Good morning, RVA: Boosters on their way, more apartment buildings, and lots of trees

I would like to replace every vacant, one-story warehouse in a residential
neighborhood with homes for people. But that's just me!

Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and here, in the middle of October, is fall! Today you can expect highs in the 60s and lots of sunshine. Early this morning it might just be the perfect time to sit on a porch wrapped in a blanket drinking a hot beverage.

Water cooler

Last Thursday and Friday, an FDA advisory committee met and recommended boosters for both the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. The Moderna recommendations generally fall in line with the Pfizer recommendations from a couple weeks back—six months out from your second dose, older folks, people with an increased chance of severe illness due to COVID-19, that sort of thing. The J&J recommendations, however, include any J&Jer who received their single shot at least two months earlier, which is basically all J&Jers. In fact, some on the FDA committee argued that this is not a J&J booster at all, but the second of what, from the get-go, should have been a two-dose vaccine. There was also some conversation about recommending mixing and matching vaccine types, but no decisions made. You can read more in the New York Times. What's next? This coming Wednesday and Thursday a CDC advisory committee will meet to talk through the FDA advisory committee's recommendations, which puts us on a path to more people eligible for more boosters as early as this weekend.

Last week I linked to Kenya Hunter's three-part series on the racial disparities facing Maggie Walker Governor's School over in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (here's part one of the series, in case you missed it). Megan Pauly at VPM sat down with Hunter to talk about the whys and hows of putting together such an expansive piece—one that took six months to report! I love when reporters talk to other reporters about their process. You often end up learning some extra notes and anecdotes that never made it into the final piece or got cut by an editor along the way.

Mike Platania at Richmond Biz Sense has a great example of A+ infill in Jackson Ward: "The property’s owner...is seeking to raze the vacant, one-story warehouse. The new building, with 13 apartments above ground-floor commercial space, would go up in its place, city documents show." This proposed development would have ZERO off-street parking spaces, which is incredible and totally appropriate for an apartment building in this part of town.

Also in Richmond BizSense, Jonathan Spiers has photos from the 12-story tower now under construction in Scott's Addition, which, once completed will be the tallest building in the neighborhood. Check out some of the east-looking views from the top of that building. I have no interest in living in an apartment building in Scott's Addition at this stage in my life, but, dang! That'd be a heckuva living room view.

Via /r/rva, this beautiful photo of downtown taken 400 feet above Forest Hill Park. That part of Southside is just so full of trees, and you can really feel the full tree vibes from this perspective.

Finally, I liked this Twitter thread of progressive Golden Age Superman comics. While today's Man of Steel is currently fighting for climate reform by joining protests, Golden Age Superman was busy burning oil wells to the ground, razing car factories, and forcing a reckoning for politicians who refuse to do anything about traffic violence.

This morning's longread
The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants

This is obvious—that online shopping returns do not end up back with the retailer, ready for someone else to buy—but I'd just never thought about it before now. Time to stop bracketing (which, I learned, is the name for when you buy a size smaller and larger of thing to make sure you get one that fits)!

It sounds harmful and inefficient—all the box trucks and tractor trailers and cargo planes and container ships set in motion to deal with changed minds or misleading product descriptions, to say nothing of the physical waste of the products themselves, and the waste created to manufacture things that will never be used. That’s because it is harmful and inefficient. Retailers of all kinds have always had to deal with returns, but processing this much miscellaneous, maybe-used, maybe-useless stuff is an invention of the past 15 years of American consumerism. In a race to acquire new customers and retain them at any cost, retailers have taught shoppers to behave in ways that are bad for virtually all involved.

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