Good morning, RVA! It's 37 °F, and today you can expect highs right around 50 °F. Looks like temperatures will drop heading into the rest of the week, so this might be your best walk-around-the-block day for awhile. Keep your eye on Thursday, though, which could bring more ice and rain.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,539 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 4 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 253 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 142, Henrico: 77, and Richmond: 34). Since this pandemic began, 721 people have died in the Richmond region. We're just coming off of a long holiday weekend, so don't get too, too excited about a new daily case count floating around 1,500. But! I think you can go ahead and get excited that the seven-day average of new reported cases has dropped to under 3,000. I mean, December 6th was the last time that happened!
In vaccine land, we crossed a huge milestone over the long weekend: more than one million Virginians have received their first dose of the vaccine. According to the VDH data dashboard, that's 12.1% of the Commonwealth's population—a double digit number! I'm pretty stoked about that. Locally, here's a graph of what vaccine distribution has looked like over the past couple of weeks (we're in the beginning of week eight right now, which is why those bars are so short (and, yes, I know I need to work on my x-axis labels)). I'm pretty impressed that our little region has hit the Stupid Math Goal of 20,000 vaccines administer per week for each of the last three weeks. That's in spite of a serious, national vaccine shortage. Also, and I don't know how useful this is, but here's that same graph with the total number of doses that state has received layered on top. I think it is mostly not useful, and I'm going to keep noodling on it.
OK, some in-person instruction stuff is quickly brewing at the General Assembly. First, remember that Governor Northam declared that all K–12 school districts should offer some sort of in-person instruction by March 15th (with some caveats that make really unclear the intensity of the italics around "should"). Actually, even before that, Sen. Dunnavant (R-Henrico) introduced a one-line bill (SB 1303) stating "That each local school division in the Commonwealth shall make virtual and in-person learning available to all students by choice of the student's parent or guardian." The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Mel Leonor has the update from yesterday, which has Democrats introducing new legislation along those same lines: "The new legislation Democratic leaders will introduce Monday, if enacted, will allow school districts to offer virtual learning only to students whose parents request it. It will also allow individual schools to go fully virtual only if the risk of transmission within the particular school building is high. Otherwise, it mandates that they remain open." This new legislation would reflect the CDC's recently-updated guidance about reopening schools which says a lot of things, but, mainly: "Schools that are open for in-person instruction (either fully open or hybrid) may decide to remain open even at high (red) levels of community transmission." I know this guidance and proposed legislation will make a lot of folks in our region uncomfortable—especially the teachers and staff. With many teachers still receiving their first dose of the vaccine, and unclear data about how much the vaccine prevents transmission of the virus to friends and family, I imagine a lot of teachers will just not?
So, how do you open schools without teachers? The same Sen. Dunnavant says you should create a Teacher Reserve Corp of unpaid "retired educators, military veterans, college students hoping to become teachers and people licensed to teach outside of Virginia’s K-12 public education system." VPM's Alan Rodriguez has the head-scratching details. I'm no expert, but I feel like we can come up with a better path forward on schools than legislating in-person learning and then sending in waves of unpaid volunteers to do the teaching?
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense says 12 apartments and a bunch of street-front retail space will replace a parking lot on Brookland Park Boulevard. I know that neighborhood has already seen (and continues to see) a bunch of new development, but this feels big! I don't think that we have a whole lot of tools for it, unfortunately, but this would be the perfect place for the government to step in and incentivize some affordable housing.
Quick downtown development update: City Council's Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee and the City's Planning Commission both meet today and will take a look at some papers related to the sale and redevelopment of the Public Safety Building. Full agendas here and here, respectively. Maybe more interesting for friends of this electronic zoning and rezoning newsletter, Planning Commission could/will kick of the rezoning of Greater Scott's Addition by passing a resolution "to declare an intent to amend the official zoning map." This declaration of intent is the first—and required—step in the rezoning process. If you we're surprised not to have heard gasping NIMBY concerns about height and density, don't worry, we just haven't gotten to that stage of the process yet. Also, Dan on Twitter suggested we call "Greater Scott's Addition" the "Diamond District," and I think that might be awesome?
The Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host a free community COVID-19 testing event today at Diversity Richmond (1407 Sherwood Avenue) from 10:00 AM–12:00 PM. Help keep the Commonwealth's coronanumbers trending in the right direction, and go get tested!
This morning's patron longread
The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis.
Submitted by Patron Lisa. Lots in this article stood out to me, but, mostly, it's that our broken independent city system puts us at a deep disadvantage when trying to tackle regional problems like housing and displacement.
The problem is that opposition to new housing also has bipartisan agreement. Blue cities full of people who say they want a more equitable society consistently vote to push housing costs onto others. They will vote for higher taxes to fund social programs, but also make sure that whatever affordable housing does get built is built far away from them. Red suburbs full of people who say regulation should be minimal and property rights protected insist that their local governments legislate a million little rules that dictate what can be built where. What does it mean to respect property rights? In zoning fights, it gets fuzzy.
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