🌱 Good morning, RVA: School funding, public housing, and tree planting

Good morning, RVA! It’s 38 °F, and that’s serious jacket weather. Highs today will settle into the mid 60s, though—which is less serious jacket weather, so you have some choices to make this morning. Temperatures look similarly brisk throughout the weekend, and there’s a possibility of rain on Sunday.

Water cooler

Justin Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says the Virginia Board of Education approved changes to the state’s Standards of Quality 💸, one of the formulas that determines how much money each school gets from the State. What does that really mean? “The revised standards call for roughly $950 million in recurring funding to be spent on more reading specialists, smaller class sizes and money specifically for schools serving students from low-income families, among other things.” But what does it really, really mean? The Governor needs to put the extra $950 million in his budget, and then the General Assembly needs to approve said budget. It’s hard not to draw a bright and direct line between this and the elections on November 5th when every single member of the General Assembly is up for reelection. Will a Republican-majority GA fund almost a billion more dollars for schools serving low-income families? I dunno, but folks should ask them.

Public housing is so super complex, and I definitely do not know enough about the inner workings of the federal funding process to say smart things about it—so keep that in mind. But! This Mark Robinson update in the RTD on RRHA’s Choice Neighborhods Planning Grant application seems bad. While this specific grant was smallish—“just” $350,000 for planning—the feedback on the application from HUD confirms what housing and tenant advocates have said for the last forever: Residents were not sufficiently involved in the process. Robinson says that, “RRHA’s grant application received three of nine possible points for resident and community engagement. It also received two of 10 possible points for ‘likelihood of implementation,’ including zero of four possible points for local government support.” See? Seems bad.

Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania checked in on the new Blanchard’s Coffee spot that just opened on Broad Street (literally adjacent to the Scott’s Addition Pulse station). I stopped by earlier this week and ordered the absolutely charming coffee pictured above.

Brendan King at WTVR says that last week a driver hit and seriously injured a pedestrian near the 7–11 off Belvidere. Not to point too fine a point on it, but I hadn’t even heard about this crash until this morning, and I certainly haven’t seen elected officials calling for a meeting with the heads of the Richmond Police Department or the Department of Public Works to figure out how to make Belvidere Street a safer place for people. It’s clearly an unsafe and dangerous stretch of road. Related: It does sound like the RPD has ramped up their speeding enforcement, at least on the Southside. They’ve issued 2,306 more speeding tickets than at this same point last year. Meanwhile, in Chesterfield County, people driving cars killed two pedestrians in three days.

Some NoBro updates! First, the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission will meet on Saturday from 9:00 AM–12:00 PM at the Richmond Police Training Academy (1202 W. Graham Road). On the agenda (PDF): Discussion of the project’s financial model and its estimated annual impact to the City’s General Fund. I’m hoping that they’ll look into those first 6–10 years (according to their projections) where the project is still under construction but not yet generating a surplus. This is absolutely a public meeting so, if banging your head against some complex municipal finance mechanisms sounds like a great way to spend your Saturday morning, get out there and do some civic duty. Second, I uploaded about 8.5 hours of audio from various NoBro-related public meetings to The Boring Show podcast. We’ve got the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission’s October 5th meeting, City Council’s third Navy Hill Development Proposal Work Session from October 14th, and this week’s Planning Commission special meeting. This, of course, is not an amount of information that any normal person could possibly consume, and it does feel a little bit like flooding the zone. But, there’s definitely no shortage of opportunities for folks to get involved in this portion of the process.

Do you like planting trees? Trick question! Everyone likes planting trees! The Science Museum of Virginia needs volunteers to help plant 50 native trees along a path that will, fingers crossed, provide a safe way for pedestrian/bikes to get between Scott’s Addition and the Fan. If this sounds like a better way to spend your Saturday morning than banging your head against complex municipal finance mechanisms, meet in the parking lot next to the Dome at 9:00 AM. You can RSVP over on Eventbrite.

This morning’s patron longread

Why are these L.A. people sleeping in stacked pods? It’s not just the cost of housing

Submitted by Patron Alexis. I dunno—for the right moment in time and the right stage in life, pod housing seems kind of neat?

Space-maximizing pod housing makes up a tiny part of the city’s overall housing mix, but it quietly is popping up in neighborhoods all around Los Angeles right now. It may well have moved in somewhere near you so discreetly that you don’t even know. In the middle of an affordable housing crisis, it’s easy enough to understand why what was once aimed mostly at short stays — tourists, new transplants — is now also being taken up as a long-term housing option. But headlines tend to emphasize space versus cost — sometimes more than $1,000 for glorified bunk beds. And if you stop right there and roll your eyes and say, “For that price why not rent a private room with a door?,” I think you might miss some of what is driving this kind of communal living.

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This morning’s Instagram