🏙️ Good morning, RVA: Housing, housing, and more housing

Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and this past week’s weirdly warm weather has passed. Today, and for the next several days, you can expect seasonally appropriate highs around 50 °F with some clouds here or there. Looking at the extended forecast and we’re definitely going to make it through January without a significant snow, which makes my 2024 goal of riding a bike in a snow-covered forest less and less likely.

Water cooler

Writing for Next City as part of their Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship For Reparations Narratives, Barry Greene Jr. reports on Faith Ministries and their work to build housing on parking lot they own out in Chesterfield. Del. Mike Jones (who you may remember as Councilmember Mike Jones) is the lead pastor of Faith Ministries, so he has plenty of experience with Richmond’s affordable housing crisis. Greene also links over to SB 233, the YIGBY (“Yes In God’s Backyard”) bill that would have made affordable housing on property owned by a religious organization a by-right use. It’s a good idea: Churches own tons of parking lots, and I imagine at least a few of them would like to do more for the common good than store empty vehicles for a couple hours each week. Unfortunately, if I’m reading LIS right, the General Laws and Technology committee continued that bill until 2025.

Speaking of housing, the New York Times recently rehashed a study by “Point2” that scored cities on how easy it is for their Gen Z residents to purchase a home, and...Richmond made the bad side of that list (#94 out of 100). I skimmed the actual study, and it looks like we get dinged hardest for a very low current Gen Z homeownership rate? I mean, it’s not good news by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d like to see where the Richmond region falls on this list because of the whole independent city thing. Honestly, digging in a little further and I have some questions. Manhattan ranks #76 but has a median home sale price of $1.1 million? Irvine ranks #91 but homes “cost almost 33 times Gen Z’s median income”? Seems like it’s probably harder for someone in their 20s to buy a home in Manhattan than Richmond, right?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board put together a generally negative take on the Governor’s plan to build the Washington Capitals and Wizards a new arena in Alexandria. I think the Board does a good job of explaining a complicated public-private project and cuts past the rah-rah-rah to get at the actual financial risks the Commonwealth would face. I’m looking forward to more of this sort of analysis from them—especially on big projects in our own region.

This past weekend, I got the absolute best reader email pointing me toward this affordable housing groundbreaking out in Albemarle County. The Piedmont Housing Alliance has put together a 121-apartment development “serving families from somewhere in the realm of 30% of the area median income all the way up to 60% or 80%.” Deeply affordable housing—which, 30% AMI qualifies as—is awesome, but, also, check out the video at the top of this story. A groundbreaking with Famous People actually using shovels to actually dig into the dirt! So it is possible, and here’s the video evidence! I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this, but I can’t stop thinking about it—and now I will make you think about it, too!

Over at South Richmond News, John Murden digs into a misspelled SCHCOL zone sign painted on the 6000 block of Jahnke Road. Murden does a little zoom-and-enhance and shows that, at some point between 2009 and today, someone went out there and transformed the first O into a C (the angles on the two Cs are just a little different). Whoever it was did an amazingly thorough job, and I think that is impressive.

Via /r/rva, an important thread debating which Mexican restaurant has the best white sauce? Tap through for a lot of good answers, including Mi Jalisco which is my favorite mostly because it takes 6 minutes to bike there from my house.

This morning's longread

We Need Your Email Address

Tech news company 404 Media put together a nice post explaining why they’ve started collecting email addresses before folks can even read some of their articles. The news biz is in a bad place! And “large language models stealing all our hard work” is just one of the many factors grinding the entire industry into dust. Immediately after you finish reading that article, tap through to this thread from media critic Jay Rosen who does an excellent job laying out some of the other as-yet-unsolved challenges facing media across the country.

Jason signed up for a Byword account, fed it the URLs of some of our articles, and was able to instantly generate articles based on them. They were not good, but they were article-shaped and came with AI-generated images. Byword also allows you to use AI to generate social media posts about the articles. Byword can connect to WordPress, has a feature where you can “Generate articles by scraping lists of your competitors’ URLs,” and is planning to launch a tool that will allow people to generate articles based directly on the sitemap of the website they’re trying to “compete with.” This is all powered by GPT-4, and larger operations require an OpenAI API key, which is particularly notable given OpenAI’s apparent respect for the craft of journalism.

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Picture of the Day

Looks like winter, but definitely did not feel like winter when I took this picture.