It was the early 1990s, and Richmond was on the verge of socioeconomic collapse. More than 20 years of residential flight to the suburbs of Chesterfield and Henrico counties had depleted the city’s population and tax base. Middle-class families left, poverty grew more concentrated, and the crack cocaine epidemic was in full force.
Following desegregation in the 1960s and an ugly annexation battle in 1970, when the city annexed 23 square miles and 47,000 residents from Chesterfield County, Richmond’s population had dropped by nearly 20%, from a peak of 249,621 in 1970 to 203,056 in 1990, according to census data. Meanwhile, Henrico’s population increased 41% and Chesterfield’s jumped 172%. For the first time, both counties had more residents than the city, which would endure a steady, precipitous decline throughout the next decade.
It was also the most violent time in Richmond’s history. The annual body count would climb above 100 every year from 1988 to 1997. The city was spiraling.
Former prosecutor David Hicks, now a general district court judge, helped create Project Exile in 1997. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
“That was the make-it-or-break-it moment,” recalls former Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney David Hicks, first elected in 1993. “Everything that we are reaping now in the city, economically and developmentally, wouldn’t happen until we dealt with our crime problem. We weren’t going to be able to get past that.”
Richmond is a different place today. Housing is in high demand. New restaurants, breweries, theaters and music venues abound. Once-forgotten neighborhoods — North Side, Scott’s Addition, Carver, Manchester, Church Hill, Randolph — are teeming with young professionals, artists and families. Virginia Commonwealth University has nearly 30,000 students sprawled across more than $2.5 billion in real estate. This year, the city’s general budget eclipsed $3 billion.
“When you see things like the Richmond metro area is the fastest growing, or the city making top 10 lists for cool places for millennials, or it’s a great outdoors town, or a great food town, or great arts and culture town — that was the not the Richmond that I moved to in 1984,” says longtime Richmonder and current U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine. “And it was not the Richmond that was in place when I got elected to City Council in 1994.”
Kaine, who started his life and career in Richmond after graduating with a law degree from Harvard University and marrying his college sweetheart, Anne Holton, is putting it gently. The year he was elected to City Council, Richmond was in a full tailspin.
‘At the Brink’
The lowest point came three weeks before the election, on Oct. 14, 1994. Richmond’s murder count had already surpassed the worst year on record, the result of rising poverty and drug-related gun violence. With 160 slayings, the state capital had the second-worst homicide rate in the country that year, behind only New Orleans.
Still, nothing could have prepared Hicks, who was barely nine months into his first term as the city’s top prosecutor, for what he’d find in Gilpin Court on Oct. 14. In an apartment at the public housing complex, five people had been brutally executed, including three children: a 9-year-old girl and her 3- and 4-year-old brothers.
A 20-year-old crack dealer from New York City, Christopher “Pops” Goins, was angry with 14-year-old Tamika Jones, who was seven months pregnant with his child and lived in the apartment with her family. After calmly shooting two adults and three children with a .45 caliber Glock pistol, Goins entered Tamika’s room and shot her nine times; three shots were directly to the abdomen, killing the fetus. Tamika and her 18-month-old sister, whom she shielded with her body, somehow managed to survive.
Hicks, now a judge in Richmond’s General District Court, still struggles to talk about the scene he encountered 31 years ago.
“It shook me to my core,” says Hicks, who went on to serve 12 years as commonwealth’s attorney, none as challenging as the first. “It’s pictures and spots. I remember a roach running through a puddle of blood. I went to the autopsy of the fetus. It was cold outside.”
During the carnage of the 1990s, Richmond was a literal ghost town, largely devoid of middle-class families, white or Black. The downtown retail district had disappeared, supplanted by sprawling malls in the suburbs. Politically, the city had been mostly written off. White suburbanites blamed the city’s Black political leadership, which rose to prominence in the late 1970s. Black political leaders mistrusted the city’s mostly white business community, and county leaders viewed the city as ungovernable.
Hicks, a Black attorney from New Jersey who earned his law degree from the University of Virginia, represented a new breed of city politician. He was a transplant who had the backing of the business community, namely grocery store magnate Jim Ukrop. His opponent in 1993 was incumbent Joe Morrissey, best known for getting into a fistfight two years earlier with a defense attorney — inside a Richmond courthouse.
In a city long defined by racial polarization, suddenly the roles had reversed: White business leaders were backing the Black candidate for commonwealth’s attorney against the white incumbent. In a time of desperation, Richmond was coming together.
“We were at the brink,” Hicks says of the biracial coalitions that were forming. “The common ground was — if the city kept falling, it wasn’t ever going to come back.”
City buses advertised Project Exile, which mandated five years in federal prison for possessing an illegal firearm. (Image via Richmond Times-Dispatch archive)
Guns and Politics
Richmond’s revival started in earnest in 1997, the first year of an aggressive new crimefighting program called Project Exile. Anyone caught with an illegal gun would be charged with a federal offense and face a mandatory five-year sentence in a federal prison.
Project Exile was the brainchild of Hicks, then-Richmond Police Chief Jerry Oliver and James Comey, the 2010s FBI director who at the time was serving as assistant U.S. attorney out of Richmond. In less than two years, the city’s homicide count would drop 33%, from 140 in 1997 to 94 in 1998. The controversial program — some saw it as excessively targeting Black and brown people — also went into effect as crack began to lose its grip on the city.
It had a tangible impact, says Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards, who joined the department in 1999 and found himself in the second precinct, one of the city’s toughest. “The stakes were just escalated,” he says of Project Exile. Serving time at the Richmond jail was different: Inmates had social networks inside the facility and out; family and friends could visit. “Everybody knew that if you got caught with a gun, you were going to do five years in federal prison,” Edwards says. “And you were going to get shipped out.”
Meanwhile, the city’s struggles with gun violence precipitated a sea change in local politics. In an unusual pairing, former Gov. Doug Wilder and ex-U.S. Rep. Tom Bliley — the nation’s first Black governor and a white, conservative funeral director — formed a commission to change the city charter to elect its mayor at large. Before 2004, Richmond’s mayor was a ceremonial position, elected from within the ranks of City Council.
Richmond had a city manager form of government, beset by infighting and corruption on City Council. Electing the city’s mayor at large — he or she would have to win five of nine districts, or “wards” — would lead to more political accountability, the thinking went, and an elected leader with a citywide vision.
Wilder and his longtime campaign manager, Paul Goldman, railing against what they and others perceived as a “cesspool of corruption” at City Hall, pushed for a citywide referendum to change the city charter; it passed in 2003. Wilder then ran and won the mayorship in 2004 with nearly 80% of the vote.
Wilder’s one term as mayor was as politically fraught as it was rejuvenating. He publicly clashed with the business community, City Council and the School Board and generally failed to deliver that citywide vision. But on Wilder’s watch, homicides declined dramatically. After the hiring of a well-liked police chief, Rodney Monroe, in 2005, the city’s homicide count dropped to 55 in 2007 and 32 in 2008, the same year Monroe left Richmond to become police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina. Edwards says Monroe’s commitment to community policing, targeting higher-crime neighborhoods, and hiring and deploying more officers played key roles in reducing gun violence.
The mid-2000s also saw a change in the way drugs were distributed, thanks to the proliferation of cellphones. In the 1990s, rival dealers would set up shop at city intersections, which would lead to routine gun violence.
“The same drug dealers were at the same corners every day. If you controlled one of these corners — 27th and Midlothian, 30th and Decatur, Dundee and Moody, 34th and McRand — there would be someone there as a lookout, someone with a gun on him or in close proximity,” Edwards says of his old beat. “People would fight over that territory.”
Dealers with cellphones could avoid all that drama, driving around the city dropping off product as customers called in. “If you have a good product and you’re a good salesman, you just needed that cellphone,” Edwards says. The territorial shootings began to dissipate.
Over the next two decades, drug-related homicides would fall off dramatically; of the 54 homicides recorded in 2025, Edwards says, just three were drug-related.
In the mid-1990s, then-City Councilmember Tim Kaine led the effort to renovate Maggie Walker High School into a governor's school using historic tax credits. (Image courtesy Quinn Evans)
Incentivizing Development
As the capital city began to rein in gun violence in the late 1990s, two tax-break programs were leading to widespread redevelopment.
Tim Kaine (File photo)
During Tim Kaine’s first year on City Council, he pushed for an expansion to a preexisting but underused real estate tax abatement program. In 1995, Council both increased the tax abatement period from five to 15 years and made it available to virtually any structure in the city that was at least 15 years old. Suddenly, real estate developers and wealthier homeowners could buy and rehab older houses and commercial properties and avoid paying taxes on the increase in value — to qualify, improvements had to be worth at least 20% of the property’s prior assessment — which meant substantial savings.
“As we were tackling the crime problem, one of the things we realized is how many vacant and blighted buildings there were in the city — all over the city, but especially in low-income neighborhoods,” says Kaine, who remembers a citywide assessment at the time found the number of blighted buildings to be “in the thousands.” “We were trying to decide, what can we do to encourage the private sector to redevelop these buildings so they’re not run down and havens for crime?”
The tax abatement program was immediately successful. By 2001, roughly $400 million in city real estate fell under the rehab program. By 2007, the tally had grown to more than $1.1 billion. “The number of properties that were significantly upgraded because of that program is just — it was revolutionary,” says Kaine, who served as Richmond mayor from 1998-2001.
Coupled with the tax abatement, new state historic rehabilitation tax credits went into effect in 1997, complementing a preexisting federal program. Developers could sell the tax credits, worth a combined 45% of the project costs, to large corporate buyers. Reinvestment in the city exploded.
Throughout the life of the state program, Richmond has received an outsized share of the tax credits issued. During the last decade, the state tax credits have incentivized $1.2 billion worth of rehabilitation projects, representing more than a third of the state total, according to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, which oversees the program.
“That not only led to dramatic investments in properties, but it also helped turn around a population decline,” Kaine says. The tax incentives led to projects like the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School rehab in 2001 and, later, the Carpenter Theatre renovation on Grace Street (now the Dominion Energy Center).
Indeed, the city’s population was growing again by the early 2000s, surpassing 200,000 for the first time since Kaine joined City Council.
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The Carpenter Theatre undergoes renovations, utilizing historic tax credits, in the mid-2000s. (Photo courtesy Wilson Butler Architects)
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Photo courtesy Wilson Butler Architects
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Photo courtesy Wilson Butler Architects
Rediscovering the River
Much of that new residential growth was occurring in an unlikely place: flood-prone Shockoe Bottom. It wouldn’t have been possible without a $143 million floodwall built in partnership with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. Completed in 1995, the floodwall’s north bank runs from 12th to 21st streets, and the south bank on the Manchester side of the river spans roughly 3 miles.
The floodwall sparked enormous new investment in the Bottom. In 1998, a developer out of Cleveland, Forest City Enterprises, purchased seven former tobacco warehouses and spent more than $150 million converting the old buildings into loft apartments. The developer used historic tax credits to help finance the project, which led to a surge of new residential construction along Main Street and the western edges of Church Hill.
Over the next two decades, the conversion of old warehouses into apartments, and later condos, would become a defining feature of Richmond’s residential renaissance.
Julian Hayter, a historian and professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond, says the early 1990s saw a sudden, and long overdue, recommitment to cleaning up and controlling the James River. It was key to the city’s revival.
“What we begin to see is that there are people, there are political and private actors in the 1980s and 1990s, who recognize that they can capitalize on the detritus left behind from Jim Crow segregation,” explains Hayter, who co-authored a recent book on the period, “The Making of Twenty-First-Century Richmond: Politics, Policy, and Governance, 1988-2016,” with fellow UR professors Thad Williamson and Amy Howard.
The city’s great hollowing out after desegregation led to widespread devaluation of buildings, businesses and property — which created opportunity. But it took the floodwall, Hayter says, and then the partially reconstructed canal walk, completed in 1999, to truly open the door.
Before the river could become Richmond’s centerpiece, it had to be contained.
“Go back to the archives — even Thomas Jefferson said Fulton can’t be developed; it’s too prone to flooding. Even after the Civil War, men like [City Engineer Wilfred] Cutshaw recognized that Richmond had a flood problem,” Hayter says. “You don’t get all of the development that takes place in and around downtown Richmond, Belle Isle and all the other islands that dot the landscape in and around downtown Richmond, until you begin to control the water in the James River.”
Lt. Col. Harvey F. Shumpert explains plans for the new floodwall in Richmond in June 1986. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
Beyond the Boom
The dire straits of 1990s Richmond have long disappeared. Thirty years of incentivizing redevelopment with historic tax credits and real estate abatements led to a sweeping economic revival unrivaled in the city’s modern history.
But it came at a cost.
“What happens with cities that have been hollowed out from decades of white flight and neglect, and blight and underdevelopment, is that people begin to convince themselves that they can build their way to, you know, a better Richmond,” Hayter says. “And we’re still in that model — that all development is good development.”
As reinvestment occurred throughout the city, property values rose, leading to the loss of lower-cost rental housing. Without sufficient guardrails or a strategy to mitigate displacement in communities experiencing significant capital reinvestment, longtime residents were pushed out, often to the suburbs of Chesterfield and Henrico, where housing was more affordable but neighborhoods were less walkable and support services were less accessible.
And, as Richmond got wealthier, it also got whiter. By the 2020 census, Richmond’s white population had surpassed the city’s Black population for the first time since the 1970 annexation.
In 2019, the city commissioned a study of its historic tax abatement program, which found that in the later years most of the reinvestment was occurring in wealthier neighborhoods, questioning the need for the incentives. The report from VCU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis also found that from 2009-2016, more than $78 million in abated real estate taxes went uncollected — essentially “lost” city tax revenue. The next year, City Council eliminated the abatement for residential properties (it remains in place for multifamily projects that include affordable housing).
Julian Hayter, a professor at the University of Richmond, says building the floodwall in Shockoe Bottom was key to the city’s revival. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Even beyond Richmond, there’s been a growing awareness of local, state and federal governments’ role in subsidizing displacement. It started with the ill-conceived public housing strategy of the mid-20th century, Hayter says. “So public housing dots the landscape of America’s inner cities, and the compression of that poverty was arguably the worst public policy and urban planning policy of the 20th century,” he says.
In the wake of those failed urban renewal efforts, which led to high-density, high-poverty public housing where drugs and gun violence proliferated, many cities turned to mixed-use development to “deconcentrate” that poverty, largely just pushing it elsewhere. As poverty shifted, it led to a more racially divided Richmond.
A report last year from Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia found gross disparities in how homes in the city are appraised — a single square foot of a single-family home, researchers found, was worth 66% more in neighborhoods where the Black population was no more than 30%. From 2010 to 2019, it also found alarming displacement of Black residents, between 18% and 45%, in central city neighborhoods including Byrd Park and Randolph, and on the North Side in places such as Brookland Park, Northern Barton Heights and Ginter Park Terrace.
It’s also a citywide problem, the very thing that drove Danny Avula, who moved to North Church Hill in 2004 after graduating from the VCU School of Medicine, to run for mayor. Watching his neighbors get pushed out by reinvestment alarmed Avula and his family. Fighting displacement was central to his mayoral campaign.
“What compelled me to run for office over everything else was what happened in my community, watching Church Hill completely change and watching many of my low-income neighbors no longer be able to call Church Hill home,” Avula says, referencing the importance of Gilpin Court’s pending redevelopment during an interview in late December.
Richmond’s evolution appears to be entering a new phase. When the head of the city’s public housing authority proposed redeveloping Gilpin last spring without clearly articulating what would happen to the community’s nearly 800 families, it raised alarms on City Council and at City Hall. For Avula, success will be measured not in economic development dollars but in how the city uplifts the disenfranchised.
“At the end of eight years, if Richmond is full of neighborhoods that have racial and socioeconomic diversity, and people feel like they’re not barred from being in certain places and haven’t felt like they’ve been pushed out of places, and these neighborhoods can actually support that mix — that’s the thing,” Avula says. “We’ve got to stay at it, and we’ve got to show up.”
