It’s a cold Monday morning in Scott’s Addition and I’m waiting for 1st District City Councilman Andreas Addison to join me for a coffee and a chat at Grit Coffeeshop. I met Andreas twenty years ago when we both tended bar at Can Can Brasserie, both members of the original staff there. I remember him as a sharp dude that always treated the gig like a career endeavor. Just ‘all-in’ on pretty much everything. It was kinda impressive.
Now he’s a twice-elected City Councilman and I want to see if that ethic stuck. What I really wanted to do was vent, to be honest. There’s just so much about our system of governance that seems so Mickey Mouse, ass backward, unimaginative, and built on legacies of inequality and racism. See, I’m already ranting.
I wanted to give him a chance to explain where some of the problems are, poke his brain for clever solutions, and just see what makes him tick on the soul level. Oh, hey, he just walked in…
ed. note: This conversation was a lot longer than the edited version you’re getting below.
Christian Detres: Andreas Addison. Where do you come from? More importantly, where are you coming from? Like physically first though. What’s your personal history backstory?
Andreas Addison: I’m proudly born and raised in Virginia. I’ve spent time in pretty much every corner of the state in some fashion. I was born in Alexandria, but I grew up on a farm in Shenandoah County. When I graduated high school, I went to Virginia Tech to study for my political science degree. I moved to Richmond in 2004, trying to move to the “big city.” More importantly, I wanted to find a way to get involved with applying what I learned. I studied Richmond throughout my childhood; most Virginians do. We have this weird history in our state. I was drawn, by interest, to the subject of recent and current (at the time) governance. Government shifted from Council-Manager to “strongly elected mayor” with Doug Wilder, our first mayor. I moved into the city during that period of rapid change. That’s when I got fascinated by what was really going on in the city and our state.
So that’s kind of what brought me to Richmond. When I got here, I worked as a bartender, opened Can Can Brasserie-
CD: That’s how we met! I was also a bartender at Can Can that first year.
AA: That’s right. I worked in a couple other restaurants and bars and then finally started my career I had set out to have. It wasn’t until the Downtown Masterplan in 2007 that I really got connected with the city government. I applied for a couple jobs and eventually got hired to work in city government under the budget office. I worked with Mayor Wilder to understand how we connect services to citizens. And so I really got thrust into the call center operations of government. How do we actually respond to calls? How does a phone call create a service request or work to be done and how was that tracked?
My whole focus was trying to help apply what I was learning to how governance works. From there, I went on to Mayor Dwight Jones’s anti poverty commission. I worked on recovery from the Great Recession (2008), designed and advocated for where we were gonna invest some of the American Recovery Revitalization Act money. That was Obama’s version of the American Rescue Plan Act.
I worked in that space, but really got fascinated with poverty-related policy. I got into the depths of understanding the history of racism in our government’s decisions. I think that blight shapes the city we see today. And so I think there has been a big disconnect in regards to the decision on where we put a highway and how that created our current public housing placement. I was interested in the history of neighborhoods that face generations of disinvestment. That divide is really creating this challenge of overcoming ourselves, and our history. I think you saw that with Dwight Jones and the proposed downtown ballpark. There is usually a conflict centered around how we honor our past but also how we move forward. Like, that location downtown is still a parking lot. Nothing was done. The challenges really front and center is that we haven’t really owned up to what our history really has been. And we haven’t really seen what I think our history as a city can and should be.
There were three referendums on where to put the highway system in Richmond, now the 64/95 corridor. It was run right through the heart of downtown. We all know that it destroyed Jackson Ward, literally Black Wall Street, the Harlem of the South. It was thriving, vibrant, had an amazing music scene, art scene, counterculture. It was a great testament to the resilience of the oppressed. We destroyed it on purpose and ruined a beacon of hope in the South. So I look at those decisions, and I recognize the roots of the problems that we face in this city today.
So when people across the city and counties complain about the performance of schools or crime and “certain neighborhoods”, I immediately think back to why those neighborhoods exist. There was intentional harm in mind. To just put a highway right through a community when it didn’t need to go there. It could have been somewhere just a little further north, in a natural valley. Instead, we destroyed neighborhoods. And and we did it again, two decades later, when we put the downtown expressway through Randolph. It’s 2023. This was done in 1970. And nothing’s changed.
I’m blessed because I’ve been given a really front and center seat to the available solutions. I’ve been able to be in front of complaints, concerns, objections, stories around what those impacts have been historically and currently. I helped create the RVA 311 call center in 2008/9. When we got that off the ground it was called Richmond Works. One of the tough problems to crack was that there were pockets of the city from where very few calls came. There are pockets where lots of calls came in, mostly from the first district. ‘Probably one of the top two call responding districts in the city. But when you go to public housing neighborhoods, there’s very little being requested of the municipal government. It was data you had to look for to know that it didn’t exist. You don’t just see it. When you start looking into it, when you actually drive through Creighton, Fairfield, Gilpin and Mosby, their streets haven’t been paved any more recently than mine. There are potholes all over the place, but yet, there’s no requests logged to get them fixed. There’s three lights that are out and no one’s requesting those to be fixed. There’s trees that have not been asked to be trimmed.
CD: You know the answer to that.
AA: 100%. What I realized when I started asking that question of leadership was, hey, maybe they’re not going to ask because they don’t trust government. Maybe the reason why they don’t want us coming in to fix things is because they think that’s gonna create other, bigger, problems. But here’s an opportunity to build trust. Trust is a bridge built between two points over time, until it’s strong enough to carry the truth across. A lot of times, we expect that truth to come quicker. You have to take the time to get in there and learn, and listen, and observe, and be told things you don’t want to hear. Those are real. So even if we don’t have complaints, like, just go pave the street. Don’t wait to be asked for potholes to be filled, go fix it. Go in there with a crew and just cut down some trees or trim them up, plant some new ones. Go in there and make sure the streetlights are all turned on, and if they’re not, make sure they’re replaced. Just go in there and do that kind of work. We’re not that big. It’s not a Herculean task. This is like “take on a problem a week” scenario.
CD: If it is a Herculean task, then you need to figure out why. What’s wrong with your bureaucracy when you cant respond meaningfully to predictable needs?
AA: 100%. Yeah, and when you inquire about it, you get, “But that’s the housing authority’s projects.” When presented with real issues handled like hot potatoes, I kept thinking, “You’re just trying to find an answer to justify inaction.” That bothered me significantly. I’m getting to the point. I’m answering you in a very polite, politician way, haha.
This is where my passion for, or why I ran for office, for City Council, came from. I was in the midst and throes of big challenges: improving access to health care for uninsured residents, figuring out how to analyze and create economic activity in formerly vibrant neighborhoods, without displacing those who currently live there. I used partnerships across the country to lead on these opportunities, to elevate this conversation. And every leader here was like, “No, we’re already doing that. No, no, we’re good. We’ve already got that.” I’m going, “No, if these people came from around the world, or from around the United States, looked at this problem, got in there with their hands and got dirty in the streets – walking, talking to people, listening, you pay attention to them. What they are recommending is the outcome of all of that process. And you’re gonna tell me no? We’re already doing enough? There’s a big problem with that. That’s a bigger problem.”
I was tired of being told the research and data collected in the field wouldn’t inform their actual decisions. I’m thinking, “These aren’t the responses that get to solutions.” If we take these well-researched steps, we can start fixing the little things that make the bigger problems easier to conquer.
CD: You don’t want to immediately point a finger and be like, “It’s your fault!” because you don’t know what they’re dealing with, right? There may be things they’ve requested that they can’t get, slashed budgets, or whatever it’s been. But still, in the end, it’s not getting done.
The real question though is, what local government position has the authority and influence to push those buttons? Where do we, as Richmonders, put our attention to ensure the right persons are in the right place? Because we’ve had enough and we’ve heard enough excuses. We’re done with the bullshit.
I think the casino thing really hits that nail on the head. We want to say to our local politicians, “You cannot keep making stupid decisions and then blame us for saying ‘no’ to everything. Because yeah, we’re gonna say ‘no’ to stupid things.” And many times, even when something needs to be addressed, we’re faced with, “Oh, well, we have an agency that’s figuring this out,” and then nothing happens.
If anything does happen, it’s usually some ill-advised, short-sighted plan (Washington Commanders camp, Coliseum/6th St Marketplace?). We have gotten to the place where our entire identity, to anyone paying attention, is tripping over our own shoes. Like that’s who Richmond is to a lot of Richmonders.
If we develop anything right, like Scott’s Addition—I mean, this place is unrecognizable from just a decade ago. I’m sitting in a beautiful coffee shop in a place that was probably an empty warehouse full of rats back then. And yet, you get one good idea here (an arcade bar?) and then there are 10 other people who come in with the exact same idea. And then nine of them fail. All right, now I’m just ranting.
But okay, so to the question I’m long-windedly getting at, is where do we put our attention? Where can I, as a voter or activist, apply pressure so we break this idiotic cycle?
AA: Good question. Consider this: I’m going to give a quick intro into what I believe is one of the most important organizational change decisions we’ve been able to make in support of City Council since I’ve been in office.
On my first term, I think in my first or second year, I supported the elimination of our employee residency requirements for many city positions. This residency requirement made people not accept promotions from a number two, or leadership, because they’d have to physically move their entire families to that district. They’d be serving the exact same district they’re being promoted to serve, but can’t unless they live exactly there. They’re like, “I’ve built a home and a family for the last 15 years; you’re not going to pay me enough to move.” That’s just not possible.
Richmond’s tiny for what these rules are meant for. This affected 85 local critical positions. Now it’s eight. Those eight positions are now required to live in the city: Police Chief, public utilities, public works. The ones that should live directly in the city—not in an adjoining suburb—that they control.
I pushed really strongly on our conversion of our retirement system from our own Richmond Retirement System to the Virginia Retirement System. RRS has always been underfunded, and we keep trying to fund it better. By transitioning to VRS, it’s now elevated. We’re now fully funding our current Retirement System.
CD: What is that done for retention rate of talent?
AA: it’s just happening right now. But what we have are people with a lot of good experience. They understand how it all works and what to do, in the right jobs. So to answer you, all the outside pressure in the world isn’t going to fix anything without working on the problems inside the machine.
So the challenge we’ve had is that inaction has been a symptom of illness embedded for decades in our systems. I give that background because I believe we’re going to see a lot of new things happen moving forward. We’ll be able to attract people that want to come take this job. Take on these challenges.
I think a lot of the problems we’ve had in really overcoming housing, workforce development, infrastructure – those have all been restrained by our own administrative missteps. I thought Mayor Stoney was going to come in and do that because he ran with an executive experience platform. He was working under Terry McAuliffe in his administration. He kind of came in with that expectation. “I’m going to come in and change some things.” I think he found those barriers that I mentioned earlier right quick. We’re kind of in our own way. He’s like, “I can’t just hire who I want to. They don’t want to come here. I can throw money at them. They still don’t want to.”
CD: This is why I asked. Where my focus is, and I think a lot of people out there agree is “okay, I know it’s difficult and all, but it’s your job to figure out why it’s this way and and we pay you to fix it.
AA: 100%. It’s always going to be voting. The second vote for the casino painted a picture of Richmonders en masse not saying “no” to anything as much as it was “not this plan”. “We want to support something better, or we don’t think you can deliver on what this is promising because you haven’t before. And if you can’t do the basic things, you certainly cannot handle something with so many ways of going wrong.” I think that trust is one of our bigger problems. Now. I would say to do the things you’re talking about fixing right? Things you care about. We’re trying to change a lot, but we’re only able to move this big giant aircraft carrier in measured increments.. But we’ve got to take the time to do it.
CD: You described the razing of Jackson Ward and Randolph. There’s so much ill will and animosity, and clearly preferential behavior to ‘certain’ residents. And it has happened for so long. There’s some maturity in understanding that something this big can only move in increments without breaking it. That is countered with the understanding that a lot of people don’t give a fuck whether you break it anymore. Because it’s already broken. We’re sick of waiting until we wind up in a situation where we’ve robbed another generation of hope, another generation of lost possibilities. It’s frustrating to think of those brilliant minds left unused, uncelebrated, because we couldn’t do what we were supposed to do to give them an education, to give them opportunities to use their knowledge or talent. Whole generations of collateral damage in the effort to move a cranky ship more than 10 degrees at a time. I mean, maybe it’s time to start building a new ship that’s already pointed in the right direction?
Moving on, I picked up on something interesting when I was reading your bio. Your efforts in getting services to those that need them, making those services available without needless hurdles by creating one-stop online portals, things like this. I had the great opportunity to speak with Senator Booker about this. I was talking to him about how difficult it is for people to sign up for unemployment or to get straight answers on anything regarding their Medicaid. The verbiage on these sites is just so thick, the UI so user-deterrent, that there is a feeling that government works in direct opposition to administering services to rightful recipients.
Politicians want to get the credit for saying these services exist. And then once you try to sign up for them, it’s unabashedly set up so that you cannot access it – at least without a great deal of patience. I asked why there isn’t a federal site that bundles all of your opportunities, grants, small business assistance, healthcare needs, warrants, taxes, etc., all this stuff in one space? Like a social media style portal where you have a profile, and all the widgets that apply to your particular situation and geography are clearly and plainly presented. How difficult is that? Why is it that every time the government does try to make something like that it’s garbage? Complete garbage. There are little startups with four to five nerds in a garage that can make it happen. What is happening with our billions and trillions of dollars? Why in the hell is this a problem? I’ve seen you have been trying to address this.
AA: The challenge is the silos of government get in the way of progress. So the money you’re talking about is propping up the leaky system we already have. When we throw money at a new idea, it’s really nowhere near enough to really move the needle. And there’s a saying that my first, boss at City Hall said. He goes, “if you can’t change the people, change the people.”
I firmly believe that because we haven’t changed people enough. We get stuck with the analog thinking of “we’re gonna put this really cumbersome manual process into a digital format because it’s what I know”, rather than going “Hey, we should change how we look at this.” So many online processes are made to mimic the workflow of a manual, pen on paper job. Aneesh Chopra who was the Chief Technology Officer under McCain when he was Governor, and then later Obama’s Chief Technology Officer, said that he learned so much when he tasked his team to look at all the application forms that citizens have to fill out. They’d mark all the different overlapping blanks for name, birthday address, phone number, email address, basic contact info, all the same. We’d start going down the list, realizing how it’s almost the same thing over and over again. Our current system for people to engage with their government is absolutely inefficient and infuriating.
With a governor’s term of technically two and a half years to get something done, throwing money at an issue is about as complex a plan you can put together before the clock runs out. Here’s the thing, all the services given to those who are income dependent or income restricted are formula based. It’s a binary decision, yes or no. Very simple. Yeah. Very complex in application, but the formula that they use is very straightforward. There’s a project on the state level I’m hoping to work with the Director of Social Services, Danny Avula, is Universal Eligibility Screening. When you apply for one service, it shows you all the services, programs, and benefits you’re eligible for, very straightforward. It would operate on a fiscal year calendar that we can control because your taxes are reported in April. We’ll know what your income was, household size, all the things that are required pieces of information to support your eligibility screening. Once a year.
CD: What happens if you get a raise or second income?
AA: You would be given a grace period to adjust to your new circumstances. If you’re going from one level to the next level, because you’re being successful, should you be punished for that? If you’ve made five grand more this year, you should be able to use that growth, not just give it right back to the government.
When kids go to college, are they likely to be 100% self-sufficient when they graduate? No, no, of course not. Could we not have a grace period of help while they figure life out? If they make a stupid purchase, or go on a trip or they shouldn’t have, and spend more money than they had? Do you help them or do you let them learn the hard way? The idea always dismissed as “we can’t be paternalistic” and thinking this is the opportunity to not be paternalistic, but to be human. Helping each other out is simply human.
CD: There seems to be so little humanity in the decisions the government makes. Who is it that doesn’t understand that babies are starving? Or that there’s women coming home from two jobs and having their 12 year old watching their 3 year old? And that’s that kid’s life. Not playing with friends, not going outside. Not learning something interesting, not building life experiences. There’s this cycle that we put people into a life of absolute bare bones subsistence. They’re circling a drain grasping for a lifeline while they pay people to watch and judge them for being poor. So, what the actual fuck? I don’t know that there’s a polite way to ask that question. What in the fuck is wrong with the people we have making these programs so difficult to access or count on?
AA: So, I think what lies right at the surface is a lot of the people that you’re asking about have never lived in poverty. They haven’t been on a federal or state support system. They’re simply trying to manage the program as it exists right now. They’re trying to manage the workload of a convoluted administration on a problem they have no understanding of.
I grew up on free lunch in school. When my little brother was born, we were on WIC, and on food stamps in rural Northwest Virginia. My stepdad wasn’t able to find a job that gave him enough income to save money, succeed. My real father was on Social Security handicap. This is common for far too many families across the country. I try to speak about things in this capacity, they look at me and go,”The white educated male in the first district? Yeah, with an MBA and an undergrad, a college degree? What makes you think you can speak about this?” I can’t speak about my experience as on par with the struggling African American population in Richmond. That situation is completely different from mine. But I understand enough about it to know that this system is not designed for them to be elevated out of poverty. Everything is designed around imaginary bootstraps, blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t work. I’m sorry. It doesn’t work.
CD: How do we initiate a situation where no person graduates high school without knowing exactly how the branches of local government work, and work together? I think everyone should have an answer to “Where do the mayor’s powers begin and end? What does City Council do? Who are these people? I feel like this is this is a big issue because we are being asked to participate in a democracy, to make informed decisions on you guys. We want to know who’s pulling the levers that that actually can make good things happen. Can we expect can we expect some sort of some sort of focus on that?
AA: So I have this bizarre, crazy, outside the box idea that every high school graduate should have a plan to enter the workforce upon graduating, maybe even going after capital and starting their own business. They may want to elevate a passion project into a viable job. They might want to go to one of our amazing colleges and universities here.
Every single student no matter what income level you have, should be financially supported, encouraged and motivated to take on that next step. And that doesn’t start at the senior year. That starts probably in middle school. I don’t see this in action across the entire city. We are not giving kids an enriching experience that prepares them for adulthood, nor giving them an understanding of how to get the most out of your local government.
If you grab kids between the hours of 3 and 6pm every day of the week with one or two events in the arts, culture, sports, or athletics realm, we can stoke curiosities and assist them to find their sweet spot. We can put them in situations where they’re not intimidated by a curriculum. These are things they already want to do. The point is, the more we can expose our children in those formative years to opportunities to follow their curiosity, we are creating positive interactions with their community and the structures that support it. It’s after school programs that aren’t centered on ‘homework’. It’s “let’s have fun. Let’s be creative. Let’s do something challenging. Let’s push yourself a little bit.” Those access points are what transform kids.
I’ll use my middle school, Albert HiIl Middle, for an example of the challenges we face. At my old school there are tennis courts, soccer fields, the Humphrey Calder community center. But if I ride the bus to school, I can’t take advantage of any of it. Because I gotta go home on that bus. There’s no other way to get home if I don’t take that bus. Automatically, we’re creating a divide. Too often that divide is cut across economic stabilities in their homes, cutting out the people in most need of those programs.
CD: How about having a second shift for the buses?
AA: 100%. It’s an investment in our children. I’m about elevating the role of school bus driver to being a more full time job. Elevating it to be a more involved, service-oriented part of our community that helps the bigger picture. Have the 3PM buses add stops at after school programs off-site, at technical centers, rec rooms, art workshops, places they can fully become themselves. You can simply add another identical route to the one used after school to take kids from these after school programs after rush hour has subsided, 6:30 or so.
CD: I like the way you’re thinking about that. Normally you have this conversation and people are all “okay, well, we have to change the way we do the curriculum to start all these other new programs” when you simply need to give people access to the opportunities that already exist. Think about the mom or dad who has to get off work early to go pick up their children. This idea of there being an after school paradigm of dream-chasing with a city-funded transportation option early evening addresses a number of anxieties parents face. Hell, the extra time could simply give them time to exhale after work, get some chores done, do the shopping, not have to pay a sitter. These benefits add up, simply for the price of another run of the school’s bus fleet on a weekday basis.
AA: It’d be easy to see this as a problem that you can’t fund. I see is an opportunity for us to be better. I see opportunities instead of problems because every problem creates an opportunity to explore a new perspective for progress. We need to get to what’s possible. What’s the opportunity that can become created? I like to reflect back to when the late 80s, early 70s. We had required to put ATA ramps everywhere because of equal access for everybody mandates. What happened was the addition of these ramps helped everyone, the disabled of course, but also moms with strollers, workers making deliveries using hand trucks, literally everything invpolving wheels going in and out of our municipal buildings. I’m trying to find and fund the next ADA ramp solution for other social problems. I don’t believe it needs to be seen as oh my gosh, how are we going to do that? How much is that going to cost? We should be looking at what changes can we make that have impacts across the entire ecosystem of issues we face.
I think transforming education into a workforce career development path is vitally important. Bringing business partners, community partners to lend their assistance to enrich after school programs, take kids to the ballet, the symphony, all the museums we have and making sure they have access to these insitutions because we already paid for them. They’re already paid for. It’s part of our city’s budget as part of our philanthropic operation.
END
Main photo by Nick Davis
You can find more information on Andreas Addison addisonforcouncil.com
You know, what did I get out of this other than having the chance to accost a City Councilmember with impossible questions? I think the obvious enthusiasm for problem-solving was refreshing to see. I also benefited from listening to the creativity put toward divining solutions that bundle our needs efficiently. I think overall though, I came out of this convo a little less cynical, with more hope that there are some people looking at the big picture and getting its message. I implore all of you that bothered to read this far to also corner your reps with sincere questions about your local world. If for nothing else, it’s fun. — Christian Detres
