Church Hill's sidewalks are still a mess, but city won't say if it's cited anyone

Normally, Hande Cakar’s walk home from her job as a barista at Riverbend Roastery is a leisurely stroll down East Broad Street. But thanks to the snowstorm that socked Richmond in late January, last week was not a normal week.

“It’s hard to walk,” she told me in a text exchange earlier this week. “It’s like 15 to 20 minutes to go home instead of seven minutes.” As with much of the East End, portions of the sidewalks on E. Broad St. last week were encased in thick crusts of unshoveled ice and snow, and at some of the intersections, heaping piles of the stuff blocked the curb cuts. To pick her way through this frozen gauntlet, Cakar more than doubled her commute—no small inconvenience in 20-degree weather. But slowing down wasn’t enough. As she walked a slippery stretch of sidewalk on the 2800 block of the street, she slipped.

It’s no secret that Richmond’s Department of Public Works has struggled to clear the city’s roads following the storm, which deposited some 3-5” of snow, followed by a bunch of freezing rain, two Sundays ago. But while most streets in the East End are now finally clear, the pedestrian paths that flank them are still a total crapshoot. The reason? Unlike the city’s roadways, from which DPW is at least nominally responsible to clear snow, sidewalks are the responsibility of whoever owns or occupies in the buildings directly adjacent to them.³  

This is a bad system that’s doomed to fail for the reasons I laid out in a column last year.⁴ But for now, it’s the system we have, and it hinges on the city’s enforcement of its own rule. After all, while clearing your sidewalk is the right thing to do, absentee landlords and scofflaws won’t without at least the potential that they may face consequences when they don’t. The penalty for noncompliance, according to Sec. 24-34 of Richmond’s Code of Ordinances, are “the cost of abating the violation.”² In other words, if you don’t shovel your sidewalk, the city may hire someone to shovel it for you, and charge you for it.

How often does Richmond cite people for not shoveling their sidewalks? I’ve never heard of somebody getting dinged; after a week of asking around, I still haven’t heard of somebody who themselves has heard of somebody getting dinged.¹ Given the state of pedestrian infrastructure in Church Hill nearly two weeks after the storm, it’s clear people aren’t particularly worried about that possibility. Good neighbors shovel; everyone else just says “good luck.”

The shovel-shirkers may have especially liked their odds of evading citation during/after this winter storm after reading a post from the liaison to 2nd District City Councilmember Katherine Jordan on the popular r/rva subreddit last week. Because the snow was mixed with ice over the course of the evening, he hypothesized, the accumulation on the sidewalks was no longer the precipitation to which the ordinance pertained. “My plain reading of the code would be that it does not include ice, but I’m reaching out to the Department of Public Works on this and will follow up here when I hear back,” wrote Liaison Sven Philipsen on January 27th, using Jordan’s verified reddit account. Shortly thereafter, he confirmed: “no, no one will get cited for ice accumulation.”

In an emailed statement, Philipsen told me he obtained this information “from conversations with several staff in the Department of Public Works, Citizen Service and Response, and Code Enforcement,” though he didn’t name any officials. “We understand that the current code creates confusion and difficulty for the relevant departments to administer it, and our hope is to modify the code to make it easier to enforce, and clearer for residents to understand,” he said. Jordan’s preferred modifications include tying the responsibility to the owner (rather than the “occupant” carveout that benefits out-of-town landlords), making noncompliance a civil penalty, and expanding the language to include other forms of precipitation.

Those are good ideas! But with respect to the friendly Philipsen, who praised “the around the clock work of DPW and our other City agencies/Departments,” the city’s semantic dodge smells like horseshit to me. Sure, it’s harder to dig up the ice than the snow, but a) that’s why you shovel throughout the storm to prevent accumulation, b) it’s still very doable with a metal shovel or pickaxe, and many civically minded folks made it work; and most importantly, c) the bureaucratic distinction makes no difference to people trying to walk across the stuff. I’m an able-bodied guy with good boots in my late 30s, and I’ve almost wrecked half a dozen times in the past couple weeks. Elderly and less able folks may not be so lucky.

I followed up with DPW to confirm this policy of non-enforcement, and to ask if the city had issued any citations to people who hadn’t cleared their sidewalks, in the East End or anywhere else. A city spokesperson issued an emailed statement that DPW “focused resources on clearing and plowing roadways,” and described in general terms the process by which the department issues sidewalk citations. But when I followed up to find out whether DPW or any other city department had actually done any enforcement since the storm, the spokesperson replied: “Can’t comment at this time.”

Whether Hande Cakar slipped on snow or ice is irrelevant compared to the fact that she fell and bruised her hip. “I’m OK now, it was a slow landing,” she said. I asked her what she’d like to tell her neighbors who don’t shovel their sidewalks. “Well, it’s dangerous to everyone including them, their children, their pets, their neighbors or loved ones. So they should!” They should. But the city doesn’t seem intent on making them when they don’t.

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🕊️ Homages to Bill Martin, and a call to action

It’s been a little over a month since longtime Church Hill resident and director of The Valentine Bill Martin was killed by a driver as he crossed E. Broad St. in the shadow of City Hall. On the evening of Thursday, January 29th, a group of mourners and safe-streets advocates held a candlelight vigil to commemorate the life of the slain 71 year-old, as well as other pedestrians killed by motorists in Richmond. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has photos from the event. In them, you’ll spot Natalie Rainer, engagement manager for Bike Walk RVA, Richmond-area traffic-violence survivor, and author of a recent, moving op-ed for the paper in which she called on city and county leaders to “move beyond paint and crosswalks alone” to reverse the “decade-long trend” of rising pedestrian deaths. Hear, hear.

Elsewhere, The Richmonder earlier this week published a lovely report by Ian Stewart on Martin’s quiet but staunch advocacy for Richmond’s LGBTQ+ community. It’s a lovely tribute to a lesser-told aspect of Martin’s tragic killing. Read it in full here.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Public Works via public shame on E. Franklin St.

A reader made an extremely funny point about the bizarre timing of DPW’s closure announcement for the 2900 block of E. Franklin St., which as I noted in last week’s edition, came last Thursday—four days after the storm. Here’s Lookout Kathy G. on the neighborhood’s “graveyard of cars”:

This timeline tracks. Reporter Madison McNamee’s piece on WWBT's website was published 5:03pm on Wednesday January 28th, while the city’s press release hit my inbox at 11:53am on Thursday, January 29th. Let that be a lesson to you, folks: if Public Works just ain’t working on your street, public shaming them on the evening news might persuade them to reconsider. Or at least, to do the bare minimum of running some caution tape across the intersection. Quite a system we’ve got here!

The “graveyard of cars” has since been reopened, as has the 2600 block of E. Franklin St., which was also closed for much of the past week. (No press release for that one.)

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Cross it off your list: Triple Crossing Fulton is doing a pizza deal for Super Bowl Sunday, but orders close today. Get the details.

• A fitting send-off: The Valentine is hosting a free open house tomorrow (2/7) from 12-4pm to honor its late director, Bill Martin. RSVP here.

• For the cause: Many Church Hill businesses are participating in the “One Big Beautiful Raffle” to benefit a local organization supporting immigrants. Ticket sales end Tuesday (2/10). More info here.

• Loaves 4 Lovers: Sub Rosa Bakery’s Valentine’s Day menu is live now, place your orders before it’s too late. Check it here.

• Cakes 4 Cupids: I don’t know man, just go with it. Fat Rabbit Bakery’s Valentine’s Day menu is also live now. Get in there.

• Twist and shout scream: For ice cream, that is, because Spotty Dog is offering chocolate/strawberry twist creemies all weekend or until they sell out. Ogle this beauty.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  Residentially, at least; one Lookout vaguely recalled some businesses receiving citations at some point.

2  This violation is also a Class 4 misdemeanor, by the way, which seems frankly absurd.

3  It’s not clear who, if anybody, is responsible for the massive piles of snow that plow trucks (from the city? contractors? vigilantes?) have deposited at some of the street corners. Fun!

4  Briefly: sidewalks are public infrastructure, and offloading their maintenance on private citizens is something of a shift-and-shaft. But if you’ve come to this footnote, you should really just read the column.