Good morning, RVA: Gun violence, food pantries, and a good voting strategy

Good morning, RVA! It’s 36 °F, and highs today will top out in the mid 60s—a totally March-like temperature range, right? Expect some pretty serious wind, though, if you’re planning on spending any of the day outside.

Water cooler

Arjanae Avula and Danny Avula (more from him later) have a pair of columns in the paper about gun violence that you should read. First, Arjanae writes powerfully about growing up and living in danger with guns. In her words: “If you live in danger and operate in danger, it’s hard to think outside that box. Being exposed to what safety looks like now that I live with the Avulas, I can sometimes think outside the box of the way I grew up. But it’s hard. This safe feeling I have isn’t something you can explain to somebody. Until more kids can get out of survival mode, they won’t be able to see anything more for themselves.” Then, Dr. Avula brings the medical perspective to living with that kind of trauma: “In fact, childhood trauma has reached an almost epidemic level in our city, with 1 in 5 Richmond residents experiencing enough trauma to create lifelong negative impacts. Exposure to violence, or even the threat of violence, has lasting negative effects on brain development and mental and physical health. Kids who have faced these adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) often grow into adults who have difficulty learning or maintaining a job, are at greater risk of drug and alcohol dependency, and exhibit trouble maintaining personal relationships.“ Gun violence is a public health issue, and the gun-violence bills the General Assembly has put forward this year willmake Virginia safer.

Ahead of the Census, the Richmond Times-Dispatch did short profiles on 14 different Richmond neighborhoods, looking at how some of these neighborhoods have changed or are in the process of changing. It’s an interesting and new format for them, and you should check it out.

This got lost in the shuffle last week: Kroger donated $10,000 to Communities in Schools to support food pantries at 17 different Richmond and Henrico Public Schools. Food insecurity is such a huge deal for kids—how can you learn if you’re hungry? Honestly, how can you do anything at all if you’re hungry?

Today, at City Council’s Organizational Development committee (5:00 PM, City Council Chambers), Dr. Danny Avula, Director of the Richmond City and Henrico County Health Districts, will deliver an update on the coronavirus. I assume its about the virus’s current, local impact, and, if it’s interesting, I’ll see if I can pull his presentation or audio afterwards. Also coronavirus-related, as King County Washington reports the first two American deaths from the coronavirus, I thought this piece in the NYT comparing it to the seasonal flu was helpful.

Councilmember Kim Gray announced she’s running for mayor and joins lawyer Justin Griffin on the early list of potential folks to challenge Mayor Stoney. Roberto Roldan at VPM has the details. I’ll keep track of who’s running for what, but I’m not going to spend a ton of time writing about each candidate until we get past the filing deadline in June. There’s a bunch of time between then and now, and lots could happen!

Reminder! The Richmond Black Restaurant Experience officially kicked off yesterday, and you should file away this PDF of participating restaurants and check off as many as you can this week.

P.S. Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and tomorrow we vote! Don’t have a voting strategy? Follow this one from my pal Sam: “My strategic voting model is pretty nuanced: I think, ‘who would do the best job of being President?’ and then I vote for that person.”

This morning’s longread

The Towers Came Down, and With Them the Promise of Public Housing

This weekend I watched 1992’s Candymanfor the first time ever (now streaming on Netflix). Growing up, I’d somehow missed this classic, and the news that Jordan Peele may/will write a remake had me searching my streaming services of choice for the original. Set it Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing, Candyman is basically a horror film about housing, land use, and racism. I learned a lot, and then spent the rest of the weekend reading about public housing in Chicago. This piece from the NYT looks at the recent national trends in public housing through the lens of the eventual demolition of Cabrini-Green.

In 1990, Chicago’s population started to tick up for the first time in 40 years; the area surrounding Cabrini-Green added 4,000 white residents during the previous decade, and vacant lots that had sold for $30,000 a few years earlier were being snapped up for five times that amount. As the fortunes of cities changed once again, public housing experienced a new pressure. HUD began to award municipalities tens of millions of dollars in grants to tear down their public-housing high-rises and replace them with much smaller developments that mixed public-housing families with higher-income renters and market-rate owners. Proposals to preserve some of the towers, filling in the cleared land around them with a variety of housing types, were rejected. Many low-rise developments in rejuvenating areas were targeted as well. A majority of the relocated public-housing residents were given Section 8 vouchers to rent from landlords in the private market. Nationwide, 250,000 public-housing units have been demolished since the 1990s. Atlanta, Baltimore, Columbus, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Tucson — just about every American city got in on the action. But no city knocked down as many as Chicago.

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