Mayor Levar Stoney kicks off a community engagement event at T.B. Smith Community Center in early March. (Photo by Jay Paul)
In South Richmond, wedged between Interstate 95 and Richmond Highway, a row of small brick colonials built in the 1940s front Ruffin Road across from a sea of cracked asphalt and rusted-out chain-link fences. There are basketball and tennis courts, a baseball field, and an aging community center, but on most days, the area looks abandoned.
Aside from a handful of roads that were repaved a few years ago, this neighborhood has received little attention from the city. It’s part of what used to be Chesterfield County before annexation in 1970. The single-story Thomas B. Smith Community Center was built more than 30 years ago.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in early March, however, the city is hosting the first in a series of “community engagement” events under a tent next to the basketball courts. Mayor Levar Stoney is here, along with City Councilman Michael Jones and architects with Baskervill and Timmons Group.
Over the next two years, the city plans to spend $20 million revamping the community center, playground and adjacent athletic courts. After a series of meetings, a plan will be introduced later this summer, with construction getting underway perhaps early next year. The mayor says the new community center will help rejuvenate a long-forgotten neighborhood after years of neglect.
“I think there’s been some clear negligence on behalf of our government when it comes to South Richmond,” he says. “The neglect, it becomes almost cultural. It gets into bloodstream, [and] folks start to believe that we don’t matter.”
A new community center should help change that, he says. “I think this is a start.”
Over the next few years, Richmond plans to spend half of its $155 million allotment, or $78 million, from the federal American Rescue Plan Act on parks and recreation projects, including improvements to three community centers — Smith, Southside Community Center on Hull Street and the Calhoun Center near Gilpin Court — and a new community center at Lucks Field playground in Church Hill. The community centers, located in low-income areas of the city, will get the lion’s share of that funding, $64 million.
The goal is to use the funds to focus on neighborhoods that have been devoid of investment and work toward social equity, says Chris Frelke, Richmond’s director of Parks and Recreation.
The size of this year’s capital infusion will allow the department to begin projects that have been on the books for years, Frelke says. “This helps us invest and really transform.”
But there are potential downsides. Infrastructure improvements such as parks and trails can lead to rising property values, which in turn can lead to displacement, says Ben Teresa, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in housing policy.
“This can place displacement pressure [on an area], sometimes in the form of gentrification, where rising rents and property values are felt by elderly homeowners, homeowners of color and Black homeowners,” Teresa says, who recommends policy protections such as limiting rising rents or property taxes and investing in affordable housing.
The mayor says the city can do both — invest in communities while also creating housing policies to prevent gentrification. At the Smith Community Center in early March, however, few seem too concerned about the potential ill effects of a $20 million makeover.
“South Side is always the last one on the ball,” says Juanita Gaines, 75, who has lived on nearby Ryburn Road since 1978. Years ago, she says, the neighborhood was vibrant, the playgrounds and basketball courts full of kids playing. Nowadays, not so much.
As for the community center project, she says, “I’ve been praying for something like this.”
