🌺 Good morning, RVA: LOW Community Level!, affordable housing funding, and a sewage update

Good morning, RVA! It’s 45 °F, and today’s temperature graph is weird. For most of the day, you can expect temperatures in the 50s, then, after the sun sets, things heat up. By the wee hours of tomorrow morning we’ll see temperatures in the mid 60s! Bizarre! You should definitely prepare for storms to roll through alongside the weirdly warm weather today, but, after that, the rest of the weekend looks real lovely.
 

Water cooler

As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield now have low CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 0, 127, and 52, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 7. Regardless of the continued weirdness with Richmond’s case rate, the entire region is back in the gentle green of a low COVID-19 Community Level. This is great news! While it doesn’t mean that the world around you is disease-free and you should start licking doorknobs, it does mean that the amount of COVID-19 floating around in our neighborhoods continues to trend downward. To keep it that way, make sure you get your booster if you haven’t already, keep an ear out for an annual COVID-19 vaccine recommendation this fall, and keep your tongue off of doorknobs.
 

VPM’s Jahd Khalil reports on some interesting public comments at this past Monday’s City Council meeting. The advocacy group RISC (Richmonders Involved to Strengthen our Communities) showed up and pointed out that the City is using ARPA money to fund affordable housing instead of allocating revenue from expiring real estate tax exemptions to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, the dedicated funding stream set aside for this very thing. The City confirmed this through a spokesperson who said, “The Mayor and the City Council decided for FY22 and FY23 to use $20 M in ARPA funding to increase the amount of funds available to fund affordable housing development and rehabilitation in lieu of using the dedicated source of funding.” I’m no lawyer and I’m not trying to seem ungrateful for the $20 million the City dedicated toward affordable housing, but Council did pass ORD. 2020–214 two years ago and it does require all of that expiring real estate tax exemption revenue to go straight into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. I think I’m with RISC and would like to see the existing $20 million already pledged by the Mayor and Council, plus the legally required contribution to the trust fund. I’d also love to hear the City Attorney weigh in—if only so we can know what to expect for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and its dedicated funding stream in the future.
 

Charlie Paullin at the Virginia Mercury reports on the resolution of a lawsuit over Henrico County dumping sewage into the James River. This might smell vaguely familiar because I wrote about it in this very newsletter one million years ago, back in December 2021. Now, a year later, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the James River Association have “reached a settlement requiring the county to notify the public of overflows, ramp up system improvements and invest $1 million in environmental work.” You can read the full press release here. Back in 2021, I wondered if legal action could force Henrico to make some changes, and, turns out, it could and did!
 

A Charlie Paullin double header! He also reports on the General Assembly’s confusing inability to fill two seats on the State Corporation Commission. I’m not going to pretend I know even the slightest bit about what all this means, but it certainly has the feeling of something we’ll read bombastic quotes about from legislators and the Governor in the coming weeks or months.
 

Tomorrow, March 4th from 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM, head over to Afterglow Coffee Cooperative to check out the UN Record Fair (Facebook) and flip through “records (new and used), books, zines, and other music related items sold by dealers traditionally underrepresented at typical record fairs.” This sounds neat—I love when folks proactively work to remove the gatekeepery aspects of their hobbies.
 

This morning’s longread

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

I still have actual nightmares about forgetting homework, messing up homework, or not being able to find the homework to turn in, so you can put me squarely in the “homework is bad” camp. I have no idea whether that’s good for student outcomes, but, turns out, neither do a lot of experts!
 

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.” But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.
 

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Picture of the Day

Camellia! So brief!