🥺 Good morning, RVA: School Board hopelessness, affordable housing everywhere, and a plan for Shockoe

Good morning, RVA! It’s 66 °F, and highs today should stick around in the upper 80s. Honestly, looks like a pretty pleasant day ahead of us! NBC12’s Andrew Freiden says a cold front will come through tomorrow, setting us up fro some excellent Thursday weather. Get excited!
 

Water cooler

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Kenya Hunter has the update from last night’s RPS School Board meeting during which they…actually, I’m still kind of confused on what they decided to do. It sounds like the Board (well, the same five-member voting bloc of boardmembers) has now required Superintendent Kamras to issue an RFP for the design of a school to replace George Wythe High School by the end of August, despite RPS not having the staff hired to do so until October. If you’re a resident of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th Districts, your school board rep is part of the voting bloc that refuses to compromise, continues to delay action, and sets unrealistic goals for the school district and its staff. It’s embarrassing and doesn’t give me a whole lot of hope for the next three years of this Board’s tenure. If you’d like to drop your rep an email, you can find all of their contact information here. Honestly though, they’re so dug in at this point I’m not sure what you’d say to change any minds. Maybe it’s worth copying your councilmember and taking a screenshot of your email to post publicly on social media? I dunno, like I said, I’ve got a real dark feeling of hopelessness.
 

City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meets today with a packed and interesting agenda. Up first, they’ll, once again, consider the Richmond 300 amendment resolution (RES. 2021-R026). I wish this resolution would take its jumbled list of inappropriate and conflicting changes to our award-winning master plan and just go away. Second, Councilmember Jones has introduced RES. 2021-R043, which asks the CAO to prepare “an affordable housing plan for each Council District that distributes as equally as possible affordable housing options across the Council District.” I think this is an interesting resolution! From the background section of the paper: “As detailed in the Affordable Housing Plan and Biennial Real Estate Strategy approved by Council, there are 76 [city-owned] parcels dedicated to affordable housing. However, a majority of the parcels are concentrated in the 6th District.” 31 parcels, in fact, are in the 6th—16 more than in any other district. This is probably the result of a million things: Land and housing values, zoning, the incredibly successfully efforts to prevent dense and new housing by folks in the more affluent parts of our city, racism. It is, of course, harder and more expensive to create affordable housing in the 1st District than it is in the 6th District exactly because of all of those things. However, I like how the summary section of this paper frames it: Each district bears a responsibility to address the affordable housing crisis. That’ll mean different strategies in the 1st than in the 7th, but it’s our responsibility to figure out those strategies. Finally, if you still don’t believe there’s an affordable housing crisis, tune in to today’s meeting to catch a presentation from Javon Burton, Director of Implementation for the Partnership of Housing Affordability. Across our entire region—in Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover—rent increases have outpaced income increases, and 32% of households are cost-burdened. Think about that next time you hear councilmembers and public commenters wringing their hands about building 10-story buildings on literal Broad Street.
 

The City kicked off the public engagement process for their Draft Shockoe Small Area Plan yesterday. You can download the 213-page document here, but don’t be deterred by page count alone! The Department of Planning and Development Review has gotten pretty good at making readable PDFs over the last couple of years, this one included. You’ll see a lot of Richmond 300 vibes once you start scrolling through the document. I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but it’d be huge to add that amount of public green space to what’s basically a broiling asphalt desert (p. 30). Also, apropos of the previous paragraph, check out page 27 for the extreme lack of affordable housing within this plan’s study area (and within a 10-minute walk from the two nearby Pulse stations). In-person public comment opportunities start at the end of the month, and you can always leave comments using Konveio or fill out this general comment form until August 27th.
 

Never in one million years would I have guessed that local hotel magnate Neil Amin would end up appointed as the chair of the State’s Cannabis Control Authority Board of Directors. But here we are! You can read through the full list of the Governor’s appointments in this release over on his website. The Governor also appointed members to the Cannabis Equity Reinvestment Board and the Cannabis Public Health Advisory Board.
 

This morning’s longread

Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement on Decision to Decline Tenure Offer at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to Accept Knight Chair Appointment at Howard University

The whole Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure situation went down while I was on vacation, so maybe it’s old news. That said, her statement is still worth reading.
 

How could I believe I’d be able to exert academic freedom with the school’s largest donor so willing to disparage me publicly and attempt to pull the strings behind the scenes? Why would I want to teach at a university whose top leadership chose to remain silent, to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight Chair before me? Or for a university overseen by a board that would so callously put politics over what is best for the university that we all love? These times demand courage, and those who have held the most power in this situation have exhibited the least of it.
 

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Picture of the Day