Gentrification on Capitol Hill (III)

GWU American Studies professor Suleiman Osman provides a slightly different take on the 1960s and 1970s from that of Anita Rechler, who focused on how real estate agents and the renovation movement created a more segregated Capitol Hill. In his fantastic book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York and great chapter in a different book "The Decade of the Neighborhood," Osman describes the exciting utopianism of the neighborhood revival movement, as well as its serious negatives. He studies Brooklyn, but this neighborhood movement emerged across the country, including on Capitol Hill. This neighborhood movement brought together a wide range of different groups: black power fighting the black political machine, civil rights and church groups, anti-poverty workers focused on decentralized community control (community action), white ethnic leaders angry about crime and independent of the Democratic machine, and especially "brownstoners," white college-educated house renovators. These groups came together around "neighborhood" and decentralized, community control to fight central city power: the old political machine (ward bosses) and the new machine that supported modernist urban renewal ("the New Deal pro-growth coalition of real estate agents, planners, business leaders, politicians, civic groups, and directors of nonprofit institutions"). On Capitol Hill, these groups fought the highway projects and formed the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. They reinterpreted "slums" as "neighborhoods" and created block associations, community-controlled schools, etc. Marion Barry emerged out of this movement as a representative of this attack on the political machine and a celebration of community and local empowerment.

Unfortunately, the different parts of this neighborhood movement came into contradiction and had a variety of consequences. The members of the neighborhood movement were no longer dissenters, but rather became powerful elites by the 1980s. Some of the white ethnic groups sought law-and-order political leaders who called for a "return" to communities before African Americans had arrived. Neighborhoodism also hurt the poor and the neighborhoods they celebrated:

But in their populist battle against bureaucracy, neighborhood activists attacked municipal programs, public housing, integration initiatives, and affordable chain stores that poorer residents depended on. And by rejecting all forms of government planning and by lionizing voluntarism and private space, the "decade of the neighborhood" unleashed the unfettered real estate market that 1980s activists complained about.

This was not the cooptation of the movement, but the movement itself had conservative elements and conservative consequences. Did this happen in Ward 6?