Good morning, RVA! It's 59 °F, and that’s today’s high. You can expect temperatures to drop and rain to fall as the day moves on. Once the rain starts it may not stop until...Friday afternoon? NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says we could see as much as three inches of rain tomorrow!
Water cooler
VDOT has released their Final Study Report for the Ashland to Petersburg Trail—and it’s not one but many PDFs! If you like the Capital Trail, you’re gonna love the Ashland to Petersburg Trail, which will connect the titular Ashland and Petersburg, through Richmond, via a multiuse trail. You can view the alignment of the trail in this PDF, and the Richmond portion starts on page 5. First, having a safe, high-quality north-south path through the city to points beyond will really change things for many, many folks. We all know people, and you may be one!, who say totally legitimate things like “I’d love to bike, but I just don’t feel safe doing so.” This project will give those folks a safe (and useful) place to ride, and that makes me incredibly excited. Second, I’ve got two immediate thoughts on the ATP’s proposed alignment: 1) Sending the kind of bike/pedestrian traffic this amenity will generate across the T-Pot bridge is a bad idea. Just check out the Capital Trail on a nice Saturday—that thing is PACKED with folks. 2) Brown’s Island Way is not a bikeable street and will force northbound folks to walk their bikes up the hill. I ride bikes a TON and Brown’s Island Way is a hill I can barely manage and that I avoid at all costs. There’s a massive bridge with a billion extra lanes just sitting due east that could solve both of these problems. Anyway, rad project, hope the alignment changes, and looking forward to encouraging jurisdictions to fund their portions of it.
Speaking of bike stuff, Bike Walk RVA has a nifty form for you to fill out that’ll let your specific state representatives know that you support the handful of bike and pedestrian safety (and funding!) bills floating around the General Assembly. Take the two minutes and do this!
It’s a wild moment in the NoBro timeline, where Council has all but killed the project and folks involved (must?) continue on like it’s biz as usual. It’s bizarre. But it does mean we keep getting stories like this one from Bridget Balch and Samuel Northrop in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about VCU’s plans—contingent on the approval of the downtown arena project, of course—to build a new health complex in the project footprint. It also means we get quotes like this from Councilmember Trammell: “I don’t care if they say the queen of England is coming down here to live, it isn’t going to change my mind.” Like I said yesterday, I’m still a bit confused about what will happen this coming Monday, what a “motion to strike” actually means, and if/when the NoBro papers will even end up on the agenda. I feel like I’m pretty involved in the goings-on of Council, and this is new territory for me!
Richmond: Grocery stores and stadiums! Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says the ABC broke ground on their new Hanover headquarters this week. That means VCU can start planning on how to build the new baseball stadium they’ll share with the Flying Squirrels on the land occupied by the current booze warehouse on Hermitage. While that land is state-owned, the City does own 60 acres in and around where the Diamond sits today, and it has tons of potential for, basically, anything other than a bunch of gross surface parking lots. Lord willing, someone somewhere in the City has learned something about how to involve the community in a large neighborhood redevelopment project from the very beginning. The real arena was the lessons we all learned along the way—now let’s see if we can apply them moving forward.
Mark Robinson, at the RTD, has an quick and interesting look at how homeless services providers conduct the required point-in-time count of the people experiencing homelessness in our region. The full results of that count aren’t yet available on Homeward’s website, but you can check out previous years’ point-in-time reports while we wait on the 2020 data.
I encourage and support this kind of clever and creative street art, via /r/rva. There are lots of fences scattered around the city, and none of them are anything to look at.
This morning's longread
It’s Time to Break Down Economic Barriers for Women in Virginia
The Commonwealth Institute has a new post up about how Virginia’s legislators could make economic life better for women. With the way the New Democratic Majority has been rolling along (repeal of Right to Work made it out of subcommittee??), some of these things definitely have a chance of passing!
As a result, Virginia’s minimum wage is the lowest in the country compared to the cost of paying for rent, groceries, transportation, child care, and other necessities. Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would help reverse the erosion in the value of the minimum wage since 1968 compared to productivity and typical wages, making sure that working people – especially women who have historically had their work devalued and underpaid – see a fairer share of the benefits from their work. The vast majority of working people in Virginia who would benefit from raising the wage are adults helping to support themselves and their families. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 would help 1 out of every 2 women of color employed in Virginia, thereby boosting the wages of those Virginians who have historically been excluded from opportunities to work in well-paying jobs and have seen the jobs they do have devalued precisely because they are filled by women of color.
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