🏪 Good morning, RVA: Stay healthy for Thanksgiving, zoning ordinance rewrite, and what’s this about convenience stores?

Good morning, RVA! It’s 28 °F, and today we get some incrementally warmer weather with highs right around 60 °F. While the nights are still cold—right around freezing—the next couple of afternoons look pretty pleasant. I think I might go for a walk around the neighborhood today to start preparing my body for the onslaught of food it’s about to endure.
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, Katelyn Jetelina at Your Local Epidemiologist put up a really nice post with some concrete guidance on how to stay safe and protect high-risk and older family members over Thanksgiving. The gist: If you’re planning to see grandma and grandpa (or anyone that’s at high-risk for COVID-19) on Thursday, consider testing both today and tomorrow and wearing a mask if you’re out and about. As I read through Jetelina’s advice, I keep thinking about Figure 15 from this recent CDC report. It shows the proportion of in-hospital deaths due to COVID-19, split out by age and vaccination status. 72% of people over the age of 65 dying from COVID have had just their primary series of the vaccine or a single booster—that’s comparable to the proportion of unvaccinated people aged 50–64 who died from COVID (68%). Older folks need to get that bivalent booster ASAP, if they haven’t already, and everyone else needs to do what they can to keep the more vulnerable members of our communities safe and healthy.
 

City Council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meets today, and you can find the full agenda here. Of deep and burning interest to readers of this newsletter: Kevin Vonk, director of the Department of Planning and Development Review, will give a presentation on the long-awaited complete rewrite of the City’s zoning ordinance. I really like this presentation! It runs through a bunch of slides stating what a new zoning ordinance will do—stuff like, “allow for neighborhoods to evolve without losing their foundation of order” and “align the maximum development potential of a parcel with the existing and future capacity of transportation networks and public infrastructure” and even “more appropriately regulate structural form, more specifically in established neighborhoods, and more architecturally in old and historic districts.” Check out slides 16–19 for how the process will work and slide 25 for an estimated timeline. It’s a big project to tackle, so I’m not surprised that Vonk thinks the entire process will take at least two years. Also of note on LUHT’s agenda, RES. 2022-R073, which would kick off the rezoning process to…ban a lot of convenience stores? Submitted by Councilmembers Robertson and Lambert, this resolution would remove convenience stores as a permitted use from a lot of existing zoning districts and, instead, have them “be regulated through either a neighborhood-based convenience store overlay district…or the conditional use permit process.” I have no idea what is going on here and would like to learn more. Regardless of the intent behind this paper (which, conspiratorially and baselessly, I think is to address a specific convenience store in the 6th District), using the zoning ordinance as a cudgel to bang away at a specific problem in one council district seems incredibly counter to the thoughtful goals laid out in the above zoning rewrite.
 

Tony Harris at RVA Mag has a list of dive bars that complements yesterday’s list from /r/rva. Importantly, he’s gone on record with his own definition of a dive bar: “A dive bar is anti trendy. There is no jumping on the newest anything, it is a bar with cheap drinks, sometimes decent food, and a bunch of regulars.” I guess by this definition, you can’t open a new dive bar, because you need regulars. I guess you could open a new bar with the intent to become a dive bar? 🤔
 

Via /r/rva 18 pictures of reptiles and amphibians found in and around the city. These are really neat, and I learned that “herping season” is a thing and that it is winding down for the year.
 

This morning’s longread

The Remedy — Grandma Lacey’s Cornbread

To me, nothing beats a story about family told through a recipe—especially something as delicious and iconically Southern as cornbread. Read this piece, and then maybe add cornbread to your Thanksgiving spread (if it’s not already on the menu!).
 

To me, love looks like a pan of hot cornbread. Salt. Cornmeal. A little flour. Cornbread is the first food I learned to cook. Girls in the South tend to learn the ways of the kitchen early; at age 11, I was overdue. I was tired of being the string bean snapper, relegated to the back porch with a big pan and a bag of beans while my older cousins chopped, seasoned, and fried their way toward womanhood. They looked so grown, tending a stove full of boiling pots, teasing each other and whispering secrets. I envied them. That summer, my mama’s mama, Alabama-born Grandma Lacey, declared me ready to cook cornbread and was thereafter my teacher, clucking softly at my heavy handedness with flour.
 

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Picture of the Day

More from InLight—these were floating in a pond!