Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today looks chilly with highs in the 50s for most of the day. Expect temperatures possibly below freezing tonight!
Water cooler
Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that “it has never been more expensive to be a renter in Richmond.” I know I say this every week, but we need to build more and denser homes in all of our neighborhoods. Here’s Robinson again, “Fueling the trend is surging demand for apartments in the region, coupled with a historically low vacancy rate that has left tenants with fewer options to choose from and, in turn, given property managers more leverage to hike costs...” Keep this—and the teachers, nurses, and civil servants—in mind next time a project ends up in front of the Planning Commission and people turn out in droves to complain about shade, neighborhood character, and parking.
Richmond’s Planning Commission will meet today, and you can find the full agenda here. Two items of note: ORD. 2021-308 and ORD. 2021-311. The former is the mayor’s ordinance to transfer money around so that the School Board can actually pay to design the schools they’ve bullied their way into building. Since it’s a transfer of funds between buckets in the City’s capital budget, the Planning Commission needs to sign off. I don’t think any of the commissioners will want to get in between the mayor/Council and the School Board on this one, so I imagine it passes quickly without much discussion. The later ordinance officially hands over the entirety of Bank Street to the State so that General Assembly can continue to block pedestrian and bicycle through-traffic with that incredibly silly gate and those ridiculously huge cement balls. I want to be mad at the City for rolling over on this one, but I’m not sure what they could—when the General Assembly demands you give them a street, you give them the street. To the City’s credit, the staff report on this ordinance closes with, “However, under the current directive, the City would not retain an easement to ensure that pedestrian and bicycle access would be retained across the conveyed right-of-way to maintain adequate circulation of pedestrians and cyclists in the area. Bank Street is currently improved with bike lanes in both directions. It serves as the main connection for cyclists between the Capital Trail and the Franklin Street bikeway via the 17th Street bikeway, the Farmer’s Market pedestrian plaza, and the East Franklin Street bike lanes. Therefore, Planning & Development Review staff finds that pedestrian and bicycle access should not be impeded along Bank Street.” Maybe Planning Commission or City Council could sneak something into the deed retaining a bike-ped easement? I have no idea, but I’m interested in today’s conversation about it.
Last week the RTD published this quick piece about the new parking deck at the Science Museum of Virginia. I’ve definitely written bad words about this specific parking deck before, but it exists, and, unlike nearly every parking deck before it, it comes with a bunch of new green space. I’m pretty excited about this: “The Science Museum will start turning the asphalt surface lot where vehicles previously parked into a nearly six-acre public green space called The Green.” We don’t usually see surface parking lots converted to much of anything, let alone a public park—especially one adjacent to a Pulse Station and near a neighborhood like Scott’s Addition that desperately lacks any sort of nature at all.
Speaking of parks and homes and development, Michael Schwartz at Richmond BizSense reports that almost the entire block south of Cutshaw between Wayne and Sheppard will be demolished to make way for a mixed-use development. This is the block just east of the nascent triangle park on Cutshaw and right down the street from another Pulse Station, and, lo, “parking for the mixed-use piece would be underground.” While Schwartz couldn’t get the planned height out of the developer (current zoning allows for 12 stories), he did get this quote: “We’re going to take full advantage of the zoning that the City Council granted that area.”
The RPS School Board will meet tonight and on the agenda are three initial drafts for an extended 2022-2023 school year. School Board has kicked around the idea of an extended year for a while now, especially as reading proficiencies in younger students have plummeted due to the pandemic; more time in school means less time for the dreaded summer slide to take hold. Calendar Option C, which includes the same amount of student days as the current calendar but adds 14 “Intersession Days,” seems closest to what the Superintendent pitched to the Board last year. Community engagement on the options starts next week with a vote planned for some time in January.
Remember last week when, to help the Supreme Court of Virginia redraw the state’s new political maps, Republicans nominated three proven gerrymanderers and Democrats nominated three...academics? At the time I said Democrats weren’t even playing the same game as Republicans. According to Patrick Larsen at VPM, the Court disliked the game entirely and “rejected three Republican nominees for special master, a position which will be awarded to a redistricting expert to help the justices draw new political maps based on 2020 Census data. All three were nominated by two state Republicans: Del. Todd Gilbert, the incoming speaker of the house, and Sen. Tommy Norment, the minority leader.” Republicans have until 5:00 PM today to nominate new humans with less blatant conflicts of interest.
This morning's longread
The Internet's Original Sin
A 2014 essay by the guy who invented pop-up ads. Some of it reads delightfully quaint, while some it reads incredibly prescient.
Over the course of five years, we tried dozens of revenue models, printing out shiny new business plans to sell each one. We’d run as a subscription service! Take a share of revenue when our users bought mutual funds after reading our investment advice! Get paid to bundle a magazine with textbook publishers! Sell T-shirts and other branded merch! At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
