IN LAST WEEK’S COLUMN, I asked what it would take to comprehensively address the problems of Richmond, the city I lived in until age 14.

I promised that I would discuss specific ideas in this week’s column, but before I get to those, I should review some general characteristics that I view as structurally critical to any solution.

There are four:

1. Any solution should be holistic, and thus address every problem as part of an interrelated whole;

2. Our efforts should be sustained through time (any problem 400 years in the making isn’t something that can be completely resolved in a few months or years);

3. Any solution should be managed and implemented, to the extent possible, by the residents of Richmond; and finally,

4. An essential foundation for effective change rests on the immediate and sustained reduction of violent crime, especially murder and assault.

Any discussion of violence should begin by acknowledging that the numbers are both bleak and heartbreaking. According to a study by researchers at Stanford University, up to one third of children in our violent urban neighborhoods are afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a proportion far higher than even among veterans of intense combat in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (The percentage there, according to estimates by the Veterans Administration’s National Center for PTSD, is between 11 and 20 percent.) Additionally, “Forty-seven percent of low-income African-American youth have witnessed a murder and 56 percent have witnessed a stabbing,” according to figures highlighted in a report by the National Urban League Policy Institute. That’s an awful lot of psychological trauma suffered by innocent children, who subsequently need massive amounts of help by psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

I have a psychologist friend who has treated many people with PTSD, including combat veterans. He told me that an absolutely essential element in treating PTSD is ensuring that the sufferer is not re-traumatized by merely discussing traumatic events in too much detail too soon. Now imagine the impact on a shell-shocked child of witnessing a gruesome murder, and then another.

The usual remedy mentioned in these discussions is adding police to the streets, and providing for lengthier prison sentences for violent offenders. My view is that this is far too one-dimensional.

For one thing, it is well-established by research that witnessing violence increases one’s chances of becoming a perpetrator of violence, so early and adequate mental health intervention would go a long way toward preventing violence.

For another, violence comes from conflict, and there are better ways to address conflicts than sending both sides to prison. One example: Negotiations in the early ’90s culminated in a peace treaty between the previously warring Bloods and Crips gangs in Los Angeles, and their example spread to other cities across the United States.

What I’ve mentioned so far are worthy projects in and of themselves, but they should be seen as foundational to the real work, which is addressing the lack of economic opportunity in Richmond.

It is worth emphasizing that our poorer urban neighborhoods are, in fact, poor. The usual rejoinder — that they are not poor if you judge their material well-being against the standards of history and the rest of the world — is true in a certain sense, but misses the point. The context by which Richmond’s residents are judged, and by which they judge themselves, is not history or the rest of the world, but the Bay Area and the early 21st century.

I visited an old friend in Richmond a few weeks ago. He’s an unemployed truck driver who used to work for Sears but was laid off a few months ago, and he mentioned that he was looking for work. Among the things he said he hated most about unemployment, one of them was not wanting to buy expensive electronics or a new car and being unable to. What he missed, he said, was fishing with his friends. Back when he was working, he would periodically split the cost of a charter boat with a few friends and spend a blissful day on the ocean feeling the wind on his face while waiting for a bite.

So Richmond needs jobs — and not just any jobs but decent-paying ones that are both plentiful and that do not require a college degree. I’ve mentioned this before, but it is not just Richmond that needs jobs like that — it is all of America. Providing these jobs requires support and incentives from the government.

Governments also can hire people directly. Among our many needs, we have infrastructure problems ranging from urgent to critical. Addressing those needs on a large scale would absorb a fair fraction of the unemployed of Richmond.

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SLIGHT CHANGE OF SUBJECT, but I wanted to add a nice update to my column of Aug. 29. I wrote about a jazz musician named Earle Davis who had played with many luminaries of jazz in the 1950s and ’60s and how I encountered him at a BART station playing for change.

I wrote then, “Earle Davis was one of the most truly free men I have ever met. His life was about doing his art, with people of like mind. He’s a good enough musician that he could easily get hired for a cushy gig playing on movie soundtracks or for Broadway musicals or whatever, but he prefers living as he does, seeking out and jamming with fellow jazz musicians, just playing his truth and hearing theirs.”

Earle’s son emailed me out of the blue and told me that his father would be attending an event in Berkeley and would love it if I could attend. I jumped at the chance, and at the event Earle told me that a friend in New York had shown him my column about him, and that when he read it he had tears in his eyes — tears of gratitude that someone finally “gotten” what he was really about. Thank you, Earle. And keep playing your truth my friend.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.