by James A. Bacon

I’ve made no secret of my disdain for former Levar Stoney’s track record as mayor of Richmond between 2017 and 2025. His only tangible accomplishment, I’ve said, was tearing down Confederate statues. But perhaps I was too harsh. If we’re to believe Governing magazine, a national trade publication that covers state and local policies, Stoney should share the credit for cutting the city’s poverty rate almost in half: from 27% in 2014 to 17.1% in the most recent American Community Survey.

That’s a major accomplishment, if warranted.

I’m a bit skeptical of the case laid out by Governing’s former executive editor Christopher Swope. The policy mix detailed in the article seem too pedestrian — job and financial-literacy training, after-school programs, free transit programs, new recreation facilities — to account for the change. But Swope cites a forthcoming paper by University of Richmond professor Thad Williamson, which finds that local policies and programs made a “meaningful contribution” to the reduction in poverty. So, who knows, maybe there’s something to the claim.

In the meantime, you can be sure that Stoney will use Swope’s column to burnish his credentials as an anti-poverty champion during his campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination for lieutenant governor. Given the scandalous maladministration of city government, culminating with the week-long interruption of water service barely a week after his term ended, he’ll need something to run on.

After trillions of dollars spent on programs nationally over the past half-century, urban poverty remains an unremitting problem in cities from Chicago to Baltimore to Philadelphia. It would be a triumph of historic proportions if Stoney finally cracked the code on how to combat poverty. Perhaps there is something the nation can learn.

In Swope’s account, Stoney’s predecessor Dwight C. Jones got the ball rolling. In 2014, Jones set a goal of cutting the 27% poverty rate in half by 2030. Five years ahead of that deadline, Richmond has cut the poverty rate to 17.1%. “Richmond is on a better trendline than nearly every comparable city in the Southeast,” he writes.

Jones birthed the process by creating the nation’s first municipal Office of Community Wealth Building, which consolidated existing anti-poverty programs, built community partnerships, and embraced a holistic approach to fighting poverty.

Not only did Stoney keep the Office of Wealth Building, he expanded it. “They started an idea to reduce the poverty rate in Richmond,” Stoney told Swope, “and we were able to expand and add value to it.”

The core of the program is workforce development. The city, writes Swope, provided job training to hundreds of residents each year and partners with local companies to hire them. The city also partnered with nonprofits and invested millions of city dollars into afterschool programming for elementary and middle schoolers. The city set up counseling spaces at high schools to help with job interviews and navigate job and scholarship applications. Another Stoney program paid the tuition of any city public school graduate to attend community college.

A pilot program tested a guaranteed income of $500 a month to supplement their wages. The city provided free bus rides, extending ridership to suburban job centers, and it “invested” federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act in its most neglected neighborhoods. (Swope does not say how the funds were “invested.”)

Stoney is most proud of four recreation and community facilities that he calls “opportunity centers.” These bring more than playgrounds and basketball courts to poor neighborhoods. “Residents will be able to come in and get resources, whether it’s job opportunities or childcare opportunities. All the things that touch one’s life you can find through these doors,” Stoney says. “You don’t have to go down to City Hall to gain an opportunity. You can gain one right here in your backyard.”

Swope enthuses over the idea of “bringing resources to where people are.” He cites a Bon Secours partnership that deploys “a small team of community health workers hired from high-poverty areas” to manage chronic health needs, navigate people to job training, and counsel on paying utility bills. Health and wealth, he says, are entwined.

Swope acknowledges that other factors might have contributed to the decline in the poverty rate. The tight labor market means unemployment is low and wages are rising. But he mainly credits Jones with originating the approach, Stoney for building on it for eight years, and the new mayor, Danny Avula, for promising to carry on with it.

I love the city’s strategy of branding its efforts as “wealth building.” That’s a much more positive orientation than “fighting poverty,” and it hints at equipping poor people with the attitudes and skills they need to succeed, a poverty-fighting strategy I approve of.

Here’s why I’m skeptical. There’s not an original idea to be seen here. Cities across America have been trying almost all these approaches in various permutations for many years. Besides, many of these efforts preceded Jones and Stoney — they’ve just been repackaged. Newer programs, like the community centers, have not been in existence long enough to have contributed to a decade-long diminishment of poverty. And, frankly, I’m having trouble seeing how some of these programs would make a material contribution to cutting the poverty rate.

Has the City of Richmond — which has been racked by chronic malfeasance in billing, credit-card expensing, and other basic administrative functions — discovered the secret sauce for ending the intractable problem of inter-generational poverty? That’s a stretch.

But I’ll try to keep an open mind, and I’ll look forward to reading UR prof Williamson’s analysis.