Good morning, RVA! It's 49 °F, and today you can expect temperatures right around 60 °F served up with plenty of sunshine. You can expect more of the same over the weekend as temperatures slowly creep down—not to, like, wintery temperatures, of course, just slightly less unseasonably warm temperatures. I hope you find some time to get out there and enjoy it.
Water cooler
As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield all now have a medium CDC COVID-19 Community Level. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 102, 173, and 135, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 14. We’re back in medium across the board, and, even with case count numbers not the most reliable, the hospital admissions number has started to trend downward. All good news (but if you wanted to keep your mask on in crowded space, I totally wouldn’t fault you)! Related, Katelyn Jetelina put together a great post dispelling the most recent crop of covidmyths, if mythbusting is your thing. While I’m not sure that reading a post like this would change the mind of a longtime COVID-denier, I do think it’s useful for reasonable folks who hear a weird thing on the internet and then go “hmmmm, that seems troubling.”
Patrick Wilson and Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch continue to report on the Governor’s decision to scuttle a Ford Motor Co. battery plant—and its thousands of jobs—in the southern part of the state. Yesterday, they reported that Ford had finalized the Pittsylvania location before Governor Youngkin pulled out of the deal, twisting the knife a little deeper for Southside residents and contradicting the Governor’s previous statements that, no, he’d pulled Virginia from consideration first. Then, just a couple hours later, a Ford spokesperson contradicted that contradiction, saying “the company had not made a site selection decision on its plans for an electric vehicle battery plant in partnership with a Chinese company.” What a mess. Sometimes, when you get too cute with playing politics it has real consequences for actual people. We’ll now have to wait and see if the Governor can clean this up and bring another company (and its jobs) to the folks living out that way—although, after this debacle, I’m note sure other companies will beat down the door to work with the Commonwealth.
Meghan McIntyre at the Virginia Mercury returns with her Three Interesting Bills of the Week column. This week features tax credits for local journalism, penalties for folks who start fires, and safety stops for bicyclists. The latter, the one I’m clearly most interested in, would let localities permit the “Idaho stop”, allowing people on bikes to treat a red light as a stop sign. Maybe counterintuitively, this increases bicycle safety and also reduce police involvement and traffic stops.
I guess I figured eventually someone would buy the Greyhound station on Arthur Ashe Boulevard and do something non-bus with it, but I don’t think I’d read any solid details one way or the other. However, Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that the property sold last month and the buyers, a hedge fund, have already put it back on the market. Not the most exciting of news, but it’s something. While technically not part of the Diamond District redevelopment plan, the Greyhound property is huge, and it’d be wild to continue to use it as a bus depot as the rest of the neighborhood grows up around it.
You’ll want to check out Rolling Stone’s new cover article about boygenius, a supergroup featuring two artists with Richmond ties: Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. You can listen to three tracks off their new album, the record, on the music streaming service of your choice—it’s some really good, guitar-heavy rock that you’ll probably enjoy. The full album drops on March 31st. Also, while we’re talking about it, Baker’s 2015 Sprained Ankle is an album that still makes me feel feelings.
Via /r/rva, stickers from old, and now dead, Richmond radio stations. I love this sort of thing.
This morning's longread
Tracing the Money
Get excited, because here’s a housing policy longread from the Urban Institute that wonders what state and federal governments could do to encourage more affordable housing—especially since some of the towns most hostile to building new housing rely on state and federal money the most. I haven’t read the full study yet, but I’m certainly into the concept, and I think it applies to other sectors too, like transportation. I mean, where do you think counties get the tens of millions of dollars required to build a single highway interchange? Certainly not from their own property tax collections!
Local governments have considerable influence on access to adequate and affordable housing through their control over land-use regulations such as zoning...We show that a cohort of the nation’s most exclusionary cities and towns—those that have added the least new housing over the past two decades—have overly restrictive land-use rules that make building anything other than single-family homes difficult. We review their budgets to show that many of these municipalities also heavily rely on revenues sourced from higher-level governments. These findings suggest many opportunities to leverage those revenues to influence local policies. The federal government or states could condition intergovernmental grant funds as “carrots” or “sticks” against exclusionary municipalities to promote better land-use policy.
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Picture of the Day
I have no idea. Sometimes you look in a window Downtown and this is what you see.
