RVA Thrives
HOUSING & DEVELOPMENT
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“If you ride down some areas, all you see is boarded up buildings. Getting a new business in there, or open up a new residency, that is not a bad thing. It’s all about how the people go about it. Don’t undercut people for their property, just because you want it for a new business. Go about it the right way.”
Lived Experience
Housing Costs
Prior to the pandemic, the Southside of Richmond was more affordable than other parts of the city, yet home prices and rents were rising.
A 2018 community listening process surveyed 300 people who live along the Richmond Highway Corridor.
Most respondents said paying for housing was harder in the last two years (30%), while 28% say paying for housing has always been hard, but it had not gotten any harder in the last two years.
Of those that indicated paying for housing had gotten harder in the last two years:
37% said they are paying more for rent but their apartment size hasn’t changed
18% said they’ve moved into a smaller or lower quality apartment to afford rent
25% said their property taxes are increasing
Gentrification
The City of Richmond has a population of approximately 221,000. Our work focuses on an area in the city south of the James River along the Richmond Highway Corridor in Richmond’s 8th and 9th districts. The 8th District has a population of 26,546 (67% Black, 24% white, 16% Latino) and the 9th District has a population of 25,621 (60% Black, 29% white, 22% Latino). Virginia Community Voice has been organizing in this area, in legacy Black neighborhoods on Richmond’s Southside since 2017. Since 2019 we have also been organizing and building relationships in several apartment complexes where many Spanish-speaking immigrant families live.
During this time we have seen the White population on the Southside grow, property values rise, and the Black population decline, indicating that gentrification is displacing people from this historically BIPOC community. This project builds on years of relationship building within Black and Hispanic / Latine neighborhoods and efforts to equip neighbors with tools to advocate for what they want and need for their families and neighborhoods so that they can stay here and enjoy the benefits of a revitalized community.
Eviction crisis
According to RVA Eviction lab (run out of VCU), and the Princeton University Eviction Lab analysis of eviction case court records, Richmond has the second highest eviction rate in the country at 11% annually from 2000 to 2016.
Approximately 30.9% of all renters in Richmond receive an eviction notice per year (Campaign to Reduce Evictions, 2018). According to the Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC), 56 families in Richmond were evicted from their homes every week in 2017 (Marra, 2019). Furthermore, families with children are evicted at double the rate of families without children. Eviction in Richmond is also a racial issue - eviction rates increase as the number of people of color increase, even when holding income and other factors constant (Campaign to Reduce Evictions, 2018).
According to VCU’s Eviction Lab, neighborhoods on Southside face higher than average evictions (see Figure 1, pulled from their report). Measured at the neighborhood level, evictions were greater than two times the average for the rest of Richmond (bright and dark red) (Teresa, RVA Eviction Lab). These neighborhoods are predominantly African-American, reenforcing multiple studies’ findings that evictions increase in minority neighborhoods.
Equitable Solutions
Equitable development scorecard
Virginia Community Voice has been working for several years to see neighbors’ vision for the natural and built environment realized, by equipping local leaders with tools and building their advocacy and organizing skills.
We formed a Housing Working Group in 2019 with approximately 20 neighbors who meet monthly to share their experiences, learn about the issues surrounding development, housing, gentrification, etc., and make plans for collective action. HWG membership is representative of the South Richmond community (63% Black and 37% Latine/x).
This led to the creation of an Equitable Development Scorecard in 2021. The Equitable Development Scorecard was created to hold developers and the city accountable to neighbors’ priorities for development on the Southside. The scorecard is divided into six categories: community engagement, food access & security, safety, equitable jobs access, neighborhood & equitable development, and neighborhood infrastructure maintenance & resiliency.
The 2022-2024 rollout plan for the Equitable Development Scorecard included: 1) Use of the scorecard by nonprofit developers; 2) Use of the scorecard by for-profit developers and 3) Passage of an ordinance by the City of Richmond requiring that developments on city owned property / publicly financed developments on the Southside align with these priorities.
Over the past few years, neighbors have learned that when developments are not planned from the beginning with community priorities in mind, it is hard to change plans mid-stream. Even with the scorecard and well-organized efforts to make their voices heard, key decision-makers within the city and developers may still ignore community priorities, as is the case with a recent redevelopment project for the Oak Grove elementary school. At this time, neighbors are focused on using the properties in the scorecard to create community-design elements for incorporating into city small area plans.
Community-Design elements
Southside will be a safer place to live in terms of both violent crime as well as health outcomes, when development is driven by what the community wants. When the process by which decisions are made is more community-centered, then the natural and built environment on the Southside will change in ways that enhance health and safety for residents. The current model does not prioritize, and often ignores the pleas of residents, and instead prioritizes the profits of developers, or the city economic growth goals, without attending to the long-term impacts this extractive approach has on the health and well-being of local neighbors.
None of the neighbors we work with through RVA Thrives are opposed to development; they understand violent crime will go down as Southside redevelops and gentrifies, as evidenced by this happening in other Richmond neighborhoods like Jackson Ward. They just want to have a say in what that redevelopment looks like and not be pushed out in the process.
Our experience suggests that neighbors need a more proactive way to communicate their vision, with specific details of what they want to see built on the Southside, block-by-block. In spring 2023, neighbors completed their first Community-Design Plan.