🍔 Good morning, RVA: Case rate trending down, a spicy budget season start, and a possible change to GRTC's board

Good morning, RVA! It’s 58 °F, and today you can expect warm and wet weather. Highs should top out in the mid 60s while rain may move in this afternoon and evening. I hope you took advantage of yesterday’s most excellent weather!
 

Water cooler

Here are this week’s graphs of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 in Virginia. The case rate per 100,000 people in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield is 160, 202, and 150 respectively. While community transmission is still “high” across all three localities, that could change quickly (at least in our region). For a bit of hope, look towards NOVA and Hampton Roads where a few counties have dipped below 100 cases per 100,000 and have fallen into the “substantial” (orange!) level of community transmission. Substantial is still a word that means “a lot,” but it also means progress. Who knows that the future will actually bring, but if you’re using some sort of metric-based framework to guide your own personal behavior—like this one from Katelyn Jetelina—I bet next week could see some exciting changes to your social calendar.
 

Richmond’s budget season is off to a spicy start, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Chris Suarez reports the Mayor has warned the School Board that they better pass the RPS budget this week or else face a year of flat funding. That’d be particularly brutal as the Superintendent’s budget relies on $22 million more from the City as compared to last year. We’ll have to see if this added pressure works and School Board gets a move on, because the piece closes with this ominous quote from 4th District Schoolboard member Jonathan Young about the Superintendent’s budget, “I will not be voting in favor of it. And at the risk of speaking for my colleagues, I don’t believe he has the five votes.” Yikes. Just a couple more days until Friday, so we’re sure to learn more soon.
 

City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee will meet today and has a couple of interesting items on their agenda. Most interesting and least likely to pass: RES. 2021-R068 which would express Council’s support for the mayor to create space in both his budget and org chart for a Department of Transportation. This is and has been my hope for the last forever, but I just don’t see it happening given all of the other needs and this administration’s priorities. Put a pin in it, and someone make it part of their mayoral platform in 2024! Moving on, LUHT’s most interesting and most likely to pass piece of legislation has to be: RES. 2022-R011, which gives City Council’s official support to expanding GRTC’s board to include Henrico County. That Henrico is not currently a voting member of the GRTC board doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I think this move to make GRTC more fully regional is probably, long term, a good one. However, I do have some anxieties about two suburban counties having a majority vote on the board of a transit system that, for the most part, serves far more urban residents than otherwise. For example: I would hate to see a future focus on commuter routes instead of beefing up heavily-used, frequent routes in the city. That said, both Chesterfield and Henrico have bought in on expanding regular ol' local service in their localities over the last couple years, so I think this might be fine (and even good).
 

Via /r/rva: Where can you get an early breakfast in Richmond? Obviously City Diner, but the thread has some more options if you’re looking.
 

And some old news from late last week: Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that Shake Shack is (finally) coming to Richmond. The burger joint has filed permits to begin demolition at 5400 W. Broad Street—an old, boarded-up Applebee’s just a short walk west from the Willow Lawn Pulse stop. I am always here for another place to get milkshakes.
 

This morning’s longread

The Next Affordable City Is Already Too Expensive

This story in the NYT is about Spokane, but it totally could be about Richmond.
 

Mr. MacDonald knows the pattern, and so does everyone else who has been following the frenetic U.S. housing market for the past decade. The story plays out locally but is national in scope. It is the story of people leaving high-cost cities because they’ve been priced out or become fed up with how impossible the housing problem seems. Then it becomes the story of a city trying to tame prices by building more housing, followed by the story of neighbors fighting to prevent it, followed by the story of less expensive cities being deluged with buyers from more expensive cities, followed by the less expensive cities descending into the same problems and struggling with the same solutions.
 

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Picture of the Day

This tree look like Cthulhu.