Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and this week’s mid-summer respite from the dangerous heat continues. You can expect the cloudy sky to help keep temperatures in the mid-80s, which sounds great, and it looks like we’ll have a decent chance of rain tomorrow morning that will extend our streak of mild temperatures. I’m wondering if I should water the outside plants tonight or just let it ride?
Water cooler
Ian M. Stewart at VPM reports on just how hard it is to get a shelter—or even a bench—installed at a bus stop in the Richmond region. Four things! First, I appreciate the ongoing coverage of this issue and do think it’s part of the reason we’ve seen more recent attention (and funding) to providing humane places to wait for the bus. Second, shout out to RVA Rapid Transit for constantly pushing this issue and generating that media coverage! Make sure you flip through their 2023 State of Transit report which highlights the need for more and better bus stop amenities. Third, this quote from a GRTC spokesperson is incredible/sad: “The Board voted to support — but did not provide funding for — the 'Aspirational' 28.6M Dollar investment...to install shelters or seating at 50% of stops." As to who should provide that nearly $30 million of funding, seems like localities should front the money required to install bus stop amenities within their own jurisdictions—not GRTC and certainly not the Central Virginia Transportation Authority. The latter shouldn’t be used to replace a city or county’s baseline investments into transportation infrastructure (although past history strongly disagrees with me). Fourth, it’s exciting to hear that GRTC is piloting pole-attached seating, which, while not the end-all-be-all of comfortable places to sit on a rainy day, is certainly better than nothing. The best thing about this particular type of seating is that you don’t need to get the City’s Department of Public Works to approve anything! You can just bolt the it right to an existing bus stop pole. Y’all know how I feel creative pilot projects, and the City should take GRTC’s lead and try out a few interesting projects of their own.
Michael Schwartz at Richmond BizSense reports that Genworth’s 45-acre Broad Street campus is under contract to a Baltimore-based developer. This is a huge piece of land with tons of potential—for housing, office space, retail, all kinds of things. In fact, a while back, Henrico County hosted some public design charettes to ask the public what they wanted from an eventual redevelopment of the space, and I was pretty optimistic about the results at the time! We’ll see if any of the public’s suggestions from 2019—BRT, walkable neighborhoods, and convertible parking garages—end up in this new developer’s plans.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s David Ress reports on the (maybe?) progress made in yesterday’s state budget negotiations. It sounds like, eventually, the there will be some sort of compromise between the Senate’s Democrats and the House’s Republicans to use the state’s surpluses to fund one-time tax rebates instead of the permanent and shortsighted tax cuts for which the Governor hopes and dreams. My own hopes and dreams can’t happen without complete Democratic control of the government (and maybe not even then), but I wish we’d stop arguing over one-time funding for education and mental health, and, instead, increase taxes on the wealthy to fund massive, ongoing investments in these sorts of things.
I haven’t looked at the Virginia Craft Beer Cup winners in a couple years, but scrolling through 2023’s list, and I’m struck by two things: 1) Not a lot of Richmond breweries on this list, and 2) I’ve never even heard of most of these places! This year’s best-in-show award went to Benchtop Brewing Company’s Crimson Gaze, a red ale that sounds like something I’d be into. You can sample some of Benchtop’s other brews at their Manchester tasting room.
This morning's longread
American Cities Have a Conversion Problem, and It’s Not Just Offices
Last month, the New York Times ran this nice piece about zoning, presumably alerting folks who do not subscribe to a daily zoning and rezoning email about how this sort of stuff really impacts people’s lives and gets in the way of fixing many of our ongoing parallel crises.
We ask far more of buildings today than decades ago, including that they be accessible, sustainable, hurricane- and earthquake-proof, that they deter flying birds and provide public spaces. Each new goal, while worthy, widens the disconnect between buildings constructed decades ago and what regulation requires today. And we’ve developed over time more rigid ideas about the built environment: that housing should gain value indefinitely, that politicians should ensure that’s so, that property owners have a right to veto change around them. The cumulative effect today, if you want to turn an office into an apartment, or even turn your back porch into an enclosed home office? The building code says no. Or the zoning does. Or the neighbors do. Or a phrase in a decades-old state law does. Or the politicians asked to change that phrase decline to.
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Picture of the Day
Despite Richmond’s Director of Public Works believing that “we can’t infrastructure our way out of” speeding, this new, cheap infrastructure has dramatically slowed drivers on my cross street.
