Building the Best Richmond: Part One
This is the first in a two-part series from outgoing Mayor of Richmond Dwight Jones. Check back Monday for part two.
Coming out of a campaign season, we’ve heard a lot of rhetoric about what’s wrong with Richmond and how to fix it. It’s a healthy conversation to have in a growing city like ours, and I’m thrilled that the next generation of leadership is energized to continue our focus on helping everyone join in the Richmond resurgence.
Now that the campaigns are over, it’s a good time to reflect on the distance between making promises and actually getting something done. That’s why I’d like to talk to you directly here in this format about the challenges my administration faced over the last eight years and the moves we have made to meet them.
I became mayor when this country was facing the worst recession any of us had ever known since the Great Depression. On top of the Great Recession, I was troubled by what I saw as a “Tale of Two Cities” (a turn of phrase I noticed many of the candidates embrace this year). In 2008, we had resurgent historic neighborhoods on one hand — and then we had a 26 percent poverty rate on the other. The most concentrated parts of that poverty rest across the MLK Bridge from downtown and north of Interstate 95. This is what you likely know as the East End, and includes three public housing communities (Mosby, Fairfield, and Creighton along with a fourth, Gilpin, to the northeast). If you don’t live over there, you can experience all the good things Richmond has to offer without ever having to see people living in the crisis of extreme poverty.
Seeing these “Two Richmonds,” I made changing the conditions of poverty in this City my top priority. It’s meant taking positions that are not popular, or even understood at all, in some neighborhoods. Mainly, it’s about being deliberate across the city administration not for anti-poverty initiatives themselves, but also viewing economic development through a lens of poverty mitigation.
All our efforts have been to create a culture of inclusion by design — not default.
Anti-Poverty
Even though recent statistics say Richmond is down from a 26 percent to 24 percent poverty rate, no one can deny there is so much left to do. The recipe for poverty alleviation is well known, and we’ve made tremendous progress in the traditional three legs of anti-poverty work: education, transportation, and family services.
On Education, despite the nay-sayers, my administration has put its shoulder into helping children and schools. Richmond Public Schools has always been the largest part of my budget. If you read the newspaper, you would believe that the key to solving educational issues in Richmond is as simple as building new buildings or fixing old ones. Four new schools have been built in my term, and that means we are the first administration since Senator Tim Kaine was RVA’s mayor to build any schools at all in this city. As part of that, we got a new high school for the first time in 40 years.
But you need to look beyond buildings and infrastructure.
Test scores over the last few years prove that new buildings aren’t enough — as shown by the sleek new MLK Middle School, located just across from Mosby Court. MLK Middle lost its accreditation since being rebuilt at great public expense.
The core issue inside our school buildings is the quality of instruction, and not just the quality of the infrastructure.
In our form of government, providing quality instruction is the role of the School Board and its administration, and I believe that is where the focus of the new School Board needs to be. When I say instruction is the role of the School Board, I am in no way abdicating responsibility of the city administration in the well-being and education of children. The city administration largely funds RPS (the majority of your tax dollars go toward education), and both the new mayor and city council should continue do all they can to make sure RPS is spending wisely on quality instruction inside school buildings. In addition, the city must work with as many partners that can be brought to the table as possible to alleviate the conditions outside school buildings — extreme poverty, and all it brings — that are contributing to the problems within.
The best place the city administration can create positive change for children is making sure that kids in crisis have a stable platform from which they can thrive, regardless of the day-to-day crisis caused by conditions of extreme poverty in our city — and especially conditions in concentrated public housing. It’s no secret that students simply aren’t in a place to learn if they are hungry, are unable to get a peaceful night’s sleep, or are dealing with the many other symptoms of extreme poverty.
Seventy years ago, using largely federal dollars, our predecessors concentrated all of the Richmond region’s poverty into just six public housing neighborhoods, some within a few blocks of each other. Because the poverty problem is expressed in geography, Richmond’s approach to poverty must be geographic, starting with the East End, where poverty has been the most densely concentrated.
Unfortunately, Richmond was not selected this year for a $30 million federal Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant for the East End, an injection of resources that would have jumpstarted the transformation of public housing.
Still, we have to be bold regardless of what the federal government can do. And we must keep working on transforming public housing. To be clear: Public housing must be torn down, and all hands — both in the public sector and in philanthropy — must be on deck to help the residents who live there now, and are living in perpetual crisis, to instead achieve dignity and the ability to sustain themselves and their families.
We are taking the right steps.
Mixed-income neighborhoods, access to healthy food, and training
Demolition has begun at Old Armstrong High School to build a mixed-income neighborhood that will look as nice as any other neighborhood in Richmond.
Things are moving fast in the East End towards building a stable, safe place to live, with secure, healthy food options enjoyed by folks we’ve helped move out of public housing. We have approved a new urban model of grocery store designed to target food deserts — it’s located directly beside three of the East Coast’s most densely populated public housing developments. People who live here haven’t been able to access a full-service grocery store for years, instead relying on convenience stores and the limited options they carry.
The new grocery also touches what most of us call Church Hill, which now has restaurants so good you read about them in The New York Times. The food desert on one side of the neighborhood — and our growing restaurant scene on the other side — could seem at first like that tale of two cities I have talked about. It also means a start-up grocer is willing to give this place a shot. This will be a new urban-scale store model that not only gives access to food to folks in poverty, but will also hire folks right from the neighborhood.
Confidence is so high in this model that we expect J. Sargent Reynolds to locate its expanded culinary school adjacent to the grocery, making a place to train up folks in the East End to join part of the Richmond resurgence expressed through our exuberant restaurant culture.
Providing the opportunity for success brings me to two of the anti-poverty approaches of which I am particularly proud — our Office of Community Wealth Building and the Mayor’s Youth Academy.
Office of Community Wealth Building
Richmond is among the first cities in the country to codify an Office of Community Wealth Building. That new agency combines our approach of using workforce development and social enterprise as key tools to move our unacceptable poverty rate in the right direction. It’s a new program, designed to connect the innovators and future employers in Richmond with the folks next door who are ready for the good jobs we see flocking into the city.
The office will take a comprehensive approach, providing wrap-around services that turn citizens in crisis into citizens who contribute. They will become productive, interact with dignity at work and in the community, and become true contributing members of the Richmond economy.
You’ve seen this approach started at the Conrad Center, another example of social enterprise culinary training, and you will see job training roll out at companies like CoStar, a real estate information company that will be working with Community Wealth Building to train a big piece of the hundreds of expected jobs coming online downtown over the next few years.
Mayor’s Youth Academy
The Mayor’s Youth Academy is another of the places designed to create opportunity for successful outcomes for our children. The academy gives Richmond Public Schools students the opportunity to work in places they may have never been able to break into otherwise due to the barriers of concentrated poverty. It’s a place where the proverbial light can come on for a child who has never seen a bright future. The Mayor’s Youth Academy is one of the best tools the new administration may have in their chest to take children out of the conditions of crisis.
On Monday, we’ll look at some of the city’s development high points and challenges, and discuss how we honor the past while looking towards the future.
