Three Launches: Mithlond, Ghent Streets, Tools Pages

A productive day. Three separate projects shipped.

Mithlond (mithlond.jason-edelman.org) is a research project applying a commons framework to AI-era data center infrastructure in Hampton Roads — who owns it, who bears the environmental costs, and whether local communities see structural economic benefit from infrastructure built in their region. The name is Tolkien: Mithlond is the Grey Havens, an Elvish port city. Norfolk is a port. The site's aesthetic follows from that — maritime research station, deep navy and signal orange, Spectral serif. The first session of research turned up some interesting findings about Dominion Energy's interconnect queue backlog and the existing industrial sites that could support dense compute without new substations.

Ghent Streets is a zoning reform campaign for our neighborhood — the HC-G2 historic district in Norfolk. The district is almost entirely residential; the only commercial uses are a 7-Eleven and a Harris Teeter, both nonconforming grandfathered uses from before the current code. The campaign asks the city to amend one table in the zoning ordinance to permit neighborhood-scale retail by right on ground floors. Dead sidewalks, no neighborhood coffee shop, no place to buy a bottle of wine that isn't a chain. Norfolk already has a working pedestrian commercial overlay model on Colley Avenue and 21st Street. We're asking for the same treatment. I was a former board member of the district and have some political capital to spend.

Tools pages on power-explained: three practitioner-facing pages for people who want to use the framework, not just read about it. One is a power analysis brief tool for any city, with a DIY research track and a prompting track. One is a commons infrastructure directory organized by domain. One documents how the site itself was built, including an honest accounting of AI's role.