Good morning, RVA! It's 73 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday but with slightly cooler temperatures—which, honestly, describing highs around 90 °F as “slightly cooler” feels misleading. How about: It should be a little less hot today. Stay hydrated, wear a hat, stay inside if you can, because we’ve got a lot more of this ahead of us.
Water cooler
Another day, another horde of young people returns to the city! Today marks VCU’s official first day of class and that means hustle, bustle, and life—especially in and around the university’s Monroe Park Campus. Welcome back students, I’m glad you’re here. To the rest of us, my warning from yesterday still stands: If you have to move through the area in a car, please be extra aware and doubly careful! You should expect an orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of people fully taking advantage of their rights as pedestrians (maybe to an extreme and slightly terrifying degree).
Last week, GRTC announced their planned service changes for Sunday, September 10th. The biggest change involves routing 17 different bus lines through the soon-to-open Downtown Transfer Station. It’s hard to believe, but, in just 20 days, Richmond will no longer have a Temporary Transfer Station for the first time in something like eight years. I have complicated feelings about the new DTS, but it exists and it definitely provides a more humane environment for bus riders to wait and make transfers should they need it. GRTC also has a few smaller but still rad changes planned, too: The Pulse will now run every 15-minutes all day long on Saturday (that’s an improvement from 30-minute service for most of the day); the #5, thankfully, returns to its 15-minute frequency until 7:00 PM; and the #7A/B both get four more hours of Sunday service. All good tweaks and steps toward restoring some of the bus service we’ve lost over the last couple of years. You can attend a public meeting about these changes a week from today, on August 29th at the Main Branch Library (101 E. Franklin Street) from 5:30–6:30 PM.
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers reports that I was wrong, and Planning Commission did not recommend the new Airbnb ordinance for approval (ORD. 2023-235), instead continuing it until their September 5th meeting. The sticking point for the Commission was the proposed residency requirement. Specifically, the requirement would mean that in residential zoning districts the “short-term rental operators could only rent out their own residence or a room within it...officials had said the requirement was needed to prevent the possibility of operators buying up multiple properties in residential districts and essentially using them as mini-hotels.” The Director of Planning said he’ll come back to the meeting on the 5th with some alternatives that try to balance short-term rentals along side the city’s growing housing crisis.
Remember earlier this year when a bunch of republican-led states up and left a multi-state voter data sharing partnership called “ERIC” because of some right-wing internet conspiracy about election fraud? Ben Paviour at VPM did some FOIAs to learn more about Virginia’s decision to exit ERIC and found, shocking no one, flimsy reasoning and a heavy hand from our will-he-or-won’t-he-run governor. To me, this whole thing seems like a bunch of hooey—a hooey invented at the top tiers of our state government that has a real and actual impact on how public servants do their jobs.
Also in state government news, Dave Ress at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a group of environmental organizations have sued Virginia to prevent the Commonwealth from leaving the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It’s now part of the official Republican Party platform to stop and reverse anything that could in any way mitigate the impacts of climate change—which the RGGI has done by generating “$328 million to help low- and moderate-income Virginians with ways to cut energy use and more than $295 million for flood control.” I used to be confused by how Republicans want to hurry the planet along to its fiery death, seemingly against their own self-preservation instincts, but then I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and I think he gets it right. These folks aren’t interested in a more resilient future for our communities, because they think their wealth will save them. That, eventually, they’ll find their way into whatever the climate catastrophe version of a gated community is—helicoptering in to an air-conditioned bunker on a mountain top stocked with supplies like a bunch of Bond villains. Anyway, read Ministry for the Future, I think about it at least twice a week.
This morning's longread
Where My Cousins Are From
RVANews alum and local hilarious person Kelly Gerow wrote this beautiful essay about home, family, and where you’re from. I loved it!
Still, feeling accomplished and proud, we celebrated with a lunch at an Irish pub in Lewisburg. I said earlier to her that I could eat a pepperoni roll, as if I always knew what one was, and was delighted to find it on the bar menu. I felt like I was sharing my culture with someone, even though it was only my second time having one. The trip with Sarah framed West Virginia differently for me. I didn’t know what it felt like to come home, because I have always been in Richmond. Although an accidental return to familiar places, it felt like I was returning home to something in West Virginia. There is no such thing, but I am a second-generation West Virginian. Maybe there is such thing.
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Picture of the Day
End of summer vibes.
