Good morning, RVA! It's 47 °F, and this week looks a lot chillier than last half dozen days. Today, though, you can expect highs in the mid 60s with temperatures warming up bit through Thursday. After that, who knows! Maybe some rain, maybe the return of cooler weather—we’ll just have to wait and see!
Water cooler
OK! I think today’s the big day for eliminating parking minimums across the entire city. As of this moment, the ordinance to do so (ORD. 2023-101) sits on the consent portion of today’s City Council agenda—the place where uncontroversial ordinances typically live. That could change before tonight’s meeting, of course, but it’s a good sign! Also in the “good sign” column, 2nd District Councilmember Katherine Jordan, who I’d pegged as a no-vote (at least on the ordinance as written), announced in her newsletter that she’ll vote yes. Tap through and read the thoughtful explanation of her vote, including a really nice description of what the proposed ordinance would and would not do. And, in a final good sign, earlier this week the Fan District Association launched a poorly-written online survey about parking minimums, I guess hoping to show massive opposition to the proposed changes. Well, the results are in, and...drum roll...64.6% of respondent supported the elimination of parking minimums. We’ll have to see if all these positive signs ultimately point toward at least five votes at Council’s meeting tonight, but I feel better about it than I did last week. If you’d like, you can still email your councilmember (and their liaison!) in support of ORD. 2023-101 this morning.
City Council will also tackle three other things of note today. First, ORD. 2023-057 would unprohibit a roundabout at the intersection of Hermitage Road and Laburnum Avenue. While I don’t think a roundabout is necessarily the best solution for this now monument-free intersection, it’s super important to wipe the slate clean of any previous shenanigans and give planners the room they need to work. Second, Planning Commission will meet for a special meeting earlier in the day so that City Council can deal with the papers authorizing the purchase of Mayo Island. Fingers crossed that all the details are nailed down and that the City can finally take ownership of the island, because I’m stoked to get rid of that billboard blocking the skyline views! Third, and this is mostly administrative, but Council should officially introduce their amendments to the Mayor’s budget tonight, which, after listening to last week’s budget session, sound like they’ll be fairly breezy.
This past weekend, the Richmond Police Department reported an officer-involved shooting. Police officers responded to a two-vehicle collision on the 3100 block of Third Avenue, and, during that response, shot and wounded an adult man. The man sustained life-threatening injuries and was taken to the hospital where he remains in stable condition. I mention it because earlier this month, Interim Chief Rick Edward’s committed to providing “Critical Incident Briefings” after every fatal officer-involved shooting. As part of those briefings, the RPD will release video footage from officers’ body cameras to the public. Given how a traumatic gun injury will likely forever change a person’s life, I think this new “Critical Incident Briefing” policy should probably apply to every time a police officer shoots a person—even if that person survives.
Via /r/rva, someone has recreated much of downtown Richmond in Cities: Skylines and it is amazing. People are incredible sometimes. You can find a few more pictures in this imgur album.
Got kids and still looking for summer camp options? How about “Spacebomb Music Camp” from a local record label / music all-everything group that’s worked with a lot of musicians you’ve probably heard of—Angelica Garcia, Fruit Bats, Matthew E. White, Natalie Prass, and a bunch more. Campers will focus on “learning music, practicing music, rehearsing as a group, recording the music we rehearse, overdubbing and layering onto that music, experimenting in the studio after we record, and synching that music to film. All this will be interspersed with conversation about music's historical context as well as its place in our current culture. And everyone will make a sick T-shirt too.” What better way to encourage your musically-inclined young person than to put them in an actual recording studio for a week? I’m jealous—where’s the class for adults?
This morning's longread
Why Are (White) Men So Unambitious?
Despite the title, this piece from Anne Helen Petersen is really more about the skills and persistence needed by everyone who’s not a white man to achieve the same level of success. And even when those folks do learn how to organize and plan their way to the top, they’re often labeled as too ambitious!
So let’s follow the argument that achieving these markers of ambition and success (college application, college completion, study abroad, home ownership, graduate school) requires more planning and organizational skills, and women have more planning and organizational skills, so now that Title IX has lifted the more explicit barriers to entry, they are zooming past their male peers. That makes some sort of sense. But why do women have these skills? Why have they honed and refined them the way a culinary student hones and refines their skills with a knife? Because they have to. And they have to hone them even sharper if they’re a woman of color, if they’re undocumented immigrants, or if they start school without English fluency. Organization and planning become the box you step on in order to start at the same position of societal privilege as the white men in your class. When it becomes visible, or “too much,” it’d coded as “ambitious”; in truth, it’s just doing all you possibly can to create the conditions and infrastructure conducive to success.
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Picture of the Day
I love some good Richmond weird stuff.
