A lot of hard work went into the segregation of Richmond.
After all, this was a place where black people, free and enslaved, lived in close proximity to white people in the 19th century, and where Jackson Ward, a historically black enclave, originally housed a large German immigrant community.
But the progressive land-use reform movement of the early 20th century, intended to improve the quality of working-class neighborhoods, paradoxically laid the groundwork for the racially and economically segregated communities of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“The nation’s planning movement, not just its Southern branch, regarded land use controls as an effective social control mechanism for Blacks and other ‘undesirables,’” wrote Christopher Silver, a former professor of urban studies and planning at Virginia Commonwealth University, in “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities.”
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Baltimore, in 1910, became the first city in the nation to adopt a race-based zoning ordinance. Richmond would enact its own ordinance the following year designating where blacks and whites could live.
“More particularly, it was designed to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods,” says John V. Moeser, a senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond and a professor emeritus of urban studies and planning at VCU.
Richmond’s ordinance was upheld by the Supreme Court of Virginia in Hopkins v. City of Richmond, a 1915 case involving a black person and a white person who had moved together into a house in a designated “white” zone.
Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially biased zoning unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. But the ruling pertained to public policy, not private real estate transactions.
The result was an increase in restrictive covenants in deeds, which weren’t outlawed until 1948. Moeser recalled that when he and his wife purchased a home in the Carillon neighborhood in the 1970s, its deed had an X-ed out covenant prohibiting the sale of the house “to any person not of the Caucasian race or Christian religion.”
Also in the aftermath of Warley, what Richmond did “was to essentially effect the same outcome by doing it based on the state’s racial purity laws,” said Moeser, referring to the 1924 Racial Integrity Act designed to prevent the mixing of the races.
What followed was the embrace of eugenics in Virginia, with its proponents in the Old Dominion and Nazi Germany becoming correspondents, Moeser said. The result, when coupled with the state’s anti-miscegenation law, could be tragically absurd. One short-lived Richmond zoning ordinance, overturned by the Supreme Court, dictated that a person could not live in a neighborhood where they couldn’t marry a resident.
Without zoning laws in the toolkit, the private sector became the instrument of housing segregation in Richmond and beyond.
Newspapers, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, had dual home listings for blacks and whites.
The lending industry began redlining in the 1930s, shading in red on a map areas deemed unfit for investment. The Federal Housing Administration prohibited the sale to any home purchaser in a neighborhood whose population was “inharmonious” with the prospective homebuyer, Moeser said. The practice stunted the opportunity for black homebuyers to get an FHA loan in the suburbs.
The absurdity of this practice was laid bare in the 1940s, when residents in adjacent black and white neighborhoods of Detroit couldn’t obtain an FHA loan because of their proximity to an “inharmonious” racial group. The solution, at least for loan-seeking white residents, was the construction of a foot-thick wall between the communities.
As Richmond’s black community expanded to such neighborhoods as Barton Heights, Highland Park and Byrd Park in the 1950s and ’60s, the real estate industry took advantage through “block busting,” a predatory practice that allowed it to purchase properties at a discount from panic-stricken whites and sell them at an inflated price to black homebuyers. The industry also engaged in steering of homebuyers toward or away from certain neighborhoods based on race.
Elected and public officials, meanwhile, were among those who adjusted to the demise of race-based zoning laws.
“The substitute for racial zoning was a race-based planning process that marshaled a wide array of planning interventions in the service of creating separate communities,” wrote Silver, now dean of the College of Design, Construction and Planning at the University of Florida.
“Street and highway planning served as a means to erect racial barriers as early as the 1920s. The siting of public housing projects explicitly (and legally) for Black occupancy proved particularly effective in furthering residential segregation. Slum clearance, neighborhood planning, private deed restrictions, and racially charged real estate practices all served the cause of segregation as effectively as racial zoning.”
In Richmond, that playbook can be seen in the mass demolition of neighborhoods such as Fulton, the decimation of black neighborhoods by Interstate 95, and the concentration and isolation of poverty.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 ostensibly ended redlining, expanding homebuying opportunities for African-Americans, who joined whites in an exodus from the city to the suburbs. “A lot of the black neighborhoods, that’s when they began to collapse,” said Moeser, citing the departure of black teachers, lawyers, professionals and civic leaders who helped serve as their glue.
As concentrated poverty became racially defined, Richmond’s urban neighborhoods gentrified, pricing out black renters. This flight of the urban poor and an influx of immigrants have led to a dramatic increase in poverty in Chesterfield and Henrico counties. Meanwhile, for the first time since 2010, growth in exurban counties is exceeding that of the urban core, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.
The walls that divide the Richmond region by class and race are so profound that we hardly need the sort of physical barrier once erected in Detroit. But they are not so impermeable as to prevent the spread of poverty to the suburbs.
Public policy and private-sector practices created this segregated terrain. This intended outcome can be undone only by intentional actions.
At the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s next Public Square, we’ll explore the issue of segregation in the region. The 56th Public Square will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday in The Times-Dispatch’s first-floor auditorium at 300 E. Franklin St.
A lack of affordable housing has direct ties to Richmond's legacy of racial segregation and has resulted in less diverse neighborhoods than ever before. And it's leading to calls for regional solutions.