Recently the Hampton Roads Community Foundation has created an initiative called Reinvent Hampton Roads to increase economic opportunities and entrepreneurship with a focus on convincing established companies to relocate here. Since 1950, HRCF has donated 230 million dollars towards such non-profits as Hurrah Players and the Up Center. Their grants support the arts, public schools, libraries and various charities. These efforts are important, but I fail to see how an organization that only helps businesses that do not pay income taxes and only pay about 5% of their staff really help the economy of any region. Voluntary and prison slave labor was a paradigm of the socialist regimes that terrorized the Cold War Era. Free Market Economies are based on free enterprise and so should our economy.


We need grants and angel investments that support start-ups and early-stage companies founded by local people for locally and internationally-based business endeavors. The 757 Angels Group says that their purpose is to fund businesses that will “derive the majority of revenues from sources outside of Hampton Roads.” Why do they charge people $100 to tell them that they don’t fit the criteria of not being focused on customers outside of our area? Why can’t they just give their funding to the best ideas and concepts instead?


Several movies have been filmed here over the past 3 decades such as Mission Impossible III and Captain Phillips, but no one feels like setting-up a company here to make it a real home for movie and TV making. Book and music publishing companies are also surprisingly absent from our area as well. The only record companies I am aware of only release hip hop and R&B and haven’t made any singles or albums that people have purchased or streamed in any great number. Most rock, pop, R&B, hip hop, country, and blues artists here struggle to be heard on local radio stations or to get national attention.

As a lifelong resident of the region known as Hampton Roads, I have always had a slight distaste for the term. I understand why people here want a regional name to lump 9 cities, 4 towns and 7 counties together, but I don’t think anyone outside of Southeastern Virginia has ever been able to grasp the concept. Instead of knowing it to include the cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Newport News, Hampton, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Poquoson and Williamsburg, many confuse it as the city of Hampton alone.


In 1956, the voters of Hampton narrowly rejected a proposal to merge with the city of Newport News and Warwick County. They wanted to call the new city Hampton Roads. Warwick and Newport News merged two years later. In 2012 there was a study conducted to propose the merging of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk into one city that would have become the 10th most populated city in the United States. It would have contained over 1 million people and be the largest in the country in terms of land area with 1000 square miles. Needless to say, it was shot down.


Most residents would agree that the most populated city of every state in America stands alone. That would include the cities of: Virginia Beach, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oklahoma City, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Honolulu and others. The same applies to the most populated cities in other countries such as: Paris, London, Helsinki, Sydney, Beijing, Toronto, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and you get the picture.​