Tag: Gentrification

CDC comes up with something dumb

(Hattip to Frozen Tropics)
The CDC (Center for Disease Control), which I would like to trust for their timely health information has put something out that erodes that trust. Eroded, because Health Effects of Gentrification, is stupid.
I don’t deny that displacement because of neighborhood demographic changes is stressful and stress impacts ones health. According to the CDC:

These special populations are at increased risk for the negative consequences of gentrification. Studies indicate that vulnerable populations typically have shorter life expectancy; higher cancer rates; more birth defects; greater infant mortality; and higher incidence of asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. In addition, increasing evidence shows that these populations have an unequal share of residential exposure to hazardous substances such as lead paint.

So is the CDC saying that gentrification, not poverty and poor housing is the cause of shorter life expectancy and asthma? Are all those new middle class residents moving in and fixing up vacant and run down houses polluting the air with lead paint? Is that what the CDC is saying? Because in poor neighborhoods in no danger of gentrification or reinvestment are healthy, lead free, utopias where the Popeye’s serve low fat vitamin rich meals and the corner mart has fresh fruit and lettuces. Oh wait, no. Those poorer neighborhoods in the other part of the District (think outside of NW) aren’t healthier because there is little to no gentrification there.
I see there was nothing for ‘Health Effects of Poverty’ because gentrification is a nice way to distract attention away from chronically poor neighborhoods.

Gentrification of Sesame Street

Sesame Street gentrified and I blame Elmo. Others blame Elmo as well, showing how this annoyingly voiced red hyper monster destroyed SS single-handedly by taking up a huge portion of screen time.
When I was a kid, we had two channels, NBC and PBS. So after I got home and Mom finished watching Days of Our Lives, I turned the channel to the PBS station to watch Sesame Street. People walked along, bumped into each other, started conversations, or ventured over to the independently owned shop “Mr. Hooper’s” and hung out, as people do here. Kim Wee as Mr. Hooper, because that’s the only small shop I hang out at, if I am hanging out anywhere. But unlike here, SS isn’t as trashy. We have more Oscars, and more guys in the alley (but unlike the SS characters they aren’t trying to give us a good deal on the letter “A”).

Turnover part 2

This map is of houses sold on these few blocks between 1999 and this year below $500K. There are still plenty of red stars representing sales. The blue are more than likely houses that sold prior to 1999, or the odd property selling at $500K and above. Since I did throw in the more than $500K on the map (not shown) it seems there were a few but not many. Comparing the map from Turnover part 1 to this one, a majority of the 1999-2009 sales were less than 1/2 a mil.
Yet the thing that I find really interesting is not so much the amount houses finally sell for, but the fact there are so many houses that change hands in a 10 year period. It seems to reflect the transient nature of DC or the investor fueled real estate boom of the 2000s.
Let’s say, for the most part, that the blue dots represents long timer residents and the red stars newer residents. It isn’t perfect, as the blue dots could be rentals that turn over every couple of years but never sold, and red stars rentals bought by new investors that remain rentals. On my own block one of the red stars was a rental home that the renters later bought from the owner. But anyway let’s say those red stars represent new blood on the block, in some spots, except that part of the 100 block of P, there is a fair amount of turnover.
If you get on the DC gov website and play with the DC Atlas for Real Property and compare and contrast with other parts of the city regarding final sale prices (which sometimes isn’t the listing price) and turn over, it’s interesting.

Turnover part 1

I had this sitting in my draft folder. It is from November 18, 2009. Instead of deleting it I’m going to publish it, fourteen years later (6/15/2023).

This was stolen off of the DC government’s DC Atlas website and what it shows are houses sold between Jan 1, 1999 and yesterday (11/18/2009). More accurately it shows houses sold for more than $1 and below a billion. I had to throw that in when it showed every house with a red star and I discovered the database had some quirky dates of homes being bought by their longtime owners for 0.00, and had to find a way to exclude that misinformation.
Each red star represents a property sale, that’s it. However, one can make guesses that a majority of those sales resulted in some turn over.

Turnover part 1

This was originally posted in 2009. I am revisiting some older posts and reposting them with commentary. This is just a test run.

Re-reading this I see that I did not understand some quirks of real estate, such as when you wind up transferring a property to yourself. This happened to me when I finally got my spouse on the deed. For some odd reason I had to transfer it to myself too.

Simply said, there is turn over. There was plenty of owner turnover, or it appeared so, in the wild years of early gentrification between 1999 and 2009.

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This was stolen off of the DC government’s DC Atlas website and what it shows are houses sold between Jan 1, 1999 and yesterday (Nov 17, 2009). More accurately it shows houses sold for more than $1 and below a billion. I had to throw that in when it showed every house with a red star and I discovered the database had some quirky dates of homes being bought by their longtime owners for 0.00, and had to find a way to exclude that misinformation.
Each red star represents a property sale, that’s it. However, one can make guesses that a majority of those sales resulted in some turn over.

“No one wants to live near poor people”

…isn’t exactly a correct comment, but I have seen it a couple of times on the web regarding mixed income housing and gentrification. I’m mean we’re living in Shaw not Woodly Park or Chevy Chase. I have a hard time imagining that people who bought housing, oh east of 9th Street, were caught completely off guard by the subsidized housing that dots the neighborhood. Than again, maybe some were.
I think of Shaw as economically diverse. You have neighbors in longtime poverty and short term (young, just starting out, etc) poverty, the elderly and disabled on fixed incomes, and others whose incomes wax and wane depending on clients, contracts, sales, rentals, or what have you. But I don’t think it is so much a neighbor’s poverty is as it is their dysfunction. Grad students are broke, but hardly anyone is up in arms about graduate family housing. Plain college students can be broke also (depending on their sources of support) but neighbors do tend to oppose their housing as that population can be a bit too rambunctious and loud, not because they may or may not have money (see Catholic U area for examples of such conflicts).
Shaw’s diversity, economic, racial, etc., is a strength and a challenge. Crime is a huge challenge, so are the blocks of concentrated poverty. In mixed income areas we learn from each other. The more middle class residents learn about the various programs for neighbors in need, the more they can train themselves to be supportive of programs that work and harshly critical of ones that fail and are nothing but fronts for poverty pimps. The more I learn about Bread for the City (CFC# 61733), and N Street Village (CFC# 90946) the more I am impressed by their work and efforts.
But let’s wander back to the question of mixed income housing and if it is possible, would non-poor people be willing to live next to poor people. Well in Shaw, we already do, in townhomes. I have a hard time telling, as it is from causal observation over the years, but the Washington Apartments, along 7th and 6th Avenues, appears to be slowly becoming more racially diverse. As far as I know they aren’t subsidized housing, but I do get the sense that those apartments are economically diverse. Feel free to correct me if I’m totally off base.

Economic identity

A comment I got here annoyed me, in the same way that being called white annoys me. I’m an African American, but a pale one, so the attack on my identity, as I see it, irks me. Same thing with the discussions of gentrification and neighborhood change, there is a string of thought that fails to see a neighborhood’s residents in terms of grades of economic diversity. Instead it is the rich, that being anyone not in subsidized housing or elderly on a fixed income, and poor, and very little in between.
Sometime back I got an inquiry from a journalism student, who asked about neighbors couching it it terms of poor neighbors vs rich ones. The more I learn about my neighbors the more I know what I don’t know about them. I can guess whose house is a Section 8, whose retired and on a fixed income, but knowing if someone is on food stamps or other forms of state assistance, I don’t know and really it isn’t any of my business. Same thing for other neighbors who have jobs and careers, So-in-So works for the government, Theotherguy works as IT, She is a freelance graphics artist, Blahblah is an Asst. Director at a non-profit, and Whatshername does something (I’m not sure what) at Pepco. Are these people rich? Wealthy? Not likely. But they are more apt to be ‘wealthier’ or ‘richer’ than neighbors who are unskilled workers or persons starting out in their careers or others for whom employment is problematic. Anywhere else in America So-in-So, Theotherguy and the rest are just middle class people living on a cul-de-sac, here, we become fabulously wealthy.
The money to buy our homes comes from savings, sometimes family members, recently deceased grandparents, and raiding the old 401K for the deposit. The renovation money from 2nd mortgages, building loans, family, savings and once again raiding that 401K. We turn to same resources the rest of middle class America does. Because we’re next door or down the street from people whose economic state is more dire or more obviously distressed, the side by side comparison makes it look like two extremes. Rich and poor.

Gentrification Reducing Downward Mobility?

I really wish the findings of a Pew Trust report (PDF) regarding economic mobility was a little clearer. The best I could figure, before they threw in the math equation, which totally lost me, is that when a neighborhood decreases poverty a child’s chance of heading downward as he/she grows up decreases. Yeah, there are a lot of negatives, unfortunately it isn’t clear when you make the sentence positive that there is the data to back it up. A positive sentence would be that when a neighborhood becomes richer, or parents move into a neighborhood with less than 10-20% poverty, their children will grow up to become successful adults who make more money than their parents. What was clear was a child growing up in a poorer neighborhood where poverty was 20% or more is more likely to become poorer.
I was reading the report trying to figure out if gentrification, or the lessening of the rate of poverty in a neighborhood, had any positive for poor children who remain in the neighborhood. The best I can figure from the report is that it doesn’t hurt. Apparently there weren’t enough families in the study group who moved from poor neighborhoods to neighborhoods with less than 10% poverty whose children became upwardly mobile adults.

How I know things are better: cars

One morning I observed a city owned tow truck moving a car on New Jersey Avenue and I was reminded of a question. The question was asked in relation to gentrification and changes in the neighborhood, and it was “what is better?” Because I say that things are getting better and one way I know the neighborhood has gotten better is with parking enforcement.
There was a time when cars would get dumped on our street and they would sit. For days and weeks. While they sat, they attracted trash that would collect under the tires. We STRONGLY suspected that our friendly neighborhood drug dealers used the cars to stash drugs. Then there were the cars that were stolen, some with broken windows.
Well as good citizens we’d call up the city and ask for the cars to go away and early on it seemed like we were ignored. Because I remember there was a car parked near or under the poo-poo tree and I reported it, several times. And it did not go away for over a month. I’d report it, wait a few days or a week and report it again. I pondered paying a tow truck to make it go away and ditch it in Maryland. But it eventually went away, but it wasn’t the only car that was left unmoved.
Now, the city actually enforces the law. They ticket, a new thing that they started a few years ago. Also in the last few years they boot cars. I credit this to the demographic changes in the neighborhood with more active voters who try to hold the city accountable and demand decent city services. It is not that there weren’t any politically or civicly active people here before, it’s just that there are now more of them, which helps with burn out.

Found on the Street- Gentrification Rant

I’m going to make this quick. I found an interesting flier on Bates Street yesterday. It appears someone decided to print out some of their blog posts on gentrification and leave them on the doorsteps of several Bates residents.
I may or may not talk about this more, but the thing that gets me is the tortured logic regarding race and gentrification, that would define Asian-Americans as White. And it doesn’t even go into the main elements of gentrification, just homelessness and definitions of other non-black ethnic groups as white. Gah, if you’re going to print something out and pass it out, stay on topic. That’s just my suggestion.