How is Richmond right now as of preseant time?
By 2024, Richmond is smaller in population and size compared to our world, with some 100,000 people altogether. The city still has a bad reputation in the rest of the United States as the former capital of the Confederacy, though unlike Charleston, Richmond was eventually rebuilt, albeit under a US military administration that planned for a smaller postwar metropolis.
During the first generation after the end of the Second Great War, the US military government systematically demolished all Confederate government buildings and monuments, along with all monuments or buildings associated with the Freedom Party. This even extended to the Tredegar Iron Workers, which were parceled out to US conglomerates before its surviving equipment was dismantled and moved elsewhere. By 2024, the Democratic Party controls Richmond politically.
The Dewey administration debated moving the state capital of Virginia to another city, but ultimately decided against it when the military advised that there weren’t any other suitable locations available to house the US and civilian administrations for the state.
Richmond, as elsewhere in the Midsouth, experienced violence during the postwar anti-US insurgency. Like elsewhere in the Midsouth, anti-US rebels failed to successfully challenge US military power in the city, though it did hamper reconstruction efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Like in other regions of the Midsouth, some surviving anti-US rebels in Richmond evolved into organized crime rackets, which formed the basis for the different outfits of the Dixie Mafia. The Richmond Outfit dominated organized crime in the city from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, when it was destroyed in an and absorbed by the larger Norfolk Outfit.
Richmond, like other cities in the Midsouth, never recovered demographically or economically from the Second Great War or the Destruction. The former African American neighborhoods in Richmond, such as Jackson Ward, were destroyed by the Freedom Party beginning in the late 1930s and continuing until the city was liberated by the United States. None of the African American survivors from Richmond returned permanently to the city after the end of the Second Great War. There is a memorial to the victims of the Destruction in Capitol Square.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Richmond began a period of economic growth, which was driven by an influx of migrants from elsewhere in the Midsouth, as well as the successful establishment of an artistic and theater center in the Riverfront District. Richmond also benefited from the opening of the Virginia Technical College in 2004, a research institute focused around technology and engineering. This period of economic growth in Richmond came to an abrupt end in 2019 with the Great Housing Crash, which led to a significant number of foreclosures in the city, as well as a contraction in tourism and the economic collapse of much of the Riverfront District.
By 2024, Richmond, like other cities in the Midsouth, is known in the United States as a place that people leave, rather than as a place that people move to.