Good morning, RVA! It's 51 °F, and you can expect highs in the mid 80s today. Looks like a pretty great start to a warm—or maybe just plain hot—weekend.
Water cooler
As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 591 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 20 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 73 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 40, Henrico: 22, and Richmond: 11). Since this pandemic began, 1,316 people have died in the Richmond region. The seven-day average of new reported cases across the state sits at 456. Here's this week's stacked graph of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the state. I'm not really sure what's going on with the deaths graph, which has stalled out on a plateau, but hospitalizations show a definite decrease over the past two weeks. As we all know, and this is just one of the weird things we all just know now, but deaths due to COVID-19 generally lag behind hospitalizations by a couple weeks. We're seeing the same drop in cases reflected locally, too. In fact, Richmond had a single-digit case count seven times over the last three weeks. I don't know when it'll happen, but there will be a time when, combined, our entire region reports daily single-digit case counts with zero deaths in a week (this week, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield reported 12 deaths).
I think we all expected this and it definitely sounds like a sign of things to come for college students across the commonwealth, but UVA announced that "all students who live, learn, or work in person at the University during the next academic year must be fully vaccinated before returning to [campus], starting July 1." I haven't seen similar statements from VCU or UR, but I certainly expect them soon.
The Mayor's office sent out a press release yesterday announcing that the Resort Casino Evaluation Panel recommended the ONE Casino + Resort, aka the 8th District site, as their preferred operator. Here's the Mayor's quote: "ONE Casino + Resort presents a tremendous opportunity to develop a resort casino project in Richmond...The project will create over 1,000 good paying jobs, generate a significant amount of new revenue for the city, and establish an additional economic engine in South Richmond." Here's 9th District Councilmember Jones's statement, which reads in part: "[The ONE Casino project] represents a half a billion dollar investment on Richmond's Southside. I believe that the selection committee and the Mayor made the right choice. This $565 million economic development project has the ability to change the trajectory of the Southside. With this type of private investment I am now calling on the Mayor and his administration to commit to seriously investing City resource to the infrastructure, communities, and lives of Southside residents." Roberto Roldan at VPM, reports that 8th District Councilmember Trammell said the announcement made her "the happiest person in the world." I've yet to read quotes—supportive or otherwise—from anyone who lives in the area, but would love some links if you have them. If you've enjoyed this whole up-and-down casino process and are feeling a little sad that it's over, take heart! Mayor Stoney will introduce some sort of paper on Monday that Council will have to vote on, and then, on November 2nd, you'll get to weigh in via the ballot box / vote-by-mail envelope. My prediction is that Council approves the operator and location nearly unanimously and that the vast, vast majority of people in Richmond will vote in favor of the casino in November. Now I've got the same questions as Councilmember Jones about how will the City use the benefits from this Casino to build actual infrastructure in the 6th, 8th, and 9th Districts.
Thank you to Jonathan Spiers for reminding me about Planning Commission's presentation on the rezoning of the Pulse Corridor around the Science Museum, Alison Street, and VCU & VUU Pulse stations! You'll for sure want to download the presentation, flip to slides 10 and 11, and compare the existing zoning, proposed zoning, and check out the future land use map floating beneath both. Spiers says the big change between this proposal and the previous proposal is a switch from B-4 to TOD-1—the former allows for taller buildings, which peeved some of the nearby neighbors. TOD-1 is still plenty dense, though, and will let developers build 12-story buildings, by-right, fronting most of Broad Street. You can expect more on this, including public commenting opportunities, in the coming weeks.
Now that we're just 41 days from marijuana legalization, Whittney Evans at VPM has this handy explainer about what you can, cannot, and should not do with your weed this summer. I think some of the best advice here is to keep it in the trunk of your car if you're driving around, and to "use your brain. Be smart about protecting yourself because even though we’re saying these things are legal, it doesn’t mean that [police] officers won’t still use that for people who don’t know their rights."
Via /r/rva, this physical distancing sign from Diversity Thrift is great.
This morning's longread
How Cities Should Analyze Crashes that Kill Peds
I...guess we should do this?
But even without a dedicated engineer to measure the distance between curbs and the calculate average vehicle throughput, cities could be doing more to understand the real cause of their walking deaths. The team that analyzed the Portland crashes was made up primarily of lay volunteers, not engineers or demographers, and project manager Brandon Summers of the Forum law group says the bulk of the project time was devoted to analyzing trends in the data and assembling reports. Each individual crash took just eight to 12 hours to research and tabulate — a relatively small amount of time to devote to understanding a tragedy that claimed a human life.
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