😟 Good morning, RVA: Rhetoric, naturally-occurring affordable housing, and seclusions

Good morning, RVA! It’s 32 °F, and we’ve got another sunny, crisp day ahead of us. Expect highs in the 50s, which should be the norm until at least this weekend.

Water cooler

Michael Paul Williams at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has his take on this past Monday’s school rezoning meeting and vote 💸. I’d like to liberate from behind the paywall two quotes about the rhetoric used at these meetings. First, from Taikein Cooper: “I’m from Prince Edward County…And I don’t know if you all know the story, but they closed the schools there using the same rhetoric that we’re using here tonight.” Second, what Genevieve Siegel-Hawley said she heard: “…language used to resist desegregation in the past, like the uncompromising mantra of neighborhood schools, the perils of busing and the importance of the freedom to choose.” Keep those quotes in mind as the School Board prepares for their December 16th meeting, when they will take up the Northside rezoning that they were unwilling to vote on earlier this week.

This sounds like a possible bummer: Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports that the folks rehabbing the apartments along Chamberlayne have put the properties up for sale. The rehab work hasn’t stopped, though, which is good. These apartments specifically—and this part of Chamberlayne generally—are some of the densest, transit-adjacent, naturally-occurring affordable housing in the region. Look at the numbers: “The firm has rehabbed nearly 300 of the 692 units, with 160 rehabs currently underway and 250 remaining…Rosa said the units were 50 percent occupied when Equishares took possession, then dropped to about 8 or 10 percent and now stand at about 40 percent occupancy. Totaling more than 458,000 of rentable space, the units average 664 square feet in size, with average monthly rents of $693.” It’s hard not to keep linking to this Twitter thread about market-rate housing compared to NoBro’s promised affordable housing.

A driver hit and killed a person crossing Route 1 in Chesterfield County on Monday. The 6500 block of Jefferson Davis Highway is just south of the city line and, despite incredibly high vehicle speeds and a general lack of sidewalks, folks walk here all the time—especially to the Food Lion on the other side of Chippenham Parkway. This is one reason why Chesterfield piloting bus service on Route 1 this spring is so important. Until serious infrastructure changes are made to Route 1—like adding sidewalks, crosswalks, and maybe even reducing lanes in some spots—providing safes ways of moving around, like the new bus route, will make living along the corridor much, much safer.

Megan Pauly at VPM has a long investigative piece on “seclusions” at the Faison Center out in the West End, and, whoa, intense editor’s note at the top of this piece. Education and disability and the intersection between the two are things I know so little about, but it certainly seems noteworthy that over half of all the private-school seclusions in Virginia take place at this one school. This piece is part of an ongoing series, so keep your eye out for follow-ups.

The RTD’s Mark Robinson says City Council has selected a consulting firm to review NoBro, so you can add C.H. Johnson Consulting Inc. to the stack of folks vetting this project. Honestly, if you’re not vetting NoBro do you even exist?? Pertinent to the overall NoBro timeline, the consultant has 90 days to do their work. That puts us into March, which starts to overlap with the 2020 budget season, which makes my head explode. God speed to us all, but especially to our technically part-time members of City Council (and their poor, poor liaisons).

Looking for a public meeting to attend, this fine Wednesday in December? You’ve got two options. First, the third Shockoe Small Area Plan meeting from 6:00–8:00 PM at the Main Branch of the Richmond Public Library (101 E. Franklin Street). Learn more about the Shockoe Alliance and what they’re working towards with the Shockoe Small Area Plan here. Second, the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission will meet at 6:30 PM in City Council Chambers (900 E. Broad Street) and will discuss affordable housing—with a presentation by Ben Teresa of RVA Eviction Lab fame! I’m…out of jokes about how there’s an endless string of NoBro meetings.

This morning’s longread

Home Is a Mug of Coffee

This illustrated personal essay about coffee (and tea, but mostly coffee) is lovely.

Because yes, I am most certainly an avid tea drinker, and I love nothing more than stuffing my little round strainer with loose-leaf chai or cinnamon-apple rooibos—but there’s something else you should know about me: I also adore coffee.

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This morning’s Instagram