Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F and rainy. It's gonna keep raining, too, so keep an eye out for potentially severe storms later this morning and into the early afternoon. Temperatures will hangout in the mid 60s which seems totally fine for the last day of November.
Water cooler
The Richmond Police Department is reporting that last Monday, Chae'Meshia Simms, a woman in her 30s, was shot to death. Police were called to the 800 block of Cheatwood Avenue for a report of a vehicle colliding into a structure and found Simms dead in the vehicle.
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 2,325↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 4↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 212↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 74, Henrico: 75, and Richmond: 63). Since this pandemic began, 464 people have died in the Richmond region. The seven-day average of new statewide cases passed 2,500 over the long weekend and sits at 2,592—the tenth consecutive day over 2,000. Locally, our seven day average of combined new cases in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is 222 and has topped 200 for the last eight days. Because it's been a while, here's the stacked graph of new statewide cases, hospitalizations, and deaths and the graph of new cases in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. Please keep in mind that reporting is weird over weekends and holidays, and that could mean either days with unusually big numbers or days with unusually small numbers. We should know more about if our troubling hockey-stick trends will continue in a couple of days.
Right before the long weekend, Chesterfield County Public Schools announced they will reverse course and put the brakes on in-person learning as case counts increase across the region. Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details. The County's decision puts the entire region's public schools—other than Hanover County—virtual until at least the early parts of 2021. Chesterfield's administrators focused on the seven-day average of new cases per 100,000 people and planned on changing course once that metric crossed a threshold of 25. Honestly, I don't know much about their decision to use that particular metric and threshold, but you can find that specific number for a given locality here (Richmond: 21.1, Henrico: 25.1, Chesterfield: 26.1). Bizarrely, some winter sports will still (for now) take place? You can read the Virginia High School League's guidance document here (PDF), but some of it seem a lot like coronatheatre. For example, basketball will eliminate the jump ball? I guess because players are too close to each other? But, like, wait until they hear about rebounding? To its credit, the document does say on every single page "During times of significantly increasing disease spread, organizers of such events should consider cancelling or postponing competition in favor of lesser risk activities such as low‐contact drills or practices." I guess we'll have to wait for schools and school districts to make their own sports decisions moving into the winter.
I don't have a picture of it yet, but the City put down part of a new bike lane on 1st Street! This is part of the planned north-south connection from 95/64 all the way to the Downtown Expressway (PDF)—a regular Tour de Urban Renewal. The 1st Street section will head from Duval to Franklin, then you'll take the Franklin Street Bike Lane to 3rd which will take you down to Byrd Street. It's a bit of a jiggity-jog but does provide a safe, nice, and needed way to move perpendicular to Franklin Street.
I've written a bunch about the new pot of transportation money the Central Virginia Transportation Authority will start to provide any minute now. It's important to remember that while the money is divided up into three buckets, other than the bucket allocated to public transit, the money can be used for almost anything transportation-related that your urbanism brain can dream up. That's why pieces like this one from Chris Suarez in the RTD are important to remind us (really, to remind our elected leadership) that transportation money does not have to mean widening highways or paving streets. It can mean filling needed sidewalk gaps, building ADA-compliant ramps, and making accessible bus stops!
Speaking of, via /r/rva, look at all of these fun urbanist issues on the front page of yesterday's newspaper!
Will Manchester get a grocery store? Maybe, says Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense. That neighborhood's going to need a massive improvement in pedestrian infrastructure to make crossing Commerce Road something you can safely do without taking your life in your own hands. See above for potential funding sources.
I don't know what to make of this other than "seems bad": the RTD's Mark Robinson says that the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board voted back in 2019 to transfer a bunch of vacant land to nonprofits so they could build some affordable housing. Here we are, a year and a half later, and that transfer has yet to happen. Apparently, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development needs to sign off on a thing, but HUD says they need more info from RRHA. I dunno who's to blame here, but the end result is property has sat vacant for months and months and months, and fewer affordable homes exist in Richmond.
This morning's longread
Housebound.
Over the weekend I watched Run on Hulu and was pretty impressed by actress Kiera Allen. Here's a no-spoilers interview with director Aneesh Chaganty about how he thought through making a moving centered around someone with a disability while not being disabled himself.
Chaganty was conscious of the fact that “[he’s] not disabled, [but] telling this story of somebody who is”. Once Allen was on board, he consulted with her constantly. “I gave her the script and the production design layout of the house and asked her to please note it up—tell us what is wrong, what you wouldn’t do. So much changed because she told us that this is not how she lives. Her costume, her room, bits of her motion, her dialogue and her backstory changed. We were very open to that. I’d ask her about the title—is the title Run offensive? We’re doing a double-play on it, but is it mean? I made sure that was okay with her.”
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