Between Richmond’s monuments and historical sites, it seems as if the city sometimes spends more time looking backward than forward. Not so for futurist John Martin, founder and CEO of SIR’s Institute for Tomorrow, where he analyzes demographic trends for municipalities and organizations to help them plan for the future. SIR is a strategic management consultancy that advises nonprofits, governmental agencies and Fortune 500 firms such as Dominion Energy.

Martin has been working in the Richmond region for decades. He says the most counterintuitive trend we face is a growing population driven not by new births and migration but by increased longevity and aging. “We’re going to have just as many people over 65 as we have 18 and younger,” he says. “Half of our population growth isn’t new people, it’s the same people growing older in place.” The future population of the Richmond region will be 20% senior citizens, he says — the same percentage as Florida today.

An aging population brings new challenges, but none of them are unique to our region — it’s part of a national trend of falling birth rates. “Boomers were four kids per family, now it’s 2.1,” Martin says. “We’re going to have relatively more older people and fewer young people; it’s a first in the history of man. The population pyramid is shifting to a rectangle.” And although Richmond’s population is growing older, it still skews younger than the state average: The average age in the city is 33 years old versus 38 statewide.

× Expand John Martin,founder and CEO of SIR’s Institute for Tomorrow (Photo courtesy SIR’s Institute for Tomorrow)

Wealth Gap Widens

Predicting the future is a risky business, but Martin and his firm have a long list of happy clients. Among them are Reinvent Hampton Roads CEO James Spore, who served Virginia Beach as city manager for 24 years. Spore first worked with Martin in 2010, forecasting the future of Hampton Roads. “He’s a spellbinder,” Spore says, describing Martin as a captivating speaker who distills complex topics. “He warned us about globalization and the specialization of labor, which we’re seeing now.”

Spore has worked with Martin and the institute on multiple campaigns, including a recent rebranding of the 17 communities of Hampton Roads as “757,” a nickname popular with younger residents that comes from the regional area code.

Although Richmond is growing faster than Hampton Roads, it’s experiencing some of the same problems, Martin says. As workers retire, competition for young talent will increase. Without more affordable housing, Richmond will lag behind cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee. To attract workers and companies, Martin says Richmond needs to make structural fixes and do more “place marketing,” a mix of branding and advertising that tells a coherent story about the city.

By 2040, racial minority groups will make up the majority.

On the structural level, Martin says our entire economic system needs to change. “The wealth gap continues to grow,” he says. “It used to be about a seven-fold difference from people over 60 to the people under 40.” Most people accrue more assets with age, he adds, but that wealth gap is now double what it once was, which, Martin says, “isn’t sustainable.”

Primary factors include ballooning education costs and wage stagnation. “Almost seven out of 10 millennials leave college with on average about $30,000 in debt,” he says. “That’s an enormous burden, and about half the people who graduate are underemployed.” The median home price today is $259,000; adjusted for inflation, that’s $83,000 in 1980 terms, nearly twice what Martin says he paid for his first home during that time.

‘Millennials Want Nature’

Martin forecasts rising wages but says poverty, inequality and housing affordability will remain major challenges. “The poverty rate isn’t growing; it’s been 13% or 14% for decades, but America has grown by millions,” he says. “By 2030, if you hold that percentage the same, there are millions more Americans in poverty.” In the city of Richmond, poverty hovers around 25%, and it drops as low as 6% in the surrounding counties.

In addition to economics, Martin thinks Richmond needs to work on its marketing. “The river is our greatest asset and our No. 1 icon, not the monuments,” he says, adding that the city hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise attractions such as the James River Park System. Martin says we need better access to the river to let more people enjoy it, but he cautions against filling the area with concrete. “We have to be careful with our development — millennials want nature,” he says. “I give Richmond an A-plus for not building a concrete pier with retail shops along the riverfront.”

Other challenges are Richmond’s Civil War monuments and its unhealed racial history, but Martin says we’re moving in the right direction, citing the renaming of Arthur Ashe Boulevard and the recent installation of Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“With 2020 coming up, minority groups will represent the majority of children,” and by 2040, racial minority groups will make up the majority. “We need to welcome people of different races, religious identities, sexual orientations and gender identities,” Martin says, adding, “We need to be a big-tent city.”

Better Together

The last lesson Martin has for the region is to look beyond its borders. He points to mega-regions such as Cascadia, a section of the Pacific Northwest containing Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, and the Texas Triangle, a pyramid-shaped region containing Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, as successful models of regional cooperation.

Spore points to a long-proposed Richmond-Hampton Roads mega-region. “The tagline is ‘We’re Better Together,’ and we are,” he says. Together, the region would be home to nearly 4 million residents with a GDP ranking in the top 20. It would let Richmond boast access to an international port and make a connection between the high-speed transatlantic data cables in Hampton Roads and the data centers in Henrico. To do that, though, we’ll need to improve transportation.

“We’ll need to widen I-64,” Spore says, and Martin brings up transit as a major challenge, both in the immediate region and as a link to Hampton Roads.

“We’re so far behind,” Martin says. “Our budget for GRTC is about $50 million. Look at any other city our size — their transit system is $150 million. We have woefully underfunded transit and consequently not been able to serve a lot of people,” he says. But even here he turns optimistic, citing studies the institute conducted for GRTC. “Over 90% of the people in Chesterfield and Henrico want more transit. That’s good news. We’re not there yet, but the forces are aligning.”