Good morning, RVA! It's 49 °F, and today we’ve got highs right around 70 °F. There’s a decent chance of rain this morning, but the afternoon looks lovely. I definitely plan on spending some time out on the porch listening to the world go by.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Rev. Al Sharpton will deliver the eulogy at Irvo Otieno’s funeral this coming Wednesday. According to the RTD, civil rights attorney Ben Crump will issue a “national call for justice for the 28-year-old, whose death echoes that of George Floyd nearly three years ago."
Richmond Connects—the City’s first update to its transportation plan in a good, long while—is inching closer to announcing its Near-term Action Plan, a list of projects that the City will look to fund over the next five or 10 years. That sentence is exciting and depressing, because while five to 10 years definitely counts as “near-term” in Transportation World it certainly feels like forever in Regular Life World. I’ll now set aside for another day my rant about how Richmond refuses to implement pilot/temporary infrastructure projects which would take much fewer than five years to fund and implement. Anyway, while we wait on the Near-term Action Plan’s prioritized list of projects, check out these neat maps of Richmond‘s “Super Needs”. From the Richmond Connect’s website: Super Needs are “the needs that communities of concern consistently raised as needing to be addressed first. These Super Needs will be given priority during the development of recommendations.” If you’re personally familiar with any of these areas, you’ll definitely find yourself nodding along and muttering “yes! yes!” to lots of the needs. Turns out, residents are experts about where they feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods, and this list of Super Needs is an example of what you get when you ask (and listen) to them.
Ben Paviour at VPM reports that legislators put the Commonwealth’s budget negotiations on hold after the Secretary of Finance “told budget negotiators Tuesday that while the state's revenues remained solid, he anticipated a stronger possibility of a recession in the next few months.” That seems ominous. This news, the recent bank shenanigans, and the inevitable and impending debt-ceiling crisis all make me want to find a good financial/economy blog to read.
Tonight, City Council will meet for their regularly-scheduled meeting and will have exactly zero items on their Regular Agenda. That’s rare! The Consent Agenda—which they vote on as a block, typically without a ton of discussion—features a bunch of Special Use Permits and a few interesting items here and there. Notably, Council has continued to a later meeting both the ordinance to unprohibit roundabouts at the intersection of Hermitage and Laburnum (ORD. 2023-057) and the SUP for the 260 apartments on Grove near the highway (ORD. 2023-068). I’m interested in what’s causing the delay behind the former, as it seems like a fairly uncontroversial ordinance.
Via /r/rva, “Who has the best Greek salad in Richmond?” I would have said Joe’s, but now I’m really interested in the commenter who recommends making your own (in two-gallon batches!) when the summer tomatoes hit.
This morning's longread
Atlanta Retrofitting Prominent Office Tower to Residential
This piece in Strong Towns about an office-to-residential renovation reminded me of the longread I linked to last week about windowless apartments. Like Atlanta, Richmond has vacant land (aka surface-level parking lots) on which we should build housing first—before spending tons of public money to subsidize complicated projects like this.
Even after a successful renovation, the economics of converting office to residential is still problematic. “As crazy as our rents are [in Atlanta], they're still not high enough to support this kind of development,” says Kronberg. For the 2 Peachtree Street project, the city hasn’t yet provided “any breakdown of price points for the rents,” according to Atlanta Civic Circle. Kronberg says many developers would struggle to make a profit with this type of project even if they were given the office building for free, citing another building Atlanta bought eight years ago that’s still vacant for want of a development partner. Kronberg would like to see the city work with developers to turn “a huge surplus of vacant land” into a greater mix of housing types, which would be more economical than the hefty expenditures for the Peachtree Street project. He also expresses frustration at how slow the permitting process is in a city with a “wretched housing crisis.”
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Picture of the Day
Signage.
