Two years ago, the Richmond City Council faced a common urban dilemma as it struggled to bring business and residents back to the city. It supported showcase projects like the Canal Walk and an expanded Convention Center. But unless the city propped up its deteriorating neighborhoods, many occupied by minorities, Richmond’s achievements would serve mostly white suburbanites who trekked home as soon as work, a special event or exhibition was over.

Past panaceas had failed. Like many large cities, Richmond had plowed federal funds into housing projects that became crime-ridden and dilapidated. Later initiatives such as federal Community Development Block Grant funding pumped millions of dollars into inner-city neighborhoods. Diluted in a sea of poverty and apathy, they too had little effect.

Curtis Davis and his daughter at their new home in Highland Park, a Neighborhoods in Bloom community. Photo by Mark Rhodes

So, the council tried a new approach: Focus funds in concentrated areas, building and rehabbing clusters of single-family homes. In theory, these nuclei of redevelopment would boost confidence and stimulate private investment. "Once these areas are stabilized and ready for private market interest, the resources can be shifted to other areas," explains Charlie Santo, principal planner for the city of Richmond.

Thus, the Neighborhoods in Bloom project was born. Over the past two years, the city has invested $7 million in federal funds and another $1 million in local money to build and renovate houses in the neighborhoods of Blackwell, Carver-Newtowne, Church Hill, Highland Park, Jackson Ward, Southern Barton Heights. The program also helps former housing-project residents find jobs, build good credit and qualify for mortgages. The goal is to build home ownership. When people own their own houses, city officials note, they take better care of their property and help fight crime.

"We can already see that it is working," says Santo. In the Blackwell community, the violent crime rate has declined by 33 percent since Neighborhoods in Bloom began nearly two years ago. Property crime has gone down by 50 percent. The police department may want to claim some of the credit for lower crime rates, but there are other signs that the home ownership strategy is working. In Southern Barton Heights, for example, a four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath house appraised at $17,000 before the program began now has a value of $91,000, a 500 percent increase in value. Overall, property values for Neighborhoods in Bloom communities increased 3.9 percent between 1999 and 2000. That’s less than more affluent areas of the city, but higher than the 0.6 percent increase for neighboring districts.

Although the program has achieved positive results, its funding is up for renewal in June. Connie Bawcum, assistant city manager, hopes to keep the ball rolling. When the program expires in June, she says, "we will recommend that City Council continue the work that is being done in these communities."

While Neighborhoods in Bloom seems to be a winner, it must overcome a hard legacy of segregation and urban "renewal." Take Jackson Ward, which was once a thriving African-American community. Forty years ago, the city built a highway through the middle of a community that was known during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as the "Harlem of the South" and the "Black Wall Street." Jackson Ward was home to one of the most prosperous centers of African-American mercantile activity in the country, including black-owned banks, hotels, insurance companies, movie theaters, fraternal organizations and churches. The area hosted celebrities from jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald to boxing great Joe Louis. But wrecking balls cut a swath through the community to make way for Interstate 95 in the segregated 1950s, during a time of Massive Resistance by whites against school integration. The community’s disenfranchised African-Americans, lacking the means and resources to resist the city’s initiatives, were powerless.

The Neighborhoods in Bloom project targets dilpidated homes, such as this one in Blackwell, for renovation or replacement. Photo courtesy City of Richmond

Other African-American neighborhoods suffered additional upheavals in the 1960s at the hands of well-meaning but now-discredited Great Society programs. Urban renewal consisted of tearing down homes that the city perceived to be slums and replacing them with government-subsidized housing. This social engineering shredded the fabric of the African-American community. Many members of the middle class – doctors, lawyers and teachers – fled the city. The poorest residents congregated in "the projects" where, deprived of middle-class leadership, they fell prey to drugs, crime and other plagues of the underclass.

But some families refused to leave. Rev. Eddie L. Radden III grew up in Blackwell, and his father decided to stay and fight the battle to rebuild the neighborhood. "In those days," Radden says, "this was an upper middle-class community. Hull Street was bustling with ice cream parlors, a grocery store, bowling alleys, movie theatres and a bookstore. Everyone in the community knew each other. The village raised you, so to speak." Then came the programs that demolished ten blocks of homes "that had been around since the 1920s."

By the time African-Americans gained political power in the 1970s, the damage had been done. Guns, drugs and hopelessness devastated their communities. "When I moved here three years ago, there were boarded up houses across the street from my house," says Charlotte Edwards, a resident of Southern Barton Heights. "There was prostitution on the corner, drugs, and sometimes shootings."

Radden, who now lives in Atlanta but frequently visits his parents’ home in Blackwell, says that seeing his old neighborhood distraught with crime was devastating. But Radden and his family aren’t just sitting by. "You won’t be selling drugs on my corner," he says. "I’ll call the police in a heartbeat. I know these kids’ parents and grandparents."

Today, city hall is trying to fix the damage done decades ago. In Blackwell and Southern Barton Heights, the redevelopment effort started off in the same way that it did the last time Richmond "revitalized" both areas – bulldozing. But this time the demolition flattened government-subsidized projects to make room for houses similar to the ones that had existed before. Literally dozens of homes have gone up in their place. Since Neighborhoods in Bloom started, Edwards says a new house has been built beside her and the boarded-up houses across the street have been renovated.

The city has mobilized the resources of other programs to work in concert with Neighborhoods in Bloom. For example, the Richmond Better Housing Coalition, a non-profit developer, has invested nearly $6 million dollars into Church Hill. "It’s a domino effect. If property value goes up, the interest of businesses will also go up," says Robert L. Newman, the coalition’s associate director of operations.

Other city agencies are working to assist former housing project residents get jobs and good credit to qualify for mortgages, so they can become homeowners. Cassandra Farmer, a former Blackwell resident who lived in one of the housing projects, is buying her first home there. Hope VI, a community program working in conjunction with Neighborhoods in Bloom, is helping her do it. "I want better for my kids," the mother of four says.

While Neighborhoods in Bloom is improving lives for lower-income and working-class folks, the reverse of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs isn’t coming any time soon. "You can’t expect that sort of change overnight," says Duane Finger, the deputy director for redevelopment conservation at the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority. "Hopefully city council will stay the course and keep its focus on these areas, because [the program will need] more than two years to work."

The real test will be if businesses take notice. The World Golf Foundation, a collaboration of all the major golf organizations in the world, created St. Augustine, Fla.-based First Tee, a nationwide initiative to make golfing more available for those who otherwise would not be able to afford it. First Tee of Chesterfield has a partnership with the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities to build a nine-hole golf course in Southern Barton Heights. While it’s not Wal-Mart or Applebee’s, it’s a start. "We’d love to have a Ukrop’s here," Edwards says.

Radden says that the transformation will take time, but he sees a much brighter future for his neighborhood. "The community is already integrated, homes are being built and people are moving into them. And as the saying goes, what once was will soon be again."

Return to Virginia Business - March 2001