💰 Good morning, RVA: A specialty school discussion, casino developer cash, and big baseball

Good morning, RVA! It’s 56 °F, and today looks absolutely wonderful. Expect highs right around 80 °F, sunshine, and, then, at least two more days of the same. A sure sign of fall: Last night, for the first time in a long time, I spent part of my evening watching TV in the hammock. It was glorious.
 

Water cooler

Alright, as per the ancient and time-honored tradition, RVADirt has the only coverage I could find this morning on last night’s RPS School Board meeting at which they discussed specialty school admissions. You can read through the entire thread on the smoking remains of Twitter. If I’m reading the details correctly, the Board adopted Option 3, the one suggested by the administration, with a 7–1–1 vote. That sort of blows my mind! I didn’t watch the meeting, so I have 1,000 questions, but will now patiently wait for some more reporting about details, timeline, and weird edge cases—like, for example, do economically disadvantaged kids who attend a private school count towards the five total seats allotted towards private and homeschool students?
 

Axios Richmond reports that the Casino 2.0 developers have “dumped a record $8.1 million into this year’s referendum campaign.” Tap through, because I just want to quote the whole piece at you, like this part: “The donations funding the pro-casino PAC are the largest single corporate contributions in Virginia history…the total contributions so far are more than three times the $2.6 million casino supporters spent during the 2021 referendum.” EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS! That’s bananas! Whatever we’re asking for in return should this thing pass is clearly orders of magnitude too small. For what it’s worth, I am still voting NO on Casino 2.0, regardless of how many ads I see on YouTube in the coming months.
 

Richmond Magazine’s Emily McCray-Ruiz-Esparza has a good overview of Richmond’s rising pedestrian deaths, how we can reverse that trend, what the City’s decided to do about it, and how you can get involved. Tap through to hear from some folks personally impacted by traffic violence, national experts on how to make our streets safer, plus some of the local advocates we know and love. It’s really great to see coverage of this topic from almost every one of our region’s news outlets—such a change from even just a couple of years ago. Content warning: There is a description of a serious crash at the top of the article.
 

Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that the State’s recently passed budget included some funding for “a new division of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services that will allow breweries to self-distribute limited amounts of beer to retailers and restaurants while bypassing traditional third-party distributors.” I think this is really interesting and should, theoretically, mean a more diverse selection of beer at local restaurants and corner stores. Virginia’s alcohol laws are so restrictive in strange ways (including its three-tier distribution system), and it’s been pretty fascinating to watch those laws loosen up a bit over the last 10–15 years. Sounds like the new division has a bunch of start-up tasks to check off first, but breweries could begin self-distributing by the end of next year.
 

Baseball fans: The Squirrels have made the playoffs and will host the Erie SeaWolves in the first game of the Southwest Division series tonight at 6:35 PM. Tickets still exist if you want to extend the season for weird stadium food and beers as big as your head (and baseball) as long as possible. Have funn, go nutz!
 

This morning’s longread

The Big City Where Housing Is Still Affordable

Warning! The rents in Tokyo will blow your mind, and, if you’re currently renting in Richmond, will probably make your stomach heave a bit. Turns out the one weird trick to keeping housing affordable is to build a ton of it while making sure it remains accessible by transit. Keep this sort of story in mind as we get closer to potentially rewriting the city’s zoning code in the coming years.
 

As housing prices have soared in major cities across the United States and throughout much of the developed world, it has become normal for people to move away from the places with the strongest economies and best jobs because those places are unaffordable. Prosperous cities increasingly operate like private clubs, auctioning off a limited number of homes to the highest bidders. Tokyo is different. In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.
 

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Picture of the Day

Gotta get that focus juuuuust right.