🌬 Good morning, RVA: Dangerous roads, zoning updates, and lots of ventilation

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and the hot, humid weather continues today and for the next several days. You’re gonna sweat, so remember to stay hydrated!
 

Water cooler

This is really terrible: Two different drivers hit and killed two people riding bikes, one in Henrico and one in Chesterfield, this past Sunday. NBC12’s Karina Bolster has the details. The first fatal crash happened near Turner Road and Hull Street. I don’t know the details of the crash, but the County just striped bike lanes on Turner Road last year. The second fatal crash happened out on Chamberlayne Avenue near Parham, which is just a rough place to get around by bike. Both of these incidents, and the very victim-blamey quotes from the Chesterfield police asking folks to wear bright-colored clothing to avoid being killed by drivers, point to the need for our region to build more and better infrastructure. It’s frustrating to read articles like this one and then remember how many tens of millions of dollars the region wants to spend on road widenings.
 

Chris Suarez and Sabrina Moreno at the Richmond Times-Dispatch report that City Council passed the resolution declaring racism as a public health crisis (RES. 2021-R039). Tap through to read some powerful stats on health inequity from Jackie Lawrence, the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts' Director of Health Equity. Also on the City Council beat, Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says Council passed the Greater Scott’s Addition rezoning AND the Pulse Corridor rezoning, unlocking denser, taller development back by the Diamond and along Broad Street. A+ work by Spiers for dropping a “Diamond District” mention into his piece.
 

I don’t know who put together this survey about incorporating 3011 and 3021 Dock Street into the James River Park System, but the Capital Region Land Conservancy sent it to me so I filled it out. These two properties fill in the riverbank gap between Great Shiplock Park and the Sugar Pad (or whatever we’re now calling that spot right before Rocketts Landing where folks fish). In addition to returning a piece of the riverbank to The People, folding these two properties into the park system will also allow for a much nicer, jersey-barrier-free Capital Trail experience. I’m incredibly excited for this to happen and will continue to fill out whatever survey is required of me!
 

Yesterday, the Governor announced his plan to spend $250 million of ARP money plus another $250 million of other relief money on public school HVAC projects. The combined $500 million will “complete nearly all currently planned school HVAC projects.” That’s a lot of ventilation, and I am deeply interested in how much money RPS will end up with out of this deal. I can’t find it in the CIP at the moment, but I know there is millions of dollars of HVAC work needed across the district, and it’d be amazing to reallocate that capital money elsewhere. However, this sentence in the governor’s release gives me pause and doesn’t seem super equitable, but I’d like to learn more before writing a bunch of angry emails: “Funding will be allocated to school divisions based on their average daily membership, with a minimum allocation of $200,000 per school division. The funds will be granted as reimbursements to divisions completing HVAC projects.” To me, it seems like funds should be allocated based on who’s got the crappiest and oldest HVAC systems.
 

Shoutout to Summer Morris who has served as Councilmember Jones’s liaison for the last forever. She’s leaving her post to take a job in Chesterfield’s planning department. Good council liaisons are so super important to a functioning council, and it’s bittersweet to lose a good one to the County. I don’t know if Jones has already hired Morris’s replacement, but if you’d be a good liaison for the 9th District, maybe reach out?
 

This morning’s longread

How to bring the ‘missing middle’ to Virginia housing development

Wyatt Gordon at the Virginia Mercury takes a look at what other localities across Virginia are doing to encourage “missing middle” housing. Put another way, that’s sticking multiple units in the footprint of your standard, single-family, detached homes—aka duplexes, triplexes, and even sixplexes. It’s a great way to add density without unleashing the typical NIMBY angst about building upwards (although we need to do that, too).
 

Standalone house or an apartment? When looking for a place to call home most folks know what type of housing they want, but what if there were more choices on the market? Last month Norfolk’s city council approved a Missing Middle Pattern Book full of free designs and schematics for dozens of so-called “middle housing”: duplexes, quadplexes and the city’s iconic “Norfolk six-packs.” The move marks the latest attempt by a Virginia locality to encourage more middle housing, the array of options that lie between single-family detached homes and large apartment buildings. But can plans on paper truly catalyze new construction and help solve the housing crisis?
 

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