Good morning, RVA! It's 33 °F, and today, again , we’ve got highs in the 50s plus some partly cloudy skies. The 10-day forecast gets us all the way out through the last full week in February, and it’s basically this sort of weather straight on through—so get used to it / I hope you enjoy it! P.S. As for the yesterday’s wind, I did commute by bike, and it was at my back in both directions!
Water cooler
Thank you to everyone who came out to last night’s event at the Valentine. First, you should go check out the museum’s Sculpting History exhibit when you get a chance, it’s really well written. Second, everyone on the panel talked a lot about the future of news, and, to be honest, no one had anything incredibly optimistic to say about it—which is pretty scary. A thriving and robust local media landscape definitely makes for a healthier city.
Anyway, I had blast, and it was great to meet so many readers of this very newsletter in person and to see many of the actual reporters who make Richmond’s news media happen. Many years ago, when I ran a news magazine, I’d do a lot of these sorts of events, and it was nice to be reminded of that time in my life. Plus I got to sit on a panel with Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams! Surreal!
Luca Powell at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a new ruling from a federal judge that found “the Richmond Police Department engages in discriminatory stops of Black drivers.” This is a complex story, and you should tap through to read the whole thing, but here’s the striking data: “Between July 1, 2020, and September 30, 2023, 61% of drivers stopped by the Richmond Police Department were Black and 31% were white.” Census data show an almost even split between Richmond’s Black and White populations (both accounting for about 44%), so it’s not just that, overall, the city has more Black drivers. The RPD, of course, say they’re not at fault and police where they see the most crime and that those places just happen to be where more Black folks live. Marvin Chiles, an assistant professor at ODU who testified during the trial, says that, no, none of this just happens, and “RPD was encouraged ‘to focus exclusively on Black neighborhoods’ in an effort born from Richmond City Council seeking to ‘attract industry back” in 1977.’” This is when I tap the “the 1970 annexation of Chesterfield County had and has so much impact on our region” sign. Like I said, complex!
Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacobs has an update on the two big pieces of marijuana legislation moving through the General Assembly. Both the House and the Senate have passed bills that would create a legal retail market, and now they’ll try and sort out their differences and come to a compromise—which, eventually, the governor will need to sign off on. Unfortunately, Jacobs reports that both bills passed along party lines, so my dream of something bipartisan heading to Youngkin’s desk is currently on life support.
Families with kids hurtling towards college or technical school: The RPS Education Foundation offers scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $1,200 dollars. You can learn more about the eligibility requirements and fill out an application here. After you do that, tell me how you managed it all—because that whole process seems incredibly stressful, and I’m not looking forward to it.
It is, of course, Valentine’s Day, which, out of all our manufactured American holidays specifically designed to make people feel bad about their lives, this one seems worst. However, many years ago, my family decided to set aside all the pressure that comes along with candy, romance, hearts, flowers, and cards, and, instead, focus on something we truly love: Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. So that’s what we’re doing tonight. We’ll go to Lee’s, get a big takeout order of fried chicken, and eat it in the living room (while probably watching an episode of Vampire Diaries). I hope you, too, can find a way to spend time with something you truly love tonight—fried food or another thing entirely!
This morning's longread
Sometimes You Need To Destroy a Perfectly Good Mansion
This post in Strong Towns felt especially timely given the recent release of Richmond’s Cultural Heritage Stewardship Plan outline. These two facts are true: 1) We’re living in a housing crisis and need to build more homes, and 2) We only have a finite amount of land. That means, necessarily, we have hard choices to make about what stays and what goes. Sometimes (a lot of times?) the right choice is to replace old, unproductive structures with just a ton of homes.
Freezing the neighborhood in time means rising home prices for the few privileged enough to live there. It means that tax revenue and per-acre productivity increasingly lose pace to the rising cost of town services, pushing the town into debt and forcing more brutal trade-offs between raising taxes and cutting vital services. As I’ve outlined here previously, the best place to put new housing is in neighborhoods where housing already exists. We already have the infrastructure and thickening these neighborhoods makes them better places to live for most people. The NIMBY argument that adding housing, however incrementally, throughout our existing neighborhoods would somehow destroy their “character” seeks to thwart the very process of growth and evolution that created these neighborhoods, in the first place. What’s more, we could add enough housing to dramatically increase the town’s financial standing (and thus quality of services, etc.) without noticeably changing the overall look of the neighborhoods. (For the record, I’m OK with the look changing!)
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Picture of the Day
More Pittsburgh bridges! They’re everywhere!
