🏫 Good morning, RVA: Uncouth Fox thoughts, retail marijuana, and multimodal transportation

Good morning, RVA! It’s 26 °F, but later today we should see temperatures around 60 °F and the beginning of a great stretch of warm-for-February weather. With the sun setting at 5:51 PM, there’s even a little extra time to get out there and enjoy it!
 

Water cooler

As Fox Elementary students head back to (virtual) school today and as Richmond Public Schools searches for a long-term temporary home, I feel like I have enough space from Friday’s fire to start thinking through my uncouth political and urbanist questions. If you’re a member of the Fox community and it’s too soon for you to think through some of these questions, I totally understand if you throw this email into the garbage! With that said, presented in no particular order:
 

• The biggest, most headline-grabbing issue in replacing Fox Elementary will almost certainly be the lack of progress in replacing another school: George Wythe. It’s taken forever and a day to make even the babiest of steps towards replacing George Wythe High School, and any rapid movement on building a brand new Fox while Wythe sits untouched will be met with plenty of justifiable community anger.
• It makes me wonder who on School Board or City Council will use the pressing need to replace Fox as leverage to push either the 1,600-seat or 2,000-seat plans for a George Wythe replacement (the former favored by the School Board’s majority voting bloc, the latter, I think, the correct path forward).
• RPS currently lacks the staff to manage building a single school, let alone two. In fact, the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Chris Suarez reported last week that Boardmember Jonathan Young wants to cut two construction management jobs from Superintendent Kamras’s budget. Living into their “schools build schools” mantra just got twice as hard for the School Board, and I’m not sure the District, at the moment, has all the resources they need to make a successful go at it.
• State Senator McClellan is a Fox parent herself and chairs the School Construction and Modernization Commission. Plus, she has a bill floating around the General Assembly to allow localities to levy a new sales tax to use for construction and renovation of schools. McClellan is one of the best and most effective legislators we’ve got, and I’m interested to see if she can squeeze any support out of the State.
• What’s up with the City’s debt capacity? How will the insurance money impact that limit? If there is insurance money, but it doesn’t cover the entire replacement of the school, will Richmond even be able to borrow enough money to fund construction?
• Probably my most uncouth thought: How will not having a school in the Fan impact real estate prices? Fox being “one of the good schools” (which, to be clear, is an incredibly harmful narrative) is a main reason mostly white, mostly affluent families move to the Fan. If it takes half a decade to rebuild Fox what happens? If students get relocated to Clark Springs Elementary in Randolph, what happens to housing over there?
• City Council elections are just two years away, and I don’t think we’ll have a new Fox Elementary by then. The 2nd District School Board and City Council races will almost certainly revolve around how the current representatives have handled this crisis.
• I’m excited to see what building an new, urban school on a smallish piece of land looks like in the 2020s. What if RPS built dense, deeply affordable housing on half the property?

This is certainly not a complete list, and we’ll most likely uncover 100 more issues to discuss over the next couple of years. Losing a school is a tragic and rare event, so people are understandably shocked, exhausted, and unmoored. Replacing a school is also a rare event (as we’ve seen with George Wythe), and I can’t help but be fascinated by the process.
 

Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury reports that legal retail marijuana sales may be a lot closer than even I thought possible—as soon as this September. This new, earlier date comes from SB 391, which just passed the Senate yesterday and now heads to an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled House. As with all things GA-related, nothing’s done until it’s signed by the Governor!
 

Our big, regional transportation planning group, PlanRVA, has put together a draft of a regional bike and pedestrian plan, and they’d like your feedback on it. The purpose of this document is, in its own words, “to update the 2004 Richmond Regional Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan.” 18 years ago! A lot has changed since our region’s last bike/ped plan, and it speaks crappy volumes that almost two decades passed without an update. BikePedRVA 2045, as its call, is a hefty document—clocking in at 124 pages—but a quick scroll through should give you the gist. I particularly like the maps of a neighborhood’s existing bike and pedestrian infrastructure with the important gaps highlighted (check out page 60 for an example). Honestly, it’s a little overwhelming to form coherent thoughts on such an enormous and broad document, so, if you can make it, consider attending the webinar at 2:00 PM tomorrow to learn more. The public comment period for BikePedRVA 2045 is open through March 23rd.
 

Via /r/rva, this great picture of multimodal transportation.
 

This morning’s longread

An Unsolicited Streaming App Spec

This man, John Siracusa, is a very opinionated tech podcaster, writer, and person-on-the-internet. I’m not sure how he’s built a public persona around having strong opinions on everyday things (like toaster ovens), but I really enjoy it. I don’t always agree with his strong opinions, but I pumped my fist in the air over this piece about how nearly every streaming app fails at the very basics.
 

I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps. Most of them fall short of my expectations. Here, then, is a simple specification for a streaming video app. Follow it, and your app will be well on its way to not sucking. This spec includes only the basics. It leaves plenty of room for apps to differentiate themselves by surprising and delighting their users with clever features not listed here. But to all the streaming app developers out there, please consider covering these fundamentals before working on your Unique Selling Proposition…These are the bare-bones basics.
 

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
 

Picture of the Day

Good morning, ivy.