Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today’s forecast looks a bit cooler, cloudier, and maybe wetter than yesterday’s. You can expect temperatures in the low 80s, and the rain, if it shows up, will hit after lunch. Sounds like we’ve got a bit of a respite from the summer’s high heat!
Water cooler
WTVR reports that this past Monday a driver hit and killed 17-year-old Geo Morton, who was riding his bike home from work on Williamsburg Road. Morton was involved in Richmond’s BMX scene, and tonight at 7:00 PM they’ll host a memorial ride and will collect donations to help Morton’s family pay for funeral costs. I’m tired of writing about memorial rides, and, while the specifics surrounding this tragedy are bizarre and horrible in all sorts of ways, no one should die while riding home from work. We need to do a better job of protecting the most vulnerable people out there just using our region’s roads to get around.
VPM’s Connor Scribner reports that Virginia Housing has denied RRHA’s application for “about $15 million in federal tax credits to build the second phase of new housing in Creighton Court,” one of Richmond’s large public housing neighborhoods. Creighton Court redevelopment—or maybe put more accurately, demolition of existing public housing and construction of new mixed-income housing—is ongoing as we speak, but this new money would have helped fund the 72-unit, second phase of the project. I am woefully underinformed on how the math for all of these new units works out, and I really need to read a simple explainer (if anyone has one, please let me know!). But, according to Scribner, the original 504 units of public housing at Creighton Court will be replaced with 681 units, 561 income-restricted units and 120 market-rate units. However, if I’m reading the reporting right, only 25% of those income-restricted units will be made available to folks making below 30% of the Area Median Income. That’s about 140 units for people with extremely low incomes, far short of the 504 original units. So are we shorting ourselves 360 units of deeply affordable housing? I don’t have enough information to say one way or the other. Public housing redevelopment is complex, with a handful of options available to existing residents, including one-for-one replacement, vouchers, and some opportunities to move to other public housing in the region. Like I said, I really need to learn more about how the math works out. There is definitely a PDF floating around somewhere that I should have read years ago, and now I need to go digging.
Also from VPM, Patrick Larsen reports on a public meeting about Dominion’s proposed natural gas plant in Chesterfield County. Seems wild to me that given this summer’s endless string of headlines on how climate-change is impacting communities across the country and the world, that we’d actually sit here and consider plans that contribute to making the problem worse. I guess when you’re an energy monopoly with misaligned incentives and vast amounts of wealth and power, this is how you spend your summer vacation. Also, shoutout to the folks attending these meetings and advocating for their communities (and, by extension, the rest of us in the region and the Commonwealth). It’s exhausting David-and-Goliath-type work, and I appreciate them for doing it!
I am definitely not smart enough to understand how the health insurance Marketplace works, especially with terms like “reinsurance,” which, come on, is a word with almost no meaning at all. Still though, this report from David Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch is terrifying: “Obamacare health insurance costs in Virginia are set to spike next year because the General Assembly budget impasse means a financial deal that cut premiums has now lapsed...The analysis projects individual coverage would rise by 28.5% in 2024, after the reinsurance program the state financed — in tandem with a much larger federal sum — cut this year's premium rates.” I understood, like, half of those words but do know that, when my family got our insurance through the Marketplace, a one-year 28% increase would have been impossible to absorb without making brutal cuts elsewhere.
Via the Free Lance-Star, a Spotsylvania woman has broken the Guinness World Record for the women’s loudest burp at 107.3 decibels. There are many, many wonderful sentences in this story (“people couldn’t believe that kind of sound came out of a person”), and, yes, video, too.
This morning's longread
2000 Seconds with Welwitschia mirabilis
An overly intense meditation on an overly intense plant. Worth reading, in my opinion, because who among us is not extremely fascinated by anything that qualifies as a living fossil??
Weltwitschia mirabilis is one of the most amazing plants in the world. Found only in the Namib Desert, it can live 1500 to 2000 years. The plant grows two leaves and two leaves only in its life, but they keep growing and piling up near the central crown like old fax machine paper around an unattended machine. It is not only alone in its genus, but also its family. Even scientists publishing papers about the plant say that its genetics and ancient relatives “allow us to regard the extant Welwitschia as a living fossil.” We’re talking about a plant whose relatives flourished when Brazil and Africa were still connected. Back in the 19th century, the Europeans lost their minds over the existence of this plant, publishing voluminous (and casually racist) correspondence about it. No one had ever seen a plant like it, either in its form or its function.
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Picture of the Day
These were my most successful container flowers this year, and I’m already planning next year’s situation!
