Good morning, RVA: Path to Equity, a packed agenda, and more music than you can shake a fist at

Path to Equity is the best civic PDF I’ve read in a long while. Great work,
everyone!

Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, and, as I look out across the extended forecast, there’s not a hint of snow (at least through Friday). Today you can expect temperatures in the 40s and just enough sunshine to get you through the day. Enjoy, and welcome to second week of January!

Water cooler

I had time over the weekend to read the City’s Path to Equity: Policy Guide for Richmond Connects and, let me tell you, it is a heckuva thing! I think this might be the single most progressive PDF to come out of City Hall, and I can’t recommend it enough—especially if you’re looking for a primer on systemic racism and how the history of Richmond’s built enviornment has contributed to deep, long-lasting racial inequity. I mean, we know these things—that the City tore down Black neighborhoods, built highways, and displaced long-time residents—but to see the City’s role in these things written down in the City’s own document feels different. It makes me optimistic about the full rewrite of Richmond’s citywide transportation plan that kicks off this spring. Fingers fully crossed! Anyway, Path to Equity is 63 pages long, but filled with maps and sidebars, so it’s not a chore to read at all. It’s totally worth your time. However, if reading’s not your thing, you can tune in to a webinar today at 1:00 PM to hear more about the document, the process, and how to leave feedback (which you can do until January 31st).

Speaking of wonderful documents, RVA Rapid Transit, Richmond’s transit-dedicated local nonprofit, released their 2021 State of Transit report and it is lovely. You’ll definitely want to check out pages 8–11 which map out our existing regional transit system, its current frequencies, and what segments are just plain missing. Then they overlay that map on population, income, and job access. It’s good stuff, and, while we’ve got a long way to go before we have a truly regional transit system, we really have made a ton of progress over the last five or six years.

Today, City Council hosts their regularly-scheduled meeting with an absolutely packed agenda—even the informal meeting agenda has plenty of items that’ll interest you. I hope each of our councilmembers got plenty of sleep last night and remembers to hydrate, because it looks to be a long night. Agenda items of note for readers of this email: The ordinance to accept the Lee Circle and Lee monument from the State (ORD. 2021-351); the ordinance to give School Board the money they need to actually move forward with procuring design services for replacing George Wythe High School (ORD. 2021-308); an ordinance to create a proper, official Office of Sustainability within Economic and Community Development (rather than inside of the Department of Public Utilities) (ORD. 2021-348); and, of course, the much-continued resolution to ask Planning Commission to make a laundry list of changes to Richmond 300 (RES. 2021-R026). I think the first and third pass without a hitch, the fourth gets continued (again), and the second...I have no idea! We could be far enough removed from the last time George Wythe dominated headlines that Council just gives School Board their money and moves on with life—which would be a huge-but-quite win for School Board’s majority voting bloc. I feel like I’ve lost the thread on this particular debate and am interested in which way things go tonight.

We’re you patient? Wait no longer, because RVA Mag has released part two, part three, and part four of their Richmond Music Catalog 1980-2021, and you’re gonna need to block out some time this week to work your way through it.

A reader sent me this absolutely amazing YouTube of a man building a tiny scale model of Richmond’s iconic train bridge in the middle of a forest somewhere. Also there is a monkey. I have no idea why this exists, or why this man has chosen to do these things, but I am so glad he has.

This morning's longread
Have Wildfires Ruined California's Magic?

I just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, and this piece in the New York Times by Elizabeth Weil provided an excellent/depressing chaser. Despite her total doom-and-gloom vibes, she really writes the stuffing out of this one!

Across California — across the world — it’s easy, even comforting, to sit in despair. To stay depressed and mired in a state where not that much has truly changed. But nihilism is a failure of imagination, the bleak, easy way out. We need to face the lives before us. We need to name the discontinuity: See, there it is, the tear in the universe created by our fear and greed. What we believed was the present is actually the past. That was Steffen’s message to me in the Berkeley bar. We failed to keep pace with the future. And the longer we sat there, drinking our beers, the wider the gap became. We can’t fix California’s wildfire problem with a big idea. We can only settle into the trans-apocalypse and work for the best future, the best present.

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