Day: November 16, 2009

…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.