Good morning, RVA! It's 63 °F this morning, and, by this afternoon, we’ll see even warmer temperatures—potentially right around 80 °F! Don’t get too attached, though, because a cool front will move through and quickly drop temperatures back into the 50s around the time the sun sets. Warm temperatures return on Saturday and Sunday, the latter looking particularly lovely for a long bike ride. I hope you find some time to get out there and enjoy it—I know I will!
Water cooler
As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have low CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 0, 85, and 25, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 4.3. It’s another week in the green for our region, and, in fact, I think this is the first time in a long time (maybe ever?) that every locality across the entire commonwealth has a low COVID-19 Community Level. If you zoom way out to the national level you’ll see a similar trend, too, with probably less than a dozen counties with a high level and just a bowlful of them with a medium level. Who knows what the future holds, and if this trend will stick, but if the last three years has taught me anything, it’s that you just kind of need to roll with the current situation—and our current situation features a whole lot less disease than it did a year ago!
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reports on new plans for the old Public Safety Building. The City reclaimed ownership of the property earlier this year after a developer failed to come through on their proposal, and now it sounds like VCU will swoop in and build a $415 million complex for a VCU Dentistry Center instead. Spiers asks the first question I had, but has no answer: “The memo does not provide more details about the project, such as whether VCU would buy the Public Safety Building property from the city. University ownership would take the 3-acre property off the city's tax rolls, as VCU is exempt from paying city real estate taxes.“ The decrepit remains of the Public Safety Building are bad, but I’m not sure hurriedly removing yet another entire block of property from Richmond’s tax rolls forever is the best option moving forward.
Jahd Khalil at VPM has today’s weird headline: “Education secretary requested university mascots appear in Youngkin PAC video.” You can watch the ad here (Twitter), and you may, at most, chuckle softly a time or two. However, political ethics experts are not chuckling and are instead wondering if public university mascots have any business at all showing up in an ad funded by the sitting governor’s political action committee. Ultimately though, is this a big deal? Probably not. Is it weird and maybe not the best? Yeah, I think so.
Tyler Thrasher at WRIC reports that “It has finally happened — Goshen Street has been repaved.” Previously a patchwork of cobblestone and detritus, Goshen is now topped with fresh, smooth asphalt. Thrasher, who sounds like they have first hand experience, puts it like this, “Stories of tripping while completely sober leaving Dunkin' Donuts on the corner of Goshen Street and Broad Street on the way home from class were just small grains of sand on the beach of memories the road had to offer Carver neighbors and VCU students living off-campus.“
Reminder: Strong Towns will host their Crash Analysis Studio today at 12:15 PM to analyze what caused the fatal crash on VCU’s campus earlier this year and to propose solutions to reduce the frequency and trauma of future crashes. This sort of rapid, specific response to a serious crash is what I’ve asked for from our own City for years now, and, while it took an outside group to put it together, I’m still very glad it’s happening. Hop on the Zoom at 12:15 PM and learn how we can make our streets safer!
This morning's longread
We Cannot Countenance Windowless Bedrooms
I thought this was an astute take on the recent “lets just build tiny apartments with no windows to solve the housing crisis” discourse floated around by some of the Very Online Men. We definitely should not make access to sunlight an amenity, and there are lots of other ways to build more housing—housing with windows even!
What is at stake here is not pesky apartment “inefficiency”: It is, and I am not being hyperbolic, the commodification of sunlight as an amenity, something you pay extra for like marble countertops or a walk-in closet. If windowless bedrooms are allowed, they will become yet another dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, and everyone who pretends otherwise certainly won’t end up on the side of the have-nots. The argument that people are willing to take a windowless bedroom in exchange for lower rent ignores the fact that many don’t want to for obvious reasons (misery and temporal disorientation) and that they shouldn’t have to deprive themselves in the first place. The windowless bedroom is not a clever building solution; it’s just rent-seeking on the backs of the urban desperate.
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Picture of the Day
You’re doing great, plant.
