Good morning, RVA! It's 57 °F, and this morning looks lovely. Later this afternoon, though, expect a few storms to roll through alongside a cold front, washing away these 80 °F afternoons. Highs tomorrow will be about 20 degrees cooler than today!
Water cooler
It's Tuesday and your COVID-19 Community Level in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is low. 7-day case rates per 100,000 people for each locality as of Sunday are 120, 101, and 112 respectively. Those case rates continue to bounce around, so I'd consider them fluctuating at this point—Richmond's hit 180 just a couple weeks ago but has dropped, flattened out, and bumped up a bit again. Keep an eye on things, stay vigilant, and be willing to adjust your behavior to match the current coronacontext!
RPS's School Board met last night, and, as usual, I can't tell what happened and it doesn't sound great. You can find their agenda here, which includes the River City Middle School Rezoning proposal. River City, which is a brand new building, has already hit its capacity, and the district has worked with parents and stakeholders on a plan for a small rezoning to bring the number of students there down to a safe level. That process has been going on for a while now—at least months according to a quick search of my inbox. However, last night School Board decided not to vote for the rezoning, and I'm not really clear what impact that decision will have on the 1,600 students who attend River City Middle School. I didn't watch live, but the @KidsFirstRPS feed (which is a large portion of our education reporting at the moment in Richmond) is full of ominous signs: The Superintendent got emotional over the Board's lack of action, and then offered to work around the clock to get them whatever they might need to move the ball forward. Not great. Note that the Board's discussion on this didn't even start until 9:30 PM, which is officially after my bed time and well after any reasonable time a public body should be making important decisions. I'll try to learn more, and hopefully read some more reporting, in the coming days.
A quick bit of follow up from yesterday's City Council meeting: I was pretty close on my Passing Papers Prediction. Council agreed to give RPS the money to redesign an 1,800-seat replacement for George Wythe (ORD. 2022-112) and continued both the short-sighted, casino-related real estate tax decrease (RES. 2022-007) and the laundry list of Richmond 300 amendments (RES. 2021-R026, which celebrates its one year anniversary today!). What I didn't expect is that they also passed an amended version of RES. 2021-R086, a resolution asking the Mayor to including funding for a real, live Department of Transportation in next year's budget. It's a non-binding resolution, of course, and I don't really think a DOT is a priority for this particular mayor, but it's nice to see Council support for the idea. Also, if you're still reading this paragraph, you probably want to know that City Council will host their third Budget Amendment Work Session today at 1:00 PM!
Interested in Virginia's progress on making large-scale solar power more of a practical reality? The Virginia Mercury's Sarah Vogelsong digs into the Virginia Solar Survey (so you don't have to!) and has five key takeaways. This part seems suboptimal: "Despite potential cost savings, most local governments have no plans to begin sourcing their power from solar."
Catherine Baab-Muguira has a great column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about why Poe belongs to Richmond, not any of the other cities that may try and claim him. Nothing says Richmond more than getting pulled back after you've left!
This morning's longread
Community Input Caused the Housing Crisis
Is community engagement worthless? Or, even worse, is it actively harmful to the development of our cities as safe, sustainable, and affordable places to live? Maybe! In Richmond, we typically give outsized power to older, whiter, less progressive (to put it kindly) civic associations in almost every conversation about housing and transportation, so a lot of this article resonates for me.
Even a demographically representative community meeting would systematically err on the side of blocking vital infrastructure. The downsides of new development tend to be very localized: loud noises from construction, or an obscured view. As a result, opponents can easily find one another and form a political bloc. By contrast, the beneficiaries are either unknown at the inception of the project (no one knows who will eventually inhabit a house a developer wants to build) or extremely diffuse (all the people who would hypothetically take mass transit if it existed). The political coalition broadly in favor of new housing, transit, and renewable energy exists, but not at the project-by-project level. This asymmetry means that the opponents of a new project will always have the upper hand.
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