A rich ‘city’ might be brought together by poverty

by John V. Moeser
for Virginia Business
April 2007

Imagine a city with a growing population, a strong economy and a high quality of life. The schools are good, crime is low, and the cultural life is rich. The business climate is attractive with a wide array of employers, including major corporations whose national headquarters have relocated to the city.

The city is ideal in many ways except one. This attribute, however, is so significant that it endangers just about everything else. The city lacks a government. Its neighborhoods govern themselves. Each operates its own schools, deploys its own police and controls its own land. Each also sets it own taxes, with the rates varying from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Ironically, the neighborhood with the greatest needs and the smallest tax base is the one with the greatest tax burden. Historical forces have conspired to concentrate in this neighborhood the city’s poorest citizens.

Meanwhile, some other neigh­borhoods serve the city’s wealthiest citizens. Large-lot zoning drives up housing costs so that only the moneyed class can afford to live there.

On occasion, the neighborhoods cooperate, but only when it is safe, not when the problems to be to solved raise questions about the effectiveness of local sovereignty or call for the exploration of resource sharing.

The central value of this “governmentless” city is local control, a value that runs deep in American democracy. The city just described, however, illustrates local control run amok.

The city that I’ve described is real. It is Metro Richmond.

This community of a million people is defined by the giant cluster of light that one sees at night from an airplane. The lights in Chesterfield County are indistinguishable from those in Henrico County, Hanover County, the City of Richmond or any other locality in the region. When residents from any of these places travel beyond Virginia, they commonly refer to their home as Richmond.

But unlike some metropolitan areas with regional governments, Metro Richmond doesn’t function as a single community. Rather, all powers of government are held by its “neighborhoods,” thanks to Virginia’s practice, unique among the 50 states, of separating counties and cities.

In Metro Richmond, localities compete with each other. Any suggestion of revenue sharing or government restructuring is met with stiff resistance. The closest the localities came to regional government in recent years was a proposal by state Sen. John Watkins in 1995 to create a single authority for Chesterfield, Henrico and Richmond that would handle water and sewer, waste disposal and transportation facilities. The bill gained a surprising amount of support in the Virginia General Assembly but ultimately died in a conference committee.

Ironically, the problem that could overcome this resistance to regionalism is the same problem that often led to resistance in the first place — poverty. The latest estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau notes that more poor people now live in the area’s suburban counties than in the City of Richmond (roughly 50,000 vs. 37,000).

Poverty is now a Metro Richmond concern. Out of self-interest, if nothing else, perhaps the area’s localities someday will make common cause to address this concern, not in an effort to confine poverty but to reduce it. Over time, an alliance of separate interests, simply through continued practice of working together, might evolve into something new and transforming. It might give way to a community of shared interests that transcends the interest of any one part. It might lead to a metro area of mixed-use, mixed-income, walking neighborhoods with integrated schools all tied together with an effective public transit system.

For cynics, such a future is pure fantasy. For leaders with imagination, commitment and courage, such a future is possible. Were that kind of leadership to emerge, the kind that unites a people in an extraordinary cause, it is not fantasy to envision such a city. It would no longer be defined strictly by the cluster of lights, but by the bright spirit of a city both large and good.

John V. Moeser is professor emeritus of urban studies and planning at Virginia Commonwealth University. He now is a visiting fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond.