Good morning, RVA: PILOT numbers, mobile newsroom, and population estimates

Good Morning, RVA!

Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today you can expect cloudy skies and highs around 60 °F. That’s still basically springlike but is quite a drop from yesterday’s weather perfection. I think we’ll see these cooler temperatures stick around throughout the week, with a couple warmer days sprinkled in here and there.

Water cooler

The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial board did the research around VCU’s PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) that I couldn’t find the time to do last week, and I’m very thankful for it. Tap through to read the whole thing, but, as foretold, VCU pays the City of Richmond just a fraction of what they’d owe if they were required to pay real estate taxes. Some of the low points:

• Richmond misses out on $45 million dollars per year of real estate tax revenue due to all of the state-owned buildings downtown (and that includes VCU and the health system).
• The City receives just $3.8 million annually in PILOT payments from the State.
• And the State doesn’t even want to pay that much: “The state not only takes land and pays almost nothing in return, but it has a history of making only partial PILOT payments. And since 2014, the number of state-owned parcels subjected to PILOT decreased by more than half, from 71 to 32.”

So you can see how the General Assembly telling VCU to cancel a contract they signed to pay an annual PILOT of just $2.5 million feels so petty. Maybe we can get DPW to stop collecting the trash from the brand new, real-estate-tax-free General Assembly building for a couple of weeks so that representatives from all around the commonwealth remember the services the City provides them—basically free of charge!

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Starting in May, the RTD will launch a new initiative called “The Mobile Newsroom” and will “send journalists to work one week a month out of different locations across the region...[to] listen to community members and report on topics important to them.” I think this is an interesting idea! I look forward to seeing what sort of stories will come out of posting up a reporter at, say, a library for a week. I think there’s a lot of power in asking community members about what impacts their lives, but I also sort of hate person-on-the-street interviews when regular folks are framed as experts on any given topic. It’d be hard for me to resist the urge to churn out a bunch of profiles of the folks who happened to stop by the library that day, and, instead, focus on finding the bigger stories. Anyway, I’m excited to see the RTD try something new and really interested in where this ends up. Now go and fill out this survey to give the them a couple suggestions about where they should set up shop.

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Tom Lappas at the Henrico Citizen reports that “Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas pushed back strongly Friday on a U.S. Census Bureau population estimate published Thursday that projected the county had grown by only 207 residents in 2023..” The County Manager estimates that Henrico saw 5,168 new residents, and sort of disparages the entire federal government in his response, saying: “It doesn’t surprise me that you get a result like this from a federal agency, because I mean in the past month, I can’t tell you how many complaints we’ve gotten in here about the Postal Service.” Those two things are definitely not related. But Census numbers do matter more than just ranking which counties in Virginia grew the most and are important to get right; federal and state funding can often fluctuate with a locality’s population numbers.

A look back

On March 18th, 2020, Charlottesville Area Transit took their bus system fare-free as part of their COVID-19 mitigation plan. At the time I wondered if GRTC would go the same direction but had some questions about where they’d find the funding to do so. Four years later, we’ve got an entire bus system that’s been fare-free for years...and I’m still wondering where they’ll find the longterm funding to keep it that way.

Also, not to turn this new section of the email into a place where I paste smart sentences Past Ross wrote, but, look at this one about pandemic-era students: “It’s wild thinking about how this cohort of students, across all grade levels, will just have an asterisk next to them whenever they show up in future datasets.”

This morning's longread

Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?

I went through the sofa-buying process during the pandemic and did, in fact, end up with a midcentury-modern sectional advertised on Instagram and shipped deconstructed to my doorstep. It’s fine. I feel better, after reading this piece in Dwell, that maybe there’s just no other way (because of capitalism).

The politics of the midcentury-modern movement are well documented, especially its ties to postwar welfare states in Europe, affordable design for the masses, and warm and homey use of fabrics and woods. A sofa that looks just like those references but is designed by a company that exists only on Instagram, made cheaply and badly, and shipped around the world in order to satisfy the bottomless maws of investors in "the Netflix of couches" or whatever, that’s a change. Midcentury design was still a product to be made and sold in a capitalist system, but it wasn’t the grimmest possible expression of that system, the way contemporary sofas can be. "This is kind of the way it goes with all products," says Reiss. "They become more efficient, but it’s just about cutting costs. The incentives to have a great $2,000 couch—I mean, who’s going to fight for that?"

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

Picture of the Day

E. E. Cummings takes over the subtitles.