Steady progress on places for over a thousand people to live. Would you advocate they tear it down and replace it with a cottage and a handful of townhomes?

The local convenience store has rebranded to “Vom” #Food #vom

a 200' wide, 114-mile long strip of rural land is apparently a top nine most endangered "place" in case you thought Preservation Virginia was actually about historic preservation and not rank nimbyism www.29news.com/2026/05/20/p...

oh no

gee i wonder why dominion wants to rebuild that 230kV line as a double circuit

This whole thing is so good 👏🏻 “Those who oppose new housing, or who look askance at denser development as somehow ideologically distasteful, are supporting a fundamentally anti-human, anti-growth policy, without even intending to.”

Huge story

Incredible things happening over on Facebook.

At #CNU34, listening to Raj Chetty explain how much, and why, better urban design led to better outcomes for the children who grew up in revitalized public housing projects.

Great day at the signing of a number of solar related bills - including plug-in 🔌 balcony solar! (HB395). Yes, you can buy a solar unit online, plug it in, on 1/1/27 ⏳ generate up to 1200W of power to lower your electricity bill. The units are portable and can move with you if you are a renter!

Bittersweet to end almost two years of work this code cycle with moderately ambitious reforms killed unceremoniously without even discussion at BHCD, but still thrilled to see four-story single-stair pass w/o a hint of opposition. Four-story single-stair buildings coming to a city near you in 2027!

This "use the incredibly legally shaky Tazewell ruling about circuit court clerks' failure to notice to invalidate the previous amendment" idea as the way to get this back to SCOVA after retiring Chafin seems… really odd. Just amend § 8.01-675.2 to make it possible for Jones to request a rehearing?

MEGA-AUGUSTA

this site has the juice

lol

We need to re-legalize the very cheap, bare bones housing that keeps people off the street. More broadly, we need policymakers to be ok with letting people build types of housing that they would not particularly want to live in.

Crawling sites & submitting every page to the Wayback Machine has been my favorite mini-side project with CC (in part because it's been the easiest). Literally hundreds of endangered government web pages+pdfs archived for the first time. Wish I had it in 2020 before Cville nuked its mid-00s site.

what

Albemarle & VDOT are pushing through a highway widening. And they can't even point to congestion to justify it. The vote is 4pm today at MPO Policy: ca-mpo.org/event/mpo-po... Expect VDOT to break its longstanding practice of not casting a tiebreaking vote in order to force this through.

Honestly don't love that we have to be in VA-6 now. We should have gotten to keep the #5, not... Farmville or whatever. @katrinacallsen.com pls fix

This evening was the second to last round of voting at the ICC on E24-24, the four-story single-stair IBC proposal. It survived an attempt to require corridor separation between the stairway and the units, and then it survived a general challenge. This was a vote of building officials who traveled…

Here in Virginia, this is the position of the Piedmont Environmental Council. They’re against utility-scale solar. “Climate change is a civilization-level threat…but—“ At this point I’m basically an advocate for building as many PV arrays as possible as quickly as possible.

most insane payment structure i've ever seen. the app is mean to you unless you pay them.

Also this is a really good video that NASA released late last night as an overall recap of Artemis II.

through years of LLM research, we have finally managed to invent a human-usable interface for ffmpeg

This means we're paying a lot for: 1-More material (bigger pipes) 2-More labor (harder to work with bigger pipes) 3-Bigger connections (cities charge by connection size) These costs are hidden even from builders and plumbers who just follow what code says without knowing it's overkill.

incredible

replies/quotes here are bleak

When a 1-unit house is replaced with ONE larger house, the new house is ~3X pricier. When replaced by 5+ houses, each new house will be (on avg) cheaper than the original house. www.aei.org/research-pro... Change is part of the deal. Will we choose greater physical change, or greater price change?

a problem and a solution

Let's goooooo! Tickets are on sale now! Daily bus service has returned from Cville to Staunton & Harrisonburg to the NW and through Richmond, RIC, W'burg, Newport News, and Norfolk to Virginia Beach to the SE. virginiabreeze.drpt.virginia.gov

America’s major cities should have zoning capacity for at least 4-5x their current populations, like they did back before the Big Downzones of the 60s and 70s.

i don't write about this often here, but charlottesville has an e-bike library, which takes up most of my shed and sometimes parts of the house too. if you're at all curious about e-biking around the area, sign up and try some bikes while the weather's good: www.ebikelibrarycville.org

the city's PTO policy in 1935 was rough

I don't think either political party -- or anyone in politics, really -- is thinking in ambitious enough terms about the electricity grid. We need to start thinking of it as the foundation of our 21st century economy & prosperity. It needs to be rethought, rebuilt, & made a solid base for growth.

if only there were an actual financial market with this information embedded that wsj could display. i bet it might have more than $11.3 million in total volume over six months

Years later a proper sequel to Harry Potter Balenciaga has been published. I think it's worth watching to understand where we are now. youtube.com/watch?v=gtnt...

I analyzed the Proud Boys donor list. The most common occupation was real estate (realtor, mortgage broker) — the same parasitic class that was over-represented among Jan 6th rioters.

If you’re pushing housing in lowrise n’hoods, eliminating useless sideyards is the unlock for the urban design everybody says they want. In exchange for sideyards that no one uses, you get better units, lush interior courtyards, space for trees and play, higher density and lower energy use.

Today is Liberation and Freedom Day In Charlottesville! March 3, 1865, is when word of liberation from slavery reached the area. A reminder below that much of what we experience as Cville/UVA culture was built by enslaved individuals & families. www.cvillepedia.org/Liberation_a...

Not driving is GOATed when not caring about gas prices is the vibe

Btw, if you are following the Anthropic debacle, and Minnesota is fresh in your mind, consider the limits your government was not willing to budge on, according to the Anthropic CEO: www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

Working through the Minnesota study on single-stair buildings and fire safety Since 2000, 0 fire deaths in MN have been caused by fires in corridors, stairwells, or ramps. 75% of deaths happen in the same room that the fire originates --- seemingly not a matter of whether there are 1 or 2 stairways

now showing: THE FLYING ACE

Flashing lights on smoke detectors in hotel rooms are so astonishingly, mindblowingly stupid that I can only assume they're a code requirement. @stephenjacobsmith.com is this true?

This is incredible. Like the previous few years, near all of the electricity capacity added to the grid was clean energy. The Inflation Reduction Act helped this - it made solar & wind cheaper but it also for the first time had a standalone incentive for grid storage. Look at the growth in storage!

SB 388, ‘Faith in Housing’ aka Yes In God’s Backyard, just passed the senate 🎉

C'ville folks! Local luminary and lender of e-bikes Josh Carp created this very cool site, which combines videos of public meetings with searchable, linkable transcripts. meetings.cvilledata.org/meetings