A decade after Interstate 95 ripped apart Jackson Ward, the city cleared out an eastern chunk of the neighborhood to build the Richmond Coliseum, which opened in 1971. (Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
In 1689, John Locke defined the “inalienable rights” of mankind to include the right to “life, liberty, and property.” Property, in the view of Locke, meant more than one’s land and physical belongings; it included ownership of one’s person and the right to personal well-being.
The people of Virginia embraced Locke’s view in 2012, when voters approved a constitutional amendment to prohibit the taking of private property for economic development purposes alone. Virginians decided that an individual’s right to access and profit from his land was more important than whatever the government might perceive as the common economic good. And by extension, using Locke’s presumed analysis, a person’s right to determine how to use that land for personal or family well-being takes precedence over the government’s interest in increasing the financial well-being of the community.
Unfortunately, the eminent domain amendment to Virginia’s constitution came many decades too late to prevent the city of Richmond and the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority from taking away not only homes, but entire neighborhoods from Black Richmonders in the name of “slum clearance” and economic development. From the 1950s through the 1970s, dozens of homes, the vast majority owned by Black families, were demolished for the “redevelopment” of Jackson Ward, Fulton and Randolph, and the entirety of the once robust Navy Hill neighborhood was erased. The city and RRHA took far more homes than necessary to build Interstate 95, which destroyed Navy Hill and damaged the aesthetic of Randolph and Jackson Ward.
More than beauty was lost; self-sustaining Black communities lost their independence. As LaToya Gray-Sparks points out in “The Reconstructing Randolph Project,” her graduate capstone research paper at Virginia Commonwealth University, residents of the Richmond neighborhood lost their businesses and homes, some of which had historic significance, through RRHA’s “renewal” plans. The relocation grants these residents were promised never materialized.
Fulton, a similarly thriving neighborhood with markets, movie theaters, social clubs and vibrant Black churches, was declared a “slum” and slated for “redevelopment” in the 1960s. According to a 1977 article in the Richmond News Leader, at least one architectural historian of the time refuted that characterization of the neighborhood, describing the Fulton homes that were demolished as “distinguished,” needing “minimal rehabilitation” to make them better than any buildings that might replace them. In various newspaper and magazine accounts, Black Richmonders who grew up in these neighborhoods recalled a strong sense of community and family life in Fulton, and said that the so-called blight was largely overstated. The homes were torn down anyway and never replaced.
While Richmond cannot go back in time to protect the rights of these Black families, it can return to their descendants the property rights that were wrongfully taken from them. Two state legislators representing the city, Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Del. Jeff Bourne, introduced budget amendments during the 2022 General Assembly session for a Richmond pilot program that would at least partially compensate Black families whose property was taken during the era of “urban renewal.” Under their proposed amendments, Richmonders who qualified for the program would receive down payment assistance sufficient to keep their mortgage payments at or below 25% of their income. To qualify, a family must have income below 80% of area median income and show that they or their ancestors owned a home taken by the city of Richmond or RRHA for highway development and/or “urban renewal.” The estimated annual cost of the program, which included funding for a full-time researcher to determine which families qualified, is $5.5 million, mere pennies in an overall biennial budget of $165 billion.
But the General Assembly didn’t include this program in the final budget, leaving it to Richmond to decide whether to prioritize returning to Black Richmond families their ancestors’ property rights, which were unjustly taken from them by former city leaders.
The city budgets during the last two fiscal years each topped $750 million, and both made important investments in programs designed to improve the lives of low-income Richmonders. When it comes time to begin crafting the budget for fiscal year 2024, I hope that Mayor Levar Stoney and his advisors will include funding to make some of the long-overdue payments on the debt the city owes Black Richmonders whose homes were taken during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in the name of “slum clearance” and urban renewal. This debt is not some amorphous form of reparations. Rather, it is debt that can be clearly determined and traced to the city’s and RRHA’s ill-conceived actions of the past. It’s time to restore to these Richmond families the right to property that John Locke and our own state constitution rightly call inalienable — rights that our former leaders took away from them.
Christie Marra is the director of housing advocacy for the Virginia Poverty Law Center.
