Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F and it's a two-blanket morning over here on the couch! In fact, today you can expect temperatures to just creep their way up into the 70s late this afternoon. I think today is as good of a day as any to get those boots out of the closet and restore them to their proper place of honor.
Water cooler
Yesterday, the Virginia Department of Health launched a new Cases Among Children data dashboard. Since March 15th 2020, VDH reports 127,997 cases among children, 380 hospitalizations, and nine deaths. I think the all-time graph of cases reported among children is really fascinating; right now we're experiencing a peak of kid cases that exceeds the peak from this past winter. Some of that, surely, is due to the lack of vaccination among youth, since the subgroup seeing the most case (5–11 year olds) aren't yet eligible. But! It really does sound like we're less than a month out from offering the COVID-19 vaccine to all school-aged kids. Let's check back in on this graph (and compare it to the general, all-time cases graph) later this year.
City Council's Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meets today with a couple items of note on their agenda. Up first, two interesting presentations that you can scroll through. RRHA will walk through the long-term plans for a bunch of their real estate project. The aforelinked PDF gives a great snapshot of properties owned by RRHA, and, if you zoom way in, some of the proposed redevelopment plans for these properties. Also, if you've still not been out to Armstrong Renaissance in the East End, flip down to page 31 for two great photographs that'll give you an idea of how that development—which is part of the plan to replace Creighton Court—is turning out. Next, Maritza Pechin, deputy director of the Office of Equitable Development, will give a presentation on the City's newly launched process to redevelop the Diamond District. Gotta love page eight, which, to me, reads as the Lessons Learned From Navy Hill slide: "Draft RFI Goals: Generate significant new revenues for the City [and] utilize financing approaches that minimize public investment/risk." There are a lot of other really great goals they want the future developers to hit, too—transportation, open space, jobs, sustainable development to name a few. One of the things that ticked people off about the Navy Hill process was snapping a fully-formed idea into existing without bringing the community along. It'll be worth watching to see if and how the Diamond District developments avoids that. Page five has a general project timeline and it puts the various Council approvals needed to move the development forward on their spring agenda. Also of note, LUHT will consider RES. 2021-R065 which would "request that the Chief Administrative Officer cause the Department of Public Works to develop a process for City residents to request traffic studies of the residential areas within their neighborhoods for the purpose of assessing the appropriateness of instituting a 15 mile per hour speed limit in such areas to increase traffic safety." Meh. Despite what the City's Director of Public Works believes, infrastructure is the only way to really slow drivers down. We can make DPW staff do traffic studies at the beck and call of residents, get Council to lower speed limits, have RPD enforce the lower speed limits, and then punish residents for speeding, all while hoping that process maintains some sense of equity _or_ we can just build safer streets.
The Attorney General has sued 29 real estate companies in the Richmond region for discriminating against folks trying to use housing vouchers, reports the Virginia Mercury's Ned Oliver. This is against the law, and maybe save this list of landlords to cross check against when you're next looking for an apartment. Kind of unrelated, I love how Oliver writes about this: "Herring announced the lawsuits in a news release, but as of Monday afternoon, none of the landlords named in the lawsuits who were reached by the Mercury were aware of the legal action. At one of the properties named in the lawsuit...a representative asked for details about the lawsuit. 'Oh,' said the representative, who did not provide a name, upon hearing of the allegations."
Read this piece by VPM's Ben Paviour about the main, national Republican redistricting group drawing a "citizen" map for the Virginia Redistricting Commission and then feel sad about life.
Sarah Vogelsong also at the Virginia Mercury reports that Dominion "raked in almost $1 billion in excess profits between 2017 and 2020" and that they've reached a settlement with the Attorney General's office to return some those excess profits to Virginians. Assuming the State Corporation Commission approves, customers would see a "a refund of approximately $67 and a monthly bill decrease of about 90 cents." That's cool, but even cooler and more interesting, "$309 million in the company’s revenues over the past four years will be used to offset costs of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot and expenses related to the rollout of smart meters and a customer information platform."
This morning's longread
Kumail Nanjiani’s Feelings
I really enjoyed this piece about Kumail Nanjiani, male body image, and mental health. Also, as per my current life themes, a few more reasons to reconsider how you use social media.
His achievement is incredible, but it is also an expression of anxiety: of muscles that he hopes will affirm his value. He tells me this isn’t what happens. New body, same issues. (It did make it harder for him to roll over in bed, though.) While he was building a comedy career, he had put his anxieties about his body into the background. Getting muscular invited an old demon back into the house. The demon took up too much space; it put its feet on the table and ate all his food. “This prison has never been tighter, man,” he says. “Having other people decide how you feel about yourself — none of that goes away. It’s all still there. What you have to do is somehow figure out how to have self-worth from within yourself. I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll let you know once I find the key.”
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