🍧 Good morning, RVA: Fentanyl and guns, walkable places, and public housing

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, but today’s highs will almost hit 60 °F. At the moment, it looks like we’ve got a bunch of rain moving in over the weekend, so if you’ve got neighborhoods to walk, trails to ride, or other outside-stuff to get done, do it now!
 

Water cooler

Every once in a while I get suckered in to reading a PolitiFact piece that reports on the validity of some claim one of our elected officials made in public. It’s nice and good journalism work—the research behind the fact-checking is always interesting—but I don’t think it does anything. First, at this moment in time, there are almost zero consequences for politicians who lie to their constituents. Second, fact-checking misspoken statistics from random committee meetings feels laughably like emptying a swimming pool with an eye dropper when you’ve got an entire political party devoted to legislating away free and fair elections. Anyway, this morning I’m glad I did read Warren Fiske from VPM’s piece about State Senator Obenshain’s claim that more Virginia children die from fentanyl than from guns. This sounds false and, turns out, is false. Fiske reports that “from the start of 2017 through September 2022…355 minors died from guns and 51 from fentanyl.” What the Senator was likely referring to is that overall, across all age groups, more people in Virginia do actually die from fentanyl than guns: “State records show 7,718 fentanyl deaths from the start of 2017 through September 2022, compared to 6,874 gun-related deaths.” I constantly underestimate (or even forget about) the magnitude of Virginia’s opioid epidemic, and that’s the real takeaway from this meandering paragraph!
 

Why did the owner of Ruby Scoops move her “New Orleans-style snowball” shop to Carytown? Here’s her quote from a piece by Jack Jacobs in Richmond BizSense: “We’re excited to be in a neighborhood with a lot of walkability.” I’m always linking to this, that, and the other thing about why Richmond should build more spaces that are safe and pleasant for people (instead of cars). But, really, people don’t need a million articles to know what kinds of spaces they want to spend time in! Folks can just tell, like in Carytown, when you get the right mix of infrastructure, land use, and zoning.
 

Via /r/rva, this story in El País, a daily newspaper out of Madrid, about Richmond’s Confederate monuments. You’ll likely know everything covered in this piece but it’s worth tapping through for the pictures of the monuments and their associated stonework laying in open-air storage—or, as the article puts it, “The storage wasteland is a carefully organized graveyard of America’s racist past.”
 

President Biden will address a Joint Session of Congress tonight at 9:00 PM to deliver his 2023 State of the Union address. Just like with the Mayor’s State of the City, this speech gives the president a chance to a tout his accomplishments and hint at future efforts—only during this speech half the people will never applaud. You can stream the address over on WhiteHouse.gov or flip over to any news or news-adjacent media of your choosing.
 

This morning’s longread

The Case for Truly Public Housing

I learned a ton reading this long piece about how Cambridge’s public housing authority is having actual success actually expanding the amount of public housing in the region. They do this through clever partnerships with the nearby university, a complex web of associated businesses and subsidiaries, and a whole lot of hard work. Pull out yesterday’s piece from Richmond BizSense and you’ll see some similarities in the recent news of RRHA spinning off its own subsidiary—but also some stark contrasts in the two cities’ end goals. Specifically, Cambridge’s authority has worked to build and operate new public housing, while RRHA now looks to “transition away from traditional public housing and help residents find a path toward homeownership.“
 

To start, the board underscored the agency’s public mission, and insisted on setting clear lines of responsibility and eliminating patronage. In practice, this meant that municipal leaders no longer intervened in agency operations, and that board members no longer rewarded political allies with staff positions or solicited preferential placement for family members in CHA apartments. The board limited its role to setting policy goals, approving budgets, and appointing the executive director. As Stockard emphasizes, these practices are the very basics of good public administration, but had been too often ignored by the struggling agency and the city. In the early years of the new millennium, the CHA reflected on this relationship in an annual report: “One of the reasons the CHA has been able to provide quality housing for over a quarter of a century is that the administrative and political leadership of Cambridge has asked nothing of the Authority other than to do a professional job, and the City has supported that kind of work at every turn.”
 

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Picture of the Day

A box of hopes and dreams.