. Samirah’s bill does exactly this, and it lines up nicely with Richmond 300’s vision for our neighborhoods. I’m very supportive!
Locally, but still housing-related, Richmond Magazine’s Rodrigo Arriaza has an interview with Housing Opportunities Made Equal’s Heather Mullins Crislip. HOME and Crislip have been deeply involved in fair housing work in our region for a while now, and that includes our ongoing eviction crisis and the recently released regional affordable housing framework.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Mark Robinson has a good recap and the tiniest bit of new news on the future of the Intermediate Terminal Building. The old’ ITB—which, I’m sure, is what people call it—was once the planned site for a Stone Bistro, then was slated for demolition, then Council got involved and, of course, everything ground to a halt. Robinson says that Richmond’s Economic Development Authority has hired an engineering firm to study the structural integrity of the building as a first step to figuring out what’s nexts with this City-owned property.
Micheal Martz, also at the RTD, checks in on the State’s ongoing and admittedly boring budget process 💸. Boring, yes, but a super dang lot of work. Check out this wild bit: “The budget committee heard from 52 delegates on almost 200 budget amendments on Wednesday afternoon. It is considering a record 912 requests for changes and additions...” I get that the GA session is so short because in the 1700s we all had to get back to our farms or whatever, but, now, in 2020, a slower session would allow normal folks more time to process what’s going on. How does a citizen even wrap their brain around 912 changes to an already inscrutable document? Let alone do it in the span of a 60-day session??
City Council’s Government Operations committee will meet today at 12:00 PM and will look at RES. 2020-R007, which expresses Council’s support of the ERA. I assume this will pass easily. They’ll also consider ORD. 2020-012 which would tweak Animal Control’s dog and cat license program, now requiring, among a few other things, animal tags stamped with “RICHMOND, VIRGINIA” instead of “City of Richmond.” There’s also ORD. 2020-013 which changes some Animal Control definitions and expands the definition of a public nuisance from just dogs and cats to any “animal of an owner.” Should it pass, any “living vertebrate creature, domestic or wild, male or female, other than Homo sapiens” could be deemed a nuisance. I’m looking at you, birds.
Hey, hey, there’s a new episode of the Sam and Ross Like Things podcast available for your listening pleasure. As always, I had a ton of fun recording this episode and learned a bunch. You can subscribe to Sam and Ross Like Things here.
This morning's patron longread
New York Is Proposing the Creation of a ‘Public Venmo’
Submitted by Patron Mark. Reading this reminded me of another local currency, the Ithaca HOURS.
Today, local currencies may be experiencing a resurgence; particularly successful examples include BerkShares, a local currency for the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, and Banco Palmas, Brazil’s first community bank, which has led to a network of 52 other community banks that issue their own local currencies in favelas around the country. The Schumacher Center for a New Economics offers a map of local, alternative paper currency worldwide. While the IVL proposal echoes many other community currency projects, it’s notably ambitious in at least two ways. The IVL defines its local “community” as the entire state of New York, making its adoption a bigger undertaking than that of most other complementary currencies. Additionally, the IVL isn’t just a complementary currency, but also a free and instantaneous, portable, smart-device-accessible universal savings and payment platform.
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