Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today looks warm and rainy. Expect highs right around 60 °F and a persistent chance of rain basically until the sun sets tomorrow. Good sloshin' around weather!
Water cooler
I've really enjoyed some of the salty ledes that reporters at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have written while covering the Youngkin administration's early attempts to push its agenda. Here's a good one from Michael Martz about Youngkin's effort to get rid of the grocery tax (which, at this point, does not have universal Republican support): "Legislators are beginning to remember why eliminating the sales tax on groceries has been hard to do, after decades of trying." Who knows what will come of any of these grocery tax bills—between skeptical Republicans; a slim Democratic majority in the Senate; and an oppositional quote from Sen. Peterson, one of the few swing votes in that chamber—but a lot of critical school funding for localities hangs in the balance.
Ben Paviour at VPM details another one of the many small decisions made by Governor Youngkin to walk back Virginia's progress on racial justice wherever he can—this time in the governor's mansion. From the piece, "[Kelley Fanto] Deetz’s work updating the mansion’s tours is part of a multiyear project that draws heavily from the experiences of descendents of enslaved workers. It’s not clear where it stands after Youngkin’s Jan. 15 inauguration." Deetz, who has done similar work elsewhere, had started to shift the public history of the governor's mansion away from "oil paintings and whimsical gubernatorial anecdotes" to include the lives and stories of the enslaved people who built and staffed the building. We've seen similar, very successful efforts at other Virginia historical sites like Montpelier and Monticello. I know Republicans like to do these small, performative erasures to make folks mad, but this part seems particularly mean: "A planned educational room for schoolchildren had been turned into a family room for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin."
Should we build more houses in the Richmond region? Yes! Gregory J. Gilligan at the RTD reports that the average price of a home jumped a shocking 11.3% over last year. The cause of this massive increase? Laura Lafayette, CEO of the Richmond Association of Realtors and all-around housing expert, says "So that’s insufficient supply and when demand outstrips supply this is what you get...It’s some natural growth and price appreciation, but historically that’s more around the numbers of 5% to 7% year-over-year. But just generally speaking, a significant portion of this price appreciation is absolutely supply [and] demand." It's so absolutely frustrating to see these clear symptoms of our ongoing housing crisis while still having to fight to the death over each and every marginal increase in density.
This Ned Oliver story in the Virginia Mercury really underscores the need for a legal and regulated marijuana retail market. It also explains the recent drama between Sen. Louise Lucas, Oliver, and the rest of Virginia's press corp.
Earlier this week, the Washington Football Team announced that, henceforth, they'd be known as the Washington Commanders. I'd kind of loved the simplicity and straightforwardness of "the Washington Football Team," and doubly enjoyed the "WFT" shorthand. I'm not really much of an NFL fan, but I do find sports branding fascinating, so I've been waiting for something like this article in the Washington Post explaining the logo, crest, and other aspects of the new look. Personally, I don't love the new logo—it looks like it belongs on the tail of an airplane to me—but it does look pretty tight on a helmet.
This morning's longread
Making Sense of Our Covid Losses
Dang I really love everything Kathryn Schulz writes, and this piece about the internal emotional conflict caused by the last two years is no exception!
These are important and generous reactions. They attend, as we too seldom do, to life’s uneven allocation of suffering, and they remind us to be grateful both for what is going well in our lives and what could be going worse. Still, when we find ourselves counting our blessings this carefully, it is generally because some of them have gone missing. The pandemic has rendered many of us reluctant to lament those lesser losses, even though they reveal a fundamental truth not only about the times we live in but about life in general: We are almost always facing more than one thing at once and therefore feeling more than one thing at once. We feel sympathy together with self-pity, good fortune together with frustration, gratitude together with grief.
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