🐏 Good morning, RVA: The Big Risk, a new path in Monroe Park, and the #25 VCU Rams

Good morning, RVA! It’s 57 °F, and it’s probably going to rain later this afternoon. Bring your rain jacket or your umbrella, and keep the weather map handy if you’re out there walking, biking, or busing around!

Water cooler

Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch spent at least part of his Saturday morning at the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission meeting and has the recap, for which we are all very thankful. Robinson highlights what I think is the Big Risk with the NoBro project: “In the first five years, the city would commit an estimated $17 million worth of downtown tax growth to repay investors in the arena portion of the project, said John Gerner, vice chairman of the Navy Hill Development Advisory Commission. That money would otherwise go to the general fund…” And here’s the City’s response: “The city’s financial advisors, as well as our third-party consultant, have shown that the project could perform at less than half of our current projections and the city would still come out ahead.” I think both of these statements can be true. Even if NoBro hits all of its projections and is a net benefit for the City after 30 years, there will still be a period of time where there is no surplus revenue coming from the project AND the TIF is capturing all of the real estate tax growth coming from Downtown. Can Richmond maintain the momentum we have and the progress we’re making now for the next half dozen years without the projected, organic growth from a huge swath of Downtown? Is it worth that medium term risk for the potential long term pay off? Do we have a plan to raise more money to keep things humming along while we build a bunch of stuff Downtown? I’m really, really uninterested in revisiting Richmond’s old, broken strategy of not increasing taxes while deferring critical investment in basic services—it sucked, and we’re still trying to get back to a baseline after a couple decades of that garbage. Anyway, that’s the Big Risk, in my opinion. Rodrigo Arriaza at Richmond Magazine has a few more quotes from the meeting if you’re interested.

Richmond City Council’s Public Safety Committee and Land Use, Housing and Transportation Committee will meet today. The former will consider both the distracted driving ordinance (ORD. 2019–288) and the stolen firearm ordinance (ORD. 2019–289) that the Mayor introduced a while back. The latter will take a look at a bunch of things (here’s the full agenda (PDF)), but will also ask the state for more funding to replace the bridge over the train tracks on Lombardy just north of the highway (ORD. 2019–280). Because I’m boring, I find the history of this project super interesting. Did you know the current bridge was built in 1901 and widened in 1932? Also that it is a “fracture critical and structurally deficient structure?” Surely this is one of the older bridges in the Richmond, and, while it’s neat, it’s not particularly fun to cross—regardless of your mode of transportation. Anyway, the City’s been scraping together money for the last couple of years to reach the estimated $13.6 million cost to replace the whole thing, add protected bike lanes, better sidewalks, and street scaping. I think we’ll have to continue to scrape for a couple more years to get the entire amount. This is literally the kind of thing I talk to people about at bars and parties.

Here’s a good column in the RTD about the importance of out-of-school time activities and what local organizations are doing to increase the number of those opportunities for kids in Richmond. Since Mayor Stoney kicked off an effort to increase out-of-school time (OST) opportunities across the City, there is now an “OST provider at every elementary and middle school in the city of Richmond and approximately 1,300 students participating in quality OST programs who did not previously have access.”

Whoa, I missed that Monroe Park’s will have its absolutely terrible and incredibly unsafe bike path replaced? I am super unfamiliar with both stone materials and construction methods, so this means nothing to me: “During construction, four inches of the current stone dust will be removed and reused in other projects. The city will also install a stabilizer solution to help with water mitigation in the area.” But stable sounds good and a huge improvement over the current situation.

A 1949 Airstream Trailer is a weird amenity for an apartment building, but, sure, why not.

Here are two posts from /r/rva that, taken together, made me smile this morning: “What’s up with all this garbage by the Manchester climbing wall?” and “Two awesome people came together to clean the Manchester Wall area! RVA is awesome.”

I’ve mostly stopped writing about sports in this space, because every time I do someone yells at me for not including their favorite team from some nearby(ish) city or town. That said, VCU, a sports team from actual Richmond, is ranked #25 in the preseason AP college basketball poll.

This morning’s longread

Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore

I think this concept of the changing definition of work breaking our social rhythms is really interesting. As always with these sorts of articles, remember that digital devices are not synonymous with social media or email clients.

Whereas we once shared the same temporal rhythms—five days on, two days off, federal holidays, thank-God-it’s-Fridays—our weeks are now shaped by the unpredictable dictates of our employers. Nearly a fifth of Americans hold jobs with nonstandard or variable hours. They may work seasonally, on rotating shifts, or in the gig economy driving for Uber or delivering for Postmates. Meanwhile, more people on the upper end of the pay scale are working long hours. Combine the people who have unpredictable workweeks with those who have prolonged ones, and you get a good third of the American labor force. The personalization of time may seem like a petty concern, and indeed some people consider it liberating to set their own hours or spend their “free” time reaching for the brass ring. But the consequences could be debilitating for the U.S. in the same way they once were for the U.S.S.R. A calendar is more than the organization of days and months. It’s the blueprint for a shared life.

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This morning’s Instagram