🏢 Good morning, RVA: Rezoning!, equitable access, and Southside density

Good morning, RVA! It’s 40 °F, and it’s rainy. Expect the rain to continue through the morning, with a chance of continuing through the day, too. Temperatures will creep up toward 50 °F later this afternoon, but stall out there. Welcome to your rainy and chilly start to December!

Water cooler

Richmond Police are reporting that this past Thursday morning, they responded to the 2000 block of Creighton Road and found Tyreese J. Barlow, 19, shot to death. Bridget Balch at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says another person was shot and killed on Saturday during a 24-hour period that saw five people shot across the city.

Tonight at 6:30 PM at E.S.H. Greene Elementary School (1745 Catalina Drive) you can attend the (theoretically) final RPS rezoning public hearing. After that hearing, the School Board will roll into their regularly scheduled meeting, receive recommendations from the Rezoning Advisory Committee, and (theoretically) vote on a rezoning proposal. The Superintendent has some thoughts in his email from last week, and you can read the full details of the final four proposals here (PDF) or a short, bullet-point summary of each proposal here (PDF). I don’t know who’ll be in the room where it happens tonight, but, if you’d like live updates, turn to Twitter and keep an eye on @JasonKamras and @jmattingly306. I’ve absolutely no insider knowledge or insight, but, if I had to bet on the outcome of tonight’s vote, I’d either put my money on a vote to delay and not vote at all, or a vote for the status-quo Proposal W. But, who knows! Maybe they’ll surprise me, come up with something different, and push the District to take a strong step towards integrating our schools.

Young people continue to inspire me! Mark Robinson at the RTD sat down with 16-year-old Asia Goode to talk about food deserts on Richmond’s Southside. Goode is working with Lewis Ginter’s Duron Chavis to start a community garden in her neighborhood, Hillside Court, to bring fresh produce to the area. I love this sobering quote from Chavis, “Are [community gardens] helping communities get access to healthy food? Yes. Are they the solution? No. They’re part of a continuum of decisions that need to be made in order to increase access to healthy food in the city.” Tangentially related, David Streever’s Sunday Story for Richmond Magazine has another good Chavis quote, this one on access to green space but could just as easily apply to food access: “Equity-based solutions require people who have a lens on racial justice and a sensitivity to communities of color…That is not only vital, it is the make-or-break point.”

City Council meets today for yet another Navy Hill Development Proposal work session. I don’t see a published agenda for the meeting, but I’m sure it’ll be a blast. Immediately following, Council will slip into something a little more comfortable and host their regularly scheduled Organizational Development committee meeting. You can find the agenda here (PDF), which includes a bunch of presentations on Council priorities like schools, community centers, permitting, and “Economic Revitalization of South Richmond (PDF).” They all sound like interesting presentations, but that last one is the final report out of a task force established back in 2017 and is worth flipping through. I was a little bummed to read through the transportation section and only see stuff about improving truck access to the port, BUT page 12 does include recommendations to add bus stop amenities, plant shade trees, and make vision zero enhancements. Just a wild guess, but economic revitalization of South Richmond will not come solely by making it easier for an endless stream of trucks to quickly pass through South Richmond. Anyway, this is an interesting report—especially the last couple of pages where they asked a ton of City departments what they’d do to improve the area. It’s a neat way to see which departments value what sort of thing. For example, DPU wants as many parcels in the area to use natural gas (duh), and Planning wants the timely adoption of Richmond 300 (also duh).

Talk about density: Developers are looking to bring two 11-story apartments to Manchester—344 units total, J. Elias O’Neal at Richmond BizSense has the details. The towers will sit directly in front of Legend Brewing Co., but are “carefully designed to not obstruct the patio view”—I think that is charmingly small-town of us. It looks like they’ll build 372 parking spots, just slightly more than one per unit. Considering “75 to 80 percent are projected to be one-bedroom units,” I think they could do better (meaning, fewer parking spaces). These will be market-rate units, which, at the moment, rent for below 80% AMI.

/r/rva has pictures of a wild turkey wandering around Nuckols Road out in deep Henrico County—definitely escaped from a Thanksgiving death sentence and now on the lam in suburbia.

This morning’s patron longread

Could New York City Eliminate Free Street Parking?

Submitted by Patron Adam. Richmond has oodles of free and way-too-cheap parking. If we priced all parking at some non-zero amount, what would happen?

Samuel I. Schwartz, who was the city’s traffic commissioner in the 1980s, said allowing on-street parking was “a big mistake.” “That just allowed for the growth of vehicles in neighborhoods that couldn’t really support it,” he said. Besides congestion, the hunt for parking spaces also contributes to air pollution. Emissions from transportation, the majority from passenger vehicles, are the single largest source of greenhouses gases, and the New York region is the country’s biggest contributor of driving-related carbon dioxide emissions. A 2008 study of the Upper West Side found that drivers cruise an average of seven blocks, or more than a third of a mile, before they find an empty space. In one 15-block area, drivers logged a total of 366,000 miles a year looking for spaces.

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This morning’s Instagram