Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F now, but, later today, you’ll find highs right around 60 °F. You can expect a continuation of these unseasonably warm temperatures straight on through to at least Friday—and probably even beyond. I think our chances for a decent snow this year have started to quickly approach zero.
Water cooler
City Council will meet today for their regularly-scheduled meeting, and you can find the full agenda here. Two of the papers I have my eyes on—expanding scooter fleets (ORD. 2023-029) and the Climate Equity Action Plan (RES. 2023-R005)—sit on the consent agenda, which usually means smooth sailing without even a chance for councilmembers to discuss or speechify. That’s good news, especially for the climate plan, because we need to just go ahead and get started on that thing. Also of note for budgetwatchers like myself, at their informal meeting, Council will have a discussion on “Council Budget Priorities Survey.” I’d love to see the results of this survey and/or hear this discussion!
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that the folks behind Shyndigz, the cake place, have plans to build a hotel just down the street from their current spot. They’ll eventually move their existing location over that way and end up with a combination cake shop, courtyard, and hotel situation. Sounds great, but even more delicious is this quote about the amount of parking required for the development: “The only thing that we’re hearing so far, and we knew we would, is parking. But it was really interesting. We did a census with our staff and we found out that 65 percent of our employees either walk, ride their bike or bus to work. That surprised me and is really cool...There’s not as much need as there used to be in the past for parking.“ Turns out! Just another data point to support the City’s plan to get rid of required parking minimums for new developments!
Related, via /r/rva, a good thread of folks chiming in with advice on how to transition from using a car to get around to strictly biking or bussing. I think maybe some of the best advice in here—at least for folks on bikes—is to forego backpacks and get yourself some sort of rack-and-basket to throw stuff in. Any old rack and this bag will cover about 75% of your needs—it’s served me well for many, many years!
Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond looked into Virginia’s new population data from UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center. The takeaway: People are moving to our region, but not necessarily to Richmond itself. I’d guess that probably has something to do with the cost of housing. If you want to make some graphs or do a bit of analysis of your own, you can find a spreadsheet of the county-by-county population estimates here.
Alert, teachers! This coming Wednesday, from 4:00–6:30 PM, Maymont will once again host their Educator Open House. Maymont is rad, and this is an opportunity for educators from across the region to stop by and learn about how to incorporate the park into the classroom—or, more accurately, incorporate the classroom into the park. The event is free, but you’ll want to register using the previous link.
This morning's longread
How did we get $32 trillion in debt?
We’re still a few months out from when Republicans inevitably hold our country ransom over the debt ceiling. That gives you plenty of time to read this history of the debt ceiling—it’s good context to have as we sail into whatever tempest of stupidity that awaits us this summer.
Today, dollars are little more than the way the international monetary system keeps score, and the Fed can create dollars simply by changing the numbers in its spreadsheet. This is why it is nonsense to talk about the US “going bankrupt” in any other way but Congress refusing to allow the Treasury to pay its bills (i.e., what McCarthy is now threatening). The US owes dollars, and dollars are whatever the Fed says they are. Worrying about the Fed running out of dollars to buy bonds from the Treasury is like worrying about the scoreboard at the Super Bowl running out of points. The ultimate threat of fiscal irresponsibility (which we’ll get into in the next post in this series) is not national bankruptcy, but inflation combined with the much vaguer threat of people and countries and corporations choosing to drop out of the dollar-denominated economic system.
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Picture of the Day
Marcel the Shell.
