Good morning, RVA! It's 56 °F, and there’s a pretty good chance of rain throughout the entire day. Temperatures will stay right around 60 °F, though! You take the good, you take the bad...
Water cooler
Last night, five members of City Council voted against the Mayor’s downtown redevelopment plan aka NoBro aka Navy Hill—NO: Gray, Hilbert, Larson, Lynch, and Trammell; YES: Addison, Robertson, Newbille, and Jones. Technically, the Council voted against unstriking the handful of necessary ordinances that they struck at last week’s Organizational Development committee meeting, but, you get the gist. It was a long Council meeting, a historic night (I think), and I have a lot of thoughts. But, before diving in, Roberto Roldan at VPM has a recap that includes a nice timeline of the last couple dozen months. OK!
First, whoa! I don’t think I ever, not even a single time, really expected this project to fail. It just seemed too big, have too much power and money behind it, and address too many of the City’s actual needs. I figured it’d tumble forward, like a big katamari clumping up supporters and amendments, until it ultimately splattered across the finish line. In Richmond, “I guess it’s either this or do nothing, and we already have nothing” has typically been a powerful argument. Turns out, not so anymore!
Second, while the folks in charge made a bunch of missteps along the way that didn’t do themselves any favors, I don’t think we’d be where we are without the work of Richmond For All. It’s a very impressive thing to run a successful grassroots organizing campaign against a project supported by the City, developers, and one of the state’s most powerful people. I’m excited to see where next they decide to deploy their new-found power!
Third, think what you want about this particular downtown project, the community benefits NoBro attempted to address are real issues facing, and still facing, the City—affordable housing, public transit, safe pedestrian and bike infrastructure, jobs, disinvestment in Black communities, school funding, environmental sustainability—not to mention a concrete wasteland north of Broad Street. None of those priorities need be tied to a downtown arena, and Council (plus the Mayor) can start to address those priorities this very budget cycle with progressive legislation and a thoughtful budget. As citizens, we can’t let Council kill this particular project and not also hold our elected legislators accountable for making real changes in the lives of Richmonders—it’s their job, they have the authority, they just need to write the legislation and approve the budget.
On the Administration side of things, here’s the Mayor’s immediate response: “It saddens me that Richmonders won’t benefit from the housing, jobs and economic empowerment this project would bring — and I’m disappointed that council did not follow through on the process they laid out to review and evaluate this transformative project for our city — but I’m resolved to wake up tomorrow and keep working to move our city forward." More interesting, I think, is how he will respond in this year’s budget and how this process impacts his ability/motivation to get bold, progressive things done.
Dang, y’all! What a night, and I am thankful that we can finally move on and start talking about literally anything else!
Sarah Vogelsong at the Virginia Mercury continues to keep me up to date on the Virginia Clean Economy Act as it works its way through the General Assembly. Although, according to Vogelsong, a schism among Democrats may prevent the bill from passing. I’m dumb about state-level stuff, but good on the holdouts who recognize the impending climate emergency and want more out of the New Democratic Majority. Del. Samirah, who championed the middle density bills, puts it this way, “We’ve already missed our window for half-measures and small ideas.” Agreed.
I’m kind of into this Virginia Local Government Exchange Program, modeled on the Sister Cities program, which the Governor announced last week. However, instead of focusing on “tourism, natural and cultural assets, and economic development strategies,” what if the program focused on housing, transportation, health, and sustainability? If we nail the latter set of things, the former should come a bit easier, right?
Via /r/rva, check out this rad video of VCU, Monroe Park, and surrounding areas from 1977! Did they even have video back then?? I guess so!
Reminder! Tonight, New Hampshire will hold their 2020 presidential primary. Next up: Nevada cacusues on the 22nd followed by the South Carolina primary on the 29th.
This morning's longread
Spreading Slow Ideas
Here’s a great story about unlocking healthier outcomes for pregnant women and infants. But! It’s also a story, I think, about how to go about doing community engagement. Which, dang, is the perfect thing to read after last night’s City Council meeting.
So what were the key differences? First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors. Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure. Listerism, by contrast, required the operator to work in a shower of carbolic acid. Even low dilutions burned the surgeons’ hands. You can imagine why Lister’s crusade might have been a tough sell. This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.
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