I took a look at some of the research on revitalizing neighborhoods for a recent post on the Urban Land Institute blog The Ground Floor: Is Gentrification a Good Thing?
The neighborhood blog directory outside.in has announced Shaw has the second most active neighborhood blog community in the country. Although DCist had a short item I thought it was worth noting the news. They claim their rankings are based on “total number of posts, total number of local bloggers, number of comments and Technorati ranking for the bloggers.” The top neighborhood was Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. Interestingly, most of the top 10 are older urban neighborhoods experiencing revitalization, including neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I first described Shaw’s blogging renaissance in January, and several new blogs have popped up since then. The exciting blogging action has even inspired envy from other bloggers around town. Gallery Place Living pondered a second home in Shaw, and one well known blogger nearly in Columbia Heights claimed residency.
On that topic, what are the boundaries of Shaw? While there are never hard and fast rules about neighborhood boundaries, history provides some guidance. The Shaw neighborhood was first defined when planners used the boundaries of the Shaw Junior High School to define an urban renewal area for redevelopment efforts. Our very own Mari from In Shaw unearthed the map above, dated 1973. If anything, since then the boundaries have become restricted as other neighborhoods have developed identities.
Inspired in part by Mr. Kennicott’s article, I decided to take a little tour of the Mount Vernon Triangle area, where a number of large condominium projects are either under construction or planned. See the entire set here.
This post is third in a series on gentrification in the District of Columbia.
Part 1 - D.C. Gentrification and Section 8 Subsidized Housing
Part 2 - ‘Gentrification’: The Birth of a Word in D.C.
Part 3 - Metrorail Growth and ‘Gentrification’ Use
Part 4 - Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement
In my previous post I described the early uses of the word “gentrification” in the Washington Post. While I believe a careful study would be needed to pin down the exact scope and character of revitalization in the city, it is clear from the newspaper evidence starting in the late 1970s the city has experienced a sustained trend of residential revitalization in a variety of neighborhoods.
It occurs to me the American cities which have experienced the most extensive “gentrification” or neighborhood revitalization since the 1960s share several major attributes: they were older cities that possess a robust public transportation system. New York City, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago are all cities which have experienced major central city real estate booms in the past two decades — and all have large and extensive networks of buses, subways, and commuter trains. While there’s plenty of other reasons these cities have flourished, I think its reasonable to conclude transportation networks shape the patterns of metropolitan growth. Has Washington’s Metro system contributed to neighborhood revitalization? Zachary Schrag’s history of the system is full of tantalizing circumstantial evidence about rapid increases in property value and new developments following the newly constructed Metrorail system. I tracked down the growth of the size of the system (see the “Metro Facts” publication on this page) and created this graph:
I initially hoped to obtain historic ridership data for the life of the system. However, this data is apparently hard to come by and I concluded even if I were able to find the numbers they would no doubt be dominated by thousands of federal workers commuting in from the suburbs, and provide little information central city revitalization. More easily accessible was the physical growth of the system, which I decided would be a good measure of the usefulness of the system to people who lived near stations. When graphed together with the use of the word “gentrification” in the Post - both on the same axes - the correlation is striking:
While this graph is clearly a rough simplification of a complex process, anecdotal evidence about redevelopment patterns seems to confirm the pattern seen here. Neighborhood revitalization comes first to neighborhoods with Metro stations, and the system has made land near stations in both the city and suburb desirable.
This post is second in a series on gentrification in the District of Columbia.
Part 1 - D.C. Gentrification and Section 8 Subsidized Housing
Part 2 - ‘Gentrification’: The Birth of a Word in D.C.
Part 3 - Metrorail Growth and ‘Gentrification’ Use
Part 4 - Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement
I find the term “gentrification” fascinating not only because it looms so large in contemporary discussions about American cities but also because as a word it is a relatively new invention. According to most resources I can find the word was first used in “London: Aspects of Change,” a 1964 book about London edited by sociologist Ruth Glass. Considering the recent history I began to wonder when the word came into common use here. I decided to search the text of the Washington Post and record the number of instances of the word from its first appearance through today. This is what I found:
First, a note on the data: the Proquest Historical Newspapers database I used for older mentions stops in 1990 for the Washington Post. The Proquest Newspapers index of the paper starts in 1997 and continues through the present. If there is an electronic index for the years between 1990 and 1997 I would be interested in knowing about it; I was unable to find one at the Library of Congress. Also, the number of instances for 1997 and 1998 seem lower than one might expect; I wonder if those years are incomplete.
The first instance of the word I found in the Post was in a feature story about London from March 25, 1973. The first usage of the word in the specific context of Washington was in a column by Wolf Von Eckardt, who wrote a regular column in the paper’s style section about urban issues. In a column describing the challenges that would face newly elected Mayor Marion Barry, Eckardt writes:
There is a danger that uninformed or dogmatic rhetoric will get in the way of constructive redevelopment. The current rhetoric is about “gentrification.” … Specifically, “gentrification” denotes the recent phenomenon of white middle-income people buying deteriorating old houses in the low-income areas in town and rehabilitating both the houses and the area. It is the best thing that has happened to American cities since ditches were turned into sewers.
While observing that “no doubt” this rehabilitation displaces poor families, he concludes its probably not as widespread as the city fears and overall a good trend for the city as long as “every available means of providing subsidized housing elsewhere in the region.” (Eckardt, Wolf Von. “Opportunity for a Livable City.” Washington Post, 13 January 1979, P. B1.)
Von Eckardt is responsible for many of the early uses of the word in the paper, although it also appears prominently in a 1979 William Raspberry column and a UPI story of that year. (”Gentrification Means Moving Poor, Elderly”) The first story reporting evidence confirming the trend in Washington is perhaps a 1981 article by Eugene Robinson which reports the percentage of whites in two city wards had increased noticeably since 1970. On closer inspection the evidence is less than shocking, however: Ward 6, which includes Capitol Hill, had seen its white population increase from 15 percent to 20 percent, but the total number of whites increased only by 1,300. The other ward with a percentage increase was Ward 1 where whites went from 20 percent to 23 percent, but all groups including whites saw a net loss during the period in that ward. While the process was clearly at work in specific neighborhoods, it seems clear that during the 1970s both whites and blacks continued to leave the city.
From 1984 to 1988 the Post ran a series of articles about change in the Adams Morgan neighborhood where rapidly increasing property values seemingly threatened the neighborhood’s diversity and eclectic character. While many of the businesses have indeed closed, what is most notably about these stories is how the dire predictions of the neighborhoods impending “Georgetownization” have not panned out as citizens predicted: “All this new development will end up squeezing out the cultural diversity” and “Adams-Morgan’s days as an ethnic and income-mixed neighborhood are numbered.” Amid the general concern one article did point out the nonprofit Jubilee Housing had already by 1988 secured 300 units for low-income tenants. To me, the most interesting side of “gentrification” are the many moderating influences to rapid neighborhood revitalization including abandoned property, stubborn property owners, racism, Section 8 buildings, and nonprofit low-income housing organizations.
As shown above, since 2000 the number of mentions has soared, and as of July when I looked up this data the Post was on track to hitting a record number of usages this year - perhaps over 100. My next post in the series will begin to tackle the connection between neighborhood revitalization and the city’s Metrorail system.
This post is second in a series on gentrification in the District of Columbia.
Part 1 - D.C. Gentrification and Section 8 Subsidized Housing
Part 2 - ‘Gentrification’: The Birth of a Word in D.C.
Part 3 - Metro Growth and ‘Gentrification’ Use
Part 4 - Neighborhood Revitalization and Displacement
I dislike the term “gentrification” because it glosses over what is a complex process, placing a negative stigma on needed neighorhood economic revitalization and ignoring the forces that slow neighborhood change. While the reduction of affordible housing and number of rental units that often comes with new neighborhood investment is a problem, gentrification can be slowed or stopped by a variety of factors: freeways, large institutions, stubborn property owners, public housing projects, etc.
One of the most important brakes in cities like DC on rapid neighborhood change is the federal government’s Section 8 housing programs. Under one facet of this program, builders can receive loan to construct a building if they agree to rent it to government-approved low and moderate income families. In exchange, the government requires tenants pay 30 percent of their income as rent, and the government pays the remainder up to a fixed “fair market rent.” This way building owners — either companies or nonprofits — have an incentive to provide affordable housing. (The program contains an individual subsidy and voucher programs, but I don’t know as much about their impact in DC.) In DC these Section 8 buildings serve as an important brakes on the gentrification process, and ensure a base level of affordable housing for the city.
Therefore, I was blown away by this quote I read in the Post recently:
The [housing] study also sounded a warning about subsidized housing. Contracts for half of the District’s 10,561 apartments that participate in the federal Section 8 program, which subsidizes rents for needy tenants, are due to expire within the next year. Building owners can decide whether to renew their contracts or sell the buildings, making the apartments no longer affordable.
Greene said it is unclear how many buildings will leave the subsidy program. “If a Section 8 contract expires and you have a really hot condo market, there’s a lot of pressure on that owner to sell it at a profit,” he said.
To try to mitigate the impact of a drop in Section 8 housing, the city is beefing up its program that helps tenants buy their apartment buildings, Greene said. Under District law, tenants have the first right to purchase a building up for sale.
With so many of these subsidized buildings up for renewal and possible development, I wondered whether this would provide the impetus for aggressive speculation in revitalizing neighborhoods, potentially at the cost of affordible homes for thousands. This housing report (PDF) from the NeighborhoodInfo DC website below contains a map of the projects, color-coding them by which will expire this year. However, their map isn’t very detailed, and doesn’t include any information about the nature of the properties. To create my own I located a Department of Housing and Urban Development’s database of all Section 8 property recipients in the nation, and extracted 117 properties located in DC. Then I plotted the properties on a map of DC to produce a clickable map. Here’s a detail:
(Click here to view the full map)
What I found in these two maps confirmed my suspicions about who owned these buildings and where they were located. While the three non-Northwest quadrants have a smattering of properties, by far the largest concentration is in the Midcity area most affected by the 1968 riot and thus targeted for redevelopment in the 1970s: the 7th Street and 14th Street corridors including the neighborhoods of Shaw, U Street, and Columbia Heights.
In these communities I’ve sometimes heard people wonder why the pace of gentrification seemed so slow. Even community leaders in Shaw sometimes wonder why — or whether — revitalization has skipped over the neighborhood entirely. While reactionary churches have something to do with it, the neighborhood’s high density of Section 8 buildings are the greater cause. (For lots of reasons best left to another post.) These properties and their residents are very stable, thanks to regulated rents locked in place by multi-year contracts with the feds.
When the HUD contracts with the building owners expire, it seems clear at least some of the private owners will cash in the astronomical property values and sell the properties wholesale, causing the forced eviction of the building tenants. However, according to the HUD data many of the buildings are owned by nonprofit corporations, most of whom I assume wouldn’t sell. A small number may seize the opportunity to capitalize on the high demand for real estate and re-develop their low-rise properties to be denser, mixed use properties appropriate to the neighborhood. Ideally the new buildings would include the same number or perhaps even a greater number of subsidized units, in addition to market-rate units and retail space. Sites along 14th Street and in Shaw (one adjacent the Metro) are two that seem good choices for this option. There are many potential obstacles to be sure, as I am not sure many models exist for the unusual financial arrangements such a project would require.
This latter path could provide additional economic opportunity in the city, as well as boosting the economic diversity of the neighborhood. “Gentrification” is often a zero-sum discussion of winners and losers, but the remarkable convergence of events can allow community organizations and city leaders to build a denser, more diverse, and more dynamic city. No matter exactly how the situation plays out, the large concentration of Section 8 properties in the Midcity neighborhoods will define the path of their development for the forseeable future.
The next step for my research will be to look closer at the data from HUD to determine which expiring contracts may result in a sale or new development, and what their location might mean for revitalization trends in the city.
> Section 8 Properties in the District (See below of a key of the property details)
> WaPo: “Price Increases Migrating To Poorer Neighborhoods”
> The Urban Institute’s NeighborhoodInfo DC (The post story was about their recent housing report)
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