Good morning, RVA! It's 41 °F, and today you can expect mostly clear skies and highs right around 60 °F. While not epically warm, beautiful summer weather, it is pretty excellent flannel weather—and we’ve only got a finite number of those kind of days left this spring!
Water cooler
The (unofficial) results are in, and, as expected, Lamont Bagby won yesterday’s special election for Virginia’s 9th Senate District seat. He crushed Republican challenger Stephen Imholt with almost 90% of the vote. You can read a short statement from the Senator-elect and Rep. McClellen, whose seat he filled, here. I’m not sure when he’ll get sworn in, but if it’s anytime soon, I guess we’d have Yet Another Special Election to fill his vacant House of Delegates seat? And if a local elected official, like, say, a member of Henrico’s Board of Supervisors, runs in that election, maybe some of us would have the opportunity for even more voting later this summer? It’s sort of chaotic and I love it, but remember: All of these jokers are back up for reelection this November. That’s when we all get really serious about casting a ballot for whatever Democrats we can to continue protecting the health and safety of Virginians for the next couple of years.
Exciting City Council news: At this past Monday’s meeting, Council introduced the ordinance to get rid of parking minimums throughout the city (ORD. 2023-101)! This is the first of The Three Zoning Changes to make it into actual ordinance form, and Planning Commission will get the first crack at it in just a couple of weeks at their April 17th meeting. I’m hopeful that the extensive public engagement the City has already done up to this point will make this an easy vote for Planning Commissioners and, eventually, City Councilmembers.
Yesterday, Mayor Stoney held a press conference to announce that he’d introduced an ordinance to declare a housing crisis in Richmond (RES. 2023-R019). Em Holter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a recap of the event. Mostly the resolution supports existing City efforts to increase the supply of affordable housing—including the $50 million set aside in the Mayor’s recently proposed budget—but there is one section about creating an Affordable Housing Commission that would “bring together public, private, and philanthropic thought leadership, innovation, and tactical implementation guidance for affordable housing projects, as well as provide coordination across the various sectors and funding streams related to affordable housing.” That sounds sort of like the Partnership for Housing Affordability, but maybe on the very local level? Anyway, my take on these sorts of resolutions is that they’re useful as an advocacy tool—to constantly bring up while advocating for other policies and legislation—and shouldn’t really be expected to change a ton of things on their own.
Patrick Larsen at VPM reports that after the death of Irvo Otieno the NAACP of Henrico has started asking great questions about criminal justice reform in the County—specifically about Henrico’s lack of a fully implemented Marcus Alert program. State law requires every locality to have a Marcus Alert program in place by next summer, and while its not a perfect system, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Otieno’s funeral will take place this morning with the eulogy given by Rev. Al Sharpton.
Have you ever seen a massive group of people riding bikes down Broad Street, most of them doing wheelies the entire time? They’re the Broad Street Bullies, and you’re going to want to read this charming interview with a few of them over in RVA Mag. Maybe they’ll teach me how to wheelie, because I desperately want to learn.
Tonight, from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM, the Library of Virginia will host “A Woman’s Place is in the House...of Delegates,” a panel discussion featuring Delegates Coyner, Herring, and Watts focused on the challenges and opportunities women experience down at the Capitol. Stop by, learn a bunch, and get inspired. The event is free, but you should register on the aforelinked website.
This morning's patron longread
Bicycle
Submitted by Patron Casey. They’re back! The person who models the surprisingly complex everyday items in our lives—down to the smallest detail—with fun and simple interactive animations has put together a really lovely explanation of how bicycles work. Set aside a whole bunch of time to work through this page and fiddle with each piece. It’s honestly like walking through an exhibit in a museum.
Compared to internal combustion engines or mechanical watches, bicycles are fairly simple machines – most of their parts operate in plain sight. What’s not directly visible are all the forces that make it possible to ride and control a bicycle without compromising the structural integrity of its components. In this article, I’ll focus on the delicate interplay between many of the forces that act on a bicycle and its parts when riding. We’ll witness how forces applied through tires make a bicycle accelerate, brake, and turn, and we’ll also investigate how the wheels and the frame handle those different forces without breaking. Before we understand these more complicated interactions, we’ll play with much simpler objects. The basic scenarios we’re about to explore will help us develop an intuition about the behavior of a real bicycle.
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
Spring on an alien world.
