Good morning, RVA! It's 69 °F, and, yes today looks hot and humid with highs in the upper 80s. But! Upper 80s is certainly an improvement over upper 90s, isn’t it? Big relief comes on Thursday, so just hold tight.
Water cooler
This past weekend saw two anti-Casino 2.0 editorials drop. First, from former city councilmember and once mayoral candidate Jon Baliles, this scathing piece in RVA Mag. I don’t think I disagree with any of the meat in this piece (but the tone did make me stress sweat a little). Like I did last week, Baliles points to the mayor’s previous offer of lowering taxes if Casino 2.0 passed and tries to square that with shift to the new package of child care programs Stoney has put on the table. Should Casino 2.0 fail, will the mayor champion other revenue sources to help address the city’s child care crisis? It’s a good question to ask! Meanwhile, over in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the editorial board weighs in with a more political take. They write that this is a high-stakes moment for a mayor with gubernatorial aspirations, yet whose “track record when it comes to economic development is, to put it generously, mixed.” But it’s not all politics for the paper’s editorial board, who end with this surprisingly sober and rational take: “When politicians show up and start waving around millions of dollars, we should know by now to take a deep breath. Richmond cannot afford a shiny new casino that preys on those who can least afford it, even if it means tens of millions for child care. Between now and Nov. 7, Richmonders have a decision to make. But don’t conflate the two: The casino — not funding for child care — will be on the ballot.”
City Council meets today for their regularly scheduled meeting, and, due to their recent August vacation, has just a ton of special use permits to work through. All of those but one sit on the Consent Agenda (with a proposal to build two homes at 910 Parrish Street the sole item on today’s Regular Agenda). Council has mostly continued the stack of interesting papers I have my eyes on: updating the Airbnbs regulations until September 25th, purchasing East End and Evergreen Cemeteries until October 10th, and establishing a Public Utilities and Services Commission also until October 10th.
Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond has put together a map of which Richmond neighborhoods saw the biggest increase in their real estate assessments, and it’s increases across the board, especially downtown and in large swaths of the Southside. While lots of folks will still see higher tax bills (screams Land Value Tax into the void), the average increase of 7.7% is way down from the last couple of years.
It’s James River Week! The James River Association has put together a million and one events for you to take part in so you can adequately celebrate the river, which is one of Richmond’s Undisputed Official Best Things. They’ve got hikes, volunteer opportunities, boat trips, family stuff, and plenty of opportunities to learn more about what, a generation ago, consultants called “Richmond’s Great, Wet Central Park.” P.S. If anyone has a copy of that PDF (maybe the 2008ish Downtown Masterplan? Maybe something my brain wants to call “The Cruper Report”?) please send it my way!
Via /r/rva this beautifully apocalyptic picture of the Richmond skyline. Sort of looks like Thanos is about to show up...
This morning's longread
#TradWife Life as Self-Annihilation
Anne Helen Petersen recently wrote this piece in Elle about “TradWives,”, a movement where women basically cosplay as wives from 1950s kitchen appliance ads. She continued with some additional reporting and deeper, more interesting thoughts in her email last week that really got me thinking—especially this bit below. Despite the soft edges of most #TradWife content, the spread of this sort of thing—mostly through social media algorithms—is not great.
#Tradwife content is not cute or inspirational or harmless; it’s the handmaiden of the Christian Nationalist agenda. It’s regressive, anti-choice politics in a housedress offering you quick and easy morning glory muffins. Tradwifes are against childcare, against protections for women in the workplace, against any sort of policy or reform that acknowledges the way the vast majority of Americans' lives are actually organized today instead of how they, themselves, have chosen to organize them. They are AGAINST COLLEGE FOR WOMEN. And maybe I need to bold this? They see women as utterly beholden to the will of men.
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Picture of the Day
If you’re gonna plant trees during the peak of summer, you really gotta water them a ton.
