Sociology in My Neighborhood: DC Ward Six

Stopping or Turning Back the Clock

2012-02-24T03:32:00.004Z

House renovations are just house renovations. However, sociologists, historians, and other social scientists show how something as innocuous or even positive as house renovations can have very different meanings or contradictory meanings in different time periods.

Sociologists often look at visual culture to understand the meaning of social phenomenon, like house renovation. Here is a Post article from November 25, 1965 (p. H1) that I saw in the papers of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society (CHRS) in the GWU Special Collections Research Center. Since this article was saved for decades and was the only item in its folder, we can be assured that it had some importance to the person who saved it.

This newspaper article is about the Thanksgiving dinner being prepared by Mrs. John Leukhardt at her long-time family home, the Yost house at 1002 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE. From the CHRS documents, I have noticed that the Yost house was mentioned quite a lot and thus had some importance to the CHRS. Just glancing at the article, we can see that it is addressed to women, since it is in the section "for and about Women" and ads for women's consumer items, like the Corset World ad in the lower right-hand corner. Also, we can see in the caption of the right-hand photo that women do not have their own names: "Mrs. John Leukhardt" and "Mrs. Richard Small." Next, the article's sub-title is "Capitol Hill Home Stops the Clock." Taking this seriously, we can ask, why would someone in 1965 want to stop the clock? Or is there a desire to, in fact, go back to an earlier time?

Throughout the article, the author demonstrates great concern with stopping time:

"Our Thanksgiving menu is practically the same as the one my mother served for her first Thanksgiving dinner in this house 71 years ago," said Mrs. Leukhardt.

"With few exceptions, they have kept the 4-story 12-room house just as it was."

"We're a very traditionally-minded family," she said. "We like to preserve old customs for the holidays. And we all love this old house. We even have the same phone number with a different exchange, that my father had in 1904."

Maybe the article's author and the woman interviewed in the article want to return back to 1904 or 1894 when the house was built? It is difficult to tell exactly when they might want the clock to stop. There were some changes, such as a "modern kitchen" and lace recently acquired from a trip to Copenhagen, but "Otherwise, everything is the same." Therefore, some changes are accepted and others are not. What might be unacceptable changes?

Sociologists often look for unspoken or invisible aspects, which are obvious now. For example, the two women in maid's outfits in this photo have their own names, Harriet McPherson and Elizabeth Prue, and are taking over the cooking of dinner once Mrs. Leukhardt has stuffed the turkey and put in the oven. The article says that Mrs. Leukhardt "mashes the sweets and combines them," but it seems likely that the women in maid's outfits are doing this work. The Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Could this article be expressing concerns about women and African Americans not "knowing their place" anymore? Might a claim to be "very traditionally-minded" be a claim against social movements for women and African Americans. Does this article show some underlying connection in people's minds in the past among house preservation/renovation, stopping the clock or turning back the clock, and anti-civil rights?

Why don't the poor go to our meetings?

2012-02-18T12:44:00.017Z

One unnamed commenter on my past post about the Hine PUD process asked, "Other than reforming the process, what do you want in terms of amenities and benefits Johanna?" Another commenter, our great ANC rep Brian Pate, wondered why I thought that the process was undemocratic and exclusive since the meetings have been public to which "a broad spectrum of stakeholders, from those adjacent to the development to those with broader interests," were invited, and wrote, "I invite you to come to our next meeting and share your ideas...Hope to see you on the 23rd and please feel free to contact me directly if you like to discuss your ideas further." I greatly appreciate being invited to take part. I feel extremely included. The problem is that thousands of our Ward 6 neighbors and their very different interests are in actuality not included in the discussion.

One of my favorite articles of all time is "Civic Participation and the Equality Problem" by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. They ask, why does civic engagement matter? They answer that it matters for "the development of the capacities of the individual, the creation of community and the cultivation of democratic virtues, and the equal protection of interests in public life." They are most interested in the last point: from whom does the government hear and what does it hear from them?

To answer these questions, they interviewed over 15,000 people by phone and then interviewed 2,517 of them in a follow-up, more detailed survey. The researchers found lots of interesting trends. The researchers asked if the respondents had been politically active about a government benefit they received. They found that the government is much more likely to hear from those with who receive seemingly automatic, non-means-tested benefits (Social Security, veterans' benefits, Medicare; benefits not determined by income level) than those with means-tested benefits (Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Those with Social Security were much more likely to contact the government about their benefits than those with AFDC.

The government hears very different messages from the advantaged and the disadvantaged. From the survey, the researchers found that the disadvantaged mainly contact the government about basic human needs: poverty, jobs, housing, and health, as well as drugs and crime. The advantaged contact the government about economic issues (taxes, government spending, or the budget) or about social issues (abortion or pornography). Since the disadvantaged are much less politically active, "public officials actually receive more messages from the advantaged, suggesting a curtailment of government intervention on behalf of the needy, than messages from the disadvantaged urging the opposite."

Why do some participate politically more than others? The researchers found that education is the best predictor. However, when the respondents were asked whether they had been invited (or recruited) to take part in a political act, like being invited personally to give an opinion about the Hine PUD, those who were invited were much more likely to be more educated and more wealthy than those who spontaneously took part in a political activity (see Table 12-2).

Those who invite or recruit others to take part are "rational prospectors," looking to use their time and energies most efficiently. Recruiters find political participants through organizational, neighborhood, and workplace networks of personal ties, as well as impersonal means such as through mass emails. Those who are recruited are different both demographically (more wealthy and more educated) and in their need for government assistance. Such selective recruitment brings in "those who are likely to be political involved already" and represents their interests, rather than providing "equal protection of interests in public life."

So, I am exactly the type of person who would be personally recruited to take part in the Hine PUD process. I have attended several Hine meetings. I greatly appreciate my inclusion in the process. At the same time, I seek to highlight those left out of the process. Were Potomac Gardens residents and their representatives like Resident Council president Melvina Middleton or DCHA Family Commissioner Aquarius Vann-Ghasri personally invited to voice their opinions about the needed amenities and benefits, since Potomac Gardens residents made up much of the Hine Junior High school population? Were some of the 20% of Ward 6 residents living in poverty personally invited to voice their opinion? Were those using Section 8 rental vouchers personally recruited? What would these neighbors say should be done with the Hine property?

Yes, as Brian Pate commented, AmericaSpeaks is expensive, but inclusive democracy does require funding and SW DC residents have benefited from being well organized (as I discussed in a past post). Also, AmericaSpeaks is not the only option. One could look at earlier efforts on Capitol Hill, such as the 1970s Capitol East Coalition for Housing and Neighborhood Improvement, which officially included representatives from public housing, senior citizen, youth, and welfare-low-income residents. Why don't the poor go to Hine meetings or why (probably) weren't they among the 200 who responded to the Hine PUD survey? Maybe they weren't asked.

All PUDs are Not Equal (II)

2012-02-13T23:52:00.007Z

In the 1970s, American cities were not a wasteland of chaos, but rather American cities were the “epicenter of political activism”(1). Capitol Hill was also an epicenter of political activism, activism that might be an example for today. It is surprising that SE Ward 6 (as opposed to SW and Near SE) lacks venues for democratic discussion. Yes, we have the ANC meetings, but they do not attract a demographically representative sample of citizens and discussions focus on parking, house renovations, and so on, leaving aside concerns of many residents. The PUD process in SE Ward 6 has not been very inclusive. We can find possible models in other parts of the city (discussed in a previous post) and in the actual history of SE Ward 6.

In the 1960s, the SE area had the Capitol Hill Community Council, the Citizen's Advisory Council, and the Southeast Civic Association. In 1977, a new group formed, the Capitol East Coalition for Housing and Neighborhood Improvement. ANC 6A and 6B formed this group "to encourage maximum feasible community participation in public and private programs designed for the Near Southeast Community Development Area. This development area crossed 6A and 6B and promised to bring new resources. The Coalition included in their membership the following representatives, who would discussion how to distribute these resources:

1) community residents from the development area
2) community organizations:

2 church representatives
a representative of the DC Federation of Civic Associations
a Friendship House board member
a representative of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society
a representative of public housing residents
2 business representatives
a senior citizen representative
a youth representative
a welfare or low-income resident representative

3) ANC Commissioners

Remember that the 1960s and 1970s were a time of extensive gentrification. The Coalition did community interviews and found the "most pressing issues to Capitol East residents" were:

displacement of low and moderate income families from the Capitol East community; exorbitant property taxes and speculation, school closings in the Capitol East area, need for adequate and suitable housing for Capitol East senior citizens, need for available food and shelter on an emergency and/or temporary basis; home financing for people who are threatened with displacement and want to remain in Capitol East area; need for adequate and quality housing for public housing tenants. (3)

It is highly possible that the nearly 20% of Ward 6 residents living in poverty might have similar concerns today. What might they want at the Hine site? Who knows? Did anyone ask?

(1) Suleiman, Osman. 2008. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(2) GWU Special Collections, Capitol Hill Restoration Society records, MS 2009, Box 35, Folder 19, "Capitol East Coalition for Housing - By-Laws (1976-77)," Capitol East Coalition for Housing and Neighborhood Improvement Bylaws, August 1977.
(3) GWU Special Collections, Capitol Hill Restoration Society records, MS 2009, Box 35, Folder 20, The Capitol East Communicator, June/July 1978, Official newsletter of the Capitol East Coalition for Housing and Neighborhood Improvements.

All PUDs are Not Equal

2012-02-10T23:10:00.008Z

Hine Junior High across from the Eastern Market Metro is being torn down and redeveloped by Stanton-EastBanc. ANC 6B is managing the PUD (Planned Unit Development) process. To collect the ideas of the "6B community," ANC 6B set up an online survey, asking respondents to list benefits or amenities, as well as concerns about traffic, management, retail choices, etc., that should be negotiated with the developers. As of a few days ago, they received over 200 responses. Who is really included in the Hine PUD process? Of course, everyone is invited, but is the Hine PUD process really inclusive?

In contrast, we can look at the PUD process in Near SE-SW. Back in March, I attended the Near SE-SW Community Summit organized by the Near SE-SW Community Benefits Coordinating Council (CBCC) with the help of DC-based AmericaSpeaks and LISC. The summit was open to everyone in ANC 6D (others were welcomed too) with the goal of figuring out the community priorities of residents in order to better inform ANC 6D policies, especially given the extensive development going on in the area. It was news to me that such citizen summits happened a lot when Anthony Williams was mayor, but seemed to disappear with Adrian Fenty. The organizers specifically targeted different groups in the neighborhood to get a representative sample: young and old, poor and wealthy, men and women, etc.

It was an extremely interesting process. We were assigned to a table, where we introduced ourselves and got to use our "clickers," devices that allowed us to personally vote. Immediately, we used the clickers to get a sense of the demographics in the room, which showed a good representation of young/old, long-term residents/new residents, and a variety of races (1% Asian/Pacific Islander, 33% Black/African-American, 4% Hispanic/Latino, 1% Native American, 54% White/Caucasian, 6% other) though it wasn't a perfect reflection of the area population. (The summary report has the demographics, goals, findings, and much more).

At our tables, we talked about which topic area we wanted to focus on that day:

Workforce Development/Jobs/Community Centers
Housing Diversity and Affordability
Neighborhood Oriented Retail and Services
Youth-Education and Services
Environmental Concerns

Then, we moved to a new table representing our chosen topic. At our new table (I chose housing), we introduced ourselves again and began to discuss our topic specifically focusing on the area's assets, challenges, and then concrete projects that could be taken. Each table had two non-area mediators. One mediator helped organize the discussion. The other mediator recorded our ideas on a laptop computer. In a corner of the room, a group of people on computers organized these thoughts coming from various tables into common themes. At the end, we voted for the two concrete projects we wanted most. Some of the chosen concrete priorities were developing pre-K, using the public schools for adult vocational training, increasing locally owned businesses, creating housing desired by the current residents, and developing community gardens.

The rest of Ward 6 could benefit from such community summits because we could get a sense of residents' priorities. The process took four (very interesting) hours, but I felt that we did not completely clarify the priorities. The summit is considered a step towards a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which would help the ANC to negotiate better and more responsibly with developers, the DC government, and other stakeholders because the ANC would know the actual priorities of constituents. I was concerned that developers could use these CBAs to legitimate all sorts of projects not in the spirit of the CBAs. CBAs are a nationwide movement. The Washington Business Journal shows that CBAs are already a big topic of discussion across DC. In spite of some concerns, I found the summit a very interesting and useful process.

A bit different from the Hine PUD, no? Wouldn't it be great to have a community summit in the Eastern Market area (to talk about Hine, etc)?

P.S. See related posts: All PUDs are Not Equal (II) and Why don't the poor go to our meetings?

Is Restoration Racist? (II)

2012-02-03T02:24:00.011Z

Thank you to the two Anonymous comments on my previous post! Racism is a complicated concept, easily thrown around, but, in the case of housing and the restoration movement, my research shows a disturbing history of racism. The "race of the steward" of Capitol Hill houses was quite important to the restoration movement, especially when it began around 1947 on the Hill but later as well. In the wonderful Special Collections Research Center at GWU, I have been reading the papers of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. Within these papers are three files dated from 1944 to 1950 on the Southeast Washington Citizens Association (SEWCA), a very early advocate for restoration and an association for "any member of the Caucasian race."(1) On the one hand, 1944-1950 was a time of intense overt racial discrimination in DC. On the other hand, times were changing and racism took new forms. As the first commenter suggested, we must go beyond seeing racism only as negative beliefs or "malicious intent" one race has towards another. Racism also is the acquisition of resources due to one's race and the protection of these resources at the expense of another race(s). One does not have to be an overt racist to gain these benefits, but, in 1944-1950, they were also overtly racist. The restoration movement is actually rather disturbing, in ways not often recognized by scholars and residents alike. Here are some disturbing aspects of this restoration movement:

The Southeast Washington Citizens Association was an advocate for whites and not an advocate for blacks. One could say that this is obvious because the world was overtly racist then, but restoration emerged from this world. It sought to restore what they called "Old S.E." or "Old Capitol Hill," which was possibly in contrast to the "new" black residents moving from the South and from other parts of DC. (What was the status of the historic African American neighborhoods?) In 1947 and 1950, respectively, the SEWCA passed motions supporting the continuation of racial housing covenants and school segregation.(2) They encouraged association officers to enforce racial housing:
"Mr. Absher gave his report on the building of the apartment house on 16th Street, S.E. He was told by one of the owners that his request regarding the occupancy of white in this apartment house would be given serious consideration. He was told that, if the immediate surroundings were predominantly white, then the apartments would be rented to the whites. If the colored are more predominant, then, they would be rented to the colored."(3)
They supported the funding of Division II, "colored" schools, "but not at the expense of the white pupils..." (4) As sociologist George Lipsitz discusses, "whites used restrictive covenants, racial zoning, redlining, steering, blockbusting, and mob violence between 1866 and 1948 to monopolize advantages for themselves and their descendants."(5)

In the minds of government officials and the real estate industry, private restoration/renewal and public renewal had a common goal -- to increase house or property values -- which meant (possibly unofficially) more white people and fewer black people. Private and public renewal had the same result and were in fact seen as complementary at the time. Unlike other places in the US, Capitol Hill restoration and renewal even occurred at the same time. Both forms of renewal simultaneously fixed up areas of the District AND made them more white.

While restoration is often viewed as a response to urban renewal that sought to destroy historic homes, the SEWCA supported both restoration and urban renewal. According to an officer in the SEWCA, Elizabeth Draper, in August 1950, Capitol Hill leaders met with the National Capitol Planning Commission to make the Hill the second area for redevelopment of slum areas after SW DC. Unlike the thousands of poor African American households in SW, those on the Hill had power based in part on their race to negotiate with urban renewal officials. These officials "took the position that the Agency would assist private capital in redoing the area, rather than come in, condemn everything, and start again."(6) Unlike in pre-renewal SW, Capitol Hill had available private capital, though primarily available to whites who were real estate agents or developers. Individual renovators often had trouble getting funds for individual projects. In its 1948-49 program, the SEWCA promoted both renovation and stated, "We shall urge the condemnation of so-called residential property that is unfit for occupancy." They also supported the destruction of the Wallach School and the rebuilding of Hine Junior High. (7)

White people on Capitol Hill learned from the experiences of Georgetown's restoration movement organized also by white citizens associations. For example, as an officer in the SEWCA, Elizabeth Draper brought her experiences from Georgetown:

"Having been president of the Progressive Citizens Association of Georgetown for two terms when that section began to improve in 1937 and again for three terms from 1944 until 1947, I knew the many problems in a restoration program."(8)

Georgetown's restoration movement had displaced the historic African American community there, as described in Black Georgetown Remembered. After her move to Capitol Hill, Draper joined the SEWCA, invited speakers to talk about restoration, and organized competitions and campaigns to realize it. According to Draper, very quickly, real estate agents recognized the benefits of the increased housing values. In both Georgetown and Capitol Hill (as discussed by Rechler), real estate agents and developers could use racial panics to their benefit, making both locations less integrated.

The restoration movement is often, though not always, seen as a white movement. Maybe this is due to its history? Maybe it is just due to observing the actual practice? In a 1976 survey conducted by the Capitol Hill Restoration Society of its members:

"many respondents elaborated on the concern over the 'upper-middle class white' make up of the Society's membership. One person seemed to capture the sentiment of many of those who answered this question by saying that ... 'It depends on one's perspective...It depends on how one is affected by restoration and the consequent increase in property values.' Many people were more explicit and pointed to the need to include more black residents into the organization so that the whole community could be represented and work together on making the 'Hill' a better place to live...Another member put it this way...CHRS is 'upper class white property owners concerned about property. It should be changed to a community group speaking on issues that are important to the future of Washington as a beautiful and economically strong multi-racial city.'...A number of people mentioned that, for some, the image of the Society is that of just being a front for the real estate interests on the Hill."(9)

Many houses were saved from the freeway and renewal projects, but for whom were they saved? In 1966, the Capitol Hill Restoration Society president sent his comments on the comprehensive plan for DC in 1985 to the National Capitol Planning Commission. The president noted that Capitol Hill had two growing populations: the well-to-do, who can afford restoration prices, and the moderate-/low-income black population, "which the suburbs are, and may continue to be, very reluctant to accommodate." Both groups need more housing, so he asked, "Where are the poor families going to go?"(10) He suggested that they be moved to Bolling Field. For whom were these historic homes saved?

As a result of its history, restoration created racialized spaces. Racist intentions are not necessary, when one can access resources in these racialized spaces, though racist intentions remain too. Lipsitz warns that this system that purportedly benefits whites actually damages their long-term interests, "while Black negotiations with the constraints and confinements of racialized space often produce ways of envisioning and enacting more decent, dignified, humane, and egalitarian social relations for everyone."(11)

(1) GWU Special Collections, Capitol Hill Restoration Society records, MS2009, Box 34, mainly Folder 14, Southeast Citizens Association: Constitution, Bylaws, minutes, June 27, 1944- Sept. 14, 1950.

(2) GWU, SECA records, Meeting minutes, December 9, 1947 and Sept. 14, 1950.

(3) GWU, SECA records, Meeting minutes, December 9, 1947.

(4) GWU, SECA records, Meeting minutes, February 27th, 1945.

(5) Lipsitz, George. 2011. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, p. 3.

(6) Draper, Elizabeth Kohl. "Progress Report on the Restoration of Capitol Hill Southeast," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, DC, Vol. 1951/1952.

(7) GWU, SECA records, SE Washington Citizens Association Program, 1948-1949.

(8) Draper, p. 134.

(9) GWU Special Collections, Capitol Hill Restoration Society records, MS2009, Box 30, Folder 16, "Communities [sic] reactions to the CHRS’s activities - survey findings (1976)."

(10) GWU Special Collections, Capitol Hill Restoration Society records, MS2009, Box 32, Folder 9, "Planning for Area: 1965/1985, Plan and Revision as comprehension plan - 1967," Historical Files. Letter from Gregory R. New to Sydnor F. Hodges, NCPC, March 5, 1966.

(11) Lipsitz, p. 6.

Get a View of the Past from the Capitol East Gazette

2012-01-31T13:31:00.003Z

The Capitol East Gazette was published in the 1960s, which later became the DC Gazette and then the Progressive Review. The newspaper had a circulation of 15,000 in 1969. The online version is now searchable, which leads to many interesting discoveries.

Is Restoration Racist?

2012-01-27T21:47:00.009Z

What are the historical origins of the restoration movement? Was it racist? Is it racist? I have gone back to the beginnings of the restoration movement on Capitol Hill around 1948, which is really very early compared to other areas like Brooklyn. In its 1948-49 plan, the Southeast Citizens' Association set out to promote the remodeling of older buildings to restore the prestige of the area. Working with other organizations, they held remodeling and repainting campaigns. They had early house tours. The Southeast Citizens' Association was an association of homeowners of "the Caucasian race." This Association was quite concerned about African Americans moving into certain areas. In the early 1950s, Elizabeth Kohl Draper wrote about her experiences bringing the restoration movement from Georgetown to Capitol Hill (1). Her very interesting article details who is renovating which blocks. For example:

Mrs. Frank Murray, living at 761 Tenth Street, S.E., has increased her holdings until she owns 25 pieces of property and 32 apartments. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wagner at 814 A Street have improved the entire block and are working with Mr. Parker in the 600 block of A Street. Mr. Harry Brogden, a Georgetown realtor, bought 130 Eleventh Street, S.E., in the famous Philadelphia Row and practically all of them are in good hands.

Many examples are very early cases of speculative/investment renovation, which is interesting because it is generally assumed that early restoration was done by individuals for their own use. But what might "good hands" mean? I would guess that all the individuals mentioned in her article were probably white and likely middle- or upper-middle class. The Southeast Citizens' Association actively supported racial housing covenants and worked to maintain white-dominant blocks, those blocks held in "good hands." Restoration was seen as a way to attract more white families to the area.

In SW DC, thousands of African Americans' homes were condemned as slums and demolished. DC was madly building public housing to house these and other households. The Southeast Citizens' Association was well-known for its opposition to public housing, since it was seen as African American housing (2). Elizabeth Kohl Draper talked about how the public housing authority in DC, the National Capital Housing Authority, wanted to buy land for public housing:

At present, the National Capital Housing Authority is trying to buy south of Virginia Avenue to make another project. If this happens, many old places that should be preserved will be torn down. If the housing project can be located elsewhere, the northern side of Virginia Avenue, Southeast will doubtless be restored by private enterprise. The entire length of New Jersey Avenue, S.E., should be restored. Some fine old houses are in the 1000 block of New Jersey Avenue, S.E., and if a group of private owners would secure and restore them, they will form an excellent unit. Many white people live in that section and should be encouraged to stay.

Was the restoration movement racist? Is the restoration movement racist?

(1) "Progress Report on the Restoration of Capitol Hill Southeast," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, DC, Vol. 1951/1952.
(2) William R. Barnes. 1980. "A Battle for Washington: Ideology, Racism, and Self-Interest in the Controversy over Public Housing, 1943-1946," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 50.

A Poverty of Knowledge

2012-01-24T14:11:00.003Z

A couple of days ago in the Post, Michael Gerson lamented the "poverty of solutions" in political debates, which revolve around ideology (the Tea Party's free market ideology vs. the Occupy Movement's rejection of capitalism) instead of talking about poverty and what to do about it. The article quickly sets aside the Occupy Movement and focuses on the fact that both political parties basically won't talk about poverty. Gerson argues that below-the-radar government programs have actually helped to reduce poverty -- welfare reform to reduce caseloads, food stamps, earned-income tax credit. Center-right and center-left politicians supporting these programs "take market forces seriously" and take government policy seriously. Gerson throws in: "The main challenge of poverty is not a lack of consumption but a lack of social capital -- measured in skills and values -- and of opportunity" and the poor's "failing community." Yet, welfare programs, in fact, do increase the incomes of and thus consumption by those living and working in poverty, which may be why they are so effective.

Gerson's argument works very well with some of the most cutting edge work in sociology done by Duke University professor David Brady. In his comparison of 18 Western democracies, Brady finds that welfare state generosity reduces poverty and therefore ending poverty is a political choice. The United States proportionately has more people living and working in poverty than the other 17 Western democracies because of political choices.

In contrast to Gerson, one should not only talk about the poor without also talking about the wealthy. As all social scientists know, one has to compare groups to figure out if there are any differences between them. The old studies of the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass" have been discredited because, as historian Alice O'Connor showed so brilliantly in her book Poverty Knowledge, scholars 1) studied only those living in poverty and not in comparison with those in other social classes and 2) focused on individual pathologies and welfare dependency, rather than on the economy and the opportunity structure. The wealthy and the poor are in fact relational to each other.

Different social classes and subclasses not only have different amounts of income and wealth, but they also have different social capital (networks) and cultural capital (education, artistic knowledge, etc) that they desperately seek to protect and expand so as to make themselves distinct from other social classes and to maintain their class status. In the Post, a book reviewer recently wrote:

More affluent parents face a different set of pressures. As it becomes increasingly difficult for middle-class families to transmit their class position to their children, many have come to regard childrearing - like the economy - as a zero-sum game, where they must pit their children against other people's offspring. This has encouraged parents to view their child as a project to be perfected and other children as a problem.

Affluent parents desperately want their children to be in the right school, which might mean taking a seat from a working class or low-income family. This form of opportunity hoarding works along with exploitation (not paying people enough) in a variety of venues, including education, housing, medical care, etc. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed, these class distinctions are further reinforced by lifestyles shaped by economic, social, and cultural capital. So, when one meets another person of one's subclass, one recognizes that person as one of us and feels physically comfortable. For example, two people of the same sub-class might order Peroni beers, eat high-end burgers, and discuss the White Stripes, while being physically repelled by hamburgers bought in vending machines and easy listening music. Preferences felt in everyone's bodies -- including in boughies' bodies -- help to maintain the social class structure. Therefore, the problem is not that the poor's "lack of social capital" or their "failing community," but rather the more affluent's opportunity hoarding in an attempt to maintain their class status in the face of feelings of insecurity for themselves and their families.

Gerson is correct that there is a poverty of solutions, but there is also a poverty of knowledge, knowledge about mechanisms of social inequality and knowledge about what the Occupy Movement might be offering as solutions.

Consumption Inequality in Ward 6

2012-01-20T02:49:00.006Z

In an earlier post, I talked about the fact that DC, along with similarly disenfranchised Puerto Rico, has some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. During the recession, as a Pew Research Center report showed, wealth inequality -- measured as assets (houses, cars, banking accounts, etc) minus debts (mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, etc) -- has continued to increase across the United States. Gentrification is often seen positively because it brings new resources into communities and thus decreases inequalities. But what if more wealthy people are, in fact, taking away resources from the less wealthy? What if consumption inequality seriously affects people's life chances?

Here are four trends in inequality:

Most American households make much less than $100,000. According to the Census, in 2008, nearly 80% of American households made under $100,000. Only 8.3% of American households made $150,000 or more (Census).
Wealthy people spend much more money. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics data below, we can see that those with the lowest incomes spend on average about $21,000 per year, while those with the highest incomes spend on average about $94,000 per year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys consumers about how much they make and how much they spend on various items, like housing, clothing, tobacco, reading material, and so on. They divide the population into five groups of equal size (about 24 million people in each, which each represent 20% of the population), from those making the least income (see Lowest 20%) to those making the most income (see Highest 20%). In this table, I chose only three of these five groups (Lowest, Mid, and Highest). I show how much money they spent in 2009 in each category and the percentage this represents of their overall expenses, such as the lowest 20% spends more of their income (16.2%) on food than the highest 20% (11.4%). The differences in consumption are enormous.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2009

	Lowest 20%	%Low	Mid 20%	%Mid	Highest 20%	%High
Avg Expenditures	$21,611	--	$41,150	--	$94,244	--
Food	$3,501	16.2%	$5,483	13.3%	$10,780	11.4%
Housing	$8,961	41.5%	$14,805	36%	$29,998	31.8%
Utilities	$2,238	10.4%	$3,574	8.7%	$5,167	5.5%
Apparel	$873	4%	$1,402	3.4%	$3,339	3.5%
Transportation	$2,855	13.2%	$6,717	16.3%	$14,105	15%
Healthcare	$1,628	7.5%	$3,069	7.5%	$4,677	5%
Entertainment	$1,015	4.7%	$2,106	5.1%	$5,474	5.8%
Personal Care	$268	1.2%	$496	1.2%	$1,167	1.2%
Education	$573	2.7%	$548	1.3%	$2,966	3.1%
Personal pension/ins.	$534	2.5%	$3,512	8.5%	$14,937	15.8%

As we know, more money spent on healthcare and on education has real consequences for people's lives. More money spent on all these items has real consequences for life chances.

3. Markets are much more responsive to the wealthy, as can be seen in Ward 6 with the expansion of expensive restaurants and expensive housing. Often these restaurants and housing replace older, less expensive establishments, leaving those with lower incomes with fewer or no options. In Ward 6, the Hawk and Dove is being replaced by "a locally-sourced, seasonal bistro menu prepared in an open kitchen," (translation: a more expensive restaurant); the fish place on Barracks Row was replaced by "vintage hot dog joint" DC-3; and the KFC on Pennsylvania Ave will be replaced by a new residential-retail building that won't likely be selling low-cost food or housing low-income families (at best, there might be one or two low-income elderly singles). With increasing demand by more wealthy people, who are generally less price sensitive, inflation results (Forbes magazine wrote about this trend in 2009), so housing, restaurant, and food prices are likely to continue to rise in the area.

4. Wealthy residents can purchase homes that provide them access to better schools and other benefits. Renters may have access to good schools, but, if their homes are sold as expensive condos or as private houses, the wealthy are often able to offer more money to buy these homes than many renters can, so the wealthy can also gain access to schools and other community benefits. Those displaced must move to areas that often do not have these good schools. The wealthy are practicing a form of opportunity hoarding.

Cooperatives and DC (III)

2012-01-13T13:14:00.002Z

I've moved the map and list of DC cooperatives to a separate webpage. This webpage includes cooperatives in the great DC area.

Cooperatives and DC (II)

2012-01-11T16:26:00.005Z

NPR's State of the Re:Union had a great piece on Cleveland and its community development experiments. In Segment B, they discuss the Evergreen Cooperatives, which are based on the Mondragon cooperative system in Spain (working since the 1950s).

These cooperatives are worker cooperatives (worker owned and controlled). As I discussed before, cooperatives are owned and controlled by their members. Cooperatives serve the needs of their members. There are different kinds of cooperatives, which are defined by their members. Evergreen Cooperatives are worker cooperatives, a cooperative organized by employees (the members) to finance, own, and democratically manage their business. Land O'Lakes is a producer cooperative, a cooperative organized by dairy farmers (the members) to market and distribute their dairy products. Best Western and ACE Hardware are purchasing cooperatives, cooperatives organized by businesses (the members) to share resources, lower costs, and be more competitive. Housing cooperatives are owned and controlled by their residents (the members). REI and the Takoma Park Silver Spring Food Co-op are consumer cooperatives, cooperatives organized by customers (the members). Each type of cooperative has a different kind of impact on community economies.

Here in DC:

Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC is exploring the creation of a food consumer cooperative in Shaw. They are looking for values-aligned entrepreneurs and employees to join a team of people working on this project. At this stage they are looking for those with experience in the food business, grocery stores, and cooperatives. Does this describe you or anyone you know? Please reach out to Allison (I'll forward it to Allison: jbockman@gmu.edu) to explore this idea further.
Some people may be trying to create worker cooperatives in DC similar to the Evergreen Cooperatives. Is this true? Any news?
I need to somehow include in the cooperative map some more DC cooperatives: GreenWorks Construction Cooperative and Brighter Days dog walking collective.

Do you know of cooperatives being formed now?

Gentrification on Capitol Hill (III)

2012-01-06T21:34:00.002Z

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?

Cooperatives and DC

2012-01-02T19:30:00.005Z

Welcome to the International Year of Cooperatives! The UN has declared 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives. Cooperatives are businesses owned and democratically controlled by their members, and cooperatives return surplus revenues to their members. Therefore, members of cooperatives control their cooperatives and keep the money made. The money does not go to outside shareholders or investors. In the US, there are over 20,000 cooperatives with more than 100 million members. People turn to cooperatives as a way to create wealth and democracy in communities. Some famous cooperatives are:

Ace Hardware
Associated Press
Best Western Hotels
Blue Diamond Almonds
Cabot Cheese
Land-O-Lakes dairy
Nationwide Insurance
Ocean Spray Cranberries
Organic Valley dairy
REI
True Value Hardware
and credit unions across the country

Some large-scale cooperatives are Spain's Mondragon cooperative, which employs about 83,000 people, and Cleveland's Evergreen Cooperatives, which include an industrial laundry, solar panel factory, and a large greenhouse. On a smaller scale, people can pool their money or other resources (like time invested in day-care cooperatives) to create capital for businesses, while having an equal vote (one person one vote) in the running of the cooperative.

Washington, DC has been a cooperative pioneer. Here is a map of DC cooperatives that I have been putting together:

View DC Cooperatives in a larger map

The map shows cooperatives across the city today. DC is known for its large cooperative housing sector. We have an extensive network of credit unions and of energy cooperatives, including the Capitol Hill Solar Cooperative. The Black Power movement was strong in DC and saw cooperatives as a way to building the economic and political power of the poor. Cooperatives invest in its members, rather than in corporations and their shareholders. Cornelius "Cornbread" Givens was a great proponent of cooperatives in DC. He helped to form food cooperatives in the Eastgate and Barry Farms housing projects. In the Arthur Capper housing project, there was the Martin Luther King Cooperative Food Store No. 2.

If we want to create jobs in Ward 6, how about creating some cooperatives? We could get help if the recently introduced National Cooperative Development Act passes:

which would establish a National Cooperative Development Center to provide capital, training and other resources to foster cooperative development in both urban and rural areas. Addressing economic development though cooperative development will advance the economic stability of local areas; increase the circulation of capital locally; and develop, attract and anchor new productive capital in urban and rural underserved communities.

Of course, we in DC lack Congressional representation. Those living outside DC, please ask your Representative to demonstrate their commitment to strengthening communities and creating jobs by becoming a co-sponsor of this bill. In the meantime, let me know about other cooperatives in DC. Are you working on forming a cooperative here in DC?

Gentrification on Capitol Hill (II)

2011-12-29T11:30:00.004Z

Thanks to Greater Greater Washington for linking to my previous post! Most of the trends I discuss here did not take place so much during the 1940s. During the 1940s, whites were moving to the suburbs. By the late 1940s, the newspapers were already talking about Capitol Hill's renovation movement. However, Anita Rechler is talking about the dramatic shifts in the neighborhood during the 1960s. I knew that there was gentrification going on during the 1960s because Friendship House and other organizations were very concerned about it, but I had focused on the late 1970s when our block (in the Transition area of the map) changed dramatically. Now, I see how much changed during the 1960s.

Gentrification on Capitol Hill

2011-12-23T16:40:00.011Z

In her fascinating 1974 M.A. thesis on the Capitol Hill renovation movement, Anita Rechler finds that, while DC and Ward 6 population declined from 1960 to 1970, the number of households actually increased. This shift resulted from:

the renovation movement, which began even by the late 1940s and attracted white, young professionals often with no children.
the movement of white families with children to the suburbs (since 1920) and to predominantly white areas elsewhere in DC, which increased after the 1954 court ruling desegregating schools. The change was quite abrupt. As I found in my own research, in 1954 when integration began, the Stanton Elementary School in Ward 8 had a 100% white student population; by 1960 it had 75% African American and 25% white students.

Using Census data and real estate transactions in the Lusk Real Estate Directory, Rechler examines the changes across the Hill between 1960 and 1970. In this map of 1970, the purple-blue are areas with many renovations (Restoration area), while the light blue are transitional areas with fewer, though numerous renovations (Transition area) and the yellow areas have few renovations (Unrestored area).

View Ward 6 Renovation Map (1970) in a larger map

She states that by 1958 over 100 houses each year were being renovated. Of course, renovating and improving buildings is a good thing. Yet, this trend had several problematic consequences. Areas became more segregated by race and class between 1960 and 1970. The renovation movement allowed certain groups -- white professionals and real estate developers -- to benefit from or take advantage of racist attitudes and racial/class inequalities to hoard opportunities. (Sociologists Charles Tilly and Douglas Massey discuss opportunity hoarding more generally.) In the Restoration and Transition areas, black homeownership and renting decreased, while white ownership increased. In the Transition areas, black and white renting declined, while ownership increased. In the Unrestored area, white ownership and renting decreased. In addition, the Restoration areas had households with higher incomes than the other areas. The renovation movement led to increased racial segregation, income inequality, and wealth inequality (due to shifts in homeownership).

On Capitol Hill, Friendship House, Group Ministries, and other groups voiced great concern about the economic impact of the renovation movement on the low- and moderate-income families. Many of these families could not afford renovations (or were renters). In 1972, the DC government proposed that south of North Carolina Ave and east of 1st St SE be made a Federally-Assisted Code Enforcement Area (FACE), which would have provided cash grants and low-interest loans for home improvements, thus allowing low- and moderate-incomes families to take part in the renovation movement. This proposal was never adopted.

Rechler also interviewed real estate agents, community leaders, and residents. She shows that renovation was not a spontaneous activity. Rather, from the late 1940s, real estate agents were deeply involved in renovation and reshaping neighborhoods. Real estate agents had long been renovating houses themselves as investments. By the time Rechler conducted her research, larger developers started working on Capitol Hill. St. Clair Investments, a large suburban development corporation, began buying and restoring in 1973.

Especially with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities around the 1930s to the 1960s, discussed in an earlier post, real estate agents stoked the fears among white families that their neighborhoods were being taken over by African Americans. Real estate agents even hired African American women to walk around the neighborhood with baby carriages and did other tactics to motivate white families to sell their houses at a low price. The real estate agents would then sell the house at an inflated price to African American families, whom agents knew could not obtain regular mortgages. So, the agents would provide high-interest loans directly to them. The African American families often could not afford these inflated loans and pay for the maintenance of these still unrenovated houses. This is called blockbusting, which led to decay.

On Capitol Hill, according to Rechler, there was an additional trend of reverse blockbusting: "Real estate agents, brokers, and speculators use sales tactics and pressure practices to displace the poor and black from their homes in order to attract the white middle class." She was told that a real estate investor might call the DC government to report a house for possible housing code violations. Low-income owners could not obtain loans to make the needed renovations and thus faced the possibility that their house might be condemned. The speculator, however, would provide cash and thus pressure the owner to sell quickly. Speculators also quickly flipped houses to each other, driving up prices. According to Rechler, the restoration movement

is encouraged by a hyperactive real estate market which vigorously solicits property to sell, real estate speculation which promises high profits for those who can afford the investment, and financial arrangements which favor the investor over the average homebuyer. In Capitol Hill restoration operates in a market where speculation is virtually uncontrolled and public access to information is greatly curtailed.

The traditional real estate market for those seeking shelter and the speculative real estate market for those seeking profits have converged more and more lately. As we rely on our houses as part of our retirement or some form of insurance, we require that our houses increase in value. Yet, as they increase in value, it means that cities become too expensive for those with low- and moderate-incomes, even those who maintained and developed community in neighborhoods, which now draws people to move to these neighborhoods.

Delays

2011-12-18T23:00:00.002Z

The end of the semester is always so busy. We're in the midst of grading and doing a wide range of administrative activities to keep our departments and universities running. I just finished grading one set of papers and will receive a pile of exams tomorrow. In the past two weeks, I made it into the DC archives on two days to do some speedy research. I'm looking at finance and public housing in DC. Wow, did I find some great stuff! More on that soon. Now, I am reading up on real estate investing!

Our Block's History Party

2011-12-04T22:15:00.005Z

What looks like local history or arbitrary personal choice is often influenced or shaped by larger social or historical forces. Social change may open up or shut down opportunities. Block histories provide concrete and tangible cases of broader social and historical change, which is what makes block and local histories so exciting, especially for sociologists.

Last night, our block had a History Party, a potluck and discussion of our block's history from the 1960s to the present. Since 2009, we have put together a phone list, a listserv, and a twice-yearly progressive block party, in which 2-3 residences host part of a dinner over one evening. Last night, we experimented with a new format. About 25 people attended, including about 6 kids, who were well behaved during this adult Show and Tell. The discussion was very lively. Early on, we went around the room, introducing ourselves, stating when we moved to the Hill and the block, and, for those who had lived a long time on the Hill/block, listing the schools we attended, etc. I was the notetaker, which was an interesting task because the discussion often broke into small groups and then returned to one large conversation. Below, I discuss a few items within broader sociological and historical context, while trying to maintain the anonymity of those involved.

At the party, we found out that, while the block had been racially mixed in and before the 1930s, our block was predominately African American by the 1960s. Our neighbor and his family who had moved to the block in 1961 remembered only one white family on the block. Our neighbor had moved from South Carolina to DC after the Second World War. While this might seem like an arbitrary personal choice, our neighbor was part of the Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans moved from the South to the North from the First World War and through the 1960s. As sociologist Stewart Tolnay has discussed, the First World War and restrictive immigration policies meant that new jobs became available to African Americans in Northern cities. Rural African Americans also long felt a push to move to cities to escape sharecropping (that left them landless and poor), unemployment caused by agricultural mechanization, Jim Crow restrictions on educational and political opportunity, and racial violence. Southern African Americans often followed relatives (our neighbor followed his uncle) and were drawn to cities with institutions that supported African American communities, such as "an NAACP chapter, a mature National Urban League, African American churches, and African American newspapers" (Tolnay, p. 217), which DC certainly had since the Civil War. In this video, which I discussed in a previous post, Potomac Gardens public housing residents talk about their Great Migration experiences:

After the Second World War, newly constructed highways, newly available mortgages, and new suburban developments, which sociologists like William Julius Wilson have shown to be racially exclusionary, drew many white families to the suburbs leaving houses available to African Americans arriving from the South. At the same time, DC also maintained racial segregation, as GWU sociologist Gregory Squires and his colleagues have found in the case of housing and as more generally discussed in a fascinating exchange on H-DC.

Long-time residents on the block also remembered the various businesses around the block. Two brothers ran the Abe Store at 9th & C St SE. At two locations at 10th & C St SE, the Brookses ran a dry cleaners, Brooks Valet, from 1952 to 1983. You can see several of our neighbors in the Post photo (first and second page of the article) of the 1983 community block party held in the Brookses honor. In the Post article, the Brookses remembered the block as predominantly African American working class residents who worked at the Navy Yard. Long-time residents remembered that the block (as well as surrounding blocks) was "family-oriented" and very social, with great block parties.

Four or five residents who moved to the block in the late 1970s and early 1980s spoke about crime during this period. The block captain in the late 1970s talked about how the block formed a Neighborhood Watch group and worked with police, which resulted in a decrease in crime by the mid-1980s. We know that during the mid- and late-1970s the nation was experiencing a severe economic crisis and large-scale unemployment. In addition, gentrification -- the displacement of lower income households by higher income, often professional households -- has been going on on Capitol Hill since the 1950s, but the late 1970s was a period of intense gentrification. Scholars often discuss Capitol Hill gentrification as a significant case study because it has been so extensive and began so early. In 1977, GWU urban studies professor Dennis E. Gale surveyed recent Hill homebuyers living in our block's census tract (67) and another highly gentrified census tract (66). In his sample, he found that 94% of these recent homebuying households were white and described our census tract as "still largely transitional in nature and population changes are occurring more rapidly there." Most of those living in our census tract moved from other parts of DC and had high incomes. According to Gale:

A large majority of our residents felt that racial conflict was not a frequent occurrence in their neighborhood. When conflict did occur though, it was generally between younger, black passers-through and white residents. Relations between black and white neighbors were perceived as good and generally free from any serious conflict. About half of our study group expressed a preference for a neighborhood composed of approximately equal proportions of blacks and whites. One-fourth preferred a predominance of whites and a minority of blacks. Most of the remainder indicated that they had no strong racial preferences but would rather their neighbors were of socio-economic backgrounds comparable to their own.(p. 3)

We can see that our block and census tract was experiencing significant social change during the late 1970s. In fact, in the late 1970s worldwide, people experienced fundamental changes to their societies, which sociologists and other scholars are studying right now. It will be interesting to continue examining our block's history to find out more about this shift taking place right in our neighborhood. Thanks to my great neighbors for a fascinating History Party!

Financialization, Inflation, and DC

2011-11-30T03:29:00.002Z

In the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein recently discussed how investors have moved from investing in production to investing in finance. As a result, we see rapidly expanding investments not in commodity production -- like in the production of wheat, corn, coffee, and other food items, as well as housing, oil, and natural gas -- but in commodity futures, betting on changes in the markets for these commodities. The expansion of investments in and profits from finance, as opposed to production, is called financialization. As I discussed earlier, financialization is not new (it has been growing since the 1970s), but now financialization is quite extensive. According to U of Michigan sociologist Greta Krippner, financial sector profits rose from 10-15% of total profits in the US economy in the 1950s-1960s to more than 40% of total profits in 2001. The popularity of financial investments and the self-fulfilling belief that increasing profits from these investments will continue indefinitely is driving up the prices of the commodities themselves. According to Pearlstein:

Little did you know that it’s no longer the supply and demand for companies, houses, office buildings, natural gas or wheat that sets prices. More likely it’s the supply and demand for the futures, swaps and other derivative instruments linked to those things.

Now, as a result of financialization, prices are not so tied to real supply and demand for things, so we see new levels of inflation in food and real estate prices. This is particularly distressing for those living on low incomes in the US and in the developing world. The DC area is experiencing this too. This graph shows the increase in consumer prices in the Washington-Baltimore area since 2001 (Bureau of Labor Statistics data):

Financialization does not seem to be going away. How will those living in poverty deal with increasing prices? What will happen to those who have lost their jobs and their housing? Or could financialization go away? Would supply and demand for things themselves reappear? Would investment in the production of things expand? Since so many pension funds invest in finance, what would happen to pension funds? What might replace financialization?

Thanksgiving, Sports, and Ward 6

2011-11-24T21:34:00.002Z

Thanksgiving is a day of many activities, including sports. Sociologists explore many aspects of sports and society. Just one example is the work by U of Minnesota sociologist Doug Hartmann. In his article "Sport as Social Intervention," Hartmann examines the interest among policymakers in midnight basketball and other programs that use sports as a tool to lure "at-risk" youth away from crime and back to school. In this article, he discusses one particularly successful program that goes far beyond offering only sports programs. Hartmann notes that midnight basketball programs too often are just ways that athletic administrators can obtain some funding for their limited sports facilities in an era of cuts to school budgets and to social services. He also warns policymakers not to expect too much from such programs. When expecting too much,

such misunderstandings can actually serve to reinforce and exacerbate the problems faced by at-risk urban youth by deflecting public attention away from deeper social sources of their problems. 'If we are not cautious,' as Jay Coakley has put it, such programs '... may unwittingly reaffirm ideological positions that identify young people, especially young people of color as 'problems' and then forget that the real problems are deindustrialization, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, racism, and at least twenty years of defunding social programs that have traditionally been used to foster community development in ways that positively impact the lives of young people.'

In the 1970s, Friendship House next to the SE Library and the Eastern Market Metro provided a wide range of programs for youths and their families that dealt with this range of "real problems" that they faced and still face today. Are young people of color in Ward 6 considered only as "problems"? Are sports the only programs provided to poor youths to succeed within massively unequal Ward 6 and society more generally of today?

Gentrification of Yesteryear

2011-11-23T16:54:00.003Z

Things have been really busy. Wanted to share something quickly. The Capitol Hill area experienced gentrification -- the replacement of lower-income residents with higher-income and often professional residents -- in the 1960s and then again in the late 1970s. In his excellent Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C., Howard Gillette cites a Washington City Paper article from 1988, which reported that all of DC lost "8 percent of the city's middle-class taxpayers since 1975, with increases of 5 percent among the poor and 7 percent among the wealthiest city residents." By 1992, the Washington Post reported a drop in the number of poor households and "increased disparities between rich and poor in Washington and the metropolitan area." While my blog has been interrupted, gentrification has not.

Friendship House and Cesar Chavez

2011-11-05T17:32:00.006Z

The Friendship House sought to organize/empower the poor so that the poor themselves could work to end poverty. In the public housing projects and in other activities, the Friendship House employees talked about various social movements. For example, in 1973, the Ellen Wilson Dwellings saw a movie about migrant workers to encourage them to join the boycott against Safeway (the nationwide boycott involving Cesar Chavez against Safeway and A&P to force them to make certain that farm workers received adequate compensation). Around the same time, African American firefighters visited Potomac Gardens to ask their support (which may have been related to the Oakland's Black Firefighters Association formed in 1973, as discussed in this PBS video). Here is a film maker seeking to make an updated version of such a film that public housing residents might have seen:

It is interesting that public housing residents seemed more politically integrated in the 1970s. Is this true? Why do you think this is?

A View of Public Housing from Within

2011-11-01T15:12:00.000Z

The Lost Connections of the Friendship House (II)

2011-10-29T16:19:00.003+01:00

Someone wrote me and said that during the past 20 years, the Friendship House was no longer really carrying out its social services mission. Possible reasons: loss of funding? gentrification moving those helped by Friendship House farther away? loss of good staff?

I'm going to be reading more in their records soon, looking for some answers. Let me know your thoughts about or experiences with the Friendship House. It really helps to have your input.

The Lost Connections of the Friendship House

2011-10-29T00:03:00.003+01:00

At 619 D St SE, the Maples condos are now selling for between $400,000 and $1.65 million. From 1936 to 2008, the Friendship House provided social services at that site. In 2008, the Friendship House closed due to bankruptcy.

The Friendship House was a settlement house. Settlement houses, like Hull House in Chicago run by Jane Addams, were set up integrate immigrants, help reduce poverty, and advocate for political change. African Americans also established settlement houses to help African Americans migrating from the South to large cities. At the GWU Special Collections, I have been reading the letters, reports, and records of the Friendship House. It quickly became apparent to me the immense loss our community has experienced.

The Friendship House was a place that helped organize the poor to advocate for themselves and create community. The Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided funding to Community Action Agencies like the United Planning Organization and the Friendship House to fight poverty by empowering the poor.

During one three-month period in 1982, Friendship House had distributed 6,175 flyers, pamphlets, and newsletters (about resident council meetings, jobs, school activities, bingo nights, etc; usually distributed door-to-door allowing them to know personally many Hill residents); connected 150 residents with resources; assisted 33 renters or owners; advocated for city-wide policy changes; organized public housing meetings and a disco to fund public housing resident councils; helped people get jobs; dispensed clothes; gave out emergency food assistance; enrolled 84 families in a food cooperative; organized parents to improve the public schools; provided a breathtaking array of youth activities; provided seniors with meals and services (including visiting them in the hospital); and more (GWU Special Collections, Friendship House Association records). They organized public housing residents into resident councils to advocate for repairs and security, formed food cooperatives and low-cost food buying clubs, and organized residents as consumers to work to improve the Safeway and call for lower utility bills. The CQ Research reported in 1998:

What's a kid to do after school or during summer vacation when Mom and Dad have to work? There are plenty of answers for those participating in the DCKids program at Friendship House in Washington, D.C., one of Washington's oldest social-service agencies. They can take guitar lessons, learn how to resolve conflicts peacefully, talk about African-American history, write a play about drug abuse and violence, or visit one of the Smithsonian Institution museums.

They also worked with organizations across Ward 6 and the city. Now, the poor have been displaced from their homes, especially with the closing of the Ellen Wilson, Arthur Capper, and Carrollsburg public housing projects, where the Friendship House worked regularly. At the same time, according to the Census, poverty has remained at 20% over the past 30 years in Ward 6. Middle- and upper-income residents have benefited from the work that the Friendship House did. An immense network has been ripped out of Ward 6 with little left to replace it. With the end of Friendship House, who is left to empower the poor?

The historic significance of Friendship House should be a concern for the Capitol Hill Restoration Society and the Historic Preservation Review Board: "Historic preservation safeguards the District of Columbia’s cultural heritage, supports the local economy, and fosters civic pride in the city’s beauty and history." From a Hill Rag article about the closing of the Friendship House:

Nancy Metzger, Chair of the Historic Preservation Committee of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, the community gatekeeper for Hill historical preservation, says she is glad that the property has been purchased and hopes that long overdue repairs might be initiated. Metzger expressed concern that the continuing neglect and unabated damage of the last years might be its permanent undoing. “I understand water has gotten in. It has been neglected. The roof needs to be addressed,” Metzger lamented. There are also concerns that faulty electrical wiring expose it to the strong possibility of fire. “We want it to be restored and brought back to the community in some way.”

Is bringing the building "back to the community" done by selling it as high-end condos? Wasn't the Friendship House long part of the community? It is sad that it ended this way. In 1973, the Friendship House became part of the Capitol East Housing Coalition "to try to help low and middle income people remain in their Capitol Hill neighborhoods...to maintain the economic and racial mix which now exists in the Capitol East area." They were formed "in response to the massive restoration of homes which is taking place in Capitol East, and which threatens to transform Capitol Hill into another Georgetown" (GWU Special Collections, Friendship House Association records). Now, the Friendship House is gone, and the building belongs to those who can pay $1.65 million.

P.S. Any updates on the Friendship House from those who worked there would be especially welcomed.

P.P.S. In what ways have you seen or experienced the disappearance of the Friendship House?

Qatar, Real Estate, and DC

2011-10-26T11:58:00.005+01:00

This morning's Post reports:

Earlier this year, the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar was looking for a safe place to park some of its vast oil wealth. Qatar’s investment arm chose to pump $700 million into the new CityCenterDC, a downtown Washington apartment, office and retail complex that doesn’t have a major tenant signed up yet. The District, the Qataris decided, was as low risk an investment as could be found anywhere in the world.

Foreign investment in DC real estate and businesses is not new. On the one hand, this investment in cities has been a worldwide strategy by investors since the late 1970s. Deregulation and high interest rates at that time in the US financial markets made foreign investors very interested in putting their money in US markets. Foreign investors as well as domestic investors (such as mutual funds and pension funds) realized that they could make much more money in financial markets than investing in production. My favorite sociologist Saskia Sassen, as well as other great sociologists like Greta Krippner, talk about the enormous inflow of capital into the US especially from Japan, how this expansion of credit has inflated real estate prices and created new forms of financial risk, and the resulting financialization of our economy (the increasing dominance of financial profit making, as opposed to profit making in production, in our economy).

On the other hand, as discussed by geographer Jason Hackworth, since the 1970s, cities around the world have actively encouraged investment in real estate in their center cities. Enticing foreign investment in such real estate is a strategy by city governments and business groups around the world. As I talked about in a previous post, "What is Neoliberalism?," in this new context, cities like Washington, D.C. have taken on many of the tasks once carried out by the national state, but these cities do not have the resources to realize these tasks (due to austerity and low tax rates) and do not have the power to stand up to the demands of multinational corporations. Cities have thus become what sociologists and geographers call "entrepreneurial," competing with other cities for international investments, high-bond ratings, and high-income residents (including the "creative class" discussed by Richard Florida). The entrepreneurial city must focus on competition and neighborhood branding to lure new residents and international investors. These trends create "dual" cities, with areas of great wealth and other areas of great poverty, through gentrification and dispersal of the poor from certain places (The Yards in SW and Hine Jr. High, both in Ward 6) to make way for new development projects funded by international investors, which in turn fund the entrepreneurial city government. As a result, as the Post article quotes the chair of the Federal City Council, which represents the DC business elite:

'there's less of a local D.C. business community' now that companies based elsewhere control many of the city's major employers. But businesses owned by out-of-town interests also have a stake in the city's financial and political health...those executives are recruiting candidates to run against council members who are 'taking us back 20 years.'

Does "taking us back 20 years" mean taking us back to a time when politicians responded more to their constituents and less to the demands of international capital in our nation's capitol? Are we unintentionally turning DC into a kind of Disneyland for adults and a safe investment for international investors, while undermining what makes DC interesting and compelling as a city? Furthermore, are all DC residents equal, as democracy requires, or are residents measured by the revenue they generate?

My Book on Neoliberalism

2011-10-10T12:43:00.004+01:00

Over the weekend, C-Span Book TV showed their interview with me about my book Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism. It's about 12 minutes long. I talk about what neoliberalism is -- policies supportive of free markets and against the state's role in the economy, though I would also add that neoliberalism is also very supportive of hierarchical authority. Neoliberal policies support hierarchical corporations and states. One economist, Ronald Coase, famously saw the similarities between the Soviet Union and large American corporations, both were/are planned societies. In my book, I talk about the ideas of many economists who envisioned societies without these hierarchical organizations.

Hawk & Dove, Race, and Class (II)

2011-09-29T19:09:00.005+01:00

The new Hawk & Dove will open with "a locally-sourced, seasonal bistro menu prepared in an open kitchen." While it did not have to happen this way, the turn to local food has in fact driven out the local, in this case the local working class and the other local residents who patronized the Hawk & Dove. Hawk & Dove also regularly provided affordable or discounted meals to the homeless and poor in the neighborhood. Similarly, and equally unnecessarily, historical preservation has been more about preserving buildings than about preserving people. Interestingly, my neighbor Thom appealed to the ANC and the Historic Preservation Review Board to preserve not the Hine school building (at 8th and Pennsylvania Ave SE) but the educational heritage of the Hine site -- the culture of children and learning that had been embedded in the schools at that site and in the community since the Civil War. (See the comments section here). According to the HPRB,

Historic preservation safeguards the District of Columbia’s cultural heritage, supports the local economy, and fosters civic pride in the city’s beauty and history.

Thom was not successful. A relatively autonomous, local children's culture is in the process of being lost.

Hawk & Dove, Race, and Class

2011-09-29T18:56:00.003+01:00

Many identify gentrification as whites moving out blacks. While one has to recognize the role that race plays in gentrification, the key feature of gentrification is the replacement of a less affluent group by a wealthier social group. Back in March, the Washington City Paper published "Confessions of a Black Gentrifier." Black gentrification has been going on for some time around the country, as discussed by sociologists such as Mary Pattillo and Michelle Boyd about Chicago and by numerous scholars about Harlem. Generally, however, the displacement of the less affluent and the shift in class composition are the defining features of gentrification. DC has had a working class including white and black residents. Even though gentrification has moved the working class outside of the District, DC's working class world continues in various forms today.

On Saturday, after being in business for over 40 years, the Hawk & Dove will close. The new Hawk & Dove will open with "a locally-sourced, seasonal bistro menu prepared in an open kitchen." A couple of days ago, I was sitting at the Hawk & Dove bar talking with a long-time (white) customer. He regularly comes to the bar as part of his circuit through the city to see his working-class friends at working-class bars. This circuit is shrinking as places like the Hawk & Dove change and working class jobs continue to disappear in DC. Also, those who had those jobs are quite old and are passing away. Yes, there were many working-class jobs around the Navy Yard, the Capitol buildings, and most importantly Foggy Bottom. At Foggy Bottom, according to my "informant," Pepco and Washington Gas employed many people, who regularly patronized Lindy's Red Lion. These jobs are now gone, and the expanding subcontracting of government jobs and the movement of many jobs to the suburbs has further undermined DC's working class world. Yet, there are still working class jobs in DC, such as those in the Capitol buildings, and the working class still patronizes Lindy's Red Lion and Hawk & Dove. What does my informant miss about DC's working class world? Those who live in all the new condos don't know their neighbors. The working class knew their working-class friends throughout the city. On Saturday, bid farewell to Hawk & Dove, but also keep an eye on the working-class networks that remain.

P.S. Thanks to Alex B's comments, I'll suggest that the current Hawk & Dove is a (at least partially) cross-class institution, unlike Senart's and Chesapeake Room nearby and owned by the new Hawk & Dove owner. Such cross-class institutions are difficult to create because they must be affordable and open/comfortable to a broad range of people. The interns who frequent the Hawk & Dove are usually working for free and have more in common with the precariat (see video interviewing the precariat) -- precarious work is temporary, informal, often unpaid or poorly paid, uncertain, insecure -- than with the proletariat.

DC Studies

2011-09-25T14:37:00.000+01:00

For those of you interested in DC Studies, I just want to recommend H-DC, the Washington, DC History Network. I subscribe to their listserv, which has great info about the history of DC. For example, H-DC told me about the upcoming DC Historical Studies Conference. The conference will take place in downtown DC Nov. 3-6, 2011. Their conference website has the schedule of panels and tours. In addition, you email questions about DC to the H-DC editors!

Our Lives Depend on MLK

2011-09-24T11:02:00.004+01:00

On October 16th, the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial will be dedicated. Some might think the memorial commemorates how African Americans finally gained rights equal to whites. Others might think that the memorial represents the special interests of African Americans and their immoral claim to special rights. In contrast to these views, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have shown that the African American struggle for rights, within which Martin Luther King, Jr. worked, created the very rights that all American citizens enjoy. The African American struggle for rights works within a social life that produces the neighborliness and community that many of us cherish in DC. Here are some of the points made by scholars:

In her work on DC during and after the Civil War, Northwestern University historian Kate Masur has shown that the African American fight for equality created positive rights. Most importantly, the 14th Amendment both granted citizenship to recently freed slaves and declared that all laws applied to everyone. Earlier, different people had different privileges and rights in different spaces. The 14th Amendment created nation-wide citizenship rights. At this time, the African Americans also forged parents’ rights to their children for all residents. One woman successfully took back her daughter from a white man with a form letter stating, "The wishes of the parent and child are both to be considered before those of any third party and all the rights of the family must be recognized and respected among these people the same as among the whites" (p. 76). Thus African Americans’ demands for specific, concrete rights helped the nation to move beyond the past system of special group privileges to our current system of universal rights and national citizenship.
American University anthropologist Brett Williams found in her study of Mt. Pleasant that residents' class cultures lead them to see and use the neighborhood in different ways. Older, mainly African American renters and homeowners develop deep, local ties on a daily basis, teaching their children "to greet and joke with shopkeepers, bus drivers, and people on the street...to learn details, nicknames, reputations, stories, and histories" and regularly visiting the same local businesses and people. In contrast, the newer, often white homeowners have a more cosmopolitan engagement, "believing in breadth rather than density and a quest for variety rather than repetition." They take their children across the city to schools, playgrounds, soccer games, and dance classes. Many African American renters excuse the new neighbors' ignorance of local street life and appreciate their contribution of "volunteer time, money, and knowledge to neighborhood activities," but the new neighbors "for the most part do not reciprocate this goodwill; their feelings seem to vary from indifference to tolerance or compassion to vague unease or active dislike." Brett Williams advocates a politics grounded in density and repetition:

"Ultimately, many white middle-class people who want to reclaim a piece of the vibrant central city for themselves are going to have to change. They need to learn from the cultural world built by those who preceded them: they need to develop some of the same skills as they try to look inward. In the summer of 1986, after a long seclusion, I was confronted by one of the men on the street: "Where the hell have you been? You never come up here anymore; you don't even associate with the people in the neighborhood." Half joking, he was almost chiding me about what was supposed to be almost a job. If we are to preserve variety in our cities, I believe that those of us who want to live in such areas have to take on that job, which is first of all the world of culture, and then we must try to link that cultural stand to broader, but also deeper, denser, more textured, repetitive, and rooted political action."

In his How Racism Takes Place, UCSB sociologist George Lipsitz writes about racial segregation that we also see in Ward 6 and argues, "the actual long-term interests of whites are often damaged by spatial relations that purportedly benefit them, while Black negotiations with the constraints and confinements of racialized space often produce ways of envisioning and enacting more decent, dignified, humane, and egalitarian social relations for everyone."

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial commemorates African American struggles over the centuries that have created our universal rights and the continuing movement to realize the vision of a more decent, dignified, humane, and egalitarian world. We all depend on this movement.

New Book on U St.

2011-09-20T13:28:00.002+01:00

Urban historian Amber N. Wiley has written a great review of Blair Ruble's Washington's U Street. Ruble, who directs the world-famous Kennan Institute and the Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center downtown, explores U St as a "Contact Zone" and DC as an ambiguous place " by virtue of its function as the seat of the federal government and geographical location between North and South." One particularly interesting part of the review:

Ruble situates Washington within a network of three cities that include St. Louis and Baltimore that had a black population consisting of a majority of free blacks by the outbreak of the Civil War. Contraband camps set up during the Civil War and the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau also added to the early important presence of blacks in the city. Ruble therefore refutes the idea that Washington became an important center of African American life only beginning in the early twentieth century. This point is significant to Ruble and other scholars of Washington history such as James Borchert, Kathleen Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibbs because it emphasizes the contributions of free and enslaved African Americans to early life in the republic.

I'll be talking more about this point in an upcoming post.

Updated DC Cooperative Map

2011-09-17T23:30:00.002+01:00

I have added a few more cooperatives to this map. I'll have to add the limited-equity housing cooperatives when I get their exact addresses. Let me know any other cooperatives or organizations that assist cooperatives in town.

View DC Cooperatives in a larger map

Gentrification is Global

2011-09-17T15:14:00.008+01:00

Gentrification is happening worldwide, as cities around the world seek to survive and grow in the global economy. Global finance invests in our local restaurants and development projects, as well as those in other cities, globalizing gentrification. In studies of this process in different locations around the world, we can see common trends. Writing about European gentrification two years ago, Berg, Kaminer, Schoonderbeek, and Zonnevelt found:

Even though population movement is a common feature of cities, gentrification is specifically the replacement of a less affluent group by a wealthier social group -- a definition which relates gentrification to class. Whether a result of city council policies or real estate pressures, gentrification stands in contrast to earlier attempts to improve deprived neighbourhoods by addressing the built environment, the central objective of urban renewal up until the 1970s. More recently, the betterment of deprived neighbourhoods has taken a completely different form as the improvement of living conditions is no longer considered the task of the state ('to enlighten the masses'), but rather a side effect of the development and emancipation of the higher and middle classes. The state seems to have acknowledged its inability to influence the welfare of its residents directly and has left that task to the workings of the supposedly objective agency of the market. Gentrification has become a means of solving social malaise, not by providing solutions to unemployment, poverty, or broken homes, but by transferring the problem elsewhere, out of sight, and consequently also geographically marginalising the urban poor and ensuring their economic location and political irrelevance.

Through HOPE VI, several DC public housing projects -- like Ward 6's Capper-Carrollsburg -- were dismantled and the residents dispersed. Likely, they were given vouchers, a market-based program in which the voucher holder pays 30% of their income and the rest of the rent is paid by the government. Those who know my research will know that I do not think that markets are necessarily a problem, specific institutions around them are. Several years back, John M. Hartung of HUD and Jeffrey R. Henig, GWU political science professor, looked at the DC-area distribution of those using vouchers. They found that those "with vouchers and certificates most highly concentrated in tracts with residents having a low socioeconomic status (tracts with a higher percentage of persons 25 years of age or older who have no more than a ninth-grade education) and where there is an ample supply of affordable rental housing...market forces cannot be counted upon to spontaneously generate socially desirable ends." It seems that the deconcentration of the poor may have led merely to its reconcentration elsewhere, marginalized outside the center of the city, its amenities (like Metro and jobs), and access to political influence. Who instead benefited from this program? Have they benefited globally?

The Decline of Rental Housing in Ward 6 and DC

2011-09-15T11:22:00.015+01:00

As the Post reported yesterday, the number of people in poverty has increased to one in six. In DC, one in five live in poverty. As far as I can tell, the new Census data made available on Tuesday does not yet provide poverty data at the census tract level, but it does provide rental housing data. Those living in poverty in DC live predominantly in rentals. Also, many other DC residents and long-term visitors also live in rentals.

Citywide, in the past ten years, our population increased by nearly 30,000 people and the number of renter-occupied units increased by about 7,000 units. The proportion of renter-occupied units has not kept up with our population growth. Percentage-wise, there are more owner-occupied units in 2010 than in 2000. However, the Census does not yet provide us with data on how much these renters pay for these units or their income levels. Therefore, we don't know whether these new rentals are predominantly high end. In 2000, about 700 households lived in the Capper and Carrollsburg public housing in census tract 72, which has been dismantled and replaced by Capitol Quarter houses, condos, and apartments with only 39 units available to individuals or families making $30,050 or less (0-30% AMI), aside from the 162 senior units. Therefore, the majority of the new units citywide are not likely for those living in poverty.

In Ward 6, the poverty rate has been steady at about 20% for the past 30 years. The population of Ward 6 has increased by about 8,000 people over the past 10 years, so the number of people living in poverty has increased. The table below lists some of the Ward 6 census tracts. (To see where these census tracts are, see this map.) The bolded items represent areas with decreasing numbers or percentages of renter-occupied units. The wealthiest census tract in Ward 6, number 67, lost nearly 40 renter-occupied units. The poorest census tract in Ward 6, number 71, gained 4.

Renter-Occupied Housing Units

	2000 (%)	2000 (#)	2010 (%)	2010 (#)
Citywide	59.2%	147,124	58%	154,652
Census Tract 67	42.2%	793	40.4%	754
Census Tract 71	69.7%	769	57.6%	773
Census Tract 64	85.6%	823	83.8%	819
Census Tract 72	96.6%	816	84%	1534
Census Tract 79.01	64.9%	951	64.2%	989
Census Tract 80.01	33.3%	378	35.1%	451
Census Tract 81	48.1%	644	46.6%	677

Many would argue that it is good to increase the number of home-owners in these areas. However, the demand for rentals is ever increasing, especially for affordable units for interns, low-wage workers, etc. The supply of affordable rentals does not meet the demand. This is a nationwide trend. Even more problematic is the conversion of rental properties into owner-occupied properties, which displaces the poor. From the incredibly informative Housing Policy in the United States 2010 textbook, we know that the average nationwide income for those working as elementary school teachers ($49,781), LPN nurses ($38,941), security guards ($29,401), and cashiers ($19,757) would not allow them to buy a house or condo. Of course, many of the new rental units available are far outside the price range of the average hourly wage for those working as LPN nurses ($15.72), security guards ($14.13), janitors ($11.57), and cashiers ($9.50), who are also in poverty. What can be done to stop the decline in affordable rentals?

Give a Call to WPFW

2011-09-14T00:25:00.004+01:00

Everyone knows that WPFW 89.3 is a great DC radio station, which has been providing an alternative to mainstream media since 1977. They also speak for DC! Give them a call and donate right now: 202-588-9739 or 1-800-222-9739. Of course, you can also donate online, but thanking the radio station with your own voice is a great thing.

P.S. Also, check out WPFW's fabulous new webpage.

Gentrification Lecture on Tuesday

2011-09-11T15:23:00.008+01:00

GWU American Studies Professor Suleiman Osman will be giving a fascinating lecture about trends we also find in Ward 6: gentrification, renovation, and our search for authenticity.

"The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Renovation and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar Brooklyn"
Lecture by Suleiman Osman, PhD, George Washington University
The National Trust for Historic Preservation
1785 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

6:30 P.M. – light refreshments, 7:00 P.M. – lecture

Reservations are not required. $10.00 for Latrobe Chapter members, student members (full time) free with ID, $18.00 for non-members.

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered a “blighted” slum by city planners in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and expensively renovated townhouses in new neighborhoods with creative names like “Boerum Hill” and “Carroll Gardens.” In his recently published work The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman locates the origins of gentrification in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Starting in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s, a new urban middle class (or “brownstoners” as they referred to themselves) began to migrate into Brooklyn’s brownstone areas, purchasing and renovating aging townhouses. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" sought a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as source of authenticity they felt was lacking in new suburbs and downtown skyscrapers. They started new reform democratic organizations, founded block associations and joined forces with long-time residents to battle urban renewal. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure.

***

For general information, please see the Latrobe Chapter website at www.Latrobechaptersah.org, or contact Christine Henry at (202)-744-8123 or christine.rae.henry@gmail.com.

Public Housing Residents: Criminalizing the Victims?

2011-09-09T16:11:00.004+01:00

I get the sense that some DC residents consider public housing residents 1) criminals, especially when crime occurs around public housing, and 2) the cause of the assumed "failure" of public housing. This is not the picture I get from reading 10 years (1979-1989) of Washington Post reporting on Potomac Gardens and the personal papers of John A. Wilson, DC council member and chair, who worked to improve other Ward 6 (then Ward 2) public housing in the 1980s. I have found that public housing residents not only have been accused of the crimes done against them but also that their decades-long, partially successful efforts to improve their living environments have been forgotten.

Across the nation, federal, state, and city governments had assumed that rents would cover maintenance costs, but this was not the case. In Ward 6, unmaintained public housing projects were without heat (many families used kitchen ovens to heat their apartments) and functioning elevators, had collapsed roofs and ceilings, had broken sewage lines and flooded first floors, and other results of the lack of general maintenance. From 1979, the Marion Barry Administration made renovation of public housing a top priority. Throughout the 1980s, renovations were made through the city, but at a very slow rate, leaving people in horrible conditions. Public housing residents feared for the health and safety of themselves and their children.

The lack of funds also meant a lack of security. Most public housing did not have functioning front doors or fences, which meant that anyone could enter their buildings anytime of day. At the 1200 Delaware Ave, SW building, there was "widespread fear among the tenants. This is apparently due to the fact that the building is totally open at all hours to anyone who wants to enter the building" (JA Wilson Papers, MS2190, Box 25, File 15). These outsiders continually broke all the lights, leaving residents in the dark. In 1988, Greenleaf residents in SW reported:

At Greenleaf, front doors were installed for a brief period last summer, but then removed so they would not be vandalized. Security guards were hired for a brief period, but then left becuase they were unsafe without doors or a guard station...When residents met with Mr. Jackson about this, he said that residents had to take responsibility for reporting drug pushers before the Department would improve security. (JA Wilson papers, MS2190, Box 25, File 17)

The city basically told residents that they would have to deal with the situation themselves. Residents across the city organized themselves. At Greenleaf public housing, a group of residents formed The Committee for the Betterment of 203 N St, SW and organized "Operation Fight Back" to drive out drug dealers in their building through regular resident patrols. A non-profit working with them asked the police for assistance in this terrifying endeavor:

Can we have 24 hour police coverage for at least three weeks -- one week while we are patrolling the halls, and coverage later so there will not be retaliation?
Would four police be possible -- two for the front, two for the back?
Could there be some undercover police?
How can we be sure pushers won't hurt the children of residents who are patrolling? Is there some way the residents who are most active can have a call-in point, where they tell their whereabouts or where they are going?
Is there any special equipment we need? What about walkie-talkies?
What has been the experience of other neighborhoods who have tried to get rid of drugs? How did 14th Street get cleaned up?
What other precautions should we take? (JA Wilson Papers, MS2190, Box 26, File 12)

For those without the money to enter the private apartment market, public housing was all they had. There were thousands on the waiting lists for private apartment vouchers or other options. Yet, public housing is more than just housing. Public housing often provides community and social networks (and social capital) that poor people in particular need to survive. As one Potomac Garden resident told the Washington Post in 1983, "I like it here. I like the people. I don't like the problems. But the people are good people."

Many in the DC government sought to help and were successful in many cases in the late 1980s, but poor residents in general were abandoned to fend for themselves. The residents organized, but a basic level of security and maintenance would have helped them to realize their goals.

Peter Bug, Fellow Sociologist in Ward 6

2011-09-02T19:45:00.003+01:00

John "Peter Bug" Matthews is a fifth generation DC resident, an alumnus of Tyler Elementary School, and a great community organizer, founding the Peter Bug Shoe Repair Academy at E and 13th St SE (right near Safeway) and committing himself early on to helping DC youth. You'll learn a lot from the interview of Mr. Matthews done by Destiny-Pride. Here are some items particularly relevant to this blog:

Mr. Matthews has a degree in sociology and anthropology from Federal City College, which opened its doors in 1968 and later became part of UDC.
Mr. Matthews worked alongside his college friend Carroll "Skeezie" Payne helping kids at Potomac Gardens and at Tyler. As part of the Roving Leaders Program, they sought to engage at-risk youth in constructive activities. This 1989 Post article talks about Potomac Gardens children spending "large chunks of their time visiting with Carroll (Skeezie) Payne, a city housing worker who has become an ex-officio grandfather to many of the youngsters in the project." Mr. Matthews did a lot of work organizing residents of Potomac Gardens, Arthur Capper, and other public housing in Ward 6.
Mr. Matthews nearly founded a shoe manufacturing company for Timberland in the area, which only required matching funds that the DC government failed to provide. The failure of this project "was one of the tragedies of the dream that we thought we were going to fulfill."
When asked what relaxes him, Mr Matthews said,

You know what really relaxes me? When I can see people having fun. Folks ask, “Man, why do you do all of this [referring to his annual Peter Bug Day]?” I say, because I want to hear folks say, “Man, we had a good time.” I need people. I need to be around people. I can’t stand to be by myself because I might drive my car off a bridge [laughter]. I’ve got to have some people around me. Just to make people feel happy and be proud of themselves – that relaxes me.

Save the Date: Peter Bug Day is the third Saturday in May.

Histories of Potomac Gardens (Part 1)

2011-08-30T22:44:00.005+01:00

Here is the fascinating 1993 documentary In Search of Common Ground about Potomac Gardens residents. The seniors living in Potomac Gardens (public housing in Ward 6) talk about their lives in rural North Carolina and other parts of the South -- many as sharecroppers, harvesting cotton and doing much difficult work -- before coming to DC in the 1950s. The interviewees remember their excitement about DC and their happiness that they no longer had to do agricultural work. At the same time, they also described the new difficulties they confronted in segregated DC.

In her classic, highly readable, eye-opening book on Mt. Pleasant, American University anthropology professor Brett Williams similarly shows the historical, social, economic, and cultural connections between the Carolinas and DC. African Americans migrating to DC (like those in the video) brought Carolina culture with them and traveled back and forth, maintaining ties with the Carolinas.

Doing Nothing isn't Doing Nothing: Violence, Inequality, and Race

2011-08-19T17:49:00.008+01:00

What is the relationship between violence, inequality, and race? A 2005 review of the literature in one of the top sociological journals found:

Higher levels of "structural disadvantage" -- poverty, low income, family disruption, and joblessness/unemployment -- in a city or neighborhood lead to higher levels of violence: "Overall, the studies reviewed above yield one clear conclusion: Structural disadvantage is a major contributor to violence for all racial/ethnic groups studied." In contrast to many popular views, the level of structural disadvantage in cities or neighborhoods contributes much more to violence than racial composition of, or racial tensions in, neighborhoods does.
Deindustrialization and its loss of jobs since the 1970s has led to further disadvantage and violence: "the disadvantage-violence relationship is due to the impact of industrial restructuring on white and black disadvantage." The disappearance of jobs, especially well-paying working class jobs, is one of the main determinants of structural disadvantage and, in turn, violence.
Of course, not everyone who is disadvantaged commits violence. The disadvantaged are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of crime. The disadvantaged are also more likely to be the victims of crime than the advantaged are.

This literature review clearly suggests that violence is the price of inequalities in wealth, income, job prospects, and other economic factors. As discussed in a previous post, Ward 6 has substantial income inequality. In Ward 6, structural advantage, such as the proportion making more than $200,000 per year, has increased and some forms of structural disadvantage, such as the proportion living in poverty, have decreased, but primarily through the displacement of the poor, such as through the closure of public housing, and the expansion of housing for the wealthy. Displacement destroys the social capital that the poor need to survive and thrive. How can Ward 6 let people stay in their homes, stop unwanted displacement, and minimize inequality and disadvantage in a new way? How can Ward 6 create employment and end poverty, while letting people stay in their homes?

Doing nothing is not really doing nothing; the current policy is 1) displacement and 2) reduction of social programs that will lead to further structural disadvantage.

Ward 6 Census Tract Map

2011-08-13T16:23:00.003+01:00

In response to several readers, I decided to make a map of the census tracts in Ward 6. I'm still working on it. Some of the tracts don't have number labels due to technical difficulties. For any tract, you can click on it to see its number and (for almost all of the tracts) a link directly to census data for that tract. You can find lots of great info about census tracts in the Census' American Community Survey.

View Ward 6 Census Tract Map in a larger map

A Reminder about Income Inequality in Ward 6

2011-08-12T15:36:00.010+01:00

Last time I checked, census tract 71 (light blue) was the poorest tract in Ward 6. It is located south of Pennsylvania Ave SE and east of 11th, just about two blocks from the wealthiest census tract in Ward 6: census tract 67 (dark blue). Census tract 67 is south of East Capitol, north of South Carolina Ave, and between 8th and 15th SE. Census tracts generally have between 1,500 and 8,000 people (ideally with 4,000 people).

View Census Tract 67 and 71 in a larger map

From the Census' American Community Survey (2009), we can see that the poorest census tract actually reflects the income distribution in the US. About 2% of American households make over $200,000, 20% make over $100,000, 50% make less than $50,000, but the under $10,000 category is much larger in the tract than in the national numbers.

We can also see that the wealthiest census tract reflects the national income distribution *turned upside down,* the inverse of the national income distribution, with a rich majority and a poor minority in contrast to the poor majority and rich minority in the country as a whole. In census tract 67, well over 80% of households make over $100,000. In the US, about 80% of households make less than $100,000.

Poorest by Income: Census Tract 71

Household Income over $200,000	1.9%
Household Income over $100,000	20.4%
Household Income under $50,000	59.1%
Household Income under $10,000	32.4%
Unemployment Rate	20.0%

Richest by Income: Census Tract 67

Household Income over $200,000	24.6%
Household Income over $100,000	65.8%
Household Income under $50,000	10.8%
Household Income under $10,000	1.0%
Unemployment Rate	2.6%

What are the consequences of such significant income inequality for a community?

A Reminder about Income Inequality in the US

2011-08-12T15:22:00.000+01:00

The overwhelming majority of American households make less than $100,000.

If you make $50,000 and, let's say your married, your spouse makes $50,000, then you make more than about 80% of American households (Census 2008).
If you make $75,000 and your spouse makes $75,000, then you are in the top 8% of income earning households in the US (Census 2008).
If you make $125,000 and your spouse makes $125,000, then you are in the top 2% of income earning households in the US (Census 2008).

Deleted Post

2011-08-12T15:21:00.000+01:00

Well, I somehow deleted an old post, so I recovered it sort of and reposted it.

Urban Renewal and Grief in Ward 6

2011-08-12T15:17:00.006+01:00

Between 1950 and 1965, more than 202,000 families were relocated as cities demolished "blighted" areas and realized urban renewal. In 1950, DC began urban renewal in Southwest. These photos are of SW DC before and after urban renewal.

According to Where are They Now?, a fascinating study of those evicted from SW, "Southwest Washington was a rat-infested, refuse-covered, unsanitary slum," from which DC cleared out the housing and 23,500 residents by 1960 "in order to build a 'new town in the city' with air-conditioned apartments for middle and upper income groups as well as some 929 public housing units...But where have the 23,500 poor people who inhabited Southwest gone?"

In the study, the researchers found and interviewed 98 families five years after they had left their homes in SW. This group is not particularly representative because they were a "demonstration group," a group of families that received extra help relocating, in contrast to a control group, which did not receive this help, and the rest of the over 23,000 people, who either left on their own or were forced out. But the researchers made several important findings.

What did they find? They found that the 98 families obtained housing that was physically improved, especially with indoor toilets and in well-maintained buildings, but they experienced new problems. (However, a significant proportion of their original SW housing had been in fine shape when it was torn down.) By 1965, government officials realized that the "myths" of housing reform and slum clearance "were based on rather vague and misleading correlations between the physical conditions of housing and such social factors," like poverty and crime. For those interviewed, poverty continued (a common experience among those displaced), and they then suffered "from another set of problems created by their removal from what was once their homes" because they lost not only their homes but also "a functioning social system." Some became sick with grief, like that experienced by a death in the family, which was a common reaction to such relocations. Seventy percent of those interviewed had visited SW after redevelopment, and "a significant number talked about crying and feeling sick" when they visited.

The researchers were most surprised by the different responses from those who had moved to public housing and from those who had moved to private housing. In line with the popular dislike of public housing in the 1960s, the researchers had expected much better experiences among those in private housing. They instead found: "the public housing resident is a much more integrated, optimistic, and informed person than the private housing dweller. The picture is consistent in every area that was studied." Why? While they complained about the institutional nature of public housing (especially the bureaucratic rules), the public housing residents had a sense of community. The researchers found,

The respondents in public housing are less anomic, more hopeful as to what the future will bring them, have a greater sense of belonging to their new neighborhoods, believe more strongly that they can organize for community improvement, have a great knowledge of community institutions, and believe to a greater extent that the Government actions to eliminate the blight of old Southwest was correct.

While those forced out of their homes scattered across the city (except west of Rock Creek in nearly all-white NW), those in public housing made it to Arthur Capper (Ward 6; 900 5th Street SE, right next to the 6th St SE exit of the 395 freeway), Greenleaf Gardens (Ward 6; 203 N Street SW), and Kenilworth Courts (Ward 7; 4500 Quarles Street NE, right near the spectacular Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens). Arthur Capper senior housing continues today in a new building. (See the photos of Capper-Carrollsburg in my previous posting). In 2002, the residents of the rest of Arthur Capper and nearby Carrollsburg were forced out of their homes, the buildings were demolished, and housing and apartments for middle and upper income groups were build. Does this sound familiar?

Today, people reject urban renewal. In 1955, Ward 6 residents began the Capitol Hill Restoration Society and, in 1973, made parts of Capitol Hill an historic district. The demolition of physical structures as practiced during urban renewal is no longer acceptable to people across the political spectrum, but it does continue. Also, communities are still being demolished, and those displaced grieve for lost community. The DC government demolished both the physical structures and the social system in Capper-Carrollsburg. This has happened elsewhere in DC. The Facebook page for now-gone Eastgate Gardens Public Housing (Ward 7), sometimes called "Cinderblock City," states: "the interpersonal relationships that were developed between Eastgate residents still stand just like the cinderblocks that composed of the housing units! This page is is dedicated to those families!" The 345 Facebook members organize an annual reunion and refer to the Eastgate "family" and to Eastgate as "home." When the researchers asked the interviewees how they would improve urban renewal, the majority said that they should have been allowed to move into the new buildings in SW. I'll bet that the residents of Capper-Carrollsburg feel the same way. Is urban renewal continuing today?

Cooperatives in Ward 6 and DC

2011-08-09T16:53:00.012+01:00

After spending the morning writing a post on consumption inequality, I realized that I need to read more about the topic. Instead, in honor of the upcoming UN International Year of Cooperatives in 2012, I decided to start a DC Cooperatives map. So far, I've been amazed by the number of cooperatives in DC. You can see housing cooperatives, cooperative schools, a cooperative bank (though there are many credit unions that I didn't include), energy coops, a purchasing coop, a cooperative grocery, etc.

View DC Cooperatives in a larger map

P.S. There is some talk of a co-op bakery on H St NE.

P.P.S. Let me know other cooperatives in town, and I'll add them. Thanks!

Is Wealth Inequality Increasing in Ward 6? (Part 1)

2011-07-29T13:28:00.004+01:00

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reviewed a Pew Research Center report on the widening wealth gap between whites and minorities. Lately, I have written about the Gini index, which is often used to measure inequalities in household income. The Pew study importantly studies household wealth, which is made up of assets (houses, cars, banking accounts, etc) minus debts (mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, etc). According to the Post, the most significant findings were:

"Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of Hispanic households dropped by 66 percent and that of black households fell by 53 percent, according to the report. In contrast, the median net worth of white households dropped by only 16 percent.

The median net worth of a white family now stands at 20 times that of a black family and 18 times that of a Hispanic family — roughly twice the gap that existed before the recession and the biggest gap since data began being collected in 1984."

The Pew Research Center graph to the left dramatically represents the enormous differences in wealth.

In addition, during the recession, the wealth gap within these groups increased. Across all groups, during the recession, the wealthy became more wealthy: "Between 2005 and 2009, the share of wealth owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of all households rose to 56 percent from 49 percent."

Did the wealthy become more wealthy and the poor become more poor in Ward 6 during the recession? I'm working on getting an answer to this.

What is Neoliberalism? Is there Neoliberalism in Ward 6?

2011-07-19T14:29:00.007+01:00

I have spent the last two weeks co-teaching a course in Budapest at the Central European University. One of our main topics was neoliberalism. For most people outside the United States, neoliberalism is a well-known concept. Sociologists around the world use the term neoliberalism to understand many global trends. I use the concept of neoliberalism as one helpful tool for understanding what is happening in Ward 6 and elsewhere around the world.

To those unfamiliar with the term, I generally say that neoliberalism can be understood as the ideas and policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that support free markets and are anti-state. However, neoliberalism is a confusing term, because different groups have used the term in a variety of ways. In general, people see that capitalism has changed since the 1970s, and they call this new kind of capitalism "neoliberal." Broadly, neoliberalism contains the following changes:

it rolls back the welfare state. On the one hand, it ends social services through austerity programs, which abandon people to a "precarious" existence. On the other hand, it expands the state by enhancing surveillance and coercion/violence to maintain order. In contrast to the usual perception that Ronald Reagan sought to dismantle the state, he in fact expanded the state in numerous ways, thus reorganizing the state. As many scholars have argued, both Republicans and Democrats have realized neoliberal policies, such as when Bill Clinton sought "to end welfare as we know it."
it expands the realm of the market into state activities. Public-private partnerships bring together the state, corporations, and non-profit organizations to realize tasks of the state, such as military activity conducted by private contractors and education provided by the Harlem Children's Zone (funded by corporate donors and focused on testing, an education fundamentally different from that of middle- and upper-income children). Most importantly, the logic of the market changes these services, so that they focus on profits, efficiency, and the short-term, rather than, for example, equal access to these activities, cooperation, and long-term sustainability.
it eradicates public or social property through privatization. In the US, most water is owned and managed by city governments, while elsewhere the water supply has been privatized and is run by international corporations.
it supports the interests of owners and managers (especially in multinational corporations and international banks), rather than the interests of employees, the unemployed who would like to work, and those precariously employed (the precariat, see the video).
it creates a new kind of individual, the neoliberal "subject." These neoliberal changes create a highly competitive, fragmentary, unstable life, to which people are adjusting (successfully or not). In this great article, sociologist Ulrich Beck shows how the new capitalism simultaneously liberates people from past constraints, puts them at considerable risk, and then blames them individually for failing in a situation they could not control. For example, our students often find themselves with a wide range of possible options and thus ask themselves "what do I really want to do? what kind of person am I really?," at the same time most options are illusory and thus they are individually blamed for their failures on the job market. For a similar discussion of the neoliberal subject, see also sociologist Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism.
it creates the neoliberal, entrepreneurial city. In the new context, cities like Washington, D.C. have taken on many of the tasks once carried out by the national state, but these cities do not have the resources to realize these tasks (due to austerity and low tax rates) and do not have the power to stand up to the demands of multinational corporations. Cities have thus become entrepreneurial, competing with other cities for international investments, high-bond ratings, and high-income residents (including the "creative class" discussed by Richard Florida). The entrepreneurial city must focus on competition and neighborhood branding to lure new residents and international investors. These trends create "dual" cities, with areas of great wealth and other areas of great poverty, through gentrification and dispersal of the poor from certain places (The Yards in SW and Hine Jr. High, both in Ward 6) to make way for new development projects funded by international investors, which in turn fund the entrepreneurial city government. As a result, city residents are not equal, as democracy requires, but rather residents are measured by the revenue they generate.

Is there neoliberalism in DC?

HIV and Ward 6

2011-06-28T01:53:00.005+01:00

Today is National HIV Testing Day. According to Street Sense, one of the most informative newspapers in the District, Ward 6 is tied with Ward 8 for the highest percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS:

Ward 6 2.8%
Ward 8 2.8%
Ward 5 2.7%
Ward 7 2.4%
Ward 1 2.1%
Ward 4 1.7%
Ward 3 .3%
Total in DC: 3%

Pruitt-Igoe and Ward 6

2011-06-26T13:49:00.008+01:00

I highly recommend "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth," a documentary in the Silverdocs Festival (showing today [Sunday] at 7pm at AFI). Many US urban historians and urban sociologists teach about Pruitt-Igoe, the famous public housing project in St. Louis, because it has become a symbol of the supposed failure of public housing and well-intentioned government programs more generally. The photo above of its demolition in 1972 has become iconic of this failure. However, as urban scholars agree, this story of failure is a myth. The film explodes this myth in a fascinating and visually compelling way. The interviews with the former residents and urban scholars are amazing. Tickets sold out on Friday, so get your tickets soon if you want to go today.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

The main lessons of the movie are

When Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954, St. Louis was already beginning to experience its own implosion, like so many cities in the US. The mass movement of people and jobs to the suburbs removed both the city's tax base and Pruitt-Igoe's middle-class occupants, whose rent paid for the maintenance and security of the buildings. Within the context of the implosion of American cities and the lack of adequate funding, Pruitt-Igoe could not succeed. Public housing in NYC has been much more successful because the NYC Housing Authority has long had effective management and there was never an "under-crowding crisis" as St. Louis experienced.
Many outsiders blamed public housing residents for the failure of public housing, but the majority of the residents were, in fact, victims of crime and violence by individual criminals and drug gangs, which, due to the lack of security, could take over public spaces and condemned buildings.
Especially those who moved into Pruitt-Igoe early on truly appreciated the social life there. The interviews with the former residents are amazing. One woman said, "It was just a... wonderful place." Another woman said, "When I feel bad, I dream about Pruitt-Igoe." These women and early occupants fondly remembered the social connections they had living amongst so many families. Importantly, men often suffered greatly there, which the interviewees vividly reveal. Especially in the late 1960s, boys were the victims of extreme violence.
The sociologist and influential DC resident Joyce Ladner gained her sociological training by studying Pruitt-Igoe. In the documentary, she provides excellent insights into the social life of its residents and the punitive, counterproductive rules imposed on public housing residents (like the fact that unemployed men could not live with their families in public housing, which caused them and their families great suffering). Ladner was a DC Financial Control Board member (1995-98), interim president of Howard University (1994-95), senior fellow at Brookings, and was named Washingtonian of the Year in 1997.

In Ward 6, Arthur Capper, Carrollsburg, Ellen Wilson, Temple Courts, and Sursum Corda public housing projects were similarly left to fall apart, due to lack of funding to maintain the buildings and provide security. However, the Washington City Paper has questioned whether this decay actually occurred, as one resident of Ellen Wilson said, "'There was nothing wrong with those houses,' says Stewart, a wiry 65-year-old whose voice still has a squeal of youth. 'But they moved us out anyway.'" These projects were dismantled (except Sursum Corda and maybe Temple Courts?) and, unlike Pruitt-Igoe, redeveloped as mixed income areas. Gentrification has been much more extensive in Ward 6 than in the area of St. Louis where Pruitt-Igoe stood. These public housing projects were still called failures. "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" is fascinating and provides insights into the history of public housing across the US. Definitely worth a trip to AFI!

Inequality in DC and Brazil

2011-06-23T18:15:00.005+01:00

The week before last, I was in Brazil, a country long known for its extraordinarily high levels of inequality. Recently, however, Brazil has a new identity, as a country that has significantly reduced inequality. According to the World Bank, Brazil has reduced its poverty (from 20% of the population in 2004 to 7% in 2009) and its extreme poverty (from 10% in 2004 to 4% in 2009). Furthermore, according to the same report, the incomes of the poor are increasing faster than the incomes of the wealthy:

Between 2001 and 2009, the income growth rate of the poorest ten percent of the population was 7 percent per year, while that of the richest ten percent was 1.7 percent.

Now, of course, the levels of poverty are quite different in Brazil and DC, but a recent Post article demonstrated that we are seeing opposite trends in the US, where "With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America." A comparison with DC is thus interesting because, as Brazil reduces inequality, "weathered the global financial downturn with relatively minor impacts," and was one of the first countries "to resume growth in 2009," US and DC's inequality increased through the 1990s and has remained stable.

The standard measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 (lowest level of inequality) to 1 (highest level). If everyone was poor or if everyone was rich, then the Gini coefficient would be 0, reflecting no inequality. If one person had all the income and everyone else had nothing, then the Gini coefficient be 1, reflecting extreme inequality. According to the UN, Gini values above 0.52 ranks as “very high.”

	1960	1979	1989	1999	2004	2006	2009
DC Gini Index		.450	.492	.549		.537	.532
Brazil Gini Index	.500		.63	[.61]	.56		.55

This table shows the downward trend in Brazil starting after 1989. In contrast, DC's Gini coefficient increased in the 1990s and then basically maintained that level since then. Brazil has consciously implemented policies to increase the incomes of the poor, which have brought down the Gini coefficient. Now, Brazil and DC have very similar levels of inequality.

However, the Gini index is a problematic measure because the slight decline in the DC Gini index could be due to many of the poor leaving DC or due to other shifts in middle income households or due to a variety of trends. In general, though, the Gini coefficient does show a highly unequal society, which has significant consequences, a topic for a future post.

Interestingly, Puerto Rico and DC have, in fact, long shared very similar levels of inequality:

	1960	1979	1989	1999	2004	2006	2009
DC Gini Index		.450	.492	.549		.537	.532
Puerto Rico Gini Index				.558		.535	.532
Brazil Gini Index	.500		.63	[.61]	.56		.54

DC and Puerto Rico also share their lack of representation in Congress. In 1989, when Brazil had reached its highest Gini coefficient level, the Brazilian people freely elected their first president after decades of military dictatorship. After 1989, Brazil's Gini coefficient declined significantly through the reduction of poverty. Could lack of democratic representation have an impact on inequality?

P.S. UN Habitat has highlighted DC as a particularly unequal city in contrast to more equal cities, such as Caracas, Amman, and Beijing.

Kate Masur's new book on DC

2011-06-07T12:55:00.002+01:00

I wrote a review of Kate Masur's new book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., for Susie Cambria's great blog Susie's Budget and Policy Corner. Here's the first part of the review:

Kate Masur’s new book about DC emancipation struggles over a century ago speaks directly to DC today. In her book, Masur examines the revolutionary changes in politics and society in DC allowed by the 1861 secession of eleven slaveholding states and the ensuing Civil War. According to Masur, Lincoln’s Republican Party and African American activism made DC into a laboratory for egalitarian policy and "An Example for All the Land." This revolutionary period continued up until 1874 when, in response to these policies, conservative business elites dismantled elected government altogether for all DC residents and presented DC as a failure, a different kind of example for the country. It would take 99 years, until Christmas Eve 1973, for DC residents to regain self-rule. The struggles by DC residents and others to end slavery and realize equality, in the words of Masur, "resonate into the present, as do the strategies of those who ultimately defeated them" (p. 12). I highly recommend this book because Masur provides us a wonderfully well-documented and fascinating history of our city with lessons for today. Read more>>

See Kate Masur's recent op-ed about DC in the New York Times.

Racial Apathy in DC

2011-05-31T14:43:00.013+01:00

In an early January post, I wrote about a study of residential segregation in DC by GWU sociologists. From their telephone survey of DC residents, Gregory D. Squires, Samantha Friedman, and Catherine E. Saidat found that blacks experienced racial discrimination in the DC housing market, even when controlling for class and other variables. Their findings support those of a 1998 Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington study, in which the Council sent out pairs of people (one black and one white) to investigate the local housing and mortgage market. According to Squires and his colleagues, "Investigators found that blacks were discriminated against 33% of the time in their efforts to buy homes, 44% of the time when they attempted to rent, and 37% of the times they applied for mortgage loans." The GWU sociologists found that the white nature of certain DC neighborhoods is not purely the result of economic reasons, educational levels, or personal choices.

The GWU sociologists made another interesting finding. Blacks are significantly less likely than whites to believe that blacks and whites have the same opportunities within the housing market. They found that over 50% of whites believed that whites and blacks, and whites and Hispanics, had the same choices in the housing market. In contrast, 16% of blacks believed that whites and blacks had the same choices, while 21% of blacks believed that whites and Hispanics had the same choices.

Why is this so interesting? Because it reflects the trends discussed by Emory University sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis in their fascinating article, "Racial Apathy and Hurricane Katrina." Forman and Lewis demonstrate that this belief that housing markets and society more generally no longer discriminate racially is actually a new form of racial prejudice, a color-blind racism. By analyzing national- and city-level opinion surveys, the authors find that the white Americans in increasing numbers have racial apathy -- apathy towards racial and ethnic inequality. By 2003, for example, 27% of young whites said that they were "never concerned about race," up from 10% in 1994. This would not seem to be a problem except that this racial apathy is statistically correlated with opposition to marriage to Blacks and Latinos, lack of sympathy for Blacks and Latinos, and the perception that Blacks and Latinos are economic and political threats; in addition "Whites who believe that Blacks and Latinos (1) are less intelligent than Whites, (2) are more difficult to get along with than Whites, and (3) do a worse job supervising their children relative to Whites, are more racially apathetic." Racial apathy is a form of collective indifference to and ignorance of racial inequality in the US. The surprise many felt when they saw the poverty among many Blacks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina can be explained by this racial apathy. They weren't paying attention, or they could actively and successfully ignore the situation.

The authors then turn to a survey and long interviews (1-6 hours long) with graduates of an integrated high school in the Midwest. The white respondents interviewed stated that they were color-blind and open minded. They also said that they were in their own worlds, avoiding politics and race discussions. Yet, some had actively structured their lives to avoid people of other races, such as by moving to nearly all white suburbs and not allowing their children to go to integrated schools. This active avoidance and indifference "sustain[s] a system of inequality that restricts opportunities for many ethnoracial minorities." This indifference is not a traditional racist attitude or even a self-conscious white identity, rather "they belong to a passive social collective or series, in which members are a similar location within the racial structure -- a location that has material implications." The racial composition of, for example, census tract #66 (over 90% white; south of East Capitol, north of Pennsylvania, between Capitol and 8th St SE), is probably not an accident "but a result of Whites' status as members of a social collectivity whose lives are at least in part shaped by the racialized social system in which they live and operate."

While Forman and Lewis made many other findings, I want to point out that the authors did talk with those who have worked actively against racial apathy. These people had consistent, meaningful contact with racial minorities and have avoided racial apathy, which "prevents many Whites and some ethnoracial minorities from recognizing or taking action to redress persistent racial inequality."

Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" that "we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." In Ward 6, do you find apathy to inequality? Is racial apathy correlated with avoidance of certain races in social life? Is racial apathy overcome by walking by each other on the street or taking the Metro in the same car? Or does it require something more, like dependence on each other to realize some substantive project or outcome?

Redistricting and Ward 6

2011-05-25T18:20:00.004+01:00

Grading is finally over. Summer is the time when professors do their intensive research and writing projects, often traveling around the world to conduct research and teach. (This summer I will be teaching a short course in Budapest, Hungary and conducting research in DC). As I am putting together a new post, I wanted to share this comment from someone in Ward 7 (from the Greater Greater Washington blog post about the proposed redistricting of parts of Ward 6 to Ward 7):

As a Ward 7 resident, I'd like to offer a different perspective. I live in Hillcrest/Fairfax Village. I have a great community with my neighbors. We've fought to get drug dealers off our streets, we have community clean-ups, we fight for our schools (Beers and Winston), and we work hard to improve our quality of life. In addition we work with our neighbors in the north (Deanwood, Capitol View, etc) to create community connections between neighborhoods. We have monthly community dinners at Thai Orchid Kitchen to support a business owned by a Ward 7 residents and to break bread over a meal. We have progressive voices that fight for better bus service and bike infrastructure.
We are not part of your "established singular identity" as Ro points out. However, we have the same concerns about quality of life and we fight like heck for what we believe in.

I don't see it as splitting your neighborhood up. I see it as an opportunity to forge new bonds (while maintaining existing bonds) with the progressive voices in Ward 7. I welcome you with open arms and would love to have new voices in Ward 7's future.
by Veronica O. Davis (Ms V) on May 25, 2011 12:17 pm

The Census and Parenting

2011-05-18T17:03:00.008+01:00

From the wildly famous work by sociologist Annette Lareau, we know that middle-class parents adopt "concerted cultivation" to intensely develop their children's skills/talents, as well as communication and negotiating skills, through hectic schedules of formal activities, while working-class and poor parents use a "natural growth" strategy, which leaves children to play on their own and develop their skills spontaneously and often among extended family. There are benefits and costs to each one. Please see Lareau's book for a more detailed discussion of her research findings, which is also easy to read. From this review (since I am still at Census training and not at home near my books), "according to Lareau, middle-class children are more likely to be argumentative, complain of boredom, demand attention, and have weak ties with siblings and other relatives." The natural growth strategy also has costs because society, especially schools, values the skills learned through concerted cultivation. Concerted cultivation is a new strategy (since I think the late 1960s), which has become a response by parents to deal with the ever increasingly competitive educational and career markets.

The Census data reveals some surprising trends in parenting. I would highly recommend the Census' child well-being report and the even more fascinating tables. For example, see Table D8: Daily Contact: Mealtimes with Child, Characteristics of Families. Overall, 56.5% of parents have dinner daily with their teenagers. Those with lower incomes and especially the lowest incomes are more likely (67.9%) to have dinner daily with their teenagers than those with higher and especially the highest incomes (48.7%). Let me know any other interesting trends you find.

The Census and DC

2011-05-17T15:46:00.013+01:00

I'm in the midst of the three-day Federal Statistics Training, which is *free* and open to everyone. I cannot recommend it enough. The training provides an overview of all the statistics collected by the Census and their statistical tools. (For academics, it might not be ideal because the training focuses on tables and maps, rather than on obtaining large datasets). Here are a few interesting, ad hoc areas in which DC is #1 (or tied for #1):

Percentage of workers who travel to work by public transportation (37.1%).
Percentage of children in poverty (29.4%), tied with Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and New Mexico.
Percentage of those over 65 living in poverty (14.6%), tied with Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, and New Mexico.
Percentage of those over 25 who have an advanced degree (28%)

Other interesting rankings:

DC is #49 in the percentage of children without insurance (2.8%), only Massachusetts is statistically lower on the list (1.4%).
DC is #2 (behind Hawaii) in the median value of owner-occupied homes ($443,700).

You can find many more rankings here.

Potomac Gardens, the Fence, and Power

2011-05-11T23:52:00.000+01:00

This quotation from famous sociologist George Lipsitz in his brand new book How Racism Takes Place made me think of the tense discussions about the fence at Potomac Gardens public housing in Ward 6 (@ 13th and Penn. SE):

People of color do not use drugs with greater frequency than whites, but they are much more likely than whites to be arrested and incarcerated for drug use. Drug enforcement efforts target minority neighborhoods because the lack of political and economic power of people in these neighborhoods means that drug dealers find it easier to serve their diverse clientele who come from areas throughout the region by setting up shop on the street in minority neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are forced to tolerate drug dealing in the same ways that they have to endure toxic hazards, polluting businesses, and other criminal enterprises that wealthier and whiter neighborhoods would find intolerable. The selective policing that allows illegal activities to be shifted to interzones and ghettos inhabited by people of color extends to the policing of individual drug users.

At the recent fence meeting, there were discussions of a "drug market" on one side of the Potomac Gardens and how DC housing authority police had jurisdiction over Potomac Gardens thus creating an interzone between police jurisdictions. At the meeting, one Potomac Gardens resident said that she was just like everyone else in the room; she went to work and put her sons through college; she just didn't have enough money to afford non-public housing. Did she also not have enough political and economic power to get drug dealers out of her housing complex?

Taxes and Opportunity Hoarding

2011-05-09T20:24:00.006+01:00

Just wanted to clarify something: DC has the highest level of income inequality nationwide. DC has levels of income inequality on par with the most unequal nations worldwide, like Brazil and Papua New Guinea.

According to the Census, DC now has the highest Gini index in the US and thus the highest level of income inequality nationwide (.532). The standard measure of income inequality is the Gini index, which varies from 0 to 1, 0 indicating perfect equality where there is a proportional distribution of income; 1 indicates perfect inequality where one person has all the income and no one else has any.
DC also has the most households in the nation making over $200,000 (8.4% of households or 21,194 households).
According to the Census, in DC at least in 2006, the share of income going to the poorest 20% of the population was by far the lowest in the country (1.9% as opposed to the national 3.4%) and by far the highest for the wealthiest 20% (56.3% as opposed to 49.9%).
For DC, the Gini index increased from 1979 (.450), to 1989 (.492), to 1999 (.549), which meant more inequality. We see a slight decrease from 1999, but the current Gini index of .532 is still well above its pre-1990 level.
From the UN data, it seems that this Gini index level is on par with Brazil, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea, countries with the highest levels of inequality in the world.
The majority of countries in the world have lower levels than DC.

Why does DC have the worst income inequality in the nation? We do know that taxes can redistribute income. Taxes to fund public schools, emergency rental assistance, housing vouchers, scholarships, and other forms of income assistance help to diminish income inequality and the effects of income inequality. DC tax rates remain the lowest in the region (see DC FPI chart to the right). Now, those making less than $10,000 are taxed 4% (more than other states). The top tax bracket is $40,001, which is at 8.5% (much lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s). How might this tax structure be a form of opportunity hoarding? What can be done?

Homeless Services in Ward 6

2011-05-08T20:53:00.002+01:00

Here is an attempt at a homeless services map. Let me know other homeless services that you know. Thanks!

View Homeless Services: DC Ward 6 in a larger map

Globalization in my Neighborhood

2011-04-28T12:52:00.009+01:00

Many people are talking about how there is no budget crisis, elites are using a supposed budget crisis to make fundamental cuts in government budgets supported by certain corporate interests. Here, I will not talk about this argument. Instead, I talk about the global trends happening in DC. Sociologists and other social scientists have documented two global trends: 1) the reduction in financial inputs into government budgets since the late 1970s and 2) increasing inequalities both within and between countries (see the work of sociologist Saskia Sassen, on inequalities see the absolutely brilliant work by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic or his video).

In DC, since the late 1970s, there has been a decrease in tax rates and thus a reduction in financial inputs into the city budget. According to a DC Fiscal Policy Institute report, the top DC income tax rate was "reduced from 11 percent to 9.5 percent in the late 1980s, and all tax rates were reduced further after 2000 under the Tax Parity Act." Since that report was written, the top DC income tax rate was further reduced to 8.5%. Property taxes also fell from $1.83 per $100 of assessed value in 1975 to $0.85 now. DC tax rates remain the lowest in the region (see DC FPI chart to the right).

Of course, economic growth could off-set decreasing tax rates. However, the economic recession from December 2007 to June 2009 and the continuing lagging economy has undermined this potential, which means that the DC government is receiving less financial input.

In DC and globally, there has also been increasing inequality. The standard measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 (lowest level of inequality) to 1 (highest level).

According to the Census, DC now has the highest Gini coefficient in the US and thus the highest level of inequality nationwide: .532. We also have the most households in the nation making over $200,000 (8.4% of households or 21,194 households).
According to the Census, in DC at least in 2006, the share of income going to the poorest 20% of the population was by far the lowest in the country (1.9% as opposed to the national 3.4%) and by far the highest for the wealthiest 20% (56.3% as opposed to 49.9%).
For DC, the Gini index increased from 1979 (.450), to 1989 (.492), to 1999 (.549), which meant more inequality. We see a slight decrease from 1999, but the current Gini index of .532 is still well above its pre-1990 level. From the UN data, it seems that this level might be on par with Brazil, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea, countries with the highest levels of inequality in the world. The majority of countries in the world have lower levels than DC.

The economic crisis only exacerbates these inequalities. The decreasing financial inputs to the DC government budget and the upcoming budget cuts will further increase these inequalities. Reducing tax revenues to the DC government increases the wealth of the wealthiest and decreases the wealth, attained through public education and income assistance, to the poorest, thus expanding inequality. These trends are not inevitable. People create policies, jobs, and so on. What can we do to change these global trends in DC?

Today's Special Election (update)

2011-04-26T17:49:00.004+01:00

Here's an update on the candidates in regards to tax policy. Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells said a few months back (according to the Examiner), "I think the way the budget is structured ... pits the rich against the poor." You can vote until 8pm tonight. Click here for info on where to cast your vote today.

According to the DC Office of the Chief Financial Officer, the top tax bracket starts at $40,001 with a 8.5% tax rate. From various sources, here are the candidates who will not raise taxes "to close a projected fiscal 2012 shortfall of $400 million to $600 million" and thus propose to cut services:

Here are the candidates who seek to rewrite the tax code so that there are more tax brackets (such as a $125,000 tax bracket) in order to avoid cutting services:

Does cutting the budget create jobs in DC? Does cutting the budget provide more money for DC schools? Today's vote means a lot to a lot of people, so vote with and for your neighbors.

Here's info on where to cast your vote today.

Today's Special Election

2011-04-26T11:52:00.009+01:00

From Facebook:

Has anyone received the all-important Sociology in My Neighborhood endorsement in tomorrow's "special" election? Over in the Lola Park neighborhood, some folks consider the SINM endorsement the "invisible primary."

The SIMN endorsement for today's special election isn't really an endorsement. According to the DC Office of the Chief Financial Officer, the top tax bracket starts at $40,001 with a 8.5% tax rate. The Federal poverty line for a family of four is $22,050. The DC government's level for "very-low income" housing assistance is $43,500 for a family of four. From various sources, here are the candidates who will not raise taxes "to close a projected fiscal 2012 shortfall of $400 million to $600 million" and thus propose to cut services:

Patrick Mara (no-tax-hike pledge)

Here are the candidates who seek to rewrite the tax code so that there are more tax brackets (such as a $125,000 tax bracket) in order to avoid cutting services:

What is on the table to be cut? According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, the proposed 2012 budget cuts "$130 million from human services and other programs that support low-income residents. Although human service programs make up 26 percent of the locally funded budget, they accounted for 67 percent of the Mayor’s cuts." These cuts are added to the $340 million cuts in human services and other low-income programs since 2008. With over 9% unemployment in Ward 6 and over 20% unemployment in Ward 7, these services, as well as jobs programs and education funds, are needed now more than ever. As of Feb. 28, 2011, 12,000 city youth have already applied for jobs through DC's summer job program, and there are only 12,000 positions. Could other kinds of innovative jobs programs (that offer real jobs) be created in DC? Or do they already exist? Do lower income taxes on those making $40,001+ create jobs in DC?

Today's vote means a lot to a lot of people, so vote with and for your neighbors.

Here's info on where to cast your vote today.

Two Thoughts about Inequality from a Busy Sociologist

2011-04-26T03:57:00.007+01:00

A sociologist's letter to the New Yorker editor about an article by Paul Tough on a San Francisco clinic run by Nadine Burke:

"Tough quotes Nadine Burke as saying that "in many cases, what looks like a social situation is actually a neurochemical situation." But, at its origins, the case is the opposite: Burke's patients presenting neurochemical problems, such as anxiety and depression, initially suffered from social problems, such as impoverished, violent, or otherwise toxic family and community situations. These neurochemical responses are the symptom, and what we need to attack is the disease -- social disparity. Disparities are characteristic of a society, not an individual. If these disparities are "treated" through social policies that reduce inequalities or, at least, their negative consequences (lack of access to a secure environment, nourishing food, health care, quality housing and neighborhoods, decent jobs, and time for family and leisure), then whole populations benefit, rather than just the few lucky individuals who land in Burke's clinic. The United States ranks highest in social inequality compared with other advanced countries, and highest in health disparities as well." Deena White, Professor, Dept of Sociology, U. Montreal.

***
Post Q: Did it take a lot of extra money to help the red zone (areas in Montgomery County worse off economically and academically)?

Jerry Dean Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County schools: Just a couple thousand dollars a student. It's a 10 to 15 percent difference. If I've got to pay 10 to 15 percent extra and get a similar or close-to-similar outcome, I'd keep investing...We set the highest scores in the history of the district. The highest SAT scores. The highest graduation rates. The highest college attendance and college graduation rates -- and we have the evidence to prove that.

***
Students pay $34,465 to attend St. Albans, while the DC Government will pay $8,770 in 2012 to educate each student. What if a couple thousand dollars per public school student could reduce the achievement gap? Does St. Albans have an achievement gap?

A Nation of Homeowners?

2011-04-22T12:11:00.014+01:00

Last night, outside under the stars, I was the beneficiary of the company of fascinating conversationalists. Our conversation was wide ranging, but one topic we discussed was affordable housing. While there is great discussion about the benefits and costs of home ownership, home ownership is out of the question for those with low salaries. Nationwide, one needs a $61,732 salary to be able to buy a house. Looking at the national median household income, 50% of US households make below $50,221 and 50% of US households make above this amount. In general (disregarding regional house price differences, generational differences, etc.), home ownership is not possible for 50% of US households.

Based on a completely unverifiable online calculator, I found out that to buy a house at the Ward 6 median sale price ($535,000, 50% of the houses sold at prices below this, 50% sold at prices above this) one would have to have a $168,000 salary. The data on jobs is from another online service, so who know how accurate it is, but you get a general view of salaries. (I don't know why NeighborhoodInfo reports average household income and not median.) No matter the calculation, home ownership is out of the question for those with such full-time jobs as receptionist, home health aide, and so on, as well as for the unemployed (DC's 10% unemployment rate, Ward 6's 9.4%, and Ward 7's 20.7%).

Nationwide

Median Household Income (2009)	$50,221
Annual Income Needed to Buy House (2008)	$61,732
Hourly Wage Needed for 2-Bed. Rental	$ 17.85
Home Ownership Rate (2009)	67%

Ward 6

Avg Household Income (2005-9)	$120,526
Median House Sale Price (2010)	$535,000
Estimated Income Required for Median House	$168,000?
Home Ownership Rate (2009)	47%

Full-Time Salaries of Selected DC Jobs

Hair Dresser	$26,000
Line Cook	$26,000
Security Guard (unarmed)	$27,000
Cashier	$28,000
Home Health Aide	$29,000
Receptionist	$34,000
School Bus Driver	$36,000
Auto Mechanic	$37,000
Administrative Asst.	$41,000
Paralegal	$54,000
Police Officer	$55,000
University Professor	$64,000
Lawyer	$104,000
DC Council Member (part-time)	$130,538
Chief Executive (national)	$167,280
Surgeon (national)	$219,770
Transocean Pres. (2010)	$1.1 million

OK, so the Transocean president is not a DC resident, but it is just there for comparison. If people wish that we were a nation of homeowners, what might we do to realize this? Or is home ownership the wrong goal?

Delays and Academic Life

2011-04-10T14:13:00.014+01:00

The past three days George Mason University has hosted the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies. What a glorious three days in which which we learned about the 20th anniversary celebrations of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the sublime Soviet director Andrey Tarkovsky, transnational Baptist communities moving between Moldova and the US, new forms of Russian grammar, the lives of Russian and Yugoslav dissident exiles in the US, and so on. The conference is mainly a venue for we professors to expand our own knowledge and train graduate students. Sunday is now devoted to class prep for Monday's classes. Then the week is full of lecturing, grading, guiding our students as they write their research papers and finish their theses, attending lectures by visiting professors, honoring our most successful students with their families in ceremonies, hosting visiting graduate students, evaluating grant proposals, applying for grants, writing and sending off articles -- two in my case -- to journals, evaluating articles for journals, writing letters of recommendation, talking about developing new research centers, generally running our departments, university, and professions, and, in a couple of weeks, graduating our students and sending them off into the world. Professors may appear absent minded -- the Post very ignorantly wrote that someone "looks like a college professor lulled into a kind of zen complacency by the anesthetic of tenure" -- but this is because we are multi-tasking madly. I have never seen a professor not racing around trying to keep up with an ever expanding number of tasks. Some tasks we take on because we have to, while others we take on because we love our research, we believe in our universities' missions, and we are dedicated to our students. We also spend much of our lives in multiple time periods and in far away places. I have spent the last year "living" in the 1920s in Berlin and Vienna, then moving around the 1970s in Budapest, Belgrade, and the US, when not teaching about Tanzania in the 19th century or the Philippines today. Completely overwhelming and utterly sublime work. Take-away point: my next posting will be a bit delayed.

The Destruction of Authenticity since the 1980s (continued)

2011-04-01T16:37:00.023+01:00

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by sociologist Sharon Zukin is a must read and a fascinating, enjoyable book. She writes as a devoted New Yorker, exploring community gardens, Latino pupusa vendors, Harlem, IKEA, cafes, farmers' markets, and public spaces, all relevant to debate here in Ward 6.

Much of the debate about DC development is structured by three unhelpful dichotomies: 1) density vs. historic preservation/NIMBYism, 2) change is inevitable vs. nostalgia for the past, and 3) inhuman, modernist urban renewal (à la Robert Moses, left photo) vs. the nurturing of urban neighborhoods (à la Jane Jacobs, right photo). These dichotomies, as with most, obscure significant trends and urgent debates. My post "When is Density just the Density of the Wealthy?" discusses the first dichotomy. In her discussion of the second and third, which I describe below, Zukin demonstrates her amazing observational powers.

After the Second World War, Robert Moses came to represent the powerful urban planner, who bulldozed the past and recreated the city (and the suburb) for the car building new bridges, public housing projects, and highways. By the 1950s, communities resisted this demolishing "urban renewal." In 1955, the Capitol Hill Restoration Society began its fight against plans to destroy row houses to make way for highways, large government office buildings, etc. Jane Jacobs represented this resistance and the desire to create real, authentic community in opposition to faceless development. Zukin documents how the dichotomy of Moses vs. Jacobs no longer applies because developers and government officials have now fused Moses' corporate/government city with Jacob's urban village.

Zukin does a wonderful job criticizing the narrowness of our term "gentrification" because it does not capture the collective investment at stake. Not only developers, but even more importantly members of community organizations, public housing leaders, new immigrants, artists, hipsters, community gardeners, and so on have turned sometimes dangerous, crime-ridden areas neglected by any investment ("planned shrinkage") into places where many people now want to live. And this is the problem.

Worldwide, cities and developers have realized that they can attract new businesses, tourist dollars, developer investment, the wealthy's extra income, and so on by creating neighborhoods that people like to visit and live in. The Washington City Paper just had a glowing article on the benefits of developers creating such neighborhoods. DC officials, developers, and businesses work together to brand and develop such new neighborhoods or, for example, the Capitol Hill Historic District and "make markets" that draw, hopefully, large corporate investments. All these cities are in competition with each other, desperately trying new strategies to appear really different and unique, when, in fact, they are becoming more and more the same. Cities are becoming more homogenous with their food trucks, similar restaurant scenes, quirky parades and festivals, screen on the green, and statues of donkeys/elephants/other city-brand mascots. In the end, "upscale development triumphs over authenticity," a corporate city has been built around the core of an urban village.

We consumers are part of this too because we seek neighborhoods that seem authentic to us -- with dive bars, quirky cafes, high-end restaurants, sleek lounges, great bookstores, underground art spaces, and so on. When identities are unstable, we turn to authenticity, which "differentiates a person, a product, or a group from its competitors; it confers an aura of moral superiority, a strategic advantage that each can use to its own benefit." Some people's authenticity is recognized as acceptable or more profitable and changes the neighborhood by driving up rents and driving out check-cashing stores, fish-fry restaurants, cheap diners, and mom-and-pop stores to be replaced by "a cultural climate where older, poorer residents fell unwelcome, if not downright threatened." Thus, city officials, developers, corporate businesses, and the creative classes have used authenticity to create a city that many of us might not want to inhabit.

Zukin is not a pessimist. She sees our desire for authenticity as a great resource. We must go beyond the old Moses/Jacobs and all the other dichotomies. Zukin argues that we should preserve not only historic buildings but also historic, diverse communities. DC's median household income is $58,553 (2008), which means that 50% of District residents make below $58,533. This means that most DC residents cannot afford the upscale communities being created. How might we think more broadly about authenticity to include all residents' right to the city? Zukin suggests "limits on rent increases, government-backed mortgage guarantees for store owners," low commercial rents, "special privileges for start-up businesses and young apprentices that will maintain crafts and trades, street vending, and even gardening." To my mind, we should also not allow all the energy that we have put into creating a community we want to live in be privatized, corporatized, homogenized, and up-scaled.

The Destruction of Authenticity since the 1980s

2011-04-01T12:57:00.002+01:00

Brooklyn College sociology professor and wildly famous urban sociologist Sharon Zukin made these observations about NYC in her most recent book:

But the city's historic diversity of uses, local specializations, small stores, and cheek-by-jowl checkerboard of rich people, poor people, and people broadly in the middle has been submerged by a tidal wave of new luxury apartments and chain stores. Global investment firms have bought thousands of low-cost apartment houses and prepare to raise the rent or sell them as condos, driving out older and poorer tenants. The fertile urban terroir of cultural creation is being destroyed by the conspicuous displays of wealth and power typical of private developers and public officials who build for the rich and hope benefits will trickle down to the poor, by the promotions of the media who translate neighborhood identity into a brand, and by the tastes of new urban middle classes who are initially attracted to this identity but ultimately destroy it. These forces of redevelopment have smoothed the uneven layers of grit and glamour, swept away traces of contentious history, cast doubt on the idea that poor people have a right to live and work here too -- all that had made the city authentic.

Her view of authenticity is that it has two mechanisms -- the protection what is seen as "original" (think historic preservation) and continual cultural innovation -- that are in tension, but are also in tension with (and used by) the homogenizing forces of redevelopment that we see in all cities today. The 1980s are a particularly important starting point for these homogenizing forces.

Ward 6 in the 2010 Census

2011-03-31T20:08:00.009+01:00

NeighborhoodInfo has posted the new data from the 2010 Census. It's really easy to look at the changes by census tract, ANC, zip code, ward, whole city, etc. Since they have the ward-level data, I decided to compare the change in two census tracts. Tract 71 is east of 11th below Pennsylvania Avenue. Tract 67 is just below Lincoln Park to Pennsylvania Avenue. These census tracts are about just a couple of blocks away from each other, but on opposite sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Poorest by income: Tract 71

	Tract 71	DC Avg	Low	High
Population, 1980	3,279	3,395	49	8,188
Population, 1990	2,880	3,228	42	7,767
Population, 2000	2,780	3,043	149	7,278
Population, 2010	2,911	3,201	171	7,976
% children, 1980	32	22	0.0	46
% children, 1990	30	19	0.0	43
% children, 2000	36	20	0.0	51
% children, 2010	21	17	0.0	43

Richest by Income: Tract 67

	Tract 67	DC Avg	Low	High
Population, 1980	3,744	3,395	49	8,188
Population, 1990	3,480	3,228	42	7,767
Population, 2000	3,543	3,043	149	7,278
Population, 2010	3,775	3,201	171	7,976
% children, 1980	14	22	0.0	46
% children, 1990	11	19	0.0	43
% children, 2000	10.0	20	0.0	51
% children, 2010	13	17	0.0	43

Here we can see that, after the significant decline in population in the 1980s, the population has rebounded in Tract 67 and remained steady in Tract 71. There was a significant drop in the percentage of children in Tract 71 during the 2000s.

For the tables below, the changes in racial composition are quite dramatic. The largest changes were in Tract 71, which cannot be explained by population growth (131 new people in 2010). The comparisons with census tracts in the rest of the city (Low/High) are also illuminating.

Poorest by income: Tract 71

	Tract 71	DC Avg	Low	High
% black non-Hispanic, 1990	86	65	0.0	100
% black non-Hispanic, 2000	83	61	1.4	100
% black non-Hispanic, 2010	59	51	2.4	98
% white non-Hispanic, 1990	10	27	0.0	93
% white non-Hispanic, 2000	10	28	0.0	94
% white non-Hispanic, 2010	31	35	0.0	87
% Hispanic, 1990	1.4	5.2	0.0	44
% Hispanic, 2000	5.0	7.9	0.0	51
% Hispanic, 2010	5.4	9.1	0.2	43
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 1990	1.0	1.8	0.0	66
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 2000	0.8	3.0	0.0	40
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 2010	3.5	4.2	0.0	34

Richest by Income: Tract 67

	Tract 67	DC Avg	Low	High
% black non-Hispanic, 1990	30	65	0.0	100
% black non-Hispanic, 2000	22	61	1.4	100
% black non-Hispanic, 2010	13	51	2.4	98
% white non-Hispanic, 1990	67	27	0.0	93
% white non-Hispanic, 2000	70	28	0.0	94
% white non-Hispanic, 2010	79	35	0.0	87
% Hispanic, 1990	0.9	5.2	0.0	44
% Hispanic, 2000	4.7	7.9	0.0	51
% Hispanic, 2010	3.9	9.1	0.2	43
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 1990	2.0	1.8	0.0	66
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 2000	2.9	3.0	0.0	40
% Asian/P.I. non-Hispanic, 2010	4.2	4.2	0.0	34

DC 2010 Census Data available Today

2011-03-24T12:16:00.004Z

The Census Bureau has announced that it will release the full data set today around 2pm (EDT). It will be available via FTP download. Within 24 hours after release, the data will be posted on the Census Bureau's new American FactFinder site. The data will include summaries of population totals, as well as data on race, Hispanic origin and voting age for multiple geographies within the state, such as census blocks, tracts, voting districts, cities, counties and school districts.

What Near SE-SW can teach Ward 6: Hine Jr. High

2011-03-18T13:42:00.009Z

On March 5th, I attended the Near SE-SW Community Summit organized by the Near SE-SW Community Benefits Coordinating Council (CBCC) with the help of DC-based AmericaSpeaks and LISC. The summit was open to everyone in ANC 6D (others were welcomed too) with the goal of figuring out the community priorities of residents in order to better inform ANC 6D policies, especially given the extensive development going on in the area. This a photo was taken by Tommy Wells, who visited the meeting and is a great supporter of the Community Benefits Agreement movement (discussed below). It was news to me that such citizen summits happened a lot when Anthony Williams was mayor, but seemed to disappear with Adrian Fenty.

It was an extremely interesting process. We were assigned to a table, where we introduced ourselves and got to use our "clickers," devices that allowed us to personally vote. Immediately, we used the clickers to get a sense of the demographics in the room, which showed a good representation of young/old, long-term residents/new residents, and a variety of races (1% Asian/Pacific Islander, 33% Black/African-American, 4% Hispanic/Latino, 1% Native American, 54% White/Caucasian, 6% other) though it wasn't a perfect reflection of the area population. (The summary report has the demographics, goals, findings, and much more).

At our tables, we talked about which topic area we wanted to focus on that day:

Workforce Development/Jobs/Community Centers
Housing Diversity and Affordability
Neighborhood Oriented Retail and Services
Youth-Education and Services
Environmental Concerns

The rest of Ward 6 could benefit from such community summits because we could get a sense of residents' priorities. The process took four (very interesting) hours, but I felt that we did not completely clarify the priorities. The summit is considered a step towards a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which would help the ANC to negotiate better and more responsibly with developers, the DC government, and other stakeholders because the ANC would know the actual priorities of constituents. I was concerned that developers could use these CBAs to legitimate all sorts of projects not in the spirit of the CBAs. CBAs are a nationwide movement. Today's article in the Washington Business Journal shows that CBAs are already a big topic of discussion across DC. In spite of some concerns, I found the summit a very interesting and useful process.

Wouldn't it be great to have a community summit in the Eastern Market area (to talk about Hine, etc)?

Whatever It Takes, Harlem Children's Zone, Ward 6

2011-03-16T16:13:00.012Z

Several of my friends, along with thousands of people across the nation, have been very excitedly reading Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America. From reader reviews, the book has evoked a great deal of hope about improving education and ending poverty in the United States. Geoffrey Canada, along with Michelle Rhee, are the stars of Waiting for Superman. The US Department of Education has funded Promise Neighborhoods, based on Canada's ideas, with one-year grants, including a Cesar Chavez Public Policy Charter High School initiative in Ward 7. While it is wonderful that Geoffrey Canada seeks to expand opportunity to poor children across the United States, does his model actually expand opportunity?

The New York Times review of the book presents Canada's project:

...Canada “believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child’s life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support.” Its “conveyor belt” begins when expectant parents learn about safety gates and mothers of toddlers learn to turn supermarkets into learning labs. Prekindergartners were enrolled for 10 hours a day, with an intensive focus on language, including French vocabulary. Canada’s high school, middle school and two elementary schools — all charters — can’t educate all the children in the zone; those left out can still attend computer workshops, fitness classes or college prep. Canada isn’t satisfied with propelling selected children to a better life; his goal is to “contaminate”the entire culture of Harlem with aspirational values, disciplined self-improvement and the cognitive tools to do better than those who came before.

Immediately as I started reading, I noticed several contradictory arguments. First, the book presents the parents as not knowing how to raise their children, or at least not in middle-class ways, which incorrectly blames the parents for the academic failure of their children. The book opens in a lottery for spots in Canada's new Promise Academy. 359 families had applied to have their child at the school, "almost twice as many children as the school had room for" (p. 9). The lottery for the spaces is a completely devastating scene with parents desperately hoping that their kids will get in the school. The parents actively sought out a better life for their children, but the program only lets in very few. As Kozol finds, blaming the parents or blaming a "culture of poverty" has "the odd effect of substituting things we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious things like cutting class size" and increasing funding to public schools to create excellent schools (see the Post article on the funding disparities; students pay $34,465 to attend St. Albans, while the DC Government will pay $8,770 in 2012 to educate each student) "that we actually could do right now if we were so inclined" (p. 56).

Second, Canada's "Baby College" trains new parents to nurture their children through reading, negotiation, and positive encouragement, but the Promise Academy instead focused on test scores and discipline, neglecting the rest of the curriculum (much to the dismay of the school's principal). When I talked about the book with my colleague, she immediately said, take a look at Jonathan Kozol and at (U. Pennsylvania sociologist) Annette Lareau.

In his The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol vividly reveals that public school districts have one method of instruction for poor kids (like Geoffrey Canada's teaching methods) and another one for middle-class kids. In Ward 6, we have numerous racially and class segregated schools (as well as some less segregated ones), such as:

Amidon-Bowen Elementary School: 98% black, 93% free or reduced-price lunch
Eastern High School: 100% black, 81% free or reduced-price lunch
Eliot-Hine Middle School: 98% black, 90% free or reduced-price lunch
J. O. Wilson Elementary School: 96% black, 91% free or reduced-price lunch
Watkins Elementary School: 60% black, 30% white, 3% Asian/Pacific, 2% Hispanic, 29% free or reduced-price lunch

In schools with majority poor black or Hispanic students, Kozol finds rote learning, memorization, pre-scripted teaching lessons, tracking away from college and into menial jobs, and an obsession with discipline: maintaining absolute silence in classrooms, hours of silent standing in line, and, in one school, "Silent lunches had been institute in the cafeteria and, on days when children misbehaved, silent recess had been introduced as well. On those days, the students were obliged to stay indoors and sit in rows and maintain silence on the floor" of the gymnasium (p. 65). Similarly, in Geoffrey Canada's Promise Academy, the teachers continually test the students and enforce SLANT (Sit up, Listen, Ask questions, Nod and Track), with no sign of training for critical thinking, independent thinking and research, or individual creativity often found in middle-class schools and required by universities.

Geoffrey Canada admirably wants to send all children in Harlem to college. Yet, this form of education is not the education of the middle or upper class. The middle and the upper class would not tolerate this form of education for their children. Not only does Jonathan Kozol's book bring to light the "apartheid schooling" in the United States and in Ward 6, but also he lets us hear the voices of the children who want a better life and see that they have been abandoned to schools that lower expectations and assume children are not worthy of a creative, critical, truly educational education.

A sixteen-year-old girl told Kozol, "If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?... I think they'd be relieved." Is this happening in Ward 6?

Potomac Gardens Fire: Donations Needed

2011-03-06T14:10:00.003Z

One of the senior citizen buildings in Potomac Gardens caught on fire Thursday night. The DCist has reported that a 79-year-old resident is in critical condition, a firefighter was injured, several other residents were injured, and 40 residents were displaced but soon should return or have already returned to their homes. However, the residents' furniture, clothing, and belongings have been damaged by fire, smoke, and water. Please help them through a donation. Go to the contributions site: http://donatecapitolhill.org/. Please write "Potomac Gardens / Emergency Fund" in the "dedication" section on the form for online donations. Thank you!

When is Density just the Density of the Wealthy?

2011-03-03T01:12:00.014Z

Urban housing density is great. However, there is density and there is density. The choice is not rentals/density versus NIMBYism/status quo, as Yglesias has presented the problem. The EMMCA blog explained the proposed design of the Hine Jr High site. Here I bring up a different set of issues. Density, even in mixed-income projects, can in actuality become the concentration of wealthy residents.

In the redevelopment of the Capper-Carrollsburg public housing site, there are far fewer rentals and many more single-family homes than before. The financial crisis has stopped the construction of the remaining rentals (321) that would merely replace the original number (707). No matter what you think about redevelopment, density has decreased there.

The developers of Hine Jr High have not stated 1) how many rentals (as opposed to condos) they will have and 2) how many low-income housing units they will have. Rentals matter because they can, though not necessarily, be more affordable than condos. At a meeting, the developers told me that they would have senior low-income housing, but other forms of low-income housing were not discussed. While senior housing can include a variety of income levels, more general low-income housing can be for those with households as high as 80% DC Area Median Income ($82,800). Workforce housing can go to those with 80-115% of DC Area Median Income (between $82,800 and $119,025 household income), while workforce rentals can allocated to those making between $50,000 and $60,000.

Most DC residents are priced out of market-rate units and likely out of any low-income units they build. According to a fall 2010 DC Fiscal Policy Institute report based on Census data,

District-wide, median incomes rose from $56,190 in 2007 to $59,290. However, the most significant income gains were made largely in an area comprising Wards 2, western parts of 6 and the southern half of Ward 1 (defined by the Census as “PUMA 5”). Median household income in this area rose from $60,000 in 2007 to $74,000 in 2009. In other areas of the city, incomes fell or remained stable.

These units would be out of the price range of full-time elementary school teachers ($49,781), LPN nurses ($38,941), security guards ($29,401), and cashiers ($19,757), as well as hourly LPN nurses ($15.72), security guards ($14.13), janitors ($11.57), and cashiers ($9.50) (Housing Policy in the United States 2010), as well as the thousands of interns and researchers who visit Ward 6 every year and single people more generally.

Cities around the world are competing with each other for tourism, businesses, and developer dollars. Cities are also competing to attract well-paid professionals, thus proving attractive environments for, in Richard Florida's words, the creative class, as well as the less-creative-more-well-paid class. We can see the creation of segmented housing markets, in which luxury rentals and condos exist in a fundamentally different market from workforce or low-income housing. As a result, developers have sought to cater to and take advantage of the increasingly well-off by providing more and more luxurious and costly urban residences. This means that the wealthy also need more money to compete for these residences, and thus their lives become more expensive. Without concerted effort, density might just lead to the dispersion of the poor/middle-class and density of the wealthy.

Bus Riding in Ward 6

2011-02-25T20:41:00.007Z

Ward 6 hosts several of the most popular Metrobus routes, including the #1 busiest bus route (90/92/93). From the top 10 busiest bus routes in DC (2010 WMATA Media Guide), I would like to highlight three:

1. 90/92/93 with an average ridership of 13,267 (my favorite bus route)
Runs from Congress Heights/Anacostia Station along 8th and Florida to Adams Morgan/Duke Ellington Bridge

5. 32/36 with an average ridership of 11,943
Runs from Friendship Heights Station along Pennsylvania Ave to Southern Ave/Naylor Rd Station

8. X2 with an average ridership of 11,254
Runs from Minnesota Ave Station along H St NE/NW to Lafayette Sq

Over 13,000 riders a day on the 90/92/93! We also host the busiest Metrorail station: Union Station with 32,745 daily entries. The surprisingly informative 2010 WMATA Media Guide describes some of the major differences between subway and bus passengers. Both share similar distributions of employment and gender. The main differences are the following:

	Bus Riders	Subway Riders
No Household Vehicle	19%	2%
Median Income	$68,110	$103,800
Below $75,000	54%	24%
Black	41%	17%
White	45%	76%
College Degree	56%	83%

Since 19% of bus riders do not have a car in their household (compared with 2% of rail riders), we can see that bus riders tend to be more transit-dependent, though I would guess that certain routes have more transit-dependent riders than others.

On my recent trip on the 90/92/93, I noticed that a lot people got on around N. Capitol St. I asked someone where she was coming from and going to. She said that she was coming from work at one of the hospitals located just to the north, which are Children's Hospital, the VA Medical Center, the National Rehabilitation Hospital, Washington Hospital Center, and Howard University Hospital. She had transferred from another bus and was on her way home over the river. A trip that took her along 8th St/Barracks Row to M St and then a brief hop over the river.

Shock Therapy in Ward 6

2011-02-24T19:55:00.003Z

Breaking up public housing breaks up social networks. Public housing is often dismantled and then rebuilt in a new form with a new name (like Capper-Carrollsburg becoming Capitol Quarter), in the hopes of dismantling the perceived dangerous or dysfunctional social ties that seem to cause crime, poverty, and other social problems. Yet, sociologists have shown that economic, social, and political success requires social ties, what they call "social capital." Building on the research that has shown that most people get their jobs through personal contacts, Stanford University sociologist Mark Granovetter showed that weak ties, not friends or family but acquaintances or friends of friends, help the majority of people get jobs. Low-income groups, in fact, rely on such social connections much more than those with higher incomes and thus, as John Betancur demonstrated in an article published this month, displacement "can seriously disrupt or destroy their systems of support, exchange and reciprocity or social fabrics." The loss of these networks make it more difficult for the poor to find jobs and childcare, as well as have a public voice.

So, with the indiscriminate destruction of social networks (functional and dysfunctional), those with strong social networks can take advantage of the situation. In Eastern Europe after 1989, many experts called for shock therapy to wipe away the remnants of the past system. While these countries gained democratically, all their economies collapsed. In the wreckage, foreign companies and well-connected individuals (like Russia's oligarchs) could buy companies inexpensively.

There is no question that the residents of public housing were complaining about the state of their housing. Except in the case of the 162 seniors in the senior building and about 25 other families/individuals (of the original 707 families/individuals), the former residents of Capper-Carrollsburg are not benefiting from the major investment being made in the site, after years of neglect. According to Affordable Housing Finance magazine, the redevelopment of Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg as mixed-income housing is using a total of $460 million, combining "12 funding sources to leverage a $36 million HOPE VI grant." The very-low-income residents have been dispersed, diminishing their social capital, and likely remain isolated and in poverty in their new neighborhoods (see the research of Goertz and Chapple). The residents knew that this would happen and tried to stop their displacement from happening, while still asking the city to invest in and improve their community. As I said in a previous post, one could say that the "failure" of public housing was a failure of government, businesses, or other entities to invest in poor areas and the "success" of mixed-income housing was the result of massive investment in these areas.

Who is benefiting from this redevelopment? Who has been allowed to maintain and strengthen their social networks?