Good morning, RVA: Equality, lawsuits, and cannolis

Good morning, RVA! It’s 38 °F, and, with highs in the mid 40s, today looks appropriately chilly. There’s a teensy chance of rain, but the forecast looks generally dry from now until next week.

Water cooler

Equality Virginia says that the Virginia Values Act (SB 868) passed the Senate again last night and will now officially head to the Governor’s desk. This bill adds sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes and gives folks a way to take legal action if they are discriminated against. It’s so rad to see concrete results of Virginia’s 2018 election so rapidly. We voted, the New Democratic Majority legislated, and now people’s lives in Virginia will be better.

As the Hanover County School Board refuses to rename their schools named after White supremacists, the Hanover County Board of Supervisors has to pick up the legal tab. C. Suarez Rojas at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says that yesterday the Board voted to transfer $75,000 from a contingency fund to cover the costs of an ongoing lawsuit 💸. Richmond and Henrico have both renamed schools, and it was…totally fine. The world did not end, and we—somehow, someway—have not forgotten that the Civil War or Harry F. Byrd existed. Hanover will end up renaming these schools eventually, and every penny spent dragging their feet is a penny spent looking super racist. It’s not a conservative use of money, I’ll tell you that.

A new 75-unit apartment building in Manchester, at Ninth & Porter Streets, will have 78 parking spaces says Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense. Boooo! That spot is a single block from a 15-minute bus line, an extremely short bike ride to the T-Pot Bridge, and a brief walk into the rest of Manchester (assuming you make it across Commerce without getting killed). If the private market isn’t forcing developers to build fewer parking spaces, I’d love to see City Council roll up their sleeves and pass some parking maximums near frequent transit lines. We did see less than 0.5 parking spaces per unit as part of the 12-story building at Broad & Lombardy, which is great, but the Pulse is not the only Good Bus. We’ve got other, high-frequency routes that need dense, transit-oriented development nearby, too!

Jack Jacobs, also at Richmond BizSense, has the details on the completion of the Virginia War Memorial’s new expansion—in memory of Virginian lives lost in “the Global War on Terrorism & Beyond.” I hadn’t really thought about how changes in the way we wage war also change the way we memorialize the dead. Check out the new space, which promises to have a commanding view of the river, this Saturday when the Memorial will host a Dedication Day & Grand Opening at 10:00 AM.

What’s the best cannoli in town? Or, do we even have a good cannoli? This thread on /r/rva has only a couple of suggestions, which bums me out. Surely more than two places in Richmond have a cannoli worth cramming in your mouth?

This morning’s longread

A Luxury Apartment Rises in a Poor Neighborhood. What Happens Next?

This quick review of a couple of housing studies at the New York Times shows that making sure everyone has an affordable place to live is complex. I think my takeaway is that we’ve got to keep building (like the recently-approved 12-story building at Broad & Lombardy) while working on policies to increase affordable housing (like inclusionary zoning).

She finds in New York that new buildings do attract more restaurants and cafes nearby. But she concludes that any effect those amenities have pushing up local rents is swamped by the power of new supply to push rents down. On net, she finds, for every 10 percent increase in housing supply, rents for properties within 500 feet drop by 1 percent, relative to other high-demand areas. Those benefits appear to be going to tenants in high-end and midrange buildings nearby. Presumably, their landlords see new competition and adjust their own rents accordingly. But Ms. Li finds that new housing has no effect on rents more than 500 feet away, and it doesn’t appear to affect rents for lower-end units nearby (those landlords probably don’t see new luxury towers as direct competition).

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