Good morning, RVA: ERA, a regional housing framework, and a redistricting update

Good morning, RVA! It’s 46 °F, and you should expect highs in the mid 50s today along with maybe just the slightest chance of rain. I keep looking at the long range forecast for the approach of actual winter, and I can’t find it. Maybe next week!

Water cooler

ERA update! Today, the House of Delegates will hold their vote on the Equal Rights Amendment. Everyone’s moving so fast with this, and that’s incredible! Now I’m really looking forward to reading the raft of articles by constitutional scholars about what happens next. Like, maybe this? Who knows!

The Partnership for Housing Affordability has released their Richmond Regional Housing Framework, and you can download a PDF summary here. First, the region decides to work together on transportation, and now they’ve decide they’ll work together on housing? What next? Education?? Anyway, this framework has been a long time coming and you should take the time to read through it. The very first recommended solution in the document, a document setting the affordable housing strategy for the entire region, is to change zoning to allow for “more multifamily development on parcels currently zoned for low-density uses.” Like I wrote yesterday, I am honestly excited to have the conversations locally, and, I guess, regionally, about how to gently increase density through duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units. Maybe with the folks behind the Partnership for Housing Affordability supporting them, elected leaders will be a bit bolder with their policies and their votes. Anyway, read through this whole thing, because it’s not just about density. It’s got strategies and recommendations for public housing, manufactured home communities, Housing Choice Vouchers, all kinds of things. I’ll dig in more soon, but I now await the Housing People to let me know what they think!

Our local climate scientists and researchers have been hard at work studying how, across 108 cities, redlined neighborhoods are hotter than non-redlined neighborhoods. NPR has the details and some neat graphs. Take a minute to think about that: Because of racist housing policies enacted almost a hundred years ago, certain neighborhoods—typically neighborhoods of color—are hotter, more uncomfortable, and folks living there are more likely to suffer legit health consequences. That’s awful, and it’s also an opportunity for local leaders to start addressing a concrete effect of racism. And I mean that literally: These neighborhoods have often been paved within an inch of their lives and lack the necessary tree canopy to provide much needed shade. To start, the City should devote more resources to its urban forestry efforts, and we should get a dang tree in every empty tree well—starting with Richmond’s redlined neighborhoods.

Micheal Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some details on the Governor’s proposed car-related legislation💸. There’s a bunch of safety stuff, but also this tidbit which, I think, applies to Richmond’s recently introduced regional transportation funding bill: “Almost as important, the bill would tie motor fuel taxes to inflation instead of wholesale fuel prices, which have plummeted from an average of $3.17 per gallon in 2013 when the state adopted its last major transportation funding bill to $1.73 per gallon last year. It also would convert regional taxes from 2.1% on the wholesale price of fuel to 7.6 cents per gallon for gasoline and 7.7 cents per gallon for diesel.” If we’re setting up a dedicated funding stream for transportation, we need to make sure it’s one that will grow not shrink!

I am nervous about Virginia’s opportunity to codify some sort of anti-gerrymandering process this year! Luckily, we have this great explainer from Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury and even greater advocacy from OneVirginia2021. I will follow their lead!

Tonight, and only one night after this, City Council will host another public hearing on NoBro. If you’re still looking to weigh in—or have new thoughts on the new and changing components of the project—head over to MLK Middle School at 6:00 PM. Also on the NoBro tip, VPM’s Roberto Roldan got his hands on some reputable yet anonymously funded (!) district-level polling, and you can read through the results on Twitter. This is 4th District specific, but of 300 folks asked, 63% oppose “the Navy Hill Coliseum proposed for Richmond.”

Impeachment stuff moves forward today, and last night’s impeachment.fyi is, as always, a good place to get caught up on what’ll happen. If, like me, you have a hard time handling the onslaught of national news, subscribing to a well-written, daily newsletter (hey! sounds familiar!) like impeachment.fyi definitely helps filter the deafening noise while keeping me about as informed as I want to be.

This morning’s longread

Cars in Cities: How’s That Working Out?

True, true.

So why do we keep driving? The simple answer is, in some cities, many of us have little choice. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health says that 60 percent of urban infrastructure is devoted to cars. Years of prioritizing driving at the expense of walking, biking and mass transit have left many people no viable alternative to private vehicles. The result is more than an inconvenience. It’s estimated that vehicle pollution accounts for 184,000 premature deaths a year globally, and collisions are responsible for 2.5 percent of all global deaths. When all is said and done, cars kill more people than tuberculosis, malaria, diabetes or HIV/AIDS. That’s a lot of incentive to do something, and more and more places are starting to.

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