💸 Good morning, RVA: $50 million, $100 million, $10 million

Good morning, RVA! It’s 43 °F, and that cold front definitely showed up. Today you can expect highs in the 50s, a lot of sunshine, and temperatures at—or even below—freezing overnight. If you’ve got freeze-sensitive plants outside, they may need a little extra care to get through the next couple of nights. Temperatures will start to creep back up on Friday, so hang tight!
 

Water cooler

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that Local Initiatives Support Corp (LISC) announced they will match the City’s five-year, $50 million investment in affordable housing. That brings in $100 million over just five years to help address Richmond’s affordable housing crisis, and LISC’s president says that the investment even “leverages significantly more.” It’s a lot of money to spend in a pretty short amount of time, and it feels like the scale of investment you’ll really see on the ground. One thing I’d love to learn more about, though, is how the City will prioritize and make decisions around spending this money—because we could do a lot of creative things with all this cash!
 

Back in 2020, the General Assembly allowed public school teachers to unionize, and, pretty quickly thereafter, the RPS School Board voted to approve collective bargaining. Now the Henrico Education Association is working to secure those same rights for teachers in the County. You can learn more about those efforts to unionize here, as well as sign an authorization card that will help press the issue with the HCPS board should they not want to introduce collective bargaining in the District on their own. I would guess that this will be a much more complicated and challenge piece of advocacy than it was in Richmond—but it’s definitely not impossible! If you’re a Henrico educator, tap through to learn more.
 

If you’d like to have your jaw dropped this morning, read Sarah Vogelsong’s “Four takeaways from the last campaign finance reports of Virginia’s 2023 elections” in the Virginia Mercury. I’m not usually a “but think about what other things we could spend that money on!” kind of guy—often, for weird and sometimes dumb reasons, specific money only exists for specific reasons. Still, though, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars—like, approaching $100 million—spent on one year’s worth of elections. Maybe we could do something else with all that time, effort, and investment?
 

Axios Richmond’s Ned Oliver reports that Casino 2.0 backers have now spent $10 million on their campaign to bring gambling to Richmond. 10! That’s significantly more than eight!
 

Tonight, from: 5:00–7:00 PM, Partnership for Smarter Growth will host a walking tour of Libbie Mill. I think Libbie Mill is a fascinating part of town: Incredibly dense for the area; decently walkable; adjacent to all sorts of retail, restaurants, and services; but also almost entirely disconnected. Creating safe and efficient ways to walk or ride from Libbie Mill to Willow Lawn and whatever we’re calling the Target/Shake Shack seems like a top priority—and I bet it’s something talked about on tonight’s tour! If you’re interested, fill out the aforelinked Eventbrite (the event is free, though) and meet out front of the Libbie Mill library.
 

This morning’s longread

The Potential of Pop-Ups

Looks like I’m not the only one thinking about pop-up infrastructure projects constantly! Here’s an entire article from Strong Towns about them that really gets at why they make a lot of sense: They give regular folks something to actually see and experience before asking them to make a decision about a particular project. In Richmond, as a community, we’ve mostly got bike lanes figured out (which, honestly, is amazing). So, if I were in charge for a day, I’d immediately start using pop-up project to introduce community members to as many different types of traffic calming as I could—lane narrowing, bus-only lanes, bump outs, all sorts of stuff.
 

Public opinion more generally is a key element of every infrastructure implementation process. Without personal experience, however, it is hard for any member of the public to know which changes may truly be meaningful for them. Pop-ups give every resident the chance to trial a change and make an informed decision about the project’s impact on their life. They also let municipalities better understand the logistics of a project by serving as a test run, not predicting but showing in real time how traffic increases or decreases, which intersections need extra support to remain safe, and, of course, to what extent citizens will use the project they funded.
 

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Picture of the Day

Bird on a wire.