Against his parents’ wishes, he picked Richmond. Twenty years later, Richmond chose him.
Before Dr. Danny Avula’s victory in the 2024 mayoral election, his rise as a public health expert paralleled a transformative period for the city. It all started in 2004, when Avula and his wife, Mary Kay, moved into a blighted section of North Church Hill with four friends from Avula’s college days at the University of Virginia.
Two decades ago, Richmond was on the cusp of an economic revival. Gun violence was abating, Virginia Commonwealth University was expanding, and real estate developers were investing millions to rebuild historic homes and convert industrial warehouses into apartments.
After 40 years of decline following racial integration in the 1960s and white flight in the 1970s, Richmond’s population was beginning to grow again. Avula was among the newcomers, settling in Church Hill’s Oakwood section after finishing medical school at VCU. It was a few years before boarded homes and barred windows gave way to new bakeries, cafes and remodels.
Over the next 20 years, residential growth lifted Richmond culturally, politically and economically. But it also made the city less affordable, particularly for longtime residents in the city’s East End, including those in Avula’s majority-Black neighborhood. Richmond’s newfound prosperity led to widespread displacement.
“The change is here. It’s coming. And it’s going to continue to be the case for the next decade,” Avula says. In other words, the city has become “the victim of its own success.”
Indeed, Richmond’s overall population soared 11% between 2010 and 2020, even as the city’s Black population declined by 11,000, falling below 50%, according to the U.S. Census.
Avula says he came to Richmond to heal neighbors and help uplift a blighted community. It’s what motivated him to buy his home in Church Hill — and, years later, run for mayor.
His ascension from medical student to public health expert to Richmond’s mayoralty, however, underscores his biggest challenge: how to deliver on campaign promises to clean up City Hall and build a thriving, equitable city while stemming the tide of gentrification.
“This is the conversation we can’t have because it’s too uncomfortable, and it gets very racial very quickly,” says Reggie Gordon, former director of the city’s Office of Community Wealth Building and co-chair of Avula’s transition team. “Life is easier when you’re next door [to] or around people who look like you, have the same amount of money, and have the same taste and preferences as you, but that’s not how you build a strong community.”
Creating strong, diverse communities is precisely what Avula envisioned when he settled in Richmond 20 years ago. Now, as mayor, he finally has the political power to deliver.
While Avula’s first year in office garnered mixed reviews, even his political rivals appreciate his willingness to engage with constituents and members of City Council. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Building a Track Record
Almost immediately after taking office a year ago, Avula felt the tension between neglect and gentrification in debates over the city’s aging infrastructure, real estate tax rate, proposed zoning code revisions and the redevelopment of decaying public housing communities.
The doctor turned mayor may be uniquely qualified to navigate those conflicts. Avula, a pediatrician who previously led the Richmond and Henrico County Health Districts and the Virginia Department of Social Services, entered his new role with experience in both government administration and politics.
He also learned how to lead during a crisis.
In January 2021, former Gov. Ralph Northam tapped Avula to spearhead the state’s vaccination efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. A year later, Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed him to lead VDSS, a $1.8 billion state agency with 2,000 employees. Dr. Danny now manages a local government with double the personnel and a $3 billion annual budget.
Richard Meagher, a political science professor at Randolph-Macon College and host of the VPM podcast “RVA’s Got Issues,” says it appears voters elected Avula to improve city operations and make government services, such as permitting and tax collection, more efficient.
His charisma helped, Meagher says. “I think he does have that open warmness when he’s even talking about really detailed or difficult things.”
Indeed, Avula’s wide smile and sunny demeanor paid dividends during the statewide vaccine rollout four years ago. He appeared regularly on TV newscasts with the governor and worked closely with local elected leaders during the public health crisis.
He quickly became known as “Richmond’s Dr. Fauci,” after the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to the pandemic and frequently clashed with President Donald Trump.
For Avula, improving City Hall while navigating an increasingly volatile national political environment during Trump’s second term will likely prove more difficult. The problems at City Hall are decades in the making. Remaining committed to his social justice agenda — to build a more equitable and inclusive city — won’t be easy.
“Those are things that we are really committed to as city leadership,” Avula says, “and that’s not going to change, despite the assault on the ideas or the words.”
Avula speaks during a Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority meeting on Nov. 19, 2025. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Trial by Fire (and Water)
Things started breaking immediately in Avula’s first week.
Before he was even formally sworn in as mayor, a catastrophe at the city’s water treatment plant knocked out service across Richmond and parts of Henrico and Hanover counties for several days. The crisis underscored how aging infrastructure and poor management allowed problematic conditions in an interconnected utility system to persist until a meltdown.
Within a few months, Avula cleaned house and appointed Scott Morris as the new director of public utilities. But when a second, less severe disruption occurred in May, requiring thousands of residents to boil their water, anxiety gripped the city once again.
Over the summer, Avula gathered City Council and the Henrico County Board of Supervisors to discuss how the municipalities could work together to modernize the aging water system.
The administration estimates that it would cost $270 million to update Richmond’s treatment plant to prevent future outages. Avula worries that the cost could fall mainly on ratepayers through escalating utility bills for years to come. But leaders from both localities have not reached consensus on how to move forward on funding such a large project.
“We’re not necessarily close to a shared governance model, where there’s a shared financial investment by all of the counties,” Avula says.
Meanwhile, the surrounding counties are becoming less reliant on city water. Henrico is investing more than $300 million to expand capacity and delivery in its own utility system, even as it remains contractually obligated to buy water from Richmond until 2040. Chesterfield, which also buys water from the city and pulls from two additional sources — Lake Chesdin, as part of the Appomattox Regional Water Authority, and Swift Creek Reservoir in Midlothian — is in the early stages of building a new water treatment plant along the Appomattox River.
While questions remain about the future of regional water management, Avula is hopeful that he can capitalize on relationships built over the last two decades with peers and colleagues who often sought his help on public health issues.
He says shared governance and investment in public institutions such as the Richmond International Airport and the GRTC bus system are examples of how the region has come together in the past.
In the coming years, those relationships could be important as he seeks help from the Greater Richmond Convention Center Authority to finance the demolition of the shuttered Richmond Coliseum and explore incentives for a new hotel and other developments in the city center.
Still, the unresolved water situation illustrates how, as mayor, Avula needs support from the city’s legislative body and other partners to advance policy goals and initiatives.
Avula helps Jay Patrick, president and CEO of Liberation Veteran Services (center), cut the ribbon on a new 50-unit apartment complex on U.S. Route 60 on Veterans Day 2025. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Finding Common Ground
Beyond the water crisis, Meagher says Avula’s signature moment of 2025 came this fall when he presented his Mayoral Action Plan. The strategic blueprint is organized around seven pillars, with metrics to track progress on goals such as new housing units, increased enrollment in prekindergarten school programs and reductions in gun violence.
“The question is if that’s going to be a real thing that we look at every year and say, ’All right, this is how we know if this guy’s doing a good job or not,’” Meagher says, adding that Avula’s success may depend on how much he sticks to the plans and ideas he’s presenting now.
So far, City Councilmembers appear cautiously optimistic.
Fifth District Councilmember Stephanie Lynch says she was pleased when the administration this fall pushed back against plans to redevelop Gilpin Court, the city’s largest public housing community with nearly 800 housing units.
At issue for activists and the mayor was RRHA’s original plan to transfer the public housing complex to the authority’s private development corporation prior to redevelopment. Critics say the proposed composition of the corporation’s executive board lacks tenant voices and adequate oversight from City Hall.
Lynch, who is in her second term on council, says it was one of the only times she’s been on the same page as the administration regarding a public housing matter. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be out here alone on an island,’ but it was just really refreshing,” she says. “I felt like we weren’t so powerless.”
Sarah Abubaker, a first-term City Councilmember representing the 4th District, has been critical of the administration’s position against lowering the city’s real estate tax rate.
After Avula presented his first annual budget proposal last spring, Abubaker was among several policymakers advocating for tax relief, proposing to lower the real estate tax rate from $1.20 per $100 of assessed value to $1.16.
The measure failed, but Abubaker remains convinced it’s one of the only ways the city can immediately curb rising housing costs. Avula, on the other hand, has resisted dropping the real estate tax rate, even after his administration announced a preliminary $22 million budget surplus, arguing the city needs additional tax revenue after years of underinvestment and to secure its finances amid the ongoing threat of federal spending cuts.
Nonetheless, Abubaker says Avula showed poise in his willingness to meet with her constituents and discuss tax policy during a district meeting last April. “It’s very easy to fall in the trap of an echo chamber,” she says. “I hope to see him continue to talk to people that don’t agree with him and actually hear their perspectives.”
Jon Baliles, former 1st District Councilmember and author of the RVA 5x5 newsletter, remains skeptical about some of the administration’s choices so far.
He notes a bright spot: The finance department recently caught a billing error and corrected it before the bills were mailed to residents. But Avula’s efforts to keep the tax rate steady, along with the city’s continuing legal fight against a former Freedom of Information Act officer who alleged that she was illegally fired in January 2024, when Levar Stoney was still mayor, raise concerns. Baliles says the latter situation makes him question Avula’s commitment to transparency.
“So far, he’s talked a lot about [transparency], but he hasn’t delivered as much as he’s promised,” Baliles says.
A Call to Contribute
Speaking on Meagher’s podcast last fall, Avula said he intends to run for reelection in 2028. Interviewed for this story, Avula says he felt it was important to share those plans now so that constituents understand it may take nearly a decade to meet his goals for the city.
“In my experience with the health department, it took five or six years before you could really tangibly feel a shift in the ethos,” he says. “I think that this work at the city scale requires that.”
It took Avula even longer to reach this point. It all started in Church Hill.
When he became a doctor and began seeing structural inequalities make the lives of low-income families harder, Avula wondered how he could have an impact on the world. Four of his closest friends from college felt similarly, so they made a pact.
“Back in 2004, we all bought houses within a few blocks from each other,” Avula says. “Even beyond that group of friends, we built this really incredible manifestation of [Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of] ‘the beloved community.’”
Romesh Wijesooriya, one of Avula’s friends from his undergraduate days at UVA, is part of the group. In dedicating themselves to living in an economically challenged urban neighborhood close to the hospital where they worked, the two men got involved in community matters and raised their families together.
He does have that open warmness when he’s even talking about really detailed or difficult things.
—Richard Meagher, professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College
They tutored kids and volunteered for the parent-teacher association at Chimborazo Elementary School. Wijesooriya’s wife, Lawson, now Avula’s chief of staff, founded Blue Sky Fund, a local nonprofit dedicated to giving underprivileged children educational outdoor experiences.
Wijesooriya says his desire to live in the same neighborhood and make it better stemmed from mission trips to Jackson, Mississippi, with a Christian fellowship group in college.
There, he says, they were exposed to ideas about racial reconciliation in a society scarred by the wounds of segregation and slavery. “Those trips were very powerful for us in that stage of life,” Wijesooriya says. “It was a significant part of why that was an idea we had in our heads.”
As the friends garnered public attention for their work in the nonprofit and public health sectors, Avula spoke about embracing interdependence for a TEDxRVA Talk in 2014.
In the presentation, he spoke about how his immigrant parents, who had fled poverty, questioned why he wanted to move to a low-income neighborhood. He knew his parents wanted a better life for him. He understands why they felt conflicted.
Pursuing the American dream for them meant creating their own story and fortune in a new world. But for their son, it means something else — creating a path to prosperity that’s accessible to everyone.
