Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and my weather app has informed me that we have a chance for "FREEZING FOG" this morning until 9:00 AM. I've seen The Day After Tomorrow, and I'm sufficiently aware of how dangerous weather can creep right up on you (and chase you through the New York Public Library)—so be careful out there this morning. Warmer weather moves in after lunch when we should see highs near 50 °F.
Water cooler
It's Tuesday, so here's this week's charts of hospitalizations and deaths in Virginia due to COVID-19. Hospitalizations continue to decrease while deaths, now, appear to have plateaued. While I'm not spending as much time tracking the graph of cases, I have been keeping a loose eye on the case rate per 100,000 people. In Richmond it's 467, in Henrico 562, and in Chesterfield 538. You can find those numbers, updated daily, on this CDC COVID Data Tracker page. Related, and mostly the reason for keeping track of this unintuitive number, Katelyn Jetelina has put together a nice framework for how individuals can re-enter (and retreat from!) the world based on case rates per 100,000. I like this tool because it's simple to use and helps me avoid constantly thinking through my own personal risk-reward ratio for every dang hangout. If the level of cases is red (anywhere above 100 per 100,000), the framework recommends that you "avoid indoor, crowded public areas where not 100% masked and vaccination status unknown." Simple! As the case rates decrease, you can mitigate less and do more things; at a yellow case rate (between 10 and 49 per 100,000) indoor, crowded events are fine without even masking! Jetelina is quick to point out that individual actions are not the way out of this pandemic but, unfortunately, it's the focus of today's reality: "This is for individual decision making. In other words, it answers: What should I do today? As a public health official, I do not agree that we need individual-level solutions. They are far less effective than population-level ones. But in our increasingly individualistic society, we need to arm people with evidence-based solutions in the landscape they are forced to navigate." Anyway, I hope this tool helps—it certainly gave me some clarity on how to navigate the spring and summer.
Mayor Levar Stoney will deliver his sixth (I think?) State of the City address tonight at 6:00 PM. If you're using the above framework and trying to avoid large, indoor public gatherings, you can livestream the address on the City's Facebook page. I always enjoy the State of the City. Yeah it's a lot of victory-lap stuff, which, to be honest, at this moment in time it'll be pretty nice to hear about some successes, but it's also a chance for the mayor to lay out his vision for the year ahead. Sometimes we even get cool policy and project announcements, later expanded upon in his budget presentation. It's a good night to curl up on the couch and root for the home team.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Chris Suarez reports on last night's RPS School Board budget meeting. The Board continues to grapple with how to make up a $7 million cut in state funding—a particularly galling predicament given how flush the Commonwealth is with cash at the moment. Ultimately, RPS will have to ask the Mayor and Council for more money, which they're not gonna love, and I imagine they'll all land somewhere in the middle. Stay tuned, because Suarez says Kamras will submit a revised budget later this month. Also, here's an unrelated, underinformed prediction: I'm pretty sure School Board Member Jonathan Young has decided to run for some other office. His quotes in the paper are increasingly oppositional and increasingly Republican (“Before I authorize expenditures for more people, I want to see the results that our new positions have provided for.” he says less than a year after creating those new positions). There aren't a ton of places a Republican candidate can win in Richmond, but the 4th District City Council seat could be one of them.
Mark Robinson, also at the RTD, reports on some pretty big local fair housing news: Housing Opportunities Made Equal, along with a handful of other fair housing organizations, reached a $53 million settlement with the Federal National Mortgage Association, aka Fannie Mae. From the piece: "The lawsuit alleged the Federal National Mortgage Association...maintained and marketed foreclosed homes in white neighborhoods while simultaneously allowing those in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods to deteriorate. The differing treatment violated the Fair Housing Act, compounded damage done to Black and Latino neighborhoods during the Great Recession, and slowed their recovery, according to the lawsuit." HOME of VA's press release says that they'll use a portion of the settlement to "promote home ownership, neighborhood stabilization, access to credit, property rehabilitation, and residential development" and provide "much-needed grants, including for down-payment assistance for first-generation homebuyers and renovations for homes that languished in foreclosure." HOME of VA is so legit! We are lucky to have them in Richmond.
One quick City Council update: The Governmental Operations committee sent both of the collective bargaining ordinances (ORD. 2021-345 and ORD. 2021-346) back to City Council with a recommendation to continue.
Here's a great picture via /r/rva of the canal completely empty. The City does this on occasion to dredge and clean, which I'm sure is what's happen—either that or We've Got A Big Problem Here.
This morning's longread
There Is No Punk Without Black Women
Read this quick piece about the contribution Black women have made to punk while adding a ton of albums to your queue.
Following X-Ray Spex’s breakup in 1979, Styrene released a post-punk album in 1981, became a Hare Krishna initiate, and then left the sect a few years later due to misogyny. Styrene returned to music in 2008 and released new music up until her death in 2011. Though her career abruptly ended, she inspired future generations of women in the industry, including FKA twigs, Karen O, and Beth Ditto. And without Styrene, we wouldn’t have the riot grrrl movement. In recent years, there has been a renewed commitment to amplifying Black musicians and their Black fans in the punk scene. The 2003 release of the documentary Afro-Punk paved the way for the now international Afropunk Festival. Afropunk may have evolved into a global phenomenon for Black punks and alt kids, but gender still impacts the scene. In one of her final interviews, Styrene told Flux magazine that she was hesitant to say that gender equality had improved over the past 30 years.
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