Danny Avula takes a break between bites of his chicken sandwich to look at Richmond’s expansive, ever-growing skyline.
From where he’s sitting, in the backyard of Blue Atlas in Richmond’s East End, he can see jagged rows of buildings — both new and old — that go on for miles. The smokestacks that once powered the city serve as place markers, guiding his eyes from district to district. If he squints, he can make out the farthest outlines of the river.
For Avula, this place is special.
The old schoolhouse-turned-restaurant embodies everything that first made him fall in love with the neighborhood and has kept him tethered to Richmond — its deep appreciation for history, its fostered sense of neighborly love and its desire to grow and adapt.
Avula pops a tater tot into his mouth, chews and takes a sip of water as he reflects on the place he has called home for more than 20 years.
What began as his desire to be a good neighbor has grown into a citywide dream. And if things go in his favor, this will become — from the tallest point in Church Hill to the bottom of Shockoe to the manufacturing plants in South Side — his responsibility.
“I think so much about how I think about public health and how I understand public health has been through the eyes of my neighbors and friends,” Avula said. “It has solidified for me this reality that local governments can make decisions and pass new policies and invest money in ways that actually preserve communities.”
Avula is one of five candidates vying for the position of Richmond mayor in the Nov. 5 election. The former commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services has built a platform that focuses on affordable housing, education reform, government accountability and inclusivity.
His approach to solving Richmond’s issues is scientific in nature: learn the symptoms, diagnose the condition, alleviate the problems, treat the root causes.
It is a practice that has proven successful throughout his career as a practicing physician and in his role within the Virginia Department of Health.
While serving as the public health director for Richmond and Henrico, Avula was tasked with establishing health clinics in the city’s “Big Six” public housing complexes. He said it’s one of the crowning achievements of his career.
The health district partnered with residents, learned their needs and helped establish a network of eight clinics to provide necessary medical care to residents.
“So much of that came out of partnering with residents, listening to residents, ensuring that their voices were heard and that was shaping our decisions as a government to invest,” Avula said.
“How each decision gets made has to be done with the appropriate level of community involvement,” he added.
From immigrating from India to the U.S. as a child to beginning medical school at VCU Medical Center to leading the state’s COVID-19 vaccination effort, Avula said that in all of his life’s journeys, he never considered running for mayor.
So when he first began weighing his options, he said it was a family decision. During talks at the dinner table, he, his wife and their five children outlined the potential changes a mayoral bid might bring — increased notoriety, less time at home and a significant pay cut if elected.
It wasn’t a decision he made lightly and, in April, he would prove to be the last out of the five to announce his candidacy.
But he kept coming back to the idea of being a good neighbor and bettering his community, and one of the largest selling points was the city’s current affordable housing crisis.
Throughout his years living in Church Hill, Avula said he has seen many neighbors come and go.
Many of his neighbors were longtime residents who aged into retirement and could not keep up with mortgage costs and higher property taxes on fixed incomes. They were forced to sell, and new owners moved in, ones among a select pool of potential buyers who could afford skyrocketing home prices. Avula watched as his neighborhood became unrecognizable.
All the while, he said that if government policies, like the Maggie Walker Land Bank and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, had been in place a decade earlier, the neighborhood would still have all of the things that make it great all while protecting some of its most vulnerable residents.
He said the same thing could happen “in parts of North Side that haven’t been gentrified or neighborhoods in South Side” unless “we are intentional about it not being that way.”
“That’s my heart in this role,” Avula said. “I will be the person who works in partnership with the council to set the agenda for what the future looks like. That’s what I want to have a hand in.”
His plan for addressing the issue includes focusing on areas most at-risk. This includes incentivizing developers to create affordable units and to get creative with their designs.
Also, he said there needs to be additional funding poured into existing avenues to make it easier for folks to own property and keep it.
Like many of the candidates, Avula is running a campaign that aims at improving Richmond Public Schools — this includes increasing funding, creating more opportunities for students and changing the culture within the division.
While he himself is not an educator, he said it is something he feels he has an inside look at from day to day.
Mary Kay Avula, Danny’s wife, is a teacher at Chimborazo Elementary School. His five children all attend Richmond Public Schools. At their dinner table every night, Avula said he hears stories of what goes on and, in a way, it has helped shape his future plans for the division, all of which come down to more funding.
“We have a moral imperative to create the best possible product for the kids that go to Richmond Public Schools and to ensure that the schools provide them a path forward either to college or to career. It needs to be a priority that the city says we are going to invest appropriately both in infrastructure and staffing,” Avula said. “If we don’t see outcomes, that’s really going to hold the city back. It’s going to keep people from wanting to stay here. We’ve seen that over and over again.”
Throughout the campaign, Avula has relied heavily on his previous experience working and leading within state and local government departments. He said it is where he is most qualified.
While it wasn’t something he ever imagined he would have to do, Avula said he took it in stride and learned to adapt to the challenges this newfound responsibility brought him. His ability to adapt to any situation, his dedication to public service and his desire to work directly with residents is what makes him the ideal candidate, Avula said.
“I’ve done the reps on being an executive leader at the local and state level and actually done the work to build teams and change culture overtime and get real clear about outcomes and figures,” Avula said. “At the end of the day, a local government exists to serve the community that it represents.”
