Good morning, RVA! It's 28 °F, and highs will hit the mid 40s before dropping a bit this evening. Keep an eye out for rain tonight and tomorrow morning with a pretty neutral weekend following. Temperatures next week, though! Break out your slip-ons.
Water cooler
Del. Jeff Bourne told Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury he’s dropping his bill that would allow some state sales tax revenue to pay for a portion of the proposed downtown arena project, aka NoBro. As far as I understood it, that bill would have given the project developers enough cash to allow them to shrink the 80-block BigTIF back down to a more reasonable size, basically the project footprint. The NH District folks (the developers) told VPM’s Robert Roldan that they are still “committed to reducing the size of the increment financing area and are exploring other avenues to help us achieve that goal.” I would love to know what those avenues are! Honestly, I felt like Bourne’s Bill was pretty OK, all things considered. I’ve no qualms with taking state money to pay for local things given how the state regularly stiffs the City on all sorts of stuff—most directly by taking up a huge portion of our downtown land with their tax-exempt buildings. But, with five councilmembers asking the Mayor to withdraw his NoBro ordinances this past Monday, the writing is on the wall, the blood is in the water, or some other noun is preposition the other noun phrase. Moving forward from this specific downtown project, I love this quote from the Mayor’s press secretary, “Regardless of whether it’s used for Navy Hill, there’s no reason this tool for economic development shouldn’t be available to Richmond, as it is for other cities.”
Also at the Virginia Mercury, Ned Oliver and Graham Moomaw look at all the progress The New Democratic Majority have made on guns this General Assembly session: “Both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly have passed major gun-control bills creating universal background checks, a red-flag law and reinstating the former one-handgun-a-month rule.” Heck yes! Now our elected leaders just need to decide if they’re willing to tackle an assault weapons ban. What a bizarre sentence that you can only write in America.
Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a long, complex update on the state of gambling bills down at the General Assembly 💸. There’s a lot going on with plenty of time left for things to change, but it doesn’t sound like we’re headed toward a future with slot machines at every gas station.
In his State of the City address, Mayor Stoney announced a 3rd-party inspection program that would, fingers crossed, speed up the permitting process. Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense has more details on the project which was created by the new building commissioner, Jason Carangelo. Spiers says the permitting office typically has five electrical inspectors, but is down to three “due to an illness and a retirement.” First, many months ago I wondered what a full-strength permitting office would look like and how many vacant-but-unfunded positions they have. Second, I wonder if the Voluntary Retirement Incentive Program (ORD. 2019-123) City Council decided to pass last year (as part of not raising real estate taxes) has had unintended consequences—like reducing bandwidth in the permitting office.
See, y’all are bananas. Via /r/rva, here’s a picture of the line to get into Whole Foods at 8:50 AM yesterday.
Impeachment update: Sounds like the Senate will acquit Donald Trump before the beginning of next week. Like Dan from impeachment.fyi says, acquittal was never in question, but I do still feel gaslit by Republicans acting as if the president can do no wrong like some sort of King George over here.
The Super Bowl is this Sunday, and, whether or not you’re into football, I hope your day is filled to capacity with a variety of chips and dips. The San Francisco 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs at 6:30 PM, commercials for things will abound, and you should probably do everything you can to avoid the grocery stores this weekend.
This morning's longread
Here’s why new homes are so expensive — and how we can fix that
Allowing gentle density—duplexes and triplexes—is such an obvious thing for cities to do! I’m going to keep talking about it because as Richmond 300 wraps up, I’m pretty sure allowing duplexes in the City’s old streetcar suburbs will be its most contentious recommendation.
That’s because, despite the risks of building just one house that the local market may not want, it would be illegal to build four houses on this lot, or even two. This lot is zoned R-60, meaning building lots can’t be any smaller than 6,000 square feet, or this lot is just small enough that you can only have one house there. You could rezone the land to allow more than one house, but neighbors in Silver Spring just spent three years fighting such a proposal a few blocks away, and you can’t blame someone for wanting to avoid that. Homebuyers would like more affordably-priced homes (if you consider $550,000 “affordable”), and homebuilders can and would like to build them. To avoid the hassle, they either build really expensive houses in close-in neighborhoods, or build cheap houses farther out. The best way to improve the situation is to allow more neighbors to live in your neighborhood. Just ask anyone who’s tried to build a house.
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