Good morning, RVA: State of the City, population estimates, thoughts on housing

Never read the comments, but do just this one time to get a feel for how so
many people’s default state is anti-housing.

Good morning, RVA! It's 36 °F, and our stretch of appropriate, wintery weather continues with highs right around 50 °F and a few more clouds. On this, the last day of January, the sun sets at 5:32 PM—which means we’re getting there! Yes, we’ve got to trudge through a dark February, but, by the time March rolls around, a decent slice of your evening will not be spent in complete darkness.

Water cooler

Last night, Mayor Stoney delivered his final State of the City address, which you can either read in full here, watch over on the City’s YouTube, or skim the highlights from the Administration’s press release. It was definitely a reflective speech in tone, with the mayor looking back across his seven years in office and hitting on key accomplishments across a variety of important areas—streets, housing, education, parks, and finances. I was struck by how much better Stoney has gotten at doing this sort of thing; this was a good, well-delivered speech (and I hope he thanked his speechwriter)! I couldn’t find his first State of the City address, but, to compare/contrast a bit, scrub to about 22 minutes in this video of Stoney’s inaugural address and watch for a bit. He’s gotten so much better and more comfortable! I guess nearly a decade of practice will do that. Anyway, back to last night’s speech: Make sure you watch Brandy Stoney’s introduction. She’s got natural stage presence, did a great job (at eight months pregnant!), and I’m sure we’ll see plenty of her during Mayor Stoney’s gubernatorial campaign. As for specific priorities announced—other than laying the foundation for his run at the governor’s mansion—the only one I caught was a commitment to turn the Washington Training Camp over to the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation and make it public space. If I missed something else, let me know! Next up on Stoney’s speaking agenda: The introduction of his budget a month or so from now.

Always a big moment in the lives of local stat nerds: UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has released their 2023 Virginia county and city population estimates, which you can view in a simple spreadsheet here. As per Virginia’s ancient and time-honored ways, independent cities are at the bottom of this otherwise alphabetically-sorted list. So! As of July 2023, the Weldon Cooper folks estimate Richmond’s population at 229,035, a slight, 1.1% increase from way back in 2020. Henrico saw a slightly bigger increase, growing 1.7% from 334,389 to 339,918; and Chesterfield experienced the biggest population increase of all at 6.4%, up from 364,548 to 387,703. Richmond is almost, almost, almost back to its pre-white flight 1950s population—which, I don’t know what that means but it is interesting. You’ll definitely want to pull up and read this chartsandgraphy blog post alongside the spreadsheet, too, which does a good job of breaking out some of the big trends seen around the Commonwealth. You’ll learn all sorts of interesting things like lots of people are moving from NOVA to Richmond, and that “at some point early this year, the size of the population in the Richmond Metro Area will have surpassed Virginia’s total population living west of the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time since before the American Revolution.”

Yesterday, I used a picture of the apartments at Broad and Lombardy, lit by the sunset, as the Picture of the Day. I always post that picture on Instagram, and, because it’s usually a picture of my plants, they never do numbers. Yesterday, though, folks in the comments had LOTS of thoughts on density, housing, and architecture. I know you should never read the comments, but do just this one time to get a feel for how so many people’s default state is anti-housing. Keep that in mind when you advocate for the next medium-density project and for how to (gently) talk to your friends and family about it!

Megan Pauly at VPM reports that bills ending legacy admission to Virginia’s public universities have passed both chambers of the General Assembly. Now, if the GA were a regular place governed by rational thought and the laws of physics, you’d feel pretty comfortable in saying that some version of this bill will end up on the governor’s desk for him to sign. But, because the GA operates in its own pocket dimension outside of time and space, you can never say for sure. That said, these are good bills, and I do hope the governor signs whichever one makes it to him. As Del. Dan Helmer, sponsor of the House version, says, “in too many colleges across America, we use legacy admissions in order to give folks a leg up not because of what they've done, but because of who their parents are.”

This morning's longread
How to Save Corporate Modernist Architecture

How do we repurpose some of the beautiful architecture that no longer serves its corporate overlords? Well, first, you need to update the zoning! Second, you probably need to hire some genius architects to think through how to make a once-private space open, welcoming, and useful to the public. My first choice for a converting a modernist office into a beautiful public space would be the Markel Building out by Willow Lawn.

The first reparative moves involve undoing the single-use zoning and car-centric planning that made America’s suburbs what they are. POST, while at the edge of downtown, is an island thanks to its giant parking lot and proximity to two interstates and the sunken Buffalo Bayou. The isolated suburban office park that once dominated the corporate landscape is increasingly a thing of the past. In December, modern preservation organization Docomomo US declared “corporate campuses” their principal topic of study for 2024. As their chronicler, the landscape architecture professor Louise Mozingo, wrote in The New York Times way back in 2011, the new model should “add to the mix new public spaces, a greater diversity of uses, and transit between multiple employment centers and residential districts.” In other words: Let’s break down those big boxes into something more human, and more urban.

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Picture of the Day

Found on Marshall Street in Carver. John Murden at South Richmond News spotted another one coming to Semmes Avenue.