If
all you had to go on were the headlines in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch or the scolding on local talk
radio, you’d easily conclude that the city of
Richmond
was in terminal decline. City council members have
been under indictment or resigning in disgrace.
Kickbacks and corruption are all too common. The
murder rate, after dipping mercifully in the late
1990s, is climbing again. Schools fall perennially
short of meeting the Standards of Learning (SOLs).
The
headlines are true, all too horrifyingly true.
But there’s more to Richmond
than scandal and conflict. Believe it or not, the
city is on the mend.
Like
every inner city in the United
States,
Richmond
has its share of highly visible social and political
problems. But economic and demographic tides have
shifted solidly in its favor. White flight, which
afflicted the city for three decades or more, has
ended. Virtually unnoticed, affluent citizens from
around the metropolitan region have been moving back
into the city. In many neighborhoods, incomes are
rising faster than the regional average. Despite the
city’s best efforts at self-sabotage, the tax base
is stabilizing.
Equally
significant, and unnerving, the pathology of poverty
is seeping into the surrounding counties. Aging
shopping centers and dowdy neighborhoods in Henrico
and Chesterfield
Counties
are showing the same signs of decrepitude that inner
city precincts did four decades ago. Higher-income
households are leaking from Richmond's
inner suburbs where there’s nothing – no charm,
no public spaces, no pedestrian comforts, no
architecture worth preserving -- to hold them. Large
swathes of the counties’ tax base are eroding.
The
trends unfolding in the
Richmond
region are national in scope, replaying in city
after city. Similar changes can be seen in urban
regions as large as the Washington
metroplex and as small as
Charlottesville.
But it’s here in Richmond
that the phenomenon has been carefully documented by
two
University
of Virginia
urban planning professors, William H. Lucy and David
L. Phillips, in a census tract-level of study of
incomes and housing types.
“Our
forecast is that in the period from 2000 to 2020,
much of Richmond
will recover, perhaps very strongly,” wrote
Lucy
and Phillips in a report to the Richmond Urban land
Institute last fall. “In contrast, much —
perhaps most — of Henrico and
Chesterfield
will stumble and some parts will collapse — as
parts of Richmond
collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s.”
The
driving force behind these tectonic shifts is a
relentless quest for better housing. As incomes have
risen over the past two decades, Americans have
sought bigger, more comfortable homes. Nationally,
the median size of a house was 1,100 square feet in
1950, according to Lucy. With each decade, the
average size grew. By 1970, the median reached
1,375 square feet. By 2000, the size reached 2,000
square feet. Most of the houses being built today
are larger than the median, Lucy says.
In
Richmond,
people moving up to bigger houses have tended to do
one of two things: Migrate to the urban periphery
where new subdivisions are being developed and the
biggest houses are being constructed, or move back
to older urban neighborhoods where houses either had
been renovated or offered the potential to be
renovated.
Newness
is what sells in the newer neighborhoods. Houses
come with all the latest amenities – sprawling
decks, home theaters, three-car garages, giant
kitchens with granite countertops, whatever happens
to be in fashion among the upwardly mobile
professionals. What sells older houses, despite the
frequent difficulty of retrofitting them to current
Yuppie standards, is a combination of
architectural elegance, structural integrity and
neighborhood ambience – in particular a
pedestrian-friendly environment and a finer-grained
mix of houses, shops and offices.
By
contrast, most housing built in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s has little to recommend it, Lucy notes. The
sheen of newness has worn away. The houses are
small, the architecture undistinguished, and the
neighborhoods lacking in charm. What's more, notes
Lucy, “Suburban neighborhoods are inconvenient.
There is little to walk to. Every activity requires
driving, and driving is not as much fun as it used
to be when there was less traffic.”
By
default, lower income households move into the
smaller houses and less desirable neighborhoods that
the more affluent families vacated. It's a fact of
life that poor people have to live somewhere. No one
is building new
dwellings for them -- builders encounter ferocious
resistance to “affordable housing” projects that
might bring in "undesirables." So, poor
people move into the houses no one else wants --
increasingly, small,
single-family dwellings in the aging suburbs.
As
a consequence, although poverty is still
concentrated disproportionately in the city of
Richmond, poverty rates starting nudging down in the 1990s. Poverty, by contrast, ticked upwards in Henrico and
Chesterfield.
Family
Poverty Rates |
|
1990 |
2000 |
%
Change |
Richmond |
17.4
% |
17.1
% |
-1.7
% |
Chesterfield |
2.9
% |
3.3
% |
+13.8
% |
Henrico |
3.9
% |
4.5
% |
+15.4
% |
Source:
Lucy and Phillips |
A
similar trend can be seen by identifying those
census districts where income gains lagged the
metro-wide average by 10 percent or more. In the
1970s, census tracts that were losing ground were
concentrated in the city of Richmond. In the 1980s,
decay had clearly shifted to the inner suburbs:
There were more declining census tracts in
Henrico/Chesterfield than in the city. By the 1990s,
twice as many census tracts were on the
downhill slide in Henrico and Chesterfield as there
were in the city!
Declining
Census Tracts
(Decreasing
in relative average family income by 10
percent or more) |
|
Total
tracts |
Number
in decline |
%
in Decline |
1970-1980 |
Richmond |
65 |
26
|
40
% |
Henrico |
69 |
6
|
10
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
14
|
23
% |
1980-1990 |
Richmond |
65 |
33 |
51
% |
Henrico |
69 |
23 |
39
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
28 |
47
% |
1990-2000 |
Richmond |
65 |
21
|
32
%
|
Henrico |
69 |
27
|
46
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
23
|
38
% |
Source:
Lucy and Phillips |
By
definition, if some neighborhoods are losing ground
compared to metro-wide averages, others are gaining.
When Lucy and Phillips examined the hottest census
tracts, where income gains exceeded metro average by
10 percent or more, they found major shifts over
time. In the 1970s, the hot, fast-rising income
tracts were located in the suburbs. The 1980s still
leaned to the suburbs, though not as emphatically.
In the 1990s, however, the number of hot census
tracts in Richmond outnumbered those in Henrico and
Chesterfield combined.
Rising
Census Tracts
(Increasing
in relative average family income by 10
percent or more) |
|
Total
tracts |
Number
Rising |
%
Rising |
1970-1980 |
Richmond |
65 |
12 |
18
% |
Henrico |
69 |
32 |
54
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
8 |
13
% |
1980-1990 |
Richmond |
65 |
12 |
18
% |
Henrico |
69 |
7 |
12
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
14 |
23
% |
1990-2000 |
Richmond |
65 |
19 |
29
% |
Henrico |
69 |
6 |
10
% |
Chesterfield |
60 |
7 |
12
% |
Source:
Lucy and Phillips |
These
positive trends do not mean that Richmond is out of
the woods. In the 1990s, Richmond still counted more
fast-declining census tracts than fast-growing ones.
That trend was still evident in 2001-2002 Internal
Revenue Service numbers indicating that taxpayers
moving out of the city earned $4,300 less than
taxpayers moving into the city. (See my column,
"The
Silent Migration," Sept. 8, 2003.) But the
fact remains that there is a two-way
migration. Affluent people are moving back into the
city in significant number.
(An
outflow of affluent households also afflicts
Henrico, where taxpayers leaving the county earned
$2,577 more than those moving into it. Chesterfield,
with fewer older neighborhoods and more brand-new
neighborhoods, is still experiencing a positive
influx, in which newcomers earned $2,982 more than
taxpayers who left.)
Popular
perceptions do not match these dramatic demographic
and economic shifts. But it seems reasonably clear
that Richmond and other central cities across the U.S.
have reached an inflection point. The inner city's
decades-long decline is bottoming out -- indeed,
many central cities are rebounding. At the same time
poverty, with all of its attendant problems, is
seeping into the suburbs. If the 20th century was
marked by the the decay of great American cities and
the rise of the suburbs, the 21st will experience
the long hoped-for urban renaissance. And it won't
be long before national news magazines and
presidential candidates are decrying
the decay of our aging, desolate suburbs.
Old
housing, once Richmond's greatest liability, is now
its greatest asset. According to Lucy, less than 10
percent of the region's housing stock was built
before 1940 -- and most of that is concentrated in
the city. Nobody's building any more of the old
stuff. In fact, nobody's building anything that
remotely resembles it. The traditional pattern of development --
grid streets, back alleys, public spaces,
architecturally prominent public buildings, pleasant
intermixture of houses, shops, restaurants and
residential-scale office buildings -- has been all
but outlawed by contemporary zoning ordinances.
Traditional
neighborhoods aren't for everyone, but Lucy suspects
that popular tastes are changing and they're coming
back in favor. As Richard Florida observes in his
work The Rise of the Creative Class, members
of the so-called creative
class -- the artistic, scientific and
entrepreneurial innovators -- crave
"authenticity," or a strong sense of
place. Another body of theory also suggests that in
the Knowledge Economy, creative professionals prefer
physical environments that stimulate personal
interaction and the exchange of ideas. Older cities
meet the test; cul de sac subdivisions and office-box Nerdistans in the suburbs
do not.
A
city like Richmond
enjoys immense advantages over the suburbs. It has
character: monuments and statues, developable
waterfront along the James River, and neighborhoods
with history and distinctive architecture. It has
institutional anchors, like the state capital
complex, Virginia Commonwealth University and a host
of museums. All
the suburbs offer is vacant land for new houses, new
malls and new office complexes. Much of the
commercial space, financed with with 20-year depreciation
schedules, is designed for planned obsolescence. Once
the newness wears off, there's nothing left to hold
customers or businesses, who migrate to the latest
and newest project.
It
also turns out that the scattered, low-density
development so typical of the suburbs has immense
drawbacks -- most visibly, the impact on traffic
congestion. Sadly, suburban elected officials appear
oblivious to the problems. Suburban politicians,
though not as corrupt as some of their city
counterparts, are every bit as misguided. Indeed,
short-sighted policies pursued in suburban counties
will only accentuate the reverse flight back into
the city.
Between
1992 and 1997, the Richmond region developed 58,000
acres for subdivisions, office parks, highways,
parking lots and other uses, according to a recent
report issued by the Southern Environmental Law
Center. ("Where
are We Growing? Land Use and Transportation in
Richmond.") That voracious pace of land
consumption outpaced the rate in sprawling,
land-hungry Northern Virginia (49,300 acres) and
Hampton Roads (43,300 acres), both of which have
significantly larger populations. Indeed, Richmond
can lay claim to being one of the fastest-sprawling
New Urban Regions in the entire country.
That
scattered, low-density growth puts an immense strain
on public services, increasing pressure on otherwise
efficiently administered local
governments to raise taxes. Sprawl also puts
intolerable stress on the transportation system.
Richmonders are among the most auto-dependent
citizens in the United States, according to the SELC
report. More than 92 percent
of all commuting trips involved driving, and only 10.4
percent of those were carpools. Only two percent of
commuters used transit, and only 5.5 percent walked
to work, rode a bike or worked at home.
Richmonders
commute farther on average -- 26.5 miles per person in
2001 -- than residents of larger urban regions such
as Northern Virginia (22.5 miles) or Hampton Rods
(22.7 miles). As a consequence, Richmond
roads are getting increasingly congested. The mean travel time to work rose from
21.4 minutes in 1990 to 24.3 minutes in 2000 -- a
13.5 percent increase. Total
hours lost to travel delays in the region increased
10-fold between 1982 and 2001, to 7.1 million hours,
the SELC noted.
As
suburban driving becomes increasingly hellish, life
looks better and better in the city center. Although
the population is denser in the city of Richmond, traffic is not as
congested. Driving distances are shorter -- and
walking, biking and buses are credible alternatives
to hopping in a car.
There
are no obvious solutions to the suburban plight.
Suburban counties cannot undo sprawl. They cannot
make small houses bigger or more attractive to
affluent home buyers. And they cannot easily rip
down strip malls and cul de sacs subdivisions. What they
can do -- but show no sign of doing -- is
acknowledge the wounds that they are inflicting upon
themselves through misguided zoning and planning
policies, and begin thinking how to encourage redevelopment
of the asphalt dystopia they've created over the
past 40 years.
The
job for city officials will start getting easier as
the trend of the past 10 years -- the out-migration
of poor households and the in-migration of affluent
ones -- continues to play out. If Richmond council
members simply refrain from graft and
corruption, the rest will take care of itself.
--
January 19, 2003
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