The new Richmond scene is missing something

I feel like a tourist in Richmond. Everywhere I go the buildings are shiny and new or else very old. I know my way around the Fan and downtown and how to get to I-95 and which exit leads to Wal-Mart, but my five years here have been mostly linear. I know about the city’s change from crime capital to quaint college town, but I never found out the details and no one ever told me. Now when I see what it means to “bring life” back to Richmond, I can better see where I fit into the time line.

I arrived after the dirty work was done, but before River City was ready for her close-up. The money had moved out of town until the poor could wage war on themselves with guns and drugs that had to come from somewhere. Now it creeps back in through the bullet holes, buying all the pieces back. The imported student community is the one that gets the jobs created by the superfluous businesses that sprout up in this early stage of renewal. Started by students who didn’t move away, these businesses feed their own kind as they pass through instead of the communities that watched their arrival. I know because I am one of these transients. I hold one of these jobs and I watched as my boss turned away a neighborhood window washer because our windows have a tint.

The Project Exile executive summary puts the direct cost of Richmond’s 122 firearm homicides in 1997 at $2,745,000 of taxpayer money, with a loss of $11,752,000 in productivity. Also in 1997, the North Carolina Supreme Court held in its Leandro v. State decision that its constitution did not guarantee “equal funding or educational advantages in all school systems.” Perhaps we sit too close to our neighbor to the south, or maybe Richmond cannot afford equal funding for schools with all those losses in productivity.

If you pass by a certain infamous BP station in the evening hours you can expect to see several policemen in their cars, waiting there, daring something to happen. Soon their job will be made even easier with the construction not too far away of a new police station. They may even be able to keep an eye on