On Monday, January 8, 2018, residents of public housing units and community advocates followed in the footsteps of Residents of Public Housing in Richmond Against Mass Eviction (RePHRAME) and took their concerns directly to the Richmond Redevelopment Housing Authority (RRHA). Frustrated by RRHA’s failure to provide heat within a number of housing developments, community advocate Maurice Tyler organized and led a “Redemption Rally,”, outside of the RRHA headquarters. “We’ve been letting things fly,” Tyler explained, but now was the time for the RRHA to act.
Protest organizers spread the word through word of mouth and a Facebook event created by a local organization, Leaders of the New South. Approximately 100 residents of the housing developments, activists, and supporters, peacefully protested outside of the RRHA headquarters at the conclusion of the RRHA employee’s workday. They used various means of protest, such as personal storytelling of residents, historical recollection, and comparisons, emotion provocation, as a call to action to the authority’s then Director T.K. Somanath.
Questions of equity, justice, and race have been at the center of public housing debates from the beginning. When the RRHA was founded in 1940, the city’s white elite worried about the possibility of integrated housing. To ease public and governmental tensions, the RRHA reinforced racial segregation with the creation of a federally subsidized housing project “for Negroes” in Gilpin Court. It was to be the first of many urban development projects established by the RRHA between 1952 and 1986. An initiative billed to help low-income families obtain livable, accessible housing, inevitably evolved into the city of Richmond discarding low-income families to the outskirts of the city, exposing them to unkempt, housing developments infested with crime, drugs, and underfunded schools. Tenant stories and outrage is critical to helping the world outside public housing understand how structures and policies affect the lives of public housing residents. Since the RRHA’s creation in 1940, residents have been placing blame on the organization for failing to follow through on promises to maintain housing units in the East End.
In January 2018, the agency disclosed that the numerous complaints residents had filed totaled more than $150 million in deferred maintenance. The RRHA’s indifference to residents have even spurred Richmond City 5th District Councilman Parker C. Agelasto to ask, “Why weren’t [the repairs] treated as an emergency from Day One?” This is a question that resonates among public housing residents. Residents are now riled enough to take action. “Certain people in certain places are sweeping things up and covering things up,” from the perspective of Creighton Court resident, Sharanda Taylor. 
Taylor has been forced to rely on space heaters for warmth and succumb to unfair treatment and secrecy by the RRHA. These unjust circumstances have inspired residents to band together to demand help from the RRHA.
Sustained community issues such as inadequate housing did not evolve in the 21st century but are deeply rooted in history. Racial segregation became embedded in American society and law in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It continues to present itself today through the strategic placement of public housing and the lived experiences of its residents. One of the pressures working against the RRHA’s efforts to develop sustainable housing is its inability to sustain, or even obtain, a desirable mix of tenants. In the mid-twentieth century Richmond, as in many American cities, similar and different social and political structures built and maintained segregated public housing.
In Richmond, these housing projects were concentrated in one area of the city, the East End, and targeted almost exclusively one group of people, African Americans. Society viewed public housing through a stigmatized lens as reserved for the most disadvantaged in the city, which was assumed to be African Americans. This common assumption reinforced by national housing regulations and banking practices that “redlined” Black Richmonders out of new housing stock in white suburbs and placed bank loans for housing renovation out of reach. Civic ambition and indifference to the vitality of black life compounded the problem. In the 1960s, new Richmond-Petersburg Expressway bisected black neighborhoods like Jackson Ward so white suburbanites could commute easily to Downtown jobs. The city of Richmond and RRHA had created a perfect concoction for producing and reproducing extreme, generational and racialized poverty.
The intentional use of racial and spatial segregation has been especially pernicious in the city’s East End, where public housing units are clustered far from the city’s core and easy access to mass transit. The RRHA and city attempted to suppress resident concerns about transportation and accessibility to schools and places of employment by promising minor fixes. Yet, currently, there remains no source of reliable public transit extending from the public housing units to where jobs are most plentiful: Short Pump Town Center and Willow Lawn. Residents find themselves trapped in the city. Lacking mobility places public housing tenants at a disadvantage, making them more likely targets of crime and cut off from information and opportunities. Ostensibly an advocate for residents, the RRHA has yet to seize the opportunity to tear down boundaries in Richmond and promote fair access to decent housing, mobility, and employment.
Redemption Rally RRHA was not alone during their time of protest, as this issue is not unique to Richmond. Although the Redemption Rally RRHA was relatively small, it contributed to a wider national movement. Nationally, there have been protests in recent years by community members and residents demanding affordable and adequate housing as well as fair practices between tenants and landlords/owners. Bolstered by the persistence of inadequate housing, tenants have begun to organize and mobilize for change, drawing on the city’s history and culture of resistance to integration and authority to voice their concerns and work for change. Rather than losing hope in themselves, residents and advocates banded together and began to share their frustrations with their local and state representatives and the administration of the RRHA. The conflicts and tensions between city officials, the RRHA, and public housing residents continue as each group falls short of their expectations of another. Housing should be viewed by all as a human right. One person should not be deprived of it simply because of their income level, of another person’s feeling of entitlement taking it away from another human being. The voices of all men are equal in the sense that we should all hear the outcries from our community members and rather than discard of them or shun them off as irrelevant, make a genuine effort to create fair and equal circumstances for all.
For Further Reading
Howard, Amy. More Than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco Public Housing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Campbell, Benjamin. Richmond’s Unhealed History. Richmond: Brandylane Publishers, 2012.