Turning a Deaf Ear to the Displaced

By Colbert I. King

Saturday, January 8, 2005; Page A19

Drive-by news gathering, which passes as journalism
today, conveys a superficial and misleading picture of
gentrification in the nation's capital. The stories
tell nothing of the wrenching consequences of people
being pushed out of their neighborhoods. But how would
those journalists know? They've never lived through
the process of gentrification, and they don't spend
nearly enough time in the community getting to know
what they write about. Facile writers with clueless
editors can get away with anything.

The tragedy is that this benign view of what's taking
place in the city is also shared in top D.C.
government circles, where our town's tightly drawn
class and racial fault lines -- and those established
residents who have been made to feel marginalized --
are ignored.

But why worry about any of that? The city's growing
tax base of middle-class couples and singles makes
D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams giddy. The sight of
"undesirable" neighborhoods being rapidly transformed
into places where wealthier folks want to live makes
Williams go weak in the knees. These changes are just
what the mayor, his economic planners and his business
friends ordered. Besides, there's no time for the displaced.
The mayor's too busy with the National League of
Cities and, when he's home, being wined and dined in
glitzy downtown restaurants, Georgetown salons and the
homes of folks he never thought he would meet when he
was laboring as an Agriculture Department bureaucrat.
The whole thing has turned his head. So what if booming property
values and a richer downtown cultural life aren't
doing much for renters or the evicted?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for growth and economic
development. But not the kind that forces people out
of their neighborhoods or across the D.C. line.
Empathy for people about to lose their homes? Not
today's Tony Williams. He is much like the fabled
senior black Army officer who, when confronted by overly familiar
black enlisted men who thought they had something in
common with him, put them in their place with the
gibe, "I'm your color, not your kind."

Besides, the mayor will tell you, it's not as if he's
doing nothing. He touts the Housing Production Trust
Fund and his plans to transform homeless shelters and
spruce up public housing for the poor. And, as he and
his minions will tell you, the pushed-out -- at least
some of them -- will have somewhere else to go when
the city gets some affordable housing up and running
in other parts of the city.

But if he really wanted to prove he doesn't want a
District of Columbia of just the rich, he could
support adoption of a mandatory inclusionary zoning
policy to make sure new and rehabilitated residential
developments include a certain minimum percentage of
housing that low- and moderate-income folks can
afford. D.C. Council Chairman Linda Cropp has proposed
such legislation to make certain current residents can
afford to stay in the city. The mayor should seek
permission from his developer friends to support the Cropp bill. Fat
chance.

But city life is more than having a roof over your
head -- a point lost on Williams and his minions.

Today's gentrified West End is much more to the
mayor's taste. He even lives in Foggy Bottom. And
what's not to like? The area is blessed with good
transportation, nice restaurants, well-kept rental
apartments and condos, less crime, fewer large
families with children, and more middle-class
dwellers. Not like when I lived there. Back in the
1940s and '50s, employees arriving for work
at the U.S. Weather Bureau at 24th and M Streets NW,
or ambulatory patients and workers entering the Columbia
Hospital for Women at 24th and L Streets NW, had to
pass through my West End neighborhood, which bordered
Foggy Bottom. To those outsiders, we were just a
working-class community on the edge of Rock Creek
Park.

Some of that was right. Words such as "new" or
"modern" were seldom spoken in our neighborhood.
Everything was old: the corner grocery store, the
churches on every other block, the schools and
playground equipment. Our clothes were clean, but they
were old, too. Most adults were working-class people:
domestics, laborers, elevator operators, porters and
the like. Those in the Weather Bureau's white-collar
workforce hardly gave us a second look, except maybe
when they were forced to step around us as we played on the sidewalk.

But when gentrification came to the West End and Foggy
Bottom, the character of our community died. To the
new arrivals, tenants being kicked out were just
faceless renters, women who cleaned other people's
houses or cared for other people's children. Men who
dug ditches and hauled trash, and who, when they had
to, scratched when nothing itched, and laughed when nothing was
funny. They went off to work in homes and on jobs
where they were called by their first names, even by
tots who hardly knew their own names.

But those same men and women, at least to kids in my
neighborhood, were community pillars. They served as
deacons and deaconesses in our churches, taught Sunday
school and sang in the choir. They grew up with our
parents and disciplined us as if we were their own. We
knew them as the respected "Mr." or "Mrs." So-and-So,
or as Sister Johnson or Brother Jones. It was
disrespectful for a child to call a grown-up by his or
her first name.

It was a community where a child could walk three
blocks and run into someone, a relative or friend, who
was known to the family. Financially embattled, yes.
But no one went hungry. Neighbors, black and white --
like the Jones family down the block -- didn't let
neighbors starve. People looked each other squarely in
the eye. They spoke on the streets. We weren't afraid
of each other. We enjoyed the same kind of food and
music, and played the same childhood games. We were the
community.

Gentrification didn't care about any of that stuff.
Once our neighborhood got "discovered" -- as when Columbus
"discovered" America -- all we shared and held dear
was destroyed. Families, churches and lifelong friendships
were ripped from their moorings and scattered. That
explains why Liberty Baptist Church on 23rd Street NW
ended up on Kentucky Avenue SE; why 19th Street
Baptist Church at 19th and I Streets NW is now on
upper 16th Street NW; why Rock Creek Baptist Church in
Foggy Bottom is now east of Georgia Avenue on Eighth Street
NW.

Oh, most of us managed to keep roofs over our heads.
We grew up and moved on. But lost forever was the
sense of community and belonging that we once had.
That is what's happening today in our city. The mayor
and drive-by journalists can't see it. Or they see it
and simply don't care.

Washington Post