Good morning, RVA! It's 16 °F, and I hope you’ve got some socks on! Today you can expect highs to maybe reach 40 °F as we wait for colder weather to move in tomorrow along with another winter storm. We’re currently under a Winter Storm Watch until 4:00 PM on Saturday, and NCB12’s Andrew Freiden says we should expect 1–4 inches of snow starting on Friday night. Get your milk and bread while you still can!
Water cooler
This week, my two favorite epidemiologist newsletter ladies, Emily Oster and Katelyn Jetelina, both talked about what the end of this pandemic looks like. As cases peak across the country, I think it’s something we’re all thinking about as we start making plans and envisioning what the rest of 2022 (and beyond) will look like. For me it’s a whole lot of hope mixed with a general buzz of anxiety over the unknown. I appreciated both of these perspectives as I sort through my own thoughts and feelings! Here’s Oster, who’s just now recovering from a mild COVID-19 infection: “This post-infection moment feels, to me, like a possible opportunity to start making the emotional transition to living with COVID that I think many of us need to do. Part of living with COVID means accepting the risk that you’ll get it; it’s not the same as welcoming it or ignoring it or being cavalier. But even if you’re careful, you may get COVID, just like the flu or other illnesses, and it is something we will ultimately need to accept and still be able to do the other things that bring us joy.” And here’s Jetelina, who, as I mentioned earlier this week, is definitely less...positive...than Oster: “On an individual-level, we pay attention to transmission on the ground. If transmission is high, tighten up behaviors: wear masks inside, consider cancelling big events, use antigen tests a lot, trust positives, and isolate. When we are at low transmission, loosen up restrictions: we eat inside restaurants, we take off our masks, we let our kids play at indoor trampoline parks. We ride the waves while, simultaneously, pushing towards an endemic state...There will be an end, it’s just not how you pictured it. The journey to reach stasis is dependent on the virus, our population-level policies, and our individual-level decisions.”
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has an early look at the City’s work to revise the current Airbnb regulations. There’s a lot going on in this piece! The major takeaway for me, though, is that Airbnb hosts don’t really care about being in compliance with the existing regulations and something about the program needs to change—either the enforcement, the regulations, or something. I plan on keeping an eye on the proposed changes, because currently folks are limited to only Airbnb-ing their primary residence. The idea being that—during a housing crisis—people shouldn’t buy up homes to use as exclusively as short-term rentals.
Hey, do you want to serve on one of the City’s many boards and commissions? You can, you should, you must, and you have until March 15th to apply for one of the current vacancies. Here are a few of the open spots that sound most interesting to me (but make sure you tap through for the full list, too): the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Supervisory Board (a member of a charitable institution or a developer), the Maggie L. Walker Community Land Trust Citizens’ Advisory Panel, the Participatory Budgeting Steering Commission (resident of public housing or a person with a disability), the Safe and Healthy Streets Commission, and the Urban Design Committee. Depending on the board or commission the level of commitment can be pretty low—some meet just quarterly—and still let you stick a hand into the warm and thrumming inner workings of government. Gross but cool! You can also fill out this form and get on the City Clerk’s email list to learn about future vacancies in case I forget to tell you about them.
Patrick Larsen at VPM has a really nice, plain-language explanation of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the Governor’s botched plan to pull Virginia out of the cap-and-trade program. It sure doesn’t sound like the Governor has the authority to quit RGGI on his own, and the actual, legal path to do so seems real narrow. The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong explores the four possible ways Republicans maybe could bail on RGGI (and our future generations). Honestly, I can’t tell if the gov got bad advice from his legal team, or if this another attempt to not really _do_ anything but just make liberals angry. If the latter, mission accomplished!
City Council will hold another Redistricting Information and Engagement Meeting tonight at 5:00 PM. I’m not sure if this is a repeat of the previous two meetings or if they’ll cover new information since Council introduced some revisions to their redistricting schedule this past Monday. Either way, Council moves on to publicly drawing new district maps on February 9th, which sounds like a ton of nerdy fun. I wonder how they’ll facilitate map drawing among nine Council members in a virtual meeting?
First, watch this absolutely bananas video of people on dirt bikes and cops in cars battling each other by zooming around Broad Street in the middle of the day (Warning: Near the end an officer runs out into the street and is hit full-on by a person on a dirt bike, and it’s hard to watch). Second, read the press release the Richmond Police Department sent out about the incident. Third, think about all the times you’ve read a police press release in the media that’s presented without any additional reporting, comment, or other side of the story.
This morning's longread
Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?
I just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future a couple weeks ago, and then, boom, the New Yorker has this good and long pröfile of him.
There is knowing and knowing. Some knowledge sits inert within us; other knowledge shapes us. This past summer, Robinson and Lisa drove across the country. “In Wyoming, we hit a pall of wildfire smoke so thick that we couldn’t see the mountains just a few miles away on each side of the road,” he wrote, in an article for the Financial Times. “It went on like that for 1,000 miles”—a sign as clear as one of the ten plagues. Among the most disconcerting ideas in “The Ministry for the Future” is that the signs of climate change will have to become unmistakable—and painful—before we really acknowledge what we know. We will learn only with experience.
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