🏠 Good morning, RVA: Housing prices, you should register to vote, and a calming set of plant-based tasks

Good morning, RVA! It’s 69 °F, and today looks the teensiest bit cooler than yesterday. Keep your eye out for potential afternoon storms, and then prepare for the remnants of Hurricane Ida to make their way through the region tomorrow. Cooler temperatures on Thursday!
 

Water cooler

It’s Tuesday, and I thought I would take a look at VHD’s COVID-19 dashboard. The all-time graphs of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths still show me that vaccination works as a strong protection against hospitalization and death. While cases are way, way up (to late January levels!), if you’re vaccinated you should feel at least some, maybe small, sense of relief. If you’re not vaccinated, you should head over to your nearest pharmacy this morning, because…cases are way, way up. While I don’t (yet) see a bump in the new vaccinations graph due to full approval of the Pfizer vaccine, the number of new doses administered each day has increased since its low point in the beginning of July. Give those employee mandates time to work, though!
 

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Chris Suarez and Mark Robinson checked in on the local housing market and, according to the headline, it’s on fire. Look at this bananas stat: “Citywide, the average value of a home surged to $315,000, up from $277,000 this year and $266,000 the year before.” Robinson and Suarez also report that Councilmember Jones plans to introduce a newly retooled tax abatement program to help longtime residents who are hit by the increase in real estate taxes. That sounds like a way better plan than Councilmember Trammell’s, who wants to reduce the real estate tax rate which hasn’t increased—even to account for inflation—for years and years and years.
 

We’re 63 days out from the November election and the Republican gubernatorial candidate has finally released his “Day One Game Plan,” which, I think, is the first actual policy he’s committed to in writing this entire year. It is, of course, a heavy-handed, shortsighted Republican fever dream of ways to strip revenue from localities like Richmond. Almost all of this candidate’s plans would require General Assembly approval, and alllllll of the House of Delegate seats are up for grabs in November, too. So consider this is your exactly nine week reminder that election are so extremely important, and you’ve got plenty of time to register to vote if you haven’t!
 

Well this is charming: Local author Catherine Baab-Muguira has written an Edgar Allan Poe-based self help book called A Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru. Karen Newton at Style Weekly has more from the author, and you can stop by a reading on September 7th at Fountain Books.
 

I find this kind of thing incredibly calming, so maybe you do, too. Peggy Singlemann, Director of Park Operations and Horticulture at Maymont has a list of tasks to prep your garden and yard for next year (which sounds way less fun than it actually is). Now is the time to divide, cut, store seeds, and plant fall crops. Future you will thank you, and present-day you could probably use the distraction from all of everything going on at the moment.
 

This morning’s patron longread

“The Mom of Bold Action”

Submitted by Patron Susan. I found this long short story by George Saunders delightful!
 

What you had to do was overrule your irrational fears. By learning the facts. She’d read about this in Best Life. One gal scared of flying had spent the month before her trip to China memorizing air-fatality statistics. A man afraid of snakes had come up with a mantra about the majority of snakes being nonpoisonous. In another article, parents, intending the best, had gone too far. One mom, super-focussed on eating right, had turned her daughter anorexic. A dad had been too strict about violin practice and now his son hated music. Also, had panic attacks whenever near polished brown wood. All over the world right now, thousands of boys were out farting around, having broken a promise they’d made to stay in the yard. Most woods were not dangerous. Generally, lungs did not just fail. The world was not a scary or hostile place, and Derek was a smart little guy with a good head on his shoulders. He was fine. What she was going to do was sit down and write something.
 

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day