more richmond

Venture Richmond is trumpeting the recent NYT article. (Venture Richmond is the current incarnation of the various groups trying to "brand" Richmond.)

This is exactly the sort of excitement that keeps making Richmond seem like an underdog among metro areas. It's almost as if they're just excited that the NYT noticed the city--Yay, we're big-time now! I'm going to term this the Dayton Syndrome--rather than really working at making the urban area a great place to be, you keep re-branding the place and hoping people in other cities with believe how great it is to be there.

This said, I think Richmond has a hell of a lot more going for it than a city like Dayton--or many others I could mention. Unfortunately, like Dayton and other cities, overcoming the legacy of white flight, incipient racism, hermetic classism and the lack of decent, widely-used public transportation is very difficult to overcome.