🌳 Good morning, RVA: School Board follow up, ADUs, and planting trees

Good morning, RVA! It’s 61 °F, and what a beautiful day we’ve got ahead of us! Expect highs around 80 °F, sunshine, and an overwhelming urge to spend at least 30 minutes zoned out in the shade of a tree. Soak it up for the next few days, because it looks like rain will move in on Saturday.
 

Water cooler

OK, a day later and we’ve got some follow up on the RPS School Board’s decision to modify the specialty school selection process to prioritize economically disadvantaged students. First, the Superintendent himself, in last night’s RPS Direct, says, “Then, when it comes time to apply for anything selective – like specialty high schools – we pretend the educational race is fair. But it’s not. In truth, low income children begin the race several yards behind the starting line. The changes adopted last night will make it a bit fairer by giving a small boost to the very talented low-income students who’ve been working themselves to the bone to win the race – despite starting well behind their higher income peers.” Second, Tracy Sears at WTVR has a recap of the School Board meeting with video of a couple public comments.
 

VPM’s Connor Scribner reminds me that City Council punted their decision on the ADUs Everywhere ordinance (ORD. 2023–196) to this fall so it’d better line up with the AirBnb ordinance (ORD. 2023–235). Scribner reports that Planning Commission recommended the ADU ordinance for approval, and it now sits on full Council’s agenda for their September 25th meeting. Should this ordinance pass, and I think it will, folks could build a small, additional unit in their back yards without having to ask the City for a Special Use Permit—a process that can take forever and involves both Planning Commission and full City Council. It’s an easy policy change that will give more people more places to live, and, as we learned in yesterday’s longread, that’s one of the best ways to keep housing affordable.
 

Wyatt Gordon at Greater Greater Washington has a nice overview of Sauer’s plans to redevelop all the land they own surrounding the Whole Foods at Hermitage and Broad. The renderings—which are, of course, just renderings so scroll past them with a grain of salt—show a really lovely urban neighborhood with a lot of mixed density and open spaces. As outgoing Deputy Director of Planning Maritza Pechin (RIP) says, “It certainly is exactly what we wanted to see happen with underutilized and vacant land along the Pulse corridor.”
 

I’m a big fan of both Cobra Cabana and Hot for Pizza, so you can definitely expect to find me at the owners’ new Space Mountain Hi-Fi, a “small space [that] is begging people to come drink liquor and swim into the sounds.” I mean, for someone who thinks that live music is too loud and involves too many other humans, how good is this: “Space Mountain’s capacity would be capped at around 15 people and while the audio quality would be high, the music would be played at a ‘very low decibel rate.’” It’s like they’re reading my (quiet and introverted) mind! Anyway, 15 seats is a tiny, tiny number, and I’m really interested to see how this place turns out. Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has more details.
 

Looking for a volunteer opportunity? The James River Association has partnered with the East End Branch Library to implement a green infrastructure site plan, and, on September 29th and 30th, needs folks to come out and help plant trees and shrubs. That’s a ways off, but these volunteer slots fill up fast, so if you want to get your hands dirty go sign up this morning! If you’re really interested, you can flip through the supporting documents for UDC 2022–19, in which Council’s Urban Design Committee approved this very site plan almost an entire year ago. I love nothing more than a good plant palette PDF.
 

This morning’s longread

Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England

Worth tapping through just to take a look at William Hogarth’s Gin Lane engraving.
 

Put simply, gin hit early modern drinkers differently, offering “not a gradual descent into inebriation” (in James Nicholls’s phrase) but instantaneous and extreme drunkenness. From this potency stemmed a range of unusual and frightening side-effects, widely rehearsed by eighteenth-century commentators, including immorality, criminality, madness, compulsive intoxication, and death. As one anonymous 1736 author observed, “by taking a small quantity people were almost in an instant rendered so much intoxicated as to lose the use of their reason, and all command over themselves”, and were “induced to commit the most wicked or extravagant enormities”. Likewise, in her 1750 treatise aimed at female gin drinkers, Eliza Haywood warned that whereas conventional beverages made their consumers “sullen, sleepy, or extravagantly gay”, gin made them “bold, obstinate, and filled with an extravagant desire of doing mischief…we may say that dram-drinking is the most expeditious way to deprive mankind of their reason…by substituting a temporary, and in time a constant frenzy in its stead”. The following year, another anonymous writer agreed that “[i]ts baneful influence reaches their [consumers’] very souls; every virtuous principle is eradicated and destroyed”.
 

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Picture of the Day

Richmond’s El Dorado, the road to Hardywood.