Good morning, RVA! It's 47 °F, and today looks wonderful. Get ready for highs in the upper 70s, a beautiful fall sky, and every reason in the world to spend at least part of the day outside.
Water cooler
Richmond's bike share system still exists! I don't even know how long RVA Bike Share—which took forever to launch—has sat mired in its first phase, constrained to fewer than 20 stations (just 16 at the moment). A couple days ago, though, RVA Bike Share announced that they'll move the Biotech Park station to Battery Park on the Northside and add an entirely new station at Chimborazo Park. This expands the bike share footprint quite a bit into the Northside and further out into the East End, maybe even by too much. The two new stations are kind of outpost islands and really will require some more stations connecting them back to the larger bike share network. According to the aforelinked Instagram post, though, this is just the start of a Phase 2 expansion, so maybe we'll start to see that infill? I've been burned before, RVA Bike Share, so I won't hold my breath. Meanwhile, I've seen a ton of these new BirdTwo scooters out and about, and they look sweet. Dockless scooter convenience (and ubiquity) will almost always beat out an extremely limited docked bike share system.
Tonight at 6:00 PM you can join a virtual public meeting to discuss the proposed rezoning of W. Broad Street. Council has already passed the resolution to kick off this rezoning process (RES. 2021-R017), so this is a real deal public meeting on actually doing the rezoning! As proposed, the plan would take an assortment of existing business and residential zones and upzone them to TOD-1, bringing the area in line with the Richmond 300 Master Plan and, fingers crossed, laying the foundation for a denser, better, less parking-lotted W. Broad Street. I foretell some light gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the bits of the plan that would allow apartment buildings adjacent to some of these wealthy residential neighborhoods—you know, the typical stuff. Despite whatever NIMBY angst may come, this is, honestly, one of the more exciting rezonings we've got going on in Richmond. Just take a Google Maps Street View trip down W. Broad Street and look at how many surface parking lots face the street. Then imagine what could be! So much potential!
I don't know enough about school lunch policy to speak intelligently about it, but the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Kenya Hunter reports on potential changes coming to the Richmond Public Schools meals contract. From my completely second-hand knowledge of the food at one particular RPS school, I am 1) impressed that they were even able to pull off lunches coming out of 500-some days of virtual school, and 2) unimpressed but not surprised at the quality of the meals. Of course I'd love to see more, fresh, and healthy food crammed into hungry kids' mouths, but I imagine some pretty serious logistical challenges stand in the way of that. This "re-evaluation" of the School Nutrition Program is worth keeping an eye on, and, now that we've all collectively made it through the opening of the school year, maybe it's a process in which the RPS community will have a chance to participate.
I missed this story in the RTD by Mark Robinson last month about Richmond Police adding three men to RRHA's Ban List. Remember, the RRHA Board just recently culled that list and made some (I think) improvements to their Official Ban List Policy. Anyway, last month, the Board voted to remove those three men from the Ban List after they watched video of the interaction with RPD—actually, just read through the entirety of Robinson's piece to get some context for what's going on. Then, last night, Robinson stuck it out at the RRHA board meeting where the Board went into "closed session debating whether to walk back this vote from last month." I don't know what exactly is going on, but I am sure glad we've got local reporters who can sit through these public meetings.
I should have linked to this earlier because I didn't think there'd be a run on free trees, which, when I type it out, seems really short sighted in retrospect. The Richmond Tree Stewards are giving away free trees on November 6th, and all you have to do is shoot them an email to claim one for yourself. Just a couple varieties remain, because people freaking love trees, but if you're interested in a hackberry, black gum, or a sweet gum fire up your email client ASAP.
This morning's longread
Easy come, easy go.
Indignity is another email newsletter that I carefully wrap up and save for later every time it hits my inbox. This one's about being old (or being young, depending on your current perspective).
When you're 50, though, a difference becomes apparent between 30-year-olds and you: they'll still be alive when you're dead. It's not as if I hadn't been thinking about death and the finality of the march of time before. But at 50, the population behind you has reached critical mass. I catch myself reading the news and dividing the newsmakers into the ones I'll outlive, and the ones who'll outlive me. Like everything else, this could probably be blamed on Donald Trump. The one comfort through the Trump administration (the first Trump administration?) was the knowledge that no matter what hideous heights of power the man might have achieved at the moment, he was elderly and unhealthy, and someday before too long, barring terrible personal bad luck, he would be dead and I would be alive. That day was (and is) there to look forward to. But once you start that line of thinking, it's hard to stop it, even when the results are no longer reassuring.
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