This story was reported and written by VPM News.
A VPM News listener named Christi wanted to know: Why is the Seven Cities area so segmented, lacking a more unified identity and collaboration on things like tourism and transportation?
So, Curious Commonwealth traveled the region — made up of the cities of Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Virginia Beach — and talked to mayors, academics and administrators to try and find an answer.
“The problem has its roots in the ‘20s, but there were some issues prior to that,” said Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a history professor at Norfolk State University, “I don’t know why we cut our noses to spite our faces, but we do in Hampton Roads.”
As an example, she pointed to a 2016 referendum on whether to extend The Tide, a light rail line established in Norfolk five years earlier, east into Virginia Beach. Virginia Beach residents voted overwhelmingly to keep the transit line out, a result Newby-Alexander said carried racial “not in my backyard” overtones that stem from the previous century.
“There were people in Virginia Beach, they were dead set against the light rail, and there were a lot of businesspeople who I knew who told me this was about race,” Newby-Alexander said. “The issue is that there are still people who want to live in the past.”
The area has had a turbulent history of contention since not long after Virginia allowed independent cities to exist as separate political bodies from their surrounding counties in 1902.
Much of that tension seems to have originated in the City of Norfolk, where a politically activated Black community gave momentum to the eventual passage of the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrining the African American vote.
In response, white residents left the city for the suburbs in droves — part of a trend of “white flight” across the country that was particularly common in the middle of the 20th century. One of the most striking features of Norfolk during that time was that the city was segregated by law. Affluent suburbs cropped up that were legally whites-only areas.
“As the population suburbanized, there’s a demand for services,” said Johnny Finn, a geography professor at Christopher Newport University. “As white people were moving out to the suburbs — what a lot of people call white flight — for the cities to maintain their tax base, they needed to grow out.”
So, Norfolk annexed affluent chunks of Norfolk County. And as the city expanded, others followed suit, either mimicking Norfolk’s objectives or acting to prevent being glommed into a Greater Norfolk.
“From the 1950s to the 1960s, you had this tit-for-tat consolidation,” Finn said. “As one city did it in the direction of another, another city did it back toward them.”
Newby-Alexander said the US Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, mandating integrated public school systems across the country, accelerated the trend of white flight in the region. Virginia was a nexus of the “Massive Resistance” movement, in which many school districts opted to close their doors altogether rather than comply with the court’s order.
The Brown decision came at a time when the map was changing rapidly in Hampton Roads. Two years before the court’s ruling, the cities of Hampton and Newport News had absorbed what was left of Elizabeth City and Warwick counties, respectively, and Virginia Beach — at that point, just the oceanfront resort strip — had separated from Princess Anne County.
A decade later, the City of South Norfolk and the remainder of Norfolk County merged to create what is now the City of Chesapeake, and the residents of Princess Anne County had successfully petitioned the City of Virginia Beach to annex the rest of its land.
“Rather than be annexed by Norfolk, they’d rather — largely based on either overt or subconscious racial bias or animus — they preferred to be annexed by the whiter Virginia Beach than Norfolk,” Finn said. “Even though the political machine in Norfolk was still controlled by whites.”
By the end of the 1970s, an area once made up largely of several rural counties had been converted into seven independent cities. But while racial and political tensions lingered, there were signs that the region was moving toward better cooperation. The federal and state governments created the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization and the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, respectively.
Some people that VPM News spoke with challenged the premise of the cities not getting along altogether, saying it was an anachronism.
“The narrative that Hampton Roads does not get along, the narrative that there is no regional cooperation, is a tired narrative from yesteryear,” said Bob Crum, the executive director of the HRPDC.
Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer echoed Crum’s opinion: “Maybe at one time that was true, but I tell you that’s not true right now. All the mayors of the 757 get along very well.”
Dyer added that the light rail project residents rejected in 2016 wasn’t designed properly, since most residents would have to drive to it to use it.
Crum, Dyer and Hampton Mayor Jimmy Gray all point to about $6 billion in highway infrastructure projects that the region has greenlit — centered on an expansion of the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel — as signs of burgeoning cooperation.
“There were zero federal tax dollars in those projects,” Crum said. “All the money was approved in this room.”
Also, Virginia Beach businessman Coleman Ferguson, has hatched a plan to build an NBA-ready arena in that city that would give the whole region a venue for concerts and sporting events. He said he plans on crowdfunding the project, rather than rely on government funding for it.
“We’re actually the largest metro area in the United States that doesn’t have its own arena,” he said, pointing to a regional population of roughly 1.8 million people.
Ultimately, the roots of discontent among the Seven Cities lie in a history of segregation and economic disparities. But whether that discontent is still a phenomenon depends on whom you ask.
“Maybe there was a time when regional cooperation wasn’t what it is today. I wasn’t in politics back then,” Gray said from his office balcony at Hampton City Hall. “But I think now we realize that maybe we’re better as a whole region than as individual cities.”