“Here We Go Again”: Race and Redevelopment in Downtown Richmond, Virginia, 1977-Present

Abstract

This article examines newspapers, archival collections, interviews, and personal papers to place Richmond, Virginia, at the center of the national debate about public–private revitalization projects. Since World War II, America’s urban leaders, led by interracial coalitions of black politicians and white business elites, have used racial capitalism to promise that tax-funded redevelopment projects would enrich their cities, provide better public services, and reconcile the legacy of racist urban planning. Richmond’s issues with Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace in the 1980s, as well as recent issues with the Navy Hill Project, reveals the continuum of political and economic peril that comes with using such plans. Because urban revitalization is supremely profit-driven and shaped by the economic thinking that created disparate levels of white corporate wealth and black urban poverty, it is bound to exacerbate systemic racism.