🦛 Good morning, RVA: Medium COVID-19 levels, new housing data, and round one of a casino battle

Good morning, RVA! It’s 30 °F, which is colder than it’s been in a minute. Today you can expect highs in the mid 40s, which, again, will definitely feel chiller than the last couple of days. However! The sun will come out, stay out, and that’s something I’m looking forward to. You can expect more of the same over the next couple of days, slightly warmer temperatures, and a pretty decent weekend weatherwise!
 

Water cooler

As of last night, all three of Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have medium CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 107, 168, and 147, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 14.3. Another week in 2023, and another week with our region at a medium COVID-19 Community Level—although I’d consider all of these numbers pretty meaty for medium. You should keep that in mind as you assess your own person risk budget! As for me, I’m continuing to: Wear a mask on the bus and in crowded public places (like VCU basketball games), test before heading off to big gatherings, and wash my hands frequently because I feel really accomplished when my Apple Watch is like “You did! You washed your hands, guy! Great work!” While we’re on the subject, Katelyn Jetelina took notes from yesterday’s VRBPAC meeting—the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee—at which experts sorted through data in hopes of coming up with a longterm COVID-19 vaccination strategy. It’s still early, but it sounds like we’re headed towards annual vaccinations, just like flu, sometime in the fall.
 

Earlier this week, the Partnership for Housing Affordability released an update to the Richmond Regional Housing Framework Data that you’re definitely going to want to spend some time with. It’s not all bad, but I’ve cherry-picked some quotes that’ll either bum you out or maybe move you to action:
 

• Black and Hispanic households consistently have the lowest median incomes, along with multiracial households in Henrico and Richmond.
• White households in the Richmond area are the only group with a homeownership rate above 70 percent.
• The average market asking rent in the region reached a two-decade high of $1,395 in the first quarter of 2022.
• The median incomes for renters in Chesterfield and Hanover—at least from 2016 to 2020—could afford average rents. That was not the case for Henrico and Richmond, where the monthly rental price affordability gaps were $20 and $218, respectively.
• [In Richmond] the greatest need still remains for households making below 30 percent Area Median Income; there was a shortage of nearly 11,000 rental homes for extremely low-income households.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, checkout theses two-page summaries for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield.
 

Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on the battle in the General Assembly between Richmond and Petersburg to host an urban casino. Martz says round one goes to Petersburg after a Senate subcommittee voted 7–2 to allow that city to hold a public referendum on their proposed casino project. However! Nothing is ever done in the GA until the session wraps up and the legislators scuttle back to wherever they came from, so this certainly could end up going either way—or both ways! The House should take up their version of this bill soon, so stay tuned.
 

NBC12’s Henry Graff has a quick article about some potential traffic calming projects coming to Richmond’s streets (see below for how folks will likely react). Most interesting to me is a plan to add curb extensions to Main and Cary in an attempt to narrow the road at intersections and slow down drivers. I’m into it! We’ve got to do something to discourage folks from using Main/Cary as a toll-free version of the Downtown Expressway, and maybe this it. Maybe reverting the pair back to two-way streets would do it, too? We’ve got a lot of options and we should start experimenting—heck, if we wanted to, we could even pilot the curb extensions with big orange barrels today.
 

I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, but RPS posted the video from last night’s combined School Board and City Council budget meeting. It’s a short meeting—as far as these two bodies are concerned—at just under an hour and a half. Play it back at 2x speed and that’s totally doable during your commute today!
 

Warning: This video of the new baby hippo at the Richmond Zoo is very cute.
 

This morning’s longread

The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift

I think we all know that some folks will battle to the death over changing our streets to make them safer for everyone. But after the bike lanes go in, the world keeps turning, and businesses even see an increase in sales, those same people will refuse to admit it! Amazing and, unfortunately, kind of predictable.
 

How had the businesses on that street fared? Quite well, it turns out. In the year after the bike lanes arrived, businesses on Skillman saw sales rise by 12 percent, compared to 3 percent for Queens in general. What’s more, that section of road saw new businesses open, while Queens overall had a net loss. The thing is, the actual merchants along Skillman? They didn’t believe it. When Coburn spoke to them and described what he’d found, only a few store owners admitted the lanes had helped. Many still insisted the lanes were killing their part of the city. And emotions ran hot: Someone scattered tacks on the bike lane. This little parable turns out to be a fascinating glimpse at the challenges cities face as they try to update their urban infrastructure—to clean up the air, reduce greenhouse emissions, and speed up travel by making towns more bike-friendly.
 

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

Picture of the Day

The neighborhood alleys have decided Christmas is over. FINE. I GUESS.