The transition from a long-standing subsistence economy in Richmond started the day the Ohlone people first met colonizing Europeans, on March 28th, 1772. A group of 14 Spanish soldiers on horseback arrived at a small town on San Pablo Creek. According to the journal written by the Spanish record-keeper, a group of Ohlone people were processing Brodieia bulbs and soaproot to eat. Over the next six decades, the Spanish established missions and attempted to replace Ohlone culture with their own through violence, assimilation, religious indoctrination, and kidnapping and enslaving children. An Ohlone woman named Maria Colos was interviewed around 1904 and described a past kidnapping: "a wagon filled with Indian children coming from Martinez… they were bringing them like animals… They wanted some water to drink. They were naked." In 1883, ownership of Richmond was given by the Mexican government to Francisco Castro, a Spanish soldier stationed in California.

In the 1940s, Richmond went through its most famous economic transition — the shipbuilding boom facilitated by federal spending for World War II. The Kaiser Shipbuilding Corporation had an out-of-state recruitment program that aimed to secure 150 new workers per week for its yards in Richmond. In the decade of the 1940s, the city's population quadrupled from 23,000 to nearly 100,000. This included the arrival of African Americans to Richmond, who, according to the 1940 US Census, numbered 270, and by 1950, were 13,374. African Americans brought traditions that shaped the local economy, including midwifery, a thriving music scene, social clubs, sports, and crops and foods from the South.

Racial violence, redlining, discrimination by realtors and banks, and other forms of racial exclusion and dispossession controlled the access of African Americans and other people of color to work, homes, land, financing, and other essentials for economic well-being. Japanese Americans in Richmond, who had built up much of the flower-growing industry, were rounded up by the federal government and incarcerated in internment camps for several years. Many came home to their properties having been taken or damaged.

The impact of mass incarceration and the influx of drugs and guns in the 1980s and 1990s had a devastating effect on Richmond's local economy. The racist effect of mass incarceration resulted in more African American adults in prison, jail, or on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began, according to Michelle Alexander. The incarceration of Black men was so extreme that by 2002, there were "nearly 3 million more black adult women than men in black communities across the United States, a gender gap of 26 percent." The economic impact of this trauma and lost time included losses in formal education, career development, growth of businesses, social networks, mentorship, and other key factors for economic well-being.