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Climate Resilience And Justice In Richmond

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When I was seven years old, I lived through one of the deadliest weather-related disasters in recent U.S. history. 

It was July 1995 and my family lived in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago, IL, in a two-story house on a corner lot with a big, beautiful weeping willow tree and a few purple lilac bushes in the backyard (ironic to me now, because they’re both non-native to Illinois, like us). My dad was a steel salesman and my mom was taking night classes to become a nurse and taught flute lessons on the side. We had a cocker spaniel that my older brother named Toby, after the baby in Jim Henson’s The Labyrinth. Most importantly for the purposes of this essay, we had central air conditioning.

Over the weekend of July 12-15, 1995, heat index temperatures (what it really “feels like” outside when combining the effects of air temperature and humidity on your body) in Chicagoland would soar to over 110°F during the day and be buoyed up over 80°F by the urbanized landscape overnight. Temperatures would sit at or over 100°F for 42 hours that weekend. This oppressively extreme heatwave had crippling effects on urban infrastructure: firefighters were opening hydrants and using the water to lubricate the bridges downtown, so water pressure would drop unexpectedly throughout the city. A few roads buckled and contorted, keeping emergency vehicles from reaching those in dire need of assistance, while rolling blackouts plagued neighborhoods across the city. 

This heatwave also dramatically changed the way we understand how social equity and climate stressors interact in our cities. Depending on the estimate, over 750 people died over the course of the heat wave, and many of these deaths were attributable to heat-related exacerbations of underlying conditions like chronic respiratory diseases. Moreover, the relative risk of dying during the heatwave was substantially higher among the elderly and Black populations in Chicago. Eric Klinenberg wrote a book about this heat wave and showed that, among these disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods, there was a history of isolating disinvestment and social fragmentation that further elevated the risk of death.

Jeremy Hoffman

Meanwhile, just a few miles away as the crow flies, I was enjoying my family’s central air conditioning. We bought a small, plastic baby pool to put under the weeping willow’s shade to cool us off when we ventured outside. We ate ice cream and freeze pops and used the slip-and-slide. We didn’t suffer heat-related illness or death. The immense level of privilege and safety afforded to me and my family by the social structures that award and protect whiteness at the expense of Black life is sharply apparent in my otherwise rosy memory of the July 1995 heat wave. Today, as a white male climate scientist at an institution focused on expanding access to scientific information, I wonder how human-caused climate change — which has already made these heat wave events more common, longer in duration, and hotter than in decades past — will further amplify these existing inequities. Furthermore, I have learned that we absolutely must invest in place-based strategies to prepare and empower communities with actionable science tools and data to achieve true climate justice. 

Human-caused climate change, brought about by the gradual accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere from the near-constant combustion of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gasoline to power our world, doesn’t affect humans the same way everywhere. Sure, I think that we hear about the effects of climate change more often now than we used to — it’ll get hotter and wetter, and coastal cities are going to have a lot of flooding issues, and a lot of people are concerned about this (or they’re blatantly denying that this exists) — but these impacts are usually spoken about at the scale of whole states, entire continents, or the world at large. Not only are climate change’s effects talked about at such vague magnitudes, but in many cases we also hold on to the perception that the effects of climate change remain far away in time and place: it’s not quite that bad yet; it’s not so bad here. This is a common frame of mind that I encounter in my work, especially when interacting with predominantly wealthy, white audiences, where extreme climate impacts remain abstracted behind a veil of privileged adaptive capacity (like air conditioning, flood insurance) or overall lower exposure to the stressors to begin with (through infrastructure like parks and tree canopy).

What we lose when we speak about climate change on these kinds of scales of time (it’s in the future) and place (it’s far away from me), of course, are the residents. The neighborhoods. The city blocks. The communities. And as it turns out, it’s at this scale where human-caused climate change really bears its gritty, inequitable teeth: any given person’s “vulnerability” to climate change is really just an intensification of the precarity that they were already experiencing. I can tell you a lot about your “vulnerability” to climate change just by knowing your zip code. Climate change simply amplifies the background hum of inequity in our world, which itself is perpetuated by the social systems that protect wealth and whiteness at the expense of communities of color. 

Here in Richmond, we see climate change inequity play out most dramatically in the urban heat island map that was generated with community science observations of air temperature during a heat wave in July 2017. We discovered a 16°F difference between the hottest and coolest places at the same time, in the same city. These temperature differences are largely explained by the amount of green amenities like trees and parks in some places and the dominance of hard, human surfaces like wide, multilane roads and short buildings in others. Much like the trends we saw play out in the 1995 heat wave in Chicago, these hotter areas experience higher rates of ambulance visits for heat-related illnesses and the majority (~60%) of those heat-related illnesses are experienced by people of color. The likelihood of experiencing a heat-related illness is also higher if you’re near a stop on our transit system network or walking outdoors in these hotter areas. 

To some, the results of our study were not altogether surprising, given the fact that the extreme heat map itself mirrored dozens of other maps of inequity in Richmond — food deserts, vacant properties, income, race, asthma, diabetes, social vulnerability, and life expectancy all vary in step with our extreme heat observations. How does this come to be? 

Over the last few years as a white male working on this research at a public science museum, I’ve needed to reflect on how best I can leverage my position and resources to amplify the mission of other organizations that are seeking to achieve justice across these intersectional issues. I’ve learned a lot about these topics from work like The Black Butterfly and The Color of Law, and had the opportunity to explore how the City’s history of redlining, subsequent decades of disinvestment and marginalization through planning, and even preindustrial trends in neighborhood placement have either locked into place existing environmental inequity or physically made it worse both here in Richmond and around the country. But, exploring these trends and data doesn’t ameliorate the generational trauma felt by present-day residents, or achieve equity by itself — it merely shows us how intersectional the impacts of climate change are in the scope of all other inequities shaped by decision makers and policy for centuries. 

So, what do I think would advance environmental justice and climate resilience in Richmond? 

I strongly feel that we need to boldly create spaces that other cities have been afraid to offer: our institutions need to acknowledge the City’s past and connect with their own history, leading with “radical vulnerability” (a term that I’ve learned from my colleague Duron Chavis) as well as humility; our grant proposal budgets need to focus financial support into organizations and projects that are already working to lift up the lived experience of marginalized communities of color in the climate justice planning process instead of creating duplicative efforts or unnecessary and damaging competition; we must continue the burgeoning trend toward concentrated, intentional community consultation on the design of and prioritization of capital projects that are needed to ameliorate environmental inequity. I understand that these strategies are long-range and amorphous and difficult to implement immediately, especially with the consistent pushback from historically privileged communities in taking on this approach. However, the co-benefits of employing these strategies in our climate action planning and execution may then permeate other processes, from transportation planning to housing to City budgets. 

What can be done to reduce the extreme nature of our City’s thermal inequity over the short term?

Richmond could, with enough political will and leadership, install shade canopies across our transit and pedestrian area systems to provide the bare minimum of protection from extreme heat exposure almost overnight. These and other types of engineered shade structures are extremely effective and could be implemented virtually anywhere in the city, especially along our most-used bus routes. These structures would also shelter transit riders not only from heat but also from rain, snow, and wind. Built with native plant gardens and stormwater harvesting capabilities, we could see these transportation infrastructure investments as co-beneficial interventions that address numerous urban design flaws that give rise to health and environmental inequity. Of course, we also know that trees are nature’s air conditioning units — and there are fewer and shorter trees in formerly redlined areas. Investing in Tree Equity is yet another promising practice that has emerged as cities and nonprofits turn their attention toward thermal inequity as well as the mental and physical health benefits of living in greener areas. I’ve also explored how increasing a city’s housing density (which, if mandated to include affordable, mixed-income communities and functional public green spaces by updating our zoning code, would address several of our current issues at once — including providing a way to minimize green gentrification) could lead to additional temperature relief during our hottest events by creating shade. 

How can we realize climate justice strategies?

Many of these strategies, both explicitly and implicitly, are being emphasized in our City’s recent Richmond 300 plan as well as the rapidly-developing RVAgreen2050 plan, which specifically centers equitable approaches to climate change action throughout its process. While these plans are great progress (and we should celebrate them as such), we must demand more. Implementing these plans will require coalitions of organizations like those we’ve been working with on recent climate resilience literacy projects that understand that climate change justice is racial justice.

In my view, centering these values in our climate change resilience and environmental justice work would lead to climate resilience policy decisions in Richmond that incorporate the values of community members, demonstrably improve community health and wellbeing, and bolster socioeconomic equity across the city. There’s also a way to see that these policies would transform other aspects of our city, such that your race or zip code no longer predicts your life expectancy, your income, your access to transportation, your summertime temperature, your food security, your propensity to chronic illness, your educational attainment, your credit score.

Dr. Jeremy Hoffman is the Chief Scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia and Affiliate Faculty in the L. Douglas Wilder School and the Center for Environmental Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Hoffman connects audiences to their changing planet through participatory environmental research and interactive, hands-on, and immersive experiences, earning recognition as one of Style Weekly Richmond’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2019 and one of the Grist 50 Fixers for 2020.

This essay is part of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays series, exploring what racial equity looks like in Richmond, Virginia. It is reprinted here with permission. Check out the full project, the accompanying videos, and the podcast.

From Red Lines To Brown Circles, Again

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“Cash rules everything around me

C.R.E.A.M., get the money

Dollar dollar bill, y’all”

-Wu Tang Clan

The hook to the popular song “C.R.E.A.M” by hip-hop group Wu-Tang has been widely referenced in American culture and music since its release in 1994. You don’t have to be a Wu-Tang Clan fan to identify how these lyrics may illuminate some of our nation’s greatest values — money and capitalism. In fact, racism as we know it was actually constructed and fueled by capitalism. Author of How to be an Anti-Racist Ibram X. Kendi calls racism and capitalism conjoined twins. This dynamic duo has fueled some of the most treacherous institutions for Black and Brown communities in our country: the gruesome 200-year American enslavement of Africans, the 13th amendment, the prison industrial complex, human trafficking syndicates (both sexual and labor) and now the invisible, yet intentional racialized disparities we see today. We can see the cumulative impacts on these ties by looking at income and wealth by race.

According to 2019 census data, Blacks earned a median income of 61 cents for every dollar compared to whites, and Hispanics earned 74 cents. Beyond income (cash flow), net worth (assets minus debt) gives an even clearer indication of wealth, and whether considering the median or mean family wealth, Black and Brown households have less than 20% of the wealth white households have according to the Federal Reserve Bank’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.

The tethered relationship of capitalism and racism requires that the dialogue about a more racially equitable Richmond include an honest conversation about money and wealth. We address this by invoking the legacy of Richmond’s own Maggie L. Walker to rebuild access to our own financial institutions with inclusive practices aimed at closing racial disparities and promoting communal gain over capitalism.

“Cash is king, but credit is power.” ~ Marriet Allen

Shekinah Mitchell

When it comes to cash, recent legislation to ultimately raise Virginia’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building’s campaign to define what a living wage is for our community and reward organizations meeting those benchmarks are examples of work happening to get more cash in the hands of Richmonders. Other programs like the Giving Wall support low-income families in meeting one-time immediate cash needs. The pandemic brought an influx of family cash payments and small business grants, which helped meet short term cash needs for families and entrepreneurs. While there is still much work to be done, the faithful advocacy for workforce reform and a renewed focus on small business investment are pushing us in a more hopeful direction.

However, in today’s society, whether building wealth through homeownership (mortgage) or through entrepreneurship (startup loan, line of credit, business credit card etc.), engaging with financial institutions to borrow money has become a prerequisite for building wealth.

With this in mind, if I were to remix Wu-Tang’s classic, the title would be “C3.R.E.A.M.” because cash, credit and capital are ruling American life. This interdependent trio of cash, credit and capital are the formula to determine wealth in this nation, and all three are tied to financial institutions and economic systems of racialized oppression.

The red lines that got us here

In most cases, the traditional paths to building wealth in our nation require engaging with banks and other financial institutions for mortgages and business loans, but these institutions are still grappling with the consequences of redlining.

These red lines changed the social and economic trajectory of Richmond and communities across the country, deeply restricting access to mortgages, business loans and other capital. As shown in this map, Richmond’s East End, Northside, Jackson Ward and parts of Southside within closest proximity to downtown were all redlined.

These lines were used to divide, separate, and reinforce racial hierarchies, and consequently affirm a white supremacist culture of self-interest over communal impact.

Although policy has changed, for many communities in Richmond, these red lines have not been erased. Through programs like credit counseling and repair and down payment assistance, we have spent our efforts building on-ramps for people of color to be considered worthy by banks. Community development financial institutions and credit unions offer special loan funds and try to leverage government programs like opportunity zones and tax credits to incentivize investment and development projects in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. In many cases these products and programs are paired with capital from traditional banks in order to close gaps and make the development projects profitable and viable. These efforts have made a difference for some families in our community; however, this falls short of justice.

Our goals must grow beyond increasing bankability into financial systems built on capitalism corrupted by racism, and instead stretch to create inclusive, communal pathways to economic liberation.

Lines are being re-drawn today through gentrification. If you want to buy a house, you need to qualify for a mortgage, and you will pay back on average 171% of what you borrowed and that is after having the cash for a down payment and closing costs and a qualifying credit score, which are also racially discriminatory. Lines are drawn in entrepreneurship because, “According to findings from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Black entrepreneurs are nearly three times more likely than White entrepreneurs to have business growth and profitability negatively impacted by a lack of financial capital.”

Back to Brown Circles: What Would Maggie Do?

“The pennies, dimes and dollars of one individual may be few indeed, but the combined dimes and dollars of a thousand individuals changed the weak word few into the powerful word many.” ~ Maggie L. Walker

When others were drawing red lines, Maggie was building brown circles.

Her strength and power were rooted in her ability to see collective opportunity over individual gain. She knew that even though individual Black households had very little income, the power of pooling those resources together could create a mighty force. Part of Maggie’s legacy is being the first woman to own a bank, and because of that incredible accomplishment during the Jim Crow era, the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank offered mortgages, savings accounts, small business loans and other products that contributed to Jackson Ward becoming the Black Wall Street and the Harlem of the South. Maggie did banking differently, and here are some examples of how she prioritized the needs of her community over business as usual:

● St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank made loans as low as $5, which was roughly one week’s worth of wages and is equivalent to roughly $150 today.

● Her bank’s hours went into the evening 6 days a week to be accessible to her constituents who worked during the day.

● Maggie had community-based credit committees that relied on references (not solely on income, algorithms or credit score).

● While traditional banks required 40% down during those times, St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank accepted 10% down, which would be equivalent to 5% down in today’s market.

● Her bank used a collective decision-making model where all stockholders (even those with a fraction of a share) had voting rights and input on operations.

● Maggie engaged youth as ambassadors and employees, going door to door to build trust in St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank. Freedman’s Savings & Trust was funded by congress to serve Blacks in 1865, but was out of business because of corrupt white managers by 1874. Black depositors only got on average 60% of what they deposited, and many lost all their money. Maggie was battling uphill against well-deserved distrust.

Maggie’s strategies to do banking differently led to providing financing through St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank for 40% of Black-owned homes in Richmond. By the 1920’s, 650 of these mortgages were completely paid off. These practices and subsequent outcomes are outstanding, and over one hundred years later, Richmond still craves the revival of this legacy, while most of our historically Black communities are grappling with poverty and gentrification.

If she was able to accomplish so much in the early 1900’s, can you imagine what would be possible if we did that today?

So often, we forget that the story of African Americans does not start on our knees in shackles on Native American land, but it begins in Africa full of rich traditions, culture and a village mentality. Linear thinking, individualism, either/or thinking, and zero sum gain are all traits of white supremacy culture. Communities of color traditionally aren’t linear but communally minded, and we need to combine the opportunities for wealth building with a collective mindset to begin breaking repetitive cycles of injustice.

What would brown circles look like?

Brown circles are strategies to close racialized economic disparities by prioritizing inclusive, communal benefit over maximizing individual profit.

Here are some examples of brown circle strategies:

Black and Brown folks pool resources into a neighborhood/community LLC to:

  • Collectively purchase properties and land in gentrifying communities to develop housing ourselves and preserve affordable access to communities.
  • Assist home-owners who are behind on taxes or without the capital to update their homes to “age in place” by providing low-interest capital and an alternative to losing their homes because they are tax delinquent or from predatory offers far below what their homes are worth.

Long-term action: Start a Richmond-based, Black-owned credit union or bank:

  • Offer low-interest mortgages, HELOCs, lines-of-credit, credit cards, micro-lending, low-interest small business loans and other financial products based on community need that look beyond racialized algorithms and credit scores to determine credit-worthiness.

Funding sources:

  • Account holders – share the vision with friends, family-members, neighbors, businesses, foundations, nonprofits etc. to begin building a base of capital. The same money circulating in our community now could be re-routed and activated for communal economic liberation.
  • Foundations and philanthropists who have principal balances of millions of dollars that generate grants and gifts based on interest gains could activate a portion of those principal balances to serve as lending capital to achieve their philanthropic goals.
  • Corporations and banks eager to gain Community Reinvestment Act credits could partner and invest in this venture.

Some may question if starting a Black bank is the right strategy, but I would challenge us all to dig deeply into the troubling history of banking in the United States by reading Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. She comprehensively and methodically illuminates the undeniable injustices within the banking industry and why Black communities in particular continue to be excluded from access to capital. She calls out federal interventions like the Community Development Financial Institutions fund, the Clinton administration’s empowerment zones, Nixon’s façade efforts to foster Black capitalism, and a history of strategies that fail to open access to capital for the Black community. While advocating for more equitable financial intervention through federal strategies is important, there needs to be a parallel path that activates communal power for our own economic liberation. It is also important to consider that Black-owned banks in the United States are in crisis. Between 2001-2018, the number of Black-owned banks declined by over 50% and this trend has continued.

Now is the time for radical, community-based intervention, and shifting to a brown circles mindset that pushes Richmond to be a more racially equitable place benefiting everyone struggling to find the on-ramp to traditional pathways of wealth building.

Don’t settle for holding the red marker

Conversations in our community have continued to shift to focus on diversity, inclusion and equity; and from an upsurge in equity-related roles within nonprofits and businesses to task forces, committees and strategic plans, there are measurable actions being taken to advance racial equity. In many cases, championing for racial diversity in leadership roles, staffing, board members etc. is an incredibly important step along the journey to equity that cannot be ignored.

However, when considering the role of financial institutions, a more racially equitable Richmond wouldn’t be Black and Brown people adopting the same practices of white supremacy.

The practice of drawing red lines around communities in the 1930’s operationalized race-based exclusion.  At its core, redlining created on-ramps to financial opportunity for some, while drawing a clear red boundary around others. If we overlay racial diversity onto similar strategies rooted in individualistic capitalism, we will end up with racially diverse decision-makers drawing new red lines that still determine who is in and who is out. Maybe those excluded would be families earning low-moderate incomes, those who are physically disabled, immigrant communities or others still fighting for equitable access to opportunity. While it is an undeniably important step, systems of oppression aren’t dismantled by simply diversifying those in power, because decades of assimilation have infected nearly every American, regardless of their race, with the lie of white supremacy.

In other words, let’s not settle for defining racial equity as having red markers in the hands of Black and Brown people, but let us build our own pathways and create a new, more equitable culture around financial empowerment. 

Maggie said it best: “Let us awake. Let us arise. We have the men, we have the women, we have the brains. Let us form a partnership of heads and brains and actually do something. Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars!” – Maggie L. Walker

Shekinah Mitchell is a native Richmonder who has worked within the nonprofit sector for over 12 years. She currently serves as the Community Liaison for Systems Equity at the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation where she focuses on the remediation of systemic barriers and equitable engagement of families.  She holds a bachelor’s in Business Management from Radford University and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from Virginia Commonwealth University where her research focused on community engagement and cultural placemaking to advance racial equity. She has a wide range of experience covering youth development and affordable housing to systems building and quality improvement. In addition to her personal experience with banking and financial institutions, her professional experience supporting wealth building, financial opportunity, minority home-ownership and small business development in Richmond’s East End and Northside inspired this essay.

This essay is part of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays series, exploring what racial equity looks like in Richmond, Virginia. It is reprinted here with permission. Check out the full project, the accompanying videos, and the podcast.

There Goes The Neighborhood: Combating Displacement in Richmond’s Historically Black Neighborhoods

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I grew up in the old Harlem, New York. Where the hot summers would bring the kids outside to run through the fire hydrants that we turned into sprinklers, stoops and railings became the porches that we didn’t have, and the corner store was our very own Walmart of snacks. 125th street, home of the famous Apollo Theater, was the place to get bootleg CDs and DVDs, and the latest Air Force One sneakers. 

I had the opportunity to traverse many cultural spaces by way of being a smart Black kid from the hood, but even after the long days of summer camps and evenings of violin lessons on the lower east side, nothing felt quite like home as much as the 1.4 square miles of my Black, Harlem community. 

In the summer of 2017, Wholefoods came to Harlem, right on 125th street and just a few avenues away from the Apollo.  And well, there went the neighborhood.  Its arrival was indicative of a different Harlem. Up until then, Harlem felt impenetrable to processes I would later learn about as an urban planner – gentrification and displacement, and the inner workings of policies that drove them.

The change that engulfed Harlem is part of a national trend in gentrifying legacy Black cities and neighborhoods across the country – wealthy, white families are moving to non-white, predominantly Black neighborhoods. According to the New York Times, since the year 2000, white residents moving to non-white communities has affected about one in six predominantly African-American census tracts. Inner cities and downtown centers once plagued by disinvestment, to which minorities were relegated, are attracting new development. The insidious nature of the changes happening in communities like Harlem is not simply the emergence of more white faces on Harlem’s streets or the newly built bike lanes. The changes symbolize renewed interest in communities that have long fought for the very resources and amenities that new residents can now access so easily. They also symbolize an erasure of the very Blackness and cultural and social norms that created such a dynamic community. 

Mariah Williams

The sudden interest in Black communities across the country is not, in fact, a sudden process. While the demographic shifts suggest a pattern of individual white households choosing to move to historically Black and disinvested neighborhoods to spur gentrification and eventually displacement, their accomplices include housing policies that both encourage and intensify changes in these Black communities. The gentrification process and the displacement it incites perpetuates patterns of injustice as Black communities are erased, removed from the fabric of reinvested communities, and priced out of the very neighborhoods that once offered affordability. These injustices are deeply rooted in the United States’ long history of intentional disinvestment in Black communities and other communities of color. This disinvestment was aided by federal, state, and local housing policies throughout the country, beginning in the early 20th century. This included practices such as redlining, blockbusting, urban renewal and highway construction, to name a few – the culmination of these interventions disseminated Black neighborhoods throughout the county. Richmond’s Black communities were no exception. 

As the city of Richmond undergoes significant transition, achieving racial equity means implementing policies to combat involuntary displacement of Black residents and to preserve the culture embedded within historic Black communities. 

Neighborhood Change in the City of Richmond

In Richmond, gentrification has been pretty significant in neighborhoods such as Jackson Ward, Church Hill, and more recently, the city’s Northside. As each of these neighborhoods have undergone gentrification, both physical and cultural displacement have occurred. This year, Jackson Ward celebrated its 150th anniversary, which prompted reflections on the changes that the neighborhood has undergone over the last century and how it has endured after decades of forcible displacement of its Black residents. 

What does it mean for a neighborhood, once known as the Harlem of the South, to have transformed to a majority white community, where African-Americans only comprise about 23% of the population? Or when long time residents are forced to move and are replaced by new and younger ones? History and culture is lost, and we lose the benefit of not only learning about the history of a community from those who lived there, but we risk the history being lost altogether if we do not continuously highlight the historical narratives and markers of its Black culture. Trailblazers such as Maggie Lena Walker and Oliver Hill, who helped make the neighborhood such a staple in Richmond’s Black community, are not just figures of the past. Their legacy can remain even as the community transforms and can even light our path forward. 

Church Hill is yet another example of a neighborhood where demographic shifts mirror those happening in historically disinvestment communities throughout the city. Church Hill is one of Richmond’s oldest neighborhoods. Beginning in the late 1950s, the neighborhood experienced significant decline. Development and housing policies gave way to white flight, leaving behind low-income African-Americans to experience decades of disinvestment. That has since changed. Between 2000-2010, the neighborhood began to attract a whiter and more educated population. By 2015, African American households, both renters and homeowners, had declined by 20 percent, after comprising almost 90 percent of households in 2000. Even more striking, in this same period, Black homeowners in Church Hill declined by 23 percent, while white homeowners increased by 159 percent. Home values have grown at the same speed as white folks in the neighborhood. In just four years, between 2010-2014, home values increased by 30 percent, from a median sale price of $165,000 to $215,000 by 2014.

These changes in the demographic make-up of the community should have prompted decision-makers, elected officials, and policymakers to take a closer look at the policies driving such drastic change in the community and attracting residents so unlike the existing ones.

The demographic and housing market shifts are compounded by a contentious cultural shift, a shift that the preservation of Black businesses have been crucial in curtailing. Brookland Park Boulevard, located in Richmond’s Northside and the city’s first streetcar suburb, once served as the physical demarcation of white and Black residents in the neighborhood. Similar to Church Hill, the Northside’s housing market is undergoing significant change and attracting a demographic that was once foreign to the community. However, the presence of Black businesses along this main commercial corridor has been key to the neighborhood maintaining its cultural footprint. These businesses reflect a commitment to making sure that Black culture and families are reflected even as the community changes. More importantly, the types of businesses matter: restaurants, Black hair salons, and barbershops, which in the Black community are of great significance. They have long offered respite for us, serving as gathering spaces to discuss politics, culture, and social issues. 

Mobility vs. Displacement

As difficult as it may be, change is a fact of life. Neighborhoods change, and the people within those neighborhoods change as personal and economic factors drive them to move out of one community and into another. I, for one, have moved countless times in my life. For jobs, for school, or simply out of a desire to be somewhere else. But, it’s important to distinguish the process of this change from the havoc it wreaks on the people who have called a community home. 

Nothing is as simple as being either for or against something. When I hear gentrification, I have a visceral reaction because of how I’ve seen it change my own community, but I know that it denotes a process, not necessarily an outcome. I do not think any Black person who has lived in an under-resourced or impoverished community is against finally getting those resources we have fought so hard for. It’s about more than being against change or investment, or for it, especially when that investment is long overdue. But it is a matter of not feeling disposable, unseen, or unheard as this investment occurs; of not feeling as though the white people moving in are somehow more deserving of paved sidewalks, greenspace, bike paths and grocery stores.  

I don’t believe gentrification has to lead to displacement, and in fact, there are cities across the country where policy has been key to combating involuntary displacement in communities of color. 

Policy got us into this, so policy has to get us out. 

Creating an equitable Richmond means being intentional about promoting policies that combat involuntary displacement, ensuring that Black households truly have a choice in remaining in their communities and that they can reap the benefits of reinvestment as much as their white counterparts. This includes policies that promote stability for Black homeowners and renters in historically Black neighborhoods. 

Property Tax Relief 

In places like the District of Columbia and Maryland, caps on property taxes for the elderly or low-income residents, called homestead laws, ensure that they can remain in their homes even as property taxes rise due to revitalization. What if these types of laws were expanded to all homeowners, regardless of age? This might be a solution for ensuring that Black homeowners are not priced out of their homes as their communities are revitalized. 

Inclusionary Zoning

Additionally, a shrinking stock of affordable housing throughout the country increases the likelihood of working class families being displaced. In the city of Richmond, a lack of affordable housing in neighborhoods that are rich in resources keeps many families from remaining in those communities. Passing and enforcing inclusionary zoning (IZ) laws that require developers to build a certain percentage of affordable housing in new or renovated buildings or to build more housing for larger families, can help ensure that residents find affordable housing within communities of their choice. Burlington, Vermont was an early adopter of inclusionary zoning in the 1990s. As part of the IZ requirements, at least 15-20 percent of newly built housing has to meet the affordability requirements, and they have to remain affordable for up to 99 years. This policy has allowed the locality to build 270 affordable units, and while it is not a perfect system, enforcing regulations means that people can access affordable housing in changing communities. 

Preservation and Celebration

While Jackson Ward still struggles with the legacy of mass displacement of Black residents, the community does provide an example of how historic preservation policies help to combat cultural displacement in legacy Black communities. For example, in 1976, Jackson Ward was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places; efforts driven by those who recognized the need to protect the community’s history. In 1978, it was recognized as a National Historic Landmark, followed by two local designations in 1986. These designations are significant because they not only provide federal and local protections against significant changes to historic properties, they also symbolize a commitment and recognition from officials that this Black community is worth being preserved. More recently, projects such as The JXN Project  and the Jackson Ward Collective have been created to preserve Black culture by supporting Black business owners and ensuring that they have the resources needed to thrive. These types of projects help prevent cultural and social displacement by ensuring that minority business owners are embedded in the city’s economy. 

Why the moment is now

Black people and neighborhoods have always deserved to be protected from displacement, but the recent health crisis has shown us just how tenuous our circumstances could be without the proper interventions. The COVID-19 crisis hit hard, but Black and Latino communities were hit the hardest. For those who never truly understood the implications of decades of disinvestment and racism in housing within Black communities, the health crisis revealed just how deep these inequities run.  As federal eviction moratoria are lifted and forbearance programs end, state and local policies are even more important to curtailing displacement. 

If racial equity is to be achieved in Black communities that have long been the epicenter for disinvestment, then as reinvestment occurs, Black households must also be able to reap the benefits of this revitalization. And being able to remain there is simply the starting point, for as neighborhoods transform, we should not be left thinking, “there goes the neighborhood.”

Born and raised in Harlem, New York, Mariah Williams is an urban planner, storyteller, adjunct professor, and researcher dedicated to highlighting the experiences of Black people and spaces in cities.  Her work on Black joy, Black women, and community has been featured in Next City, Third Wave Urbanism and For Harriet. Mariah received her B.A in Sociology from the University of Richmond and her Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from Virginia Commonwealth University.

This essay is part of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays series, exploring what racial equity looks like in Richmond, Virginia. It is reprinted here with permission. Check out the full project, the accompanying videos, and the podcast.

Housing Is The Root Of Wealth Inequality: Building An Equitable Richmond

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In April of 2018, Richmond received a rude wake-up call. We were called out on the front page of the New York Times for chronically tolerating the second-highest eviction rate in the country, over 4 times the national average. Even today, in 2021, thirty percent of renters in the City of Richmond get an eviction notice on their door every year.  These renters are overwhelmingly Black, female, and heads of households. This is a shameful, cruel, systemic problem, but it is the tip of the iceberg, demonstrating deep substantial differences in housing that limit the opportunities of families and hold our entire community back from shared prosperity. 

We all intuit, if only indirectly, that the cycle of poverty is firmly centered on housing and where you live.  It impacts every other aspect of one’s life, framing one’s life expectations and opportunities, but also their access to jobs, healthy food, and exercise. Differing housing opportunities and systemic inequities are the foundation of wealth inequality in Richmond and the U.S. at large. If we can address these life-altering issues, we will build an equitable, thriving community where we all benefit from the work, creativity, and vibrancy of every citizen.

Heather Mullins Crislip

The dismal precariousness of the rental market is alarming, but it’s not the whole picture of the differences in housing opportunities. Virginia has a 25% gap in the rate of homeownership between white and Black households (non-Hispanic white households at 73% and African Americans at 48% in 2019).  Homeownership is the way in which Americans build wealth and security.  Owning a home is the mechanism to send your kids to college, or leverage equity to start a small business, or have resources to retire comfortably.  Owning your home provides security to allow people to prosper. There are societal conversations positing that we should not use housing as our primary wealth-building mechanism, but the reality for low- and middle-income households is that it is the most reliable and accessible way to do so.

The dramatic differences in homeownership that undermine Black wealth are not largely a function of income, as many often assume. There are structural barriers, both historic and contemporary, that deliver this result.

In recent years, our community has become much more aware of the history and impact of redlining in U.S. cities, Richmond being prominent among them. Redlining is a discriminatory practice by which insurance companies, banks and other institutions deny services to residents based on the racial or ethnic composition of their neighborhoods.  Historically, these practices were designed by the predecessor of the Federal Housing Administration denying mortgage underwriting to Black neighborhoods across America by drawing literal red lines on maps and declaring minority or transitioning neighborhoods to be a poor credit risk for public mortgage underwriting, regardless of their economic profile.  In Richmond, this meant that if you wished to purchase a home in Jackson Ward, a wealthy Black neighborhood coined “Black Wall Street of the South,” you would be unable to get a newly available 30 year mortgage to do so. This had devastating impacts on thriving neighborhoods that limited the appeal of homes that could not be financed and thus were not invested in. The gulf in value between properties that could be financed and those that could not began the cycle of undervaluing properties in Black neighborhoods that still gives us dramatic differences in property values between Black and white neighborhoods today. At the same time, redlined neighborhoods became home to all public housing developed in Richmond. Both systems were underwritten with public dollars, but public underwriting delivered private wealth leveraged into life opportunities in white neighborhoods, and public housing does not.

In the modern era, redlining is more subtle but still present.  Banks and Insurance companies target their products based on their perceived risk for the areas, which often is not based on tangible business reasons but perceptions of the value of those living in the neighborhood. Mainline institutions such as banks and insurance companies have fled Black neighborhoods and left them with inferior financial options. Ask yourself where in Richmond you see reputable bank branches and where you see check cashing facilities with exploitative terms?

Black neighborhoods have also seen sophisticated efforts to strip wealth through inferior financial products in recent years. Predatory lending can be referred to as “Reverse Redlining” when predatory financial products are targeted to Black neighborhoods. In Richmond, according to publicly available mortgage data, from 2004 to 2011, 107,000 home mortgages originated for owner occupied home purchases of 1-4 units in the Richmond region. Of these, 12 percent, or almost 13,000 were considered subprime. Comparing these loans against the minority composition of the neighborhoods in which they were made reveals a startling disparity. Subprime loans accounted for just 5 percent of the total number of loans made in neighborhoods having less than a 20 percent minority population. In contrast, subprime loans constituted 31 percent of the total number of loans in neighborhoods having greater than 20 percent minority population. Nationally, the Center for Responsible Lending found that even after considering individual credit scores and other characteristics, Hispanic and African American borrowers were more than 30% more likely to receive higher-rate subprime loans.  

Loan Products Were Irresponsible, not Consumers

Many people perceive the foreclosure crisis as being a function of people who took subprime loans who would not have qualified for regular credit and found themselves in an unsustainable position, having purchased more than they could afford. This is not the case; the vast majority of those who received subprime loans were for refinance, not purchase, which suggests purely exploitative and predatory objectives. It is the loan products, not the borrowers, that were unsustainable. The result was a foreclosure crisis that hit Richmond very hard. Prior to the crisis, the Northside of Richmond had the highest rates of African American homeownership, and the foreclosures experienced during the last decade mean that we now have the same gap in homeownership that existed when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

An equitable Richmond would give all households the opportunity for stability and growth. The first step in this would be to have housing available that people can afford, distributed across the region to allow for choice, and opportunities for sustainable homeownership. A thriving Richmond would also break down racial and economic segregated housing patterns to create an integrated community.  These problems are not intractable; public policy and business practices created them, and public attention and accountability can solve them.

Align our Housing Stock with Our Incomes 

In Richmond, like in much of America, our housing stock and choices do not line up with our incomes. This is our community’s challenge, not a failure of individuals to make responsible choices.  In Richmond, 50% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent (and nearly 20% of renters spend more than 50% of their income on rent). This is because less expensive units are just not available, not because half of renters have chosen to be cost burdened. The pandemic has worsened the squeeze on affordable units as middle-income households have sought out more-affordable units and now compete for those units as well. When we see a sad housing story of a family being displaced, we should realize that almost always, it is a story of our community’s failure, and not poor choices of individuals.

Build More Affordable Units for Homeownership

We have to open up homeownership opportunities and build units accessible to the half of us who make less than the average income of the region. At Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia, we have seen a dramatic shortage of units affordable to first time homebuyers escalate even more rapidly in recent years. We must figure out how to have affordable housing integrated through our community to give households a place to start. This can be achieved through inclusionary zoning (requiring affordable units to be developed in new developments), subsidies for development, or other public policy efforts.

Affordable Housing Should be Available in Every Neighborhood

We must build affordable rental units in every neighborhood and community, so that workers can live where they work and there is true choice in schools and communities. Our region has a distinct disconnect between where affordable housing is located and where entry-level jobs are, creating a logistical difficulty for our most vulnerable families. This means more affordable rental units in our suburbs, and purposefully making sure that every community is mixed-income. The connection of our segregated housing patterns and our segregated schools would mean that living together will mean we educate our kids together and prepare them for life in an integrated, equitable American society.

Housing underpins all other aspects of a person’s life, it determines where our kids go to school, what jobs we can access, what grocery stores and food are available to us, what banks serve us, and whether there are safe outdoor and recreation assets that we can access.  It is critically important that Richmond works to address housing inequity in rental and homeownership so that we can build communities that live, work, and play together.  Our segregated society was purposefully created through the action of the government, the private market and individuals, and we can overcome the weight of that history with action and attention from the same.

Heather Mullins Crislip served as President & CEO of HOME from 2012-2021. Heather holds a BA in Economics and Political Science from the University of Mary Washington and a JD from the University of Connecticut School of Law. Returning to Virginia in 2009, Heather oversaw the bipartisan policy projects for the Miller Center at the University of Virginia for former Governor, Gerald Baliles. She also served as the Staff Director of the Goode National Transportation Policy Project, and did significant policy work on Higher Education, among other areas.  At HOME, she oversaw major systemic investigations and fair housing enforcement actions; established two new housing counseling programs (Mobility Counseling and Eviction Diversion) and deployed HOME’s capacity for research for advancement in housing policy. Currently, she serves as Rector of the University of Mary Washington. She has been admitted by examination to the State Bars of Connecticut, Hawai’i, and Virginia.

This essay is part of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays series, exploring what racial equity looks like in Richmond, Virginia. It is reprinted here with permission. Check out the full project, the accompanying videos, and the podcast.

Black and Brown Centered Placemaking Rooted in Identity & Ownership

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As a Black woman who grew up in New York and has now lived in Virginia for 18 years, I’ve seen racial differences written into every landscape of my life for as long as I can remember. I began to notice these differences when I was around 8 years old. As I rode through my working-class Black and Latino community in Hempstead, NY into Garden City or Rockville Center, white communities directly north and south respectively, everything changed. The corner stores, liquor stores and modest homes transitioned into larger homes with bigger lawns, better shopping and better schools; better everything, it seemed. That shift in the built environment signified wealth and whiteness, which was quite the contrast from some of the struggling neighborhoods in my community. If I had just interpreted what I saw in these differences, I would have surmised that there was something better about white neighborhoods, white schools, and white shopping areas. Maybe even that white people were better. I never really believed that, though my eyes told me otherwise as I looked at the streets and observed larger society. I always sensed that something was awry in the world around me, that I lived in a twilight zone, where Black prosperity seemed the exception and white thriving the rule. However, I knew that there wasn’t anything intrinsically better about those communities or the white people that lived in them. I’d been bused to an all-white school for a few years when I lived in Queens. I was the only Black girl in my class.  I felt out of place, I didn’t talk much and was almost left back. It wasn’t until I went to a Black and Brown school district in Long Island, that I moved up several reading levels and began to thrive. They saw me. The white school had more resources and wealthier parents, but a Black environment supported my thriving.

Though I grew up around hardworking Black and Brown folks, the places I lived were labeled “distressed” and I was considered “disadvantaged,” because I lived in single parent household where we struggled to make ends meet and was enrolled in a low performing school district. In order to flip my “disadvantaged” status on its head, I strove to become the epitome of success by graduating at the top of my class and going off to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Now, as a successful Black entrepreneur who “beat the odds,” I am considered an exception. I,  however, am not satisfied with being an anomaly. Even under the worst oppression, there were some Black people that were successful. What would be exceptional is if Black and Brown prosperity were the norm. What if we had a system that encouraged Black and Brown prosperity? What if we had a system that valued and invested in it, and removed the greatest barriers to it: systemic racism and economic inequality–both of which feed into each other. What if we had neighborhoods and communities that displayed, supported and celebrated Black and Brown prosperity rooted in property and business ownership and a robust cultural identity?

Ebony Walden

I went into urban planning because I wanted to create these types of communities, where Black and Brown prosperity was written into the landscape. I wanted to see more Black and Brown communities with renovated buildings, grocery stores with healthy food, quality housing and successful businesses and commercial buildings owned by the people who lived in the neighborhood. Neighborhoods where Black and Brown presence and culture are celebrated, not seen as signs of degradation. This is still my hope; to help create a racially equitable Richmond that is absent of stark visible differences in streets and streetscapes, parks, housing, services, schools and business districts between the mostly Black and Brown communities in the East End, Northside and Southside – and those in the West End – wealthier and white. 

To do this, we must intentionally acknowledge and address the racial inequities that have become the norm in our community. Data outlined in Richmond 300 (The City’s Master Plan) Insights Report and RVA Green 2050 (The City’s Climate Resilience Planning Process) Equity Index show that the wealth, health, school performance, housing and homeownership and environmental disparities are racial, economic and geographic – the neighborhoods that are not thriving are Black and Brown and in certain sections of the city. I’d bet there has also been disparities in city capital improvement spending in Richmond, otherwise sidewalks and street repairs and streetscape improvements would be more equitably distributed. 

We have to be diligent and vigilant in unmasking and disrupting white supremacy and the ways it has shaped our urban environment. We know the history of redlining, highway construction through Jackson Ward, concentrating public housing and how Black and Brown communities were targeted for subprime lending and experienced the greatest impact on wealth, foreclosures and homeownership from the Great Recession. Black wealth is at an all-time low; we have lost 3,600 Black homeowners in Richmond and our city is gentrifying. We are far from “ONE” Richmond. We are, like most places, a tale of two cities, one prospering and white, and the other mostly struggling and Black and Brown. I am not sure what we need is unity. We need to be comfortable with difference, to celebrate diversity and to make sure those that are marginalized are at the table and have power. We need to work to upend the disparities that have been associated with our differences for far too long. My equitable Richmond includes thriving Black and Brown communities centered on and celebrating cultural identity and ownership in intentional neighborhood-centric ways. Creating neighborhoods and communities rooted in Black and Brown cultural identity, while supporting ownership and entrepreneurship, will be keys to advancing racial equity in our city.

Create Communities Rooted in Black & Brown Identity & Excellence

We may not be initially aware of it, but we have created spaces and institutions that cater to and reflect whiteness. What if we also intentionally created Black spaces, and other cultural spaces that reflected the broad diversity of our community. When I travel, there is a natural draw for locals and tourists to Chinatowns, Little Italys, Koreatowns or other neighborhoods rooted in specific identities and cultures but are also welcoming and attractive to visitors and residents of all types. What if Richmond had the 21st century equivalent to a Jackson Ward at its height, representative of Black prosperity? What if we uplifted Latino businesses and culture in the Southside, in our placemaking? Local projects that I have worked on as an urban planning consultant that desire to reimagine once-prosperous Black neighborhoods in our current landscape have craved this rootedness in cultural identity, art, business and prosperity. These values and ideas were reflected in the recent neighborhood plan for the area of Jackson Ward North of 95 and the Starr Hill Small Area Plan that I worked on in Charlottesville’s Vinegar Hill, a Black community razed by Urban Renewal. Both projects’ values and goals were rooted in equity and Black prosperity and created a vision for homeownership, entrepreneurship, and cultural arts rooted in African American history and culture. There are models for this type of placemaking around the country. There is Domino Park in Little Havana in Miami, a park infused with art, community and play specifically for Latinos; or Homecoming, an art project that preserves and celebrates Black stories and presence in the Hill Neighborhood in Pittsburgh. 

We must be intentional about creating, visioning and cultivating these places, or the default will be market-driven neighborhood development rooted in whiteness and promoting gentrification, which often has the form of “diversity” but not the substance. In such places,  you may have a diversity of food and culture, but the businesses, buildings and homes are not owned by people of color and perhaps they can’t even afford to live and run businesses there anymore (which is one by-product of gentrification). Though gentrification is technically creating multi-racial, mixed-income communities, when the majority of the white folks are higher income and the people of color are lower-income and/or if displacement takes place, it is actually harmful. We need culturally centered neighborhoods, parks, business districts and arts and culture that celebrate communities of color in Richmond. These things will make our city rich and attractive to visitors but also more home to those who live here. We need to make sure that 50% of Black and Brown people can stay here and call it home.

I am advocating for investing in existing communities of color, not as the only viable option, but a key effort worth investing in. We are systemically set up for the disparate racial results that we achieve. So, we must systematize Black and Brown prosperity, write it into our policies, programs and our neighborhood development efforts, not just move people around. Jackson Ward was racially segregated, but had income diversity that contributed to its thriving legacy. We can also have integrated neighborhoods that are culturally centered, but we must work towards income AND racial diversity. And even then, we must be still be vigilant, as the racial bias of whites in mixed-race thriving neighborhoods can still have a negative impact, especially on Black boys, because the underlying issue we must address is racism.

Support Black & Brown Ownership & Entrepreneurship

We know the key to prosperity in this country is wealth creation, which is connected to ownership – of land, capital and capacity to leverage resources. Thus, in order to catalyze communities of color in this generation and the next, we should focus on ownership of these resources. A more equitable Richmond would increase the homeownership opportunities as well as business ownership and entrepreneurship of Black and Brown folk in the city. A recent PolicyLink report focused on COVID-19 recovery in cities, suggests creating a Community Reparations Program that supports Black homeownership. Evansville, Illinois, established a Restorative Housing Program fund to provide Black residents with $25,000 grants for homeownership as a form of reparations for housing discrimination via racist zoning in place from 1919 to 1969. In July 2020, Asheville, North Carolina, began establishing a program focusing on redressing the harms of its urban renewal program in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognizing the significant and irreparable harms to Black residents created by past city policies, many other cities are considering local reparations programs. Richmond should as well, in addition to collaborations with nonprofits and private industry to support and bolster Black Homeownership, helping new homeowners and stabilizing existing homeowners.

That same PolicyLink report suggests cities create “inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems” — comprehensive systems of business support to help people of color start and scale up businesses. The Nowak Metro Finance Lab describes five key approaches 1) Providing entrepreneurial support through intermediaries that effectively serve business owners of color; 2) Increasing access to capital through new products and community navigators; 3) Expand supplier diversity by building the capacity of subcontractors and connect purchasers to vendors; 4) Strengthening commercial corridors in communities of color; and 5) Growing and diversifying sectors through targeted efforts to support and scale people-of-color-owned businesses in growing, higher paying sectors.

Additionally, programs like Buy the Block (a crowdsourcing platform to support local businesses) can also help longstanding Black businesses stay in the neighborhoods and acquire the buildings their businesses inhabit. I live near Brookland Park Boulevard, a haven for Black-owned businesses, but also for gentrification. As the market gets hotter, those longstanding businesses will be vulnerable to push out. Business programs that support property ownership will be key to stabilizing Black business, which equates to ownership and wealth.

This emphasis on supporting Black and Brown centered identity, community building and ownership opportunities may seem extreme to equity skeptics, but what we have experienced for the past 400 years is privileging and centering whiteness in both our racist and race-neutral policies, from federal to local policies to the private market. To counteract that legacy, we need to work harder to invest in marginalized communities of color – from a placemaking, neighborhood planning and economic development perspective. We must start now, unmasking racism in ourselves, our communities and institutions, unlearning its ways and tricks, and being midwives to the new equitable Richmond that is waiting to be born. 

This essay is part of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays series, exploring what racial equity looks like in Richmond, Virginia. It is reprinted here with permission. Check out the full project, the accompanying videos, and the podcast.

Panel Calls For ‘Paradigm Shift’ In Virginia School-to-Prison Pipeline

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University of Richmond’s School of Law held a six-hour symposium recently about the school-to-prison pipeline and ways students of color are kept at a disadvantage by zero tolerance policies and overpolicing of school grounds.

Schools have become places of trauma for students of color and help reinforce centuries of systemic racism by driving students into the criminal justice system, according to speakers at a recent University of Richmond symposium. 

The UR School of Law hosted a six-hour event via Zoom with four presentations, nine panelists, and over 200 attendees. The event featured UR law students, educators, social justice advocates, and activists. 

Suspension and expulsion are used disproportionately against Black students, other students of color, and those with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Those punishments, along with arrests at school, often lead to students having a criminal record, according to the NAACP. The trend is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Julie McConnell, a UR law professor, said the origins of the school-to-prison pipeline is decades old. McConnell is the director of the university’s Children’s Defense Clinic, a program where law students represent indigent children in court.

School to Prison Pipeline Symposium panelists: Valerie L’Herrou (pictured top left), Allison Gilbreath (pictured top right), Doron Samuel-Siegel (pictured middle left), Kevin Woodson (pictured middle right), Cassie Powell (pictured bottom)

The school-to-prison pipeline has been an issue for many years, but it began to take hold during the “superpredator era” in the 1990s, following incidents such as the Columbine High School shooting, McConnell said. The superpredator theory centered around fear there was going to be a wave of violent kids threatening communities and schools. The theory popularized strict zero tolerance policies in schools.

“We would automatically suspend and expel kids who got in trouble in school for very minor offenses in many cases,” McConnell said. 

She referenced a 2015 incident in South Carolina when a school resource officer tossed a student across a classroom after she refused to surrender her cellphone.

Zero tolerance policies mandate predetermined punishments for certain offenses in schools, including the possession of a weapon, alcohol, or drugs, according to Shared Justice. Minor offenses often punishable by suspension or expulsion include disorderly conduct and insubordination.

McConnell and other speakers discussed how punitive policies often drive students into incarceration, as some offenses previously handled within schools are now dealt with by juvenile courts. McConnell said suspending minors results in higher rates of dropout, mental health problems, delinquency and substance abuse issues. 

Virginia lawmakers have worked to return punishment back to the schools. Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, sponsored two measures that passed the Virginia General Assembly last year. Students cannot be charged with disorderly conduct during school, on buses, or at school-sponsored events. School principals no longer have to report student acts that constitute a misdemeanor to law enforcement, such as an assault on school property, including on a bus or at a school-sponsored event.

Valerie Slater, executive director for the RISE for Youth Coalition, said there are disproportionate rates of suspension in Virginia. RISE for Youth is a campaign focused on dismantling the youth prison model.

Black youths from ages 15 to 17 made up 21 percent of the state’s overall population during the 2016-2017 school year, but they accounted for 57 percent of youths suspended statewide, according to a 2019 Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis and RISE for Youth report. Black teens also made up 49 percent of Virginia minors reported to juvenile courts by school authorities and 54 percent of minors detained in local jails, according to the same report.

The country’s history of racial bias and discriminatory practices have enabled the school-to-prison pipeline, speakers said.

One panel focused on Richmond’s history of segregated housing trends, such as the illegal practice of redlining. That is when creditworthy applicants are denied housing loans based on the applicants’ race or neighborhood where they lived. White students as a result were concentrated in wealthier suburban areas and Black students in underprivileged urban centers, said panelist Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“We can easily see the vestiges of this history just in the way that we assign students to schools,” said panelist Kathy Mendes, a research assistant at the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis. 

Mendes said children of color from under-resourced areas often attend schools with insufficient resources. 

Panelist Rachael Deane, legal director of Legal Aid Justice Center’s JustChildren program, said communities of color are “incredibly over-policed.” Community policing of these areas spills into schools, exposing children of color to constant surveillance by school resource officers, Deane said. 

Heavy policing in schools does not effectively prevent juvenile delinquency, speakers said. Zero tolerance policies fail to consider the mental well-being of disadvantaged children. Children with behavioral problems may experience external stressors such as high rates of neighborhood crime, domestic violence, and extreme poverty.

“If you never got into the issue of why a student was fighting, then you are doing nothing but delaying another fight after suspending them,” said Rodney Robinson, winner of the 2019 National Teacher of the Year award. Robinson is a 19-year teaching veteran of Richmond Public Schools.

Rodney Robinson, 2019 National Teacher of the Year. Photo via Council of Chief State School Officers

Schools need to replace school resource officers with mental health counselors, and teach students how to cope with trauma rather than driving them out of schools, Robinson said. 

Robinson said he witnessed the severity of the school-to-prison pipeline issue while teaching convicted juveniles at Virgie Binford Education Center. He said there is a need for reformative school programs. 

“To me it wasn’t about the school-to-prison pipeline, it’s a school-to-cemetery pipeline,” Robinson said. “Because if you’re failing these kids, and they’re not graduating, and they’re ending up in such horrible conditions, then eventually they will end up a victim of street violence.”

Educator bias against students of color needs to be eliminated, Robinson said. He said teachers should understand how their privilege may affect how they view students.

Valerie L’Herrou, a Virginia Poverty Law Center staff attorney, said she feels “hopeful” about recent racial justice protests. L’Herrou said the protests showed more people are open to reexamining their privilege and role in maintaining racist structures. 

Siegel-Hawley and other speakers proposed altering schools’ rezoning criteria in order to fully desegregate Richmond communities. 

Slater encouraged leaders to focus on the “roots” over the “symptoms” of the school-to-prison pipeline, and to create programs to permanently rehabilitate children and communities. 

Educational funding needs to be equally distributed throughout the commonwealth, Slater said. She also proposed expanding the definition of school resource officers to include other forms of support such as credible messengers. Credible messengers are individuals who have passed through the justice system, transformed their lives and provide preventative support to at-risk youth, according to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. 

“It is time for a paradigm shift in Virginia,” Slater said. “It is time to realize that a healthy, thriving community is the greatest deterrent to justice system involvement.”

Written by Christina Amano Dolan, Capital News Service. Top Photo: “Prison Bars Jail Cell” by JobsForFelonsHub, CC BY 2.0, via CNS.