Good morning, RVA! It's 49 °F, and, while cloudy, today looks lovely with moderate highs in the 70s. Rain definitely returns tomorrow, and Sunday is a real will-they-or-won’t-they situation. Yesterday the forecast for the end of the weekend looked pretty dry, but today it looks like we’ll have a sopping wet Sunday evening. Anyway, take advantage of today however you can!
Water cooler
RPD report that around 8:00 PM this past Sunday, a driver hit and killed a person who was attempting to cross the 3300 block of Richmond Highway. I’m irritated by how the press release notes that the “RPD Crash Team responded to the scene and determined that Taylor was attempting to run across the street when he was struck by the vehicle,” as if running implies wrongdoing when it’s the only reasonable way to cross the terrifyingly fast six lanes of traffic. The entirety of Richmond Highway sits on the High-Injury Street Network, so we already knew that this exact spot is too fast and too dangerous for people—in fact, someone was hit and injured on the same block last August. Now that someone has died, will we do anything to slow traffic down and keep people safe?
Melissa Hipolit at WTVR has the update on Enrichmond Foundation’s sudden dissolution that I’ve been waiting for: “The Enrichmond Foundation was violating its contracts with nonprofit partners by using nearly $500,000 in partner funds to pay off Enrichmond debts.” You’ll want to read the whole thing, as Hipolit paints a pretty grim picture of the organization’s last few months before shutting down. Two things I’ll note: 1) According to a board member, budget shortfalls “were in large part because Enrichmond was not getting enough funding to maintain two historically black cemeteries it acquired in 2017“; and 2) It’s never a good sign when a picture of bankers boxes full of your documents end up on the news. I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this story yet, so stay tuned.
May means Bike Month, and next week Bike Walk RVA kicks off their 10th iteration of RVA Bike Month, bringing a whole monthsworth of bike and bike-adjacent events to the Richmond region. Honestly, it’s an overwhelming embarrassment of riches with something for everyone. Just a few highlights: Wheelie Clinic on the 2nd, Bike to School Day on the 3rd, Cargo Bike Meetup on the 6th, Ride of Silence on the 17th, Breakaway RVA on the 18th, Bike to Work Day on the 19th, and Tour De Taco on the 27th. There are tons more events that may be more or less your speed, so tap through and start putting things on your calendar!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Em Holter reports on the proposed exotic animal bill I wrote about yesterday (ORD. 2023-130). I wanted to link to this piece solely for this quote from the director of Richmond’s Animal Control and Care: “We have a house right now where we know raccoons are living in it...We want something in city code that we have, that we can move forward with when we know there is someone living with 20 raccoons in their house." And maybe this quote about a potential Special Use Permit for venomous snakes, too: “The worry is that if that snake kills you in your house and we have to go and get you, we want to know that we're walking into a house that has venomous snakes...I'm open to that alteration for poisonous snakes or venomous snakes if that should be your choice.” You should probably go read the whole thing because there are just a lot of great quotes in there that make me wonder how people have time for these sorts of hobbies.
Today, from 12:00–1:00 PM, RVA Rapid Transit will host a Transit Talk focused on how public transportation influences the social determinants of health. They’ve put together a fun panel with folks from the City’s Office of Community Wealth Building, Bon Secours, and HDAdvisors. The event is free, but you’ll want to register over on the aforelinked Eventbrite.
Also for your calendar, tonight from 5:30–7:30 PM, the League of Women Voters and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture will host a forum title “Dismantling Virginia’s Housing Segregation Legacy Brick by Brick.” Spend your afternoon talking transit and your evening discussing housing—I guarantee you portions of these conversations will overlap and amplify each other. This event is also free, but you should also register over on the aforelinked Eventbrite.
This morning's longread
Upzoning Might Not Lower Housing Costs. Do It Anyway.
As Richmond creeps toward rewriting its zoning ordnance and, with any lucky, broadly upzoning large portions of the city, it’s important for advocates—and elected officials!—not to treat that work as an affordable housing silver bullet. Upzoning is one tool, one step that we need to take to build a better city. We should treat it like that and be thoughtful in how we talk about it as we move through the zoning rewrite process.
The best reason to broadly upzone cities applies even if it doesn't, in itself, do a thing for housing affordability: It's simply that walkable urban neighborhoods should be legal. A few years back, planners in Somerville, Massachusetts, did a survey of how many residential lots in the city of about 80,000 were fully compliant with the city’s own modern-day zoning. The answer: 22. Almost the entire city of Somerville would be functionally illegal to recreate if it burned down tomorrow. Somerville is a fairly prosperous place, home to residents with a wide range of incomes and life situations. It has many expensive, highly desirable homes. It is walkable, transit-rich, fifth in the nation for its share of bicycle commuters, and meets a growing demand for places where you can live either without a car, or without needing to use one for every daily need. There is a deep, systemic shortage in America of places like this. And most Americans seem to agree that places like this are, on balance, pretty nice!
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Picture of the Day
Everybody loves pizza.
