Good morning, RVA: 705 • 7; open streets everywhere but here; and a Rodney Robinson appearance

Good morning, RVA! It’s 61 °F, and that’s about the high for today. We’ve got a chance of rain today and maybe every day for the rest of this week. I’m…not looking forward to spending even more time indoors.

Water cooler

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 705 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 7 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 53 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 29, Henrico: 26, and Richmond: 17). Since this pandemic began, 160 people have died in the Richmond region. Despite the relatively low number of new cases in the City, Richmond saw more new cases reported over the weekend than ever before (147). In good data news, VDH has update their dashboard to now show percent positivity by health district (tap on “Testing” and then you can select a locality from the drop down). Remember: 7-day positivity rate has become the go-to metric for the governor in his phased recovery plan, and now we’ve got the ability to see that metric change over time. Richmond’s 7-day positivity rate is 25.8% and has increased each of the last eight days. Chesterfield’s remains mostly flat around 11%, and Henrico’s sits at 13.7% having increased from 10.7% since May 12th. Turns out, jurisdictions are different, and the availability of more and more data continues to highlight the inequitable effects the coronavirus. To whit, over the weekend, Sabrina Moreno and Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch looked at the disparate impact COVID-19 has on Black and Latino communities: “Hispanic Virginians make up almost 30% of cases despite being only 9% of the state population. Black residents are 16% of cases, and almost 20% of the population, but in Richmond, make up 16 of the 18 deaths. One is Hispanic and one is not reported.” Additionally, Kate Masters at the Virginia Mercury continues her excellent healthdata reporting and has a good piece on how the Commonwealth still fails to meet the governor’s stated metrics for safely moving into recovery. Masters’s piece will also give you some insight into how the data available from VDH has changed, sometimes abruptly, over the last couple of months—much to the dismay of spreadsheetidemiologists and local policy makers alike.

The City’s Planning Commission meets today to hear a presentation on Richmond 300, and you can take a peek at the slides beforehand. First, the draft of the plan drops on May 26th! That’s pretty exciting. Second, you should gird yourself for a bunch of topic- and geography-focused (virtual) meetings in June. Also, if you scroll down a bit in that PDF, you can see the results of the Planning for a Post-Pandemic Society survey I linked to a couple weeks back. Of particular interest to me is page 11 which shows responses to “Which features do you think individuals will want their neighborhoods to have in a post-pandemic society?” Top four answers: Sidewalks, a public park within a short walk, a commercial area within a short walk, and bike lanes. People want safe, easy ways to get to the things they need to live a thriving life—without a car! To prepare for this—while addressing folks' health and safety needs—the City can and should pilot dozens of miles of slow/open streets all over the place. Honestly, the City should have done this months ago, but, for whatever reason, it has not. In fact, when places like Ashland are piloting open streets and talking about making them permanent, it feels like our City’s leadership actively does not want this sort of thing to happen. You should ask them why not ([email protected] and City Council contact information).

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says City Council will take the next baby steps forward in figuring out what to do with the area around the Coliseum, aka NoBro, aka the ex-Navy Hill project. At tomorrow’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee meeting Council will consider RES. 2020-R034, which would declare a handful of downtown properties as surplus—something they’ve got to do before issuing Requests for Proposal for future development. I’d like to pause a moment to remind Council that they very much wanted to complete a small area plan for that neighborhood before the City issued any new RFPs. Spiers points out that a plan is mentioned in the resolution’s notes, but, regardless, I wanted to say it out loud while making a concerned face. Probably the biggest single misstep of the entire Navy Hill situation was the lack of public engagement at the RFP-stage of the process. Let’s not go through that whole thing again, OK? Side note: There’s a lot of interesting stuff on the Land Use, Housing and Transportation committee’s agenda for tomorrow, and you can see what I’m tracking on this public Trello board.

That Graduate Together 2020 video you may have seen floating around featured Richmond’s own National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson! It also featured other people you may have heard of like “Barack Obama” and “LeBron James”—neither of those people are from Richmond, though. Robinson says some of his words got cut for airtime, but you can read the entirety of his segment over on his Twitter.

Employment note! The Virginia Department of Health is hiring 1,300 contact tracers. I honestly have no idea what’s involved in contact tracing, but it does sound kind of like being a disease detective? VDH wants interested folks to contact one of the staffing agencies found in this PDF.

This morning’s longread

F*ck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.

This is some good, good writing.

I call my mother. “I can’t find bread flour or yeast anywhere.” “F*ck the bread,” says my mother. “The bread is over.” In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.

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