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I live in Indy and much prefer Richmond. I've been to Richmond probably half a dozen times.
Granted, the parts of Indy you see from casually driving around the city are ugly. 465 is mostly suburban office parks on the north side, and a lot of cold industrial development around the rest of the city. A lot of blight is visible.
Richmond is old and has blight, but it's less prevalent than in Midwestern cities IMO. Both are high crime areas. Richmond has a lot of the old Southern architecture, but little of the Southern culture.
No doubt VA has far superior outdoor opportunities, but there are some in IN, just not very close to the metro.
I live in Indy and much prefer Richmond. I've been to Richmond probably half a dozen times.
Granted, the parts of Indy you see from casually driving around the city are ugly. 465 is mostly suburban office parks on the north side, and a lot of cold industrial development around the rest of the city. A lot of blight is visible.
Richmond is old and has blight, but it's less prevalent than in Midwestern cities IMO. Both are high crime areas. Richmond has a lot of the old Southern architecture, but little of the Southern culture.
No doubt VA has far superior outdoor opportunities, but there are some in IN, just not very close to the metro.
Richmond has more blighted area in comparison to its size than Indianapolis by a country mile. Mark Holmberg of WTVR (CBS 6) did a report on the blight in the city of Richmond. CBS 6 concluded that the city Richmond is its own worst slumlord. There were over 1,800 properties worth at least a billion and a half dollars with some 980 of those properties owned outright by the city of Richmond. 769 owned and managed by the city's housing authority, 75 owned by the Richmond Metropolitan Authority and a handful owned by Venture Richmond. There were vast and valuable bluidings that have been vacant for a generation, like the Intermediate Terminal building by the city's old river port. Whole long-empty schools sit in poorer neighborhoods like the old Whitcomb Court Elementary. Vast lots of overgrown city property where problem properties were demolised, like on Lynnhaven near Commerce Road, where the city tore down a vast and ruined apartment complex.
On W. Brookland Park Boulevard there is a bank built in 1927 frozen in time for a decade. Two block west on Brookland Park Boulevard, a gas station owned by the housing authority for 10 years. The school system's book repository, still in use in a million-dollar building off the Boulvard, is so poorly cared for the roof is near colapse and storm water falls where it will, flooding the wall by a door that warns the room inside contains high-voltage equipment. The city's housing authority, RRHA, owns several hundred vacant lots, along with plenty of boarded up houses, some of them in neighborhoods plagued by murders and vice offenses.
Perhap the next half a dozen times you visit the Richmond you may want to actually drive around the city. Richmond has southern charm in spades but it also has more than its fair share urban decay. For a city is has 4 times the population, Indianapolis is richer and has much less urban decay.
Richmond has more blighted area in comparison to its size than Indianapolis by a country mile. Mark Holmberg of WTVR (CBS 6) did a report on the blight in the city of Richmond. CBS 6 concluded that the city Richmond is its own worst slumlord. There were over 1,800 properties worth at least a billion and a half dollars with some 980 of those properties owned outright by the city of Richmond. 769 owned and managed by the city's housing authority, 75 owned by the Richmond Metropolitan Authority and a handful owned by Venture Richmond. There were vast and valuable bluidings that have been vacant for a generation, like the Intermediate Terminal building by the city's old river port. Whole long-empty schools sit in poorer neighborhoods like the old Whitcomb Court Elementary. Vast lots of overgrown city property where problem properties were demolised, like on Lynnhaven near Commerce Road, where the city tore down a vast and ruined apartment complex.
On W. Brookland Park Boulevard there is a bank built in 1927 frozen in time for a decade. Two block west on Brookland Park Boulevard, a gas station owned by the housing authority for 10 years. The school system's book repository, still in use in a million-dollar building off the Boulvard, is so poorly cared for the roof is near colapse and storm water falls where it will, flooding the wall by a door that warns the room inside contains high-voltage equipment. The city's housing authority, RRHA, owns several hundred vacant lots, along with plenty of boarded up houses, some of them in neighborhoods plagued by murders and vice offenses.
Perhap the next half a dozen times you visit the Richmond you may want to actually drive around the city. Richmond has southern charm in spades but it also has more than its fair share urban decay. For a city is has 4 times the population, Indianapolis is richer and has much less urban decay.
Richmond does have some tough neighborhoods, although crime and blight have been rapidly falling in recent years. Even Brookland Park BLVD is getting closer to being gentrified.
One place these two cities differ is in annexation. Indy expanded city limits to a massive 365 sq/miles which certainly helped with a declining population in the core over the past forty years. I would imagine this helped Indy from a tax-base perspective, whereas Richmond really struggled to make ends meet. To this day, Richmond City has a terrible relationship with its regional partners (namely Henrico). That was a HUGELY frustrating part of living in the area for me. It was nearly impossible to progress on projects that required regional cooperation.
That's the impression I got while driving through. I don't think I can handle such bland terrain and scenery. But I heard that the gay community in Richmond sucks.
If you are making judgments on places to live based on what you saw when you drove through once; you're doing it wrong. When you are passing through on an interstate, you miss things like the cultural trail, or planned projects like the water way project; or jug rock and views like this in Brown County. Don't buy into the idea that Indiana is nothing but flat boring farm land; because while there is a lot of that, you've missed a lot if that's all you see.
Indiana has that too. Repeating the same lie over and over again doesn't make it true.
If you think Indiana is that flat and a farming state. Take a trip back home to Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Ohh geez. It is what it is. I'm not saying it's a total wasteland, but compared to Virginia and the east coast in general, Indiana will not compare and it is generally very flat, barren and ugly (just like much of many other states), although OK has some pretty cool areas.
There is a difference between CT, MD, VA, NC, SC, PA etc. You have far more recreational options and far more people taking advantage of them.
Indy, is much like KC. The city is decent, but it's not really in the most amazing location and when you leave the metro, you are generally in farmland country and that it. (like KC).
The scented (honeysuckle, mimosa, magnolia and that tree that smells like semen in the spring) air, the insect noise, the slick and Warm river water, the creative atmosphere, the archeticture, the history (the stories on historic markers read like erotic fiction for those titillated by war, class struggle and indigenous people), the sound of tires on cobble stone, the sound of river rapids, the smell of the residents after a day of mountain biking or white water kayaking, the Edwardian infrastructure, the Victorian and Federal houses, the light cutting through a thick canopy late in the evening, the sound of garage and post punk bands playing at a distant house party, the sound of the trains carrying KY and WV (in the form of coal) to the docks in Newport News, the bright faces of couples flirting in Jackson Ward. The smell of coffee roasting, beer brewing, cigarettes being manufactured and bread.
That's a fraction of what makes Richmond sexy.
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