🟨 Good morning, RVA: Medium COVID-19 level, candidate updates, and Christmas events

Good morning, RVA! It’s 27 °F, and I need to put another blanket on my bed tonight. Today, though, you can expect cloudy skies and highs in the mid 50s (which is right on track with the historical average, turns out). Tomorrow, one of Richmond’s big Holiday Event Days, we might see some rain early on in the morning so keep an eye out.
 

Water cooler

As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield popped back up to a medium CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 87, 92, and 101, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 10.2. This is the first time in a while we’ve crossed back over into medium’s yellow territory—and that’s before we see whatever impact the long holiday weekend, filled with travel and family get-togethers, will have on the spread of COVID-19. As for how this should change your own personal behavior, the difference in CDC guidance between a low/green level and a medium/yellow level is the addition of this sentence, “If you are at high risk for severe illness, consider wearing a mask indoors in public and taking additional precautions.” Since this is America, it is totally up to you what precautions you take, but with an increased amount of flu and RSV floating around, too, I’d suggest keeping your respiratory disease toolbox handy: staying home if you’re sick, spending time outside or in well-ventilated spaces if you can, washing your hands, and wearing a mask.
 

This seems weird: Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the City of Petersburg has “no records available to show how the city selected The Cordish Companies” to operate their proposed casino. In response to a FOIA request submitted by the RTD, the City replied: “There are also no public records of any evaluation of potential casino resort projects proposed to the City of Petersburg in this calendar year.” That seems wild! Not even a single email from a public official about who to pick to build and run their (proposed) multi-million dollar casino? I find that hard to believe, but Petersburg has apparently contracted all of the work—and I guess, like, really 100% all of it—out to a third-party consultant. I have no idea what this means, if anything, but I think it’s really interesting. As for where we are in this ongoing, tumbledown casino process, the General Assembly will most likely decide in their upcoming session whether Richmond, Petersburg, or both can host a casino. Pending that GA approval, the casino would then still need voter approval in either city (or both).
 

The Virginia Mercury’s Graham Moomaw has an interesting report on the State’s attempts to regulate Delta 8, a quasi-legal, still-get-you-high hemp derivative. Regulation of marijuana and marijuana-adjacent substances is such a mess right now in Virginia. I wish we’d hurry up, fully legalize retail sales, and get some standards in place. What we’ve got now is definitely suboptimal.
 

NBC12’s Henry Graff has a small update on the constellation of people eyeing Rep. McEachin’s 4th District congressional seat, reporting that Leon Benjamin, the Republican who ran against McEachin this past November, will not run in the special election.
 

Also election-related, I hadn’t seen this confirmed anywhere yet, but the Richmond Free Press’s Jeremy Lazarus reports that 3rd District City Councilmember Anne-Frances Lambert will run for the 79th House of Delegates district in the upcoming 2023 election. Lambert will be able to keep her Council seat while running for a General Assembly seat.
 

Alert! The Christmas Parade begins its steady march down Broad Street tomorrow at 10:00 AM. This means lots of charming Richmond things—like Nutzy, stormtroopers, and high school bands—but it also means street closures and bus detours. Take note if you’ve got to move about the city tomorrow, and keep an eye on the weather if you’re planning on attending the parade. NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says “rain is LIKELY tomorrow…it won’t be heavy but bring rain gear if you are headed to the Christmas Parade.” Also, I’m never not laughing at this video of the crowd reactions to the time in 2010 when Rudolph got impaled on the stoplight at Meadow.
 

This morning’s longread

Housing Breaks People’s Brains

Folks often do a whole lot of mental gymnastics when they argue against building more housing—in ways they wouldn’t when arguing against building more widgets or whatever.
 

Shortage denialism, which I have observed in my own reporting, and supply skepticism, which these researchers revealed through their survey data, are related phenomena. Not only are they false, but they are false in the same direction. They push against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes. After all, if there is no shortage or if building new homes doesn’t reduce rents, then no one has to tackle NIMBYism, no one has to work to bring down housing-construction costs, and no one needs to build millions of new homes in America’s cities and suburbs. In fact, this magical thinking goes, we can fix our housing crisis without changing much of anything at all.
 

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