Good morning, RVA! It's 38 °F, and today we’ve got highs right around 60 °F—but it’ll take most of the day for them to get there. With a mostly cloudy sky for a large portion of the day, it’s the perfect time replace your profile pic with a moody outdoor selfie.
Water cooler
Do you or one of your best pals want to represent the 9th District on City Council? If so, just fill out this form before 12:00 PM on November 27th. Yesterday, Council staff put out this press release—surprising me with the quick turnaround and answering all of the questions I had about how they plan on filling Councilmember Jones’s soon-to-be-vacant seat. The gist: City Council will appoint a replacement to serve from January 1st through December 31st, the November election will continue on as planned, applicants (of course) must be a 9th District resident, and everyone interested will be required to attend a December 4th Organizational Development committee meeting to “express their candidacy.” What a fun and fascinating process. I assume we’ll see the list of potential candidates on that OrgDev agenda in a couple of weeks, and I can’t wait to get a look at the pool. Will it be a bunch of folks just looking to maintain for a year? Or a preview of the people hoping to run for the 9th District seat this coming November?
Also in hot City Council form news: Applications to receive non-departmental funding from Richmond’s upcoming budget close on Friday December 1st. Non-departmental funding covers all sorts of things from quasi-governmental entities like GRTC, to community organizations like the Peter Paul Development Center, to the Richmond’s own Sister City’s Comission. It’s a big bucket of money, too: $88.7 million in last year’s budget, up from $84 million in FY21. If you’re interested, the City has put together a really useful webpage with lots of resources, guidelines, and forms to fill out. Just two weeks remain before the deadline, so you better get cracking!
NBC12’s Sarah Chakales reports that folks Have Questions about newly-reelected State Senator Hashmi’s permanent residence. First, Sen. Amanda Chase—Virginia’s most Trumpy senator—makes up the “folks” in that previous sentence, so take the aforelinked article with a grain of rightwing extremist salt. Second, I’ve written about it before and can’t find the link this morning, but I’m always shocked that elected officials don’t take Virginia’s residency requirements seriously. The recent redistricting exacerbated the issue, with candidates needing to up and move to continue representing the general area they have in the past. And, like, some of them—on both sides of the aisle—just haven’t. Moving sucks! I get it! But them’s the rules. It makes me wonder if there’s a sort of unspoken agreement among the General Assembly to not look too, too hard into where folks spend most of their nights.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports one small update to his ongoing coverage of VCU Health’s failed downtown development situation: “On Monday, the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission, the oversight agency of the Virginia General Assembly, included the health system among topics it approved for in-depth study in the coming year.” Stressful (and maybe a bit political? I’m not sure).
Axios Richmond’s Karri Peifer has put together a big, cheery list of pop-up holiday bars lighting up all across town over the next couple of weeks. Many of these bars require you to make reservations way in advance, just minutes after those reservations open—which, and this is some old man stuff, is not how bars are supposed to work! Whatever happened to walking in to a packed place, seeing a ton of folks you knew, and standing three deep at the bar waiting to catch the bartender’s eye? Are you even allowed to stand at a bar anymore!? Old Man Ross is shouting questions!
Thank you, r/rva, for reminding me of this uniquely Richmond pandemic-era meme. We had some good times during those horrible times!
This morning's longread
The 6 Zoning Reforms Every Municipality Should Adopt
Richmond’s already made good progress on this list of six zoning reforms. We’ve eliminated parking minimums, authorized ADUs, and dabbled in legalizing multifamily housing in commercial zones by creating (and deploying) TOD-1 zoning. Still lots of work left to do, though, and I haven’t heard the other reforms on this list pop up in conversation too often.
Toward this end, below I list out the six zoning reforms that I think every city and town in North America should adopt. While this program might have seemed radical five years ago, I consider this to be the bare minimum for zoning reform in 2023. These are “no-brainer” reforms that have been tried and tested in more than a few jurisdictions. For each item, I point you to a good “comp” and suggest some educational material on the subject. Whether your community is trying to tackle housing affordability, kickstart economic revitalization, undo segregation, or retool around sustainability, these six reforms are a fine place to start.
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Picture of the Day
This past Saturday, I rode a bicycle from my house to Jamestown and back again. 117 miles!
