Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and today we’ve got a beautiful day ahead of us with sunny highs in the 80s. October is far and away my favorite time in Richmond, and it looks like this week—at least as far as the weather goes—will live up to my expectations!
Water cooler
The City’s Planning Commission and City Council’s Organizational Development committee will both meet today. The former will tackle an interesting rezoning on N. Lombardy Street (ORD. 2023-271) which would allow for increased density and height along the block of N. Lombardy just west of Chamberlayne Avenue. Looks like the developers want to build a six-story apartment building, some first-floor retail, and shove the parking in the back. Then, later in the day, the Gov Ops committee will hear a presentation on the City’s legislative priorities for this upcoming General Assembly session. On the budget side of things, the City would like its $100 million in combined sewer overflow money back, thank you very much; alongside $15 million for Ancarrow’s Landing; and a separate bucket of funding from the State for street maintenance since Richmond functions as “the steat of state government and the capital city of the Commonwealth.” On the legislative side you’ll see some familiar items: a desperate plea for inclusionary zoning, a long-term owner occupancy program, a tweak to existing legislation that would allow “photo speed monitoring devices” on college campuses, and whatever changes to the Charter City Council decides to move forward on. It’s all good stuff, but I have no idea the likelihood of any of it making progress in the General Assembly this winter. Oh, also, OrgDev will consider that Public Utilities and Services Commission I’ve been on about for a while now (ORD. 2023-188).
Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports on possible changes to SMART SCALE—Virginia’s transportation funding process—that sound like a bunch of steps in the wrong direction. In fact, the State’s own Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment says that if the new changes were put in place today “75% of the bike and pedestrian projects recently funded through SMART SCALE would have gone unfunded.” Seems bad! It’s wild, in this, the year 2023, to read about the commonwealth doubling down on “new capacity highways” and “new interchanges.” If it were me, of course, I’d ban funding new interchanges and highway expansions for just a couple of years and, instead, pay for 100% of every locality’s bike and pedestrian plans.
If you’re interested, you can read this Washington Post profile of Spotsylvania County’s Jennifer Petersen, one of America’s serial book banners. This profile reads like an Apocalypse Now-style descent into darkness, and makes me wonder how people have so much free time—free time that they use to waste other people’s time! The County’s library staff “estimated that a team of 11 people spent 40 hours per week on [Petersen’s] challenges last school year.” Ridiculous.
Today, October 2nd, the Capital Trail celebrates its eighth birthday—happy birthday to Central Virginia’s best and biggest separated, multi-use path! The Capital Trail Foundation has put together a handful of activities across the month for you to participate in as we look forward to another eight, great years of walking, rolling, and riding through some really beautiful parts of the commonwealth. Honestly, I think that this is a good practice, and we should celebrate the birthdays of more bike and pedestrian infrastructure.
We’ve not quite hit pot pie season yet, but we’re getting closer and closer, so maybe bookmark this thread on /r/rva about where to get the best chicken pot pie in the city.
I tapped on this story in VPM, by Katherine Hafner at WHRO, almost entirely because the sheep-based pun in the headline. Great work, everyone.
This morning's longread
We're all lurkers now
This seems true, at least of my own social media usage: That more and more folks are lurking on social media and fewer and fewer folks are actually posting content. Even the newest network, Threads, on which I continue to post links to this very email newsletter, seems mostly like brands, politicians, and meme accounts shouting to an entirely disengage audience. I wonder what that shift will mean for how we communicate to each other about large, societal events (like presidential elections)?
It’s somewhat ironic to see tech companies now coming to the realization that people on social media may want to talk to each other. That’s why social media started, after all. It’s just that the people in charge dropped the ball on those features in 2020 during their frantic (and failed) race to usurp TikTok. Apps began prioritizing algorithms and discovery and ways of increasing views that de-emphasized direct connection, putting us all in the same place while somehow tearing us further apart.
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Picture of the Day
Patio cat.
