CITY OF RICHMOND

More millennials living alone in Richmond than in any other major U.S. city

More millennials live alone in Richmond than in any other major U.S. metro, according to an analysis released Thursday by Zillow, a Seattle-based real estate and rental research firm. The report shows that 15 percent of people 23 to 34 years old live alone in Richmond, followed by 14 percent in Pittsburgh and in Buffalo, N.Y. Nationwide, nearly 9 percent of millennials live alone, a percentage that has declined since 2005, likely due in some markets to high rents and a tough job market. As a result, more millennials are living with their parents or with roommates.

Mayor: Raise Richmond’s debt limit, taxes to fund projects for city, schools

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones issued his recommendations for resolving the city’s school facilities quandary Monday: Borrow more money and raise taxes. Jones said he supports “immediate action” to raise the city’s debt limit, which is currently maxed out. The move would enable the city to issue $580 million in bonds over the next 10 years. He said the money should be used for projects for the city and for schools, which are projecting a combined $1.5 billion in capital needs.

Richmond School Board chairman seeks end to meddling; 2 on board defend actions

One month before a high-ranking Richmond Public Schools official resigned, citing interference from School Board members as the cause, board Chairman Jeffrey Bourne chastised colleagues for getting in the way of administrators. In the letter delivered May 16, Bourne took members to task for participating in “school-based meetings, specifically in their capacity as board members.” This, Bourne wrote, “has caused great confusion and concern among the administration and school-based personnel. Board members, I am compelled to remind us that while we all are passionate in our advocacy for our constituency, which includes our students, our roles … are to focus on the development of policy which drives the action of our employees and to safeguard and provide for the financial foundation of the school division,” he wrote.

Richmond assessor to retire

Richmond Assessor James D. Hester announced Wednesday that he is retiring. His last day on the job is today. Hester, appointed by the City Council in 2006, oversaw the assessment and reassessment of 75,000 tax parcels and the city’s tax abatement program for renovations. Assessments issued by his office occasionally caused controversy. An unexpected $1.75 million tax bill he issued in 2014 to the organization that oversees the Altria and Dominion theaters led the group to ask the city to cover the payment, which the City Council reluctantly approved.

Richmond City Council votes to pull $4M from savings to close budget gap

Richmond City Council members begrudgingly voted Monday to move $4.1 million from the city’s savings to plug a projected budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends June 30. Three council members — Parker C. Agelasto, Reva M. Trammell and Charles R. Samuels — cast what they called “protest votes” against the measure, which was introduced by Mayor Dwight C. Jones’ administration. Others said they wanted to vote against it but that doing so would do more harm than good. “This is extremely unfortunate. That would be the most charitable thing I could say,” Councilman Chris A. Hilbert said. “But we cannot let the train go off the side of the mountain because we’re upset about something.”

Williams: Auditing and politics intertwined in Richmond

If you haven’t heard of Vaughan Crawley, well, no surprise there. Crawley was hired as Henrico County’s director of internal audit in June 2009. Since then, he hasn’t made the news. He is part of a four-person staff and reports to County Manager John A. Vithoulkas, making recommendations to a three-person audit committee consisting of Vithoulkas and two members of the Board of Supervisors. “Ultimately, the auditor’s responsibility to me as the manager is to improve our efficiency and accountability and make us stronger as an organization,” Vithoulkas said Tuesday. “And from those two premises, everything else flows.”

CHESTERFIELD

Citizen agrees to sell and for new Beulah school

One day before the Board of Supervisors was expected to decide whether to initiate eminent domain proceedings against him, a longtime Chesterfield resident agreed last week to sell the county two land parcels for construction of a new Beulah Elementary School. Bernard Huff will be paid $900,000 for his 27.851 acres of Beulah Road property, which isn’t far from the current school site at the intersection of Beulah and Hopkins roads. “I’m ecstatic we were able to resolve the situation without using eminent domain,” said Dale District Supervisor Jim Holland, calling the condemnation of private property “a last resort” and “the most extreme action you can take as a supervisor.”

STATE

Hundreds of new laws set to take effect today

New laws soon to be on the books in Virginia affect everything from guns and marriage to school testing, day care facilities and smoking in cars when a young child is present. There are new ethical guidelines for lawmakers and public officials, procedural requirements for handling reports of campus sexual assault, and regulations for fantasy sports gaming in Virginia. Hundreds of bills that the General Assembly passed this year and Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed into law take effect this Friday.

McAuliffe hoping to lock in federal grant for big road, rail projects
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said Wednesday that he hopes to hear very soon that the federal government will grant as much as $200 million to the commonwealth to advance the Atlantic Gateway transportation projects. The projects include an extension of the 95 Express Lanes south to Fredericksburg, a new Interstate 95 bridge over the Rappahannock River and a fix for the aging Long Bridge over the Potomac River, as well as other rail improvements in Northern Virginia. “I think we’ll know in the next few days,” McAuliffe said during his “Ask the Governor” show on WTOP radio. McAuliffe was buoyant in describing the potential impact of this set of transportation projects, not only on travel along the I-95 corridor in Northern Virginia but also on long-range travel through the southeastern United States. A portion of what overall would amount to more than $1 billion in state, federal and private investment would help lay the groundwork for high-speed rail through the Southeast by allowing Virginia to acquire CSX’s S Line, an abandoned rail route between Petersburg and the North Carolina border.

Run-down Ramsey Homes to be torn down, replaced by mixed-income housing
The Alexandria City Council is telling the city’s public housing agency to replace the run-down Ramsey Homes apartment complex with a 52-unit, mixed-income building, without attempting to preserve any remnants of the segregated federal housing. The unanimous vote Tuesday night, which reversed guidance that the council members gave in February, added yet another twist to the long-running saga of the effort by the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority (ARHA) to raze four low-rise apartment houses along busy Patrick Street. The council was presented with two options: Build 53 new affordable apartments in two three-story buildings, or provide 52 units in a single four-story building and renovate one historic building for two new apartments.

NATIONAL

Millennials look to the suburbs, not cities, for first homes
Like any good developer, Kyle Zeppelin sensed a trend, noticed undervalued property, and made his move. A Denver developer who grew up with the family business (and currently partners with his father, Mickey), Zeppelin wasn’t blind to the demographic trends reshaping cities and urban areas across the country: families wanting to live downtown, and young adults looking for a cool, authentic urban experience. So unlike some developers pushing cookie-cutter luxury condos, the Zeppelin family began work on a development in a disused, riverside industrial park 16 years ago that has, through numerous additions, become an ideal urban village. One of the latest additions to the collection of mixed-use housing, commercial buildings, and office space known as Taxi (named after one of the buildings, a former taxi dispatch station) features affordable rental housing and townhomes meant for families.

How Housing’s New Players Spiraled Into Banks’ Old Mistakes
When the housing crisis sent the American economy to the brink of disaster in 2008, millions of people lost their homes. The banking system had failed homeowners and their families. New investors soon swept in — mainly private equity firms — promising to do better. But some of these new investors are repeating the mistakes that banks committed throughout the housing crisis, an investigation by The New York Times has found. They are quickly foreclosing on homeowners. They are losing families’ mortgage paperwork, much as the banks did. And many of these practices were enabled by the federal government, which sold tens of thousands of discounted mortgages to private equity investors, while making few demands on how they treated struggling homeowners.

East Coast states want to tax drivers’ travel, not their gas
A group of East Coast states wants to help overhaul the way America pays for its decaying roads, and it’s starting with Monopoly money. Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Hampshire are proposing pilots to figure out how they might charge motorists a fee for the miles they travel — rather than taxing their gas, as state and federal officials do today. The I-95 Corridor Coalition, which represents transportation officials from 16 states and the District of Columbia, applied for a federal grant last month to test the idea.

Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life

In 1940, a white developer wanted to build a neighborhood in Detroit. So he asked the US Federal Housing Administration to back a loan. The FHA, which was created just six years earlier to help middle-class families buy homes, said no because the development was too close to an ‘inharmonious” racial group. Meaning black people. It wasn’t surprising. The housing administration refused to back loans to black people – and even people who lived around black people. FHA said it was too risky. So the next year, this white developer had an idea: What if he built a 6 foot tall, half mile long wall between the black neighborhood and his planned neighborhood? Is that enough separation to mitigate risk and get his loan? When he did that, the housing administration backed the loan. That was 75 years ago, but this type of racist housing policy helped create two divergent Americas.