Good morning, RVA! It's 55 °F, and, once again today looks beautiful. You can expect sunshine, highs in the mid 80s, and maybe a little sweat on folks as they come inside. Fine by me! As a year-round bike person, I’m always a little sweaty, and I’d love to normalize showing up at the office a little damp and glistening—I mean, everyone sweats!
Water cooler
City Council update! Yesterday, Council’s Organizational Development committee recommended the papers relating to Casino 2.0 and the riverfront amphitheatre. I haven’t seen a vote count for the Casino papers yet, but, for now, they sit on Council’s Consent Agenda, a place for (theoretically) uncontroversial items. Papers move off the Consent Agenda and onto the Regular Agenda all the time, so take their current home with a grain of salt. Regardless, this coming Monday’s regularly-scheduled council meeting should be a thriller with a packed agenda full of things I’ve had my eye on (including the ban on exotic animals). Mark your calendars!
I have a hard time keeping up with the development and redevelopment going on in Scott’s Addition, because it all seems ongoing, endless, and kind of samey. However, Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacobs reports on a big, notable one: A developer who submitted an RFP for the Diamond District will bring 368 apartments and 13,000 square feet of retail space to the entire block bounded by Mactavish Avenue, Norfolk Street, Highpoint Avenue, and Moore Street. The whole thing—which will replace an enormous surface-level parking lot, by the way—will cost upwards of $133 million.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond has some more reporting on the dissolution of the Enrichmond Foundation, including this tidbit about the organization’s stack of old documents: “They're being housed in a steel cage in a warehouse attached to the Department of Parks and Recreation, surrounded by holiday decorations, sports equipment and other municipal miscellany.” Amazing. What I’m really looking forward to, though, is finding time to curl up with Brian Palmer’s longread “The Enrichmond Files.” Palmer runs the Friends of East End group and, for years and years, has raised the alarm about Enrichmond taking ownership of East End and Evergreen cemeteries. He’s also an excellent journalist and photographer, so I’m guessing it’s worth your time!
Today, at 1:00 PM, Mayor Stoney and the Office of Sustainability will head over to the Sankofa Community Orchard to celebrate the launch of the Neighborhood Climate Resilience Grant Program. This new grant program, funded through ARPA dollars, will support folks working “on the frontlines of climate change throughout the City of Richmond.” Tap through to read a bit more about the grant’s target areas—which includes things like parks, green spaces, sidewalks, and “pedestrian safety features like crosswalks”—and to read through the full application. If you’re interested, you’ve got until August 4th to apply.
Today marks the seventh deathiversary of my previous news-related project, RVANews.com. While extremely sad and sort of foundation-shaking for me at the time, the end of that project led to the real beginnings of this project—work which I find incredibly fun and fulfilling. 2016 was a wild year, and I’m glad we’ve all moved on. Anyway, you can support Good Morning, RVA, the phoenix from RVANews’s ashes, by joining the Patreon and chipping in a couple of bucks each month (patreon.com/gmrva). Also! If you’re still on Twitter, consider leaving that toxic, ad-ridden hell scape and joining Mastodon. There are a plenty of ways to do that, but rva.fyi is one good way to get started.
This morning's longread
A Defense of ‘La Sombrita,’ LA’s Much-Mocked Bus-Stop Shade
I guess some company designed a shade and light that LA’s bus company could install on an existing bus stop sign without getting any special approvals from the City. As you can imagine, what you’re allowed to just do in the public right-of-way, even as the bus company, is extremely limited, and so the shade/light was also extremely limited. For this, they got intensely roasted online! First, the point here is to illustrate just how broken the process is to get humane amenities installed at a bus stop. Second, we should celebrate incremental steps forward while we work to change those broken processes! More celebration, less roasting!
Most of the criticism, of course, centered on what La Sombrita doesn’t do: Its light isn’t brilliant enough; its shade doesn’t pivot with the sun; it doesn’t provide seating or bus arrival information. But of course, if it did all those things, it would be a bus shelter or a streetlight! According to Llanos, building even that modest level of infrastructure requires coordination between multiple agencies, years of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars. “It takes months of coordination and permit review,” Llanos says. “Sometimes it can take years to secure the funding you would need to widen a sidewalk or pathway.” No question, the process is borderline ridiculous. Sidewalks are some of the most mitigated spaces in the US. The design of La Sombrita reflects these constraints.
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
I like the cut of this tree’s jib.
