This is not the song of the Richmond that fell the night they drove ol’ Dixie down. There is a Richmond on the left coast in a working class stronghold, on the other shore of the San Francisco Bay, where it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Berkeley and Oakland. Richmond keeps popping up on the radar for the unlikeliest of reasons.
Bill Moyers says that Chevron has treated Richmond like “a company town.” We learned about those in high school when we studied the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age. A company town was built in an urban or rural wilderness when some valuable resource was identified (location, trained labor, natural resource) and the company had to provide infrastructure to sustain a workforce to extract or exploit that resource. Texaco - since bought out by Chevron - built a huge refinery in Richmond. The refinery has been the largest employer and taxpayer in Richmond for decades. Chevron is the third largest company in the world. They were in the news in 2012 when a fire at the refinery poured toxic smoke into the air which drove 15000 area residents to the hospitals with respiratory ailments.
Labor Notes describes Chevron’s annoyance when confronted by organized local candidates who thought that Chevron should be more responsible for its effects: global and local pollution, hazards to workers and residents, emission of greenhouse gasses.
In addition, the city was suing for damages caused by the fire, including plummeting property values. Chevron wanted pliable people in office, people who would give the company a cheap settlement.
Chevron took a lot of heat for attempting to buy the election. Their response to the criticism was to throw more money. They lost and the radical weirdos (RPA - Richmond Progressive Alliance) won. Chevron spent about $150 for every vote cast, outspending RPA 15 to 1.
Richmond is also not shy about getting in the face of the financial players that arguably precipitated the 2008 economic meltdown. San Francisco may continue where Richmond left off in using municipal powers of eminent domain to buy up and forgive the debt of homeowners whose homes are “underwater” - who can’t refinance their mortgages because the value of their homes has dropped below what they owe on their mortgage. In spite of battalions of expensive attorneys suing Richmond for their dark design, Richmond, led by then-mayor Gayle McLaughlin (an erstwhile RPA candidate) was relentlessly on-track.
The eminent-domain strategy is not a fabulous idea. Like virtually every other proposal to help homeowners hurt by the housing crash, it tries for simplicity but falters in the face of the enormity of the post-financial-crisis mess, and, as markets improve, it may come too late to make much difference. The plan’s legality and wisdom have been debated in editorials and blog posts, with questions ranging from the true value of the mortgages to whether the chosen homeowners deserve the help.
But to advocates, eminent domain offers perhaps the only chance to remedy the failure of the federal government and mortgage servicers to offer widespread, meaningful relief to the hardest-hit communities.
Mayor McLaughlin’s position was, “The risk that is really confronting us is waiting on the sidelines for the next wave of foreclosures.” She was ready to follow through but the issue became moot: Housing markets are improving. Local foreclosure rates are declining. With the improving economy, many of the previously threatened homeowners are no longer “underwater”. Risk-reward factors no longer pencil out. Richmond called off the council vote that would have implemented the plan.
Extraordinary stats on crime and poverty have, for decades, also tended to raise Richmond’s profile in a tragic way:
For years, the Bay Area city had been battling one of the nation's worst homicide rates and spending millions of dollars on anti-crime programs to no avail. A state senator compared the city to Iraq, and the City Council debated declaring a state of emergency. In September 2006, a man was shot in the face at a funeral for a teenager who had been gunned down two weeks earlier, spurring local clergy to urge city hall to try something new—now. "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten," says Andre Shumake Sr., a 56-year-old Baptist minister whose son was shot six times while riding his bicycle. "It was time to do something different."
Chris Magnus, the new police chief - tough and deeply experienced - can take a lot of credit for trying “something different.” He turned a lot of heads when he held up a sign reading "#blacklivesmatter" during a protest over the deaths of two unarmed black suspects at the hands of Missouri and New York police. Chief Magnus has dismantled the "street teams," units of heavily armed officers deployed in high-crime areas. His focus on community policing includes “code enforcement, homeless outreach and a shake-up of command duties to build stronger ties to the community ... along with equipping patrol officers with body cameras and a call for more social media communications.”
The numbers are indisputable and moving in the right direction, especially in the rates of murders and shootings. It may be hard to sort out the reasons for this.
Richmond benefits from a confluence of forces, including improvements in policing strategies and the ONS, along with community groups and faith leaders who conduct frequent "peace walks" in the city's most crime-plagued neighborhoods
The above-mentioned ONS is the most controversial and seemingly wacky approach among all of them. The city council, after intense debate in the face of a public safety crisis, commissioned DeVonne Boggan to go out and “do something different” and he established Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. Critics have called the program “hugs for thugs,” a softhearted approach that coddles criminals and rewards shooters for their deadly behavior. This characterization is belied by the technocratic methods and assumptions used in its formulation. Mother Jones reports:
It has done it with a mix of data mining and mentoring, and by crossing lines that other anti-crime initiatives have only tiptoed around. Four times a year, the program's street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves. ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While ONS is city-funded and has the blessing of the chief of police, it resolutely does not share information with the cops. "It's the only agency where you're required to have a criminal background to be an employee," Boggan jokes.
Quixotically, Richmond is finding ways to struggle out from under a manhole cover of crime, poverty, ignorance and the forces of lots and lots of money who stand to benefit from such a dismal status quo. Richmond's confidence and brashness is the very image of pulling one’s self up by his or her bootstraps. Certainly Richmond must be admired by bold captains of industry and all those fearless and resilient self-made individuals who are ever-ready to define the American way for the rest of us.
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