Why Is This City Different?

From the Washington Post -

Gentrification in D.C. means widespread displacement, study finds

By

Marissa J. Lang 

April 26, 2019 at 8:05 a.m. EDT

 

 

In most American cities, gentrification has not pushed low-income residents out of the city they call home, according to a study.

But Washington is not most cities.

In the District, low-income residents are being pushed out of neighborhoods at some of the highest rates in the country, according to the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, which sought to track demographic and economic changes in neighborhoods in the 50 largest U.S. cities from 2000 to 2016.

“For all the talk of gentrification happening in cities all over the country, what we found is that it really isn’t,” said Myron Orfield, director of the institute, founded at the University of Minnesota law school to investigate growing social and economic disparities in American cities. “Washington is one of the few places in the country where real displacement is actually occurring. It’s quite rare.”

More than 38 percent of District residents, including about 35 percent of low-income residents, live in census tracts — geographic areas smaller than Zip codes that contain a few thousand residents — that are growing economically. But low-income people who live in those areas are at the greatest risk of displacement, the report says.

The study, conducted over several months and released April 10, comes as gentrification and its consequences are being discussed with renewed urgency in the nation’s capital.

Earlier this month, two neighborhood disputes revealed deep divisions in areas undergoing rapid demographic change. In one incident, a noise complaint briefly silenced the hallmark go-go music of an electronics store in Shaw, while in the other, Howard University students asked their new neighbors to stop treating their campus like a public park.

Neither incident occurred in the area of the District where, according to the study, the most intense displacement has been happening: Ward 6.

According to researchers, Ward 6 — which includes Capitol Hill, Navy Yard, the Southwest Waterfront and parts of downtown — has had some of the most dramatic changes in the District.

In portions of the Kingman Park and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, nearly 75 percent of the low-income populations have vanished, census information shows. In the Navy Yard neighborhood, about 77 percent of residents were identified as low income in 2000. Sixteen years later, that population dropped to 21 percent.

Most of the people pushed out of these economic hot spots are black and low income, according to the data. The number of District families headed by single mothers or those without a college degree also has declined.

“Since 2000, the same neighborhoods have seen overall population growth of 19 percent, and white population growth of a staggering 202 percent,” researchers wrote. “A huge swath of the city is experiencing gentrification and displacement, stretching from Logan Circle to Petworth, and including neighborhoods like Shaw and Columbia Heights.”

In places such as the Shaw neighborhood, where the go-go music controversy played out, low-income populations have dropped by as much as 57 percent.

The study divided neighborhoods into categories based on who is moving in and who is moving out:

●Areas experiencing “growth” were defined as regions that were economically expanding while also increasing their number of low-income residents.

●Those experiencing “low-income displacement” — like District neighborhoods — were losing low-income people while growing economically.

 

●Areas experiencing “low-income concentration” were experiencing an economic decline and an uptick in low-income residents.

Cities struggling with “abandonment” were losing low-income people and suffering economic decline.

“There are organizations spending millions of dollars fighting gentrification in cities and neighborhoods that aren’t actually seeing any displacement,” Orfield said of the national data. “We wanted to build this database to show people where that’s actually happening.”

Pockets of the District have had an increase in low-income residents, but those areas are what researchers call low-income concentration zones because they are not also experiencing economic growth, according to the study.

Several of these zones are east of the Anacostia River, in Wards 7 and 8, where poor areas appear to be getting poorer, researchers said. In neighborhoods such as Good Hope and parts of Greenway, low-income populations have grown by about 60 percent.

“This may reflect an intensification of racial and economic segregation within the city proper, as individuals displaced from a set of gentrifying neighborhoods are concentrated into a nearby set of declining neighborhoods,” the study says.

Areas outside the District were more prone to this phenomenon, data shows.

About 437,000 residents of the city’s suburbs live in areas where low-income populations have increased by as much as 70 percent since 2000. Those areas simultaneously lost about 30 percent of their white residents, according to the data.

Parts of Prince George’s County were the most likely to experience these demographic changes, researchers said.

“The rents are less affordable for poor people in these declining areas not because the rents are going up,” Orfield said. “It’s because the poor people who live there are increasingly worse off.”

 Los Angeles is the only other U.S. city that comes close to the District’s levels of gentrification, researchers said, and its displacement rates are higher.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-the-district-gentrification-means-widespread-displacement-report-says/2019/04/26/950a0c00-6775-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html

 

Field Trip: Delaware Botanic Gardens

From the Washington Post -

How a soybean field in middle-of-nowhere Delaware became a buzzy botanic garden

By

Adrian Higgins 

September 23, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

 

 

Two years after an army of volunteers installed thousands of little nondescript plant plugs, a two-acre field of perennials and grasses near the Delaware shore has sprouted into a beguiling meadow conceived by the prominent Dutch plant designer Piet Oudolf.

In September, the garden is more a medley of textures and end-of-season earth tones than an explosion of color — that occurred over the summer — but its power and depth are not subdued.

I adore this expression of gardening for loads of reasons: It’s naturalistic, it’s dynamic, it gets more interesting with each passing month of the season. For its maker, it allows countless permutations of plant combos. For the viewer, no matter how seasoned, it provides the thrill of discovering new varieties.

But you can judge for yourself.

The 70,000-plant composition forms the centerpiece of one of the nation’s newest public gardens, the Delaware Botanic Gardens, which opened in the unlikely setting of a former soybean field and creek-side woodland near Dagsboro, Del., a dozen miles west of Bethany Beach.

 

The 37-acre attraction is a work in progress; the meadow and woodland are ready to be enjoyed, and basic infrastructure is in place, but the main visitor center, a central water feature and other key elements have yet to appear. Other design professionals involved in the project include RAS Landscape Architects in Media, Pa., and the San Antonio architects Lake/Flato.

The enterprise is not the product of a wealthy entrepreneur or corporation, driven rather by an eager band of individuals who have tapped into the goodwill of the local business community and other donors in southern Delaware and who found grants from an array of foundations. The land is owned by a conservation trust.

“Every time I think the world is coming to an end, this project breathes new life into me,” says Ray Sander, the garden’s president.

Sander said the goal is to get 30,000 visitors in the first season. Oudolf, who is listening keenly, chimes in: “It’ll get those, but you need a coffee bar. And an espresso machine, not filtered coffee.” Sander is silent, a little nonplussed. The European epicure persists. “And a good croissant.”

The gardening team is small, headed by Brian Trader, late of Longwood Gardens, and relies on a corps of volunteers, many of them Delmarva sun-seekers and retirees who have fled workaday Washington and other cities. Oudolf’s participation has elevated its place in the gardening world, and he said he took on the job, in part, because much of his work has been in creating highly private residential gardens that few people will ever get to see. His public commissions in the states have included the High Line in New York and the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

The Delaware garden, in its layout of paths through rather than around an immersive herbaceous landscape, reminds me of a similarly scaled creation at Durslade Farm in England, where the Oudolf Field is part of the art gallery campus known as Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Oudolf sees major differences in the plant palette between them, but in both cases he has transformed what were once empty farm fields. This gets to a point that transcends even Piet Oudolf and the New Perennial Movement. The fact that a shapeless plot can be turned into a garden with its own form, character and, especially, spirit of place is nothing short of miraculous.

Oudolf picked up on this point, saying that the metamorphosis here is all the starker for its setting. 

The High Line has the context of a vibrant city, as does the Lurie Garden. Delaware Botanic Gardens arises on flat land between a country road and a brackish creek. “It’s in the middle of nowhere,” he says.

Creating so much from nothing gets to the essence and power of garden making. This is why we do it, to create a paradise out of thin air. Dream a space, make it real, and let it speak to us.

What does the Oudolf Meadow have to say? For one, that you don’t have to wait long for a garden of perennials and grasses to reach effective maturity. The vigor of the Delaware garden is fueled by the heat and rainfall of its location. (Last year’s record rain actually caused ponding and the death of some grasses.)

Oudolf’s gardens function on two basic levels. Broadly, they are a canvas of textures, colors and horizontal lines. Closer up, the plants are in a dance with their immediate neighbors. It’s a hoedown that changes with each step, as your viewpoint shifts, and it’s at this level that you see value in September of seemingly “dead” material — that is, the ghostly dark remnants of the yarrow blooms of June, the blackened seed heads of coneflowers or the declining remnants of the architectural eryngium known as rattlesnake master. They convey a moribund beauty that is part of what is known as the fifth season, the period of top-growth decline in early to mid-fall as the perennials retreat into the ground for the winter.

 As much as I love this effect, I thought the garden would have more color than it did in mid-September. But the asters have yet to produce a show, the pink muhly grass is subdued this year and some perennials saw their flower show compressed by what was another abnormally hot summer, Trader explained.

There was still much to get the sap flowing. The mountain mints were magnets for a carnival of lesser-spotted pollinators, the mass planting of switch grass proved an effective hedge, bulky but fine textured, and a gigantic variety of blazing star, Liatris pycnostachya, leaned under the weight of its torchlike seed heads.

More than 300 donors and other supporters gathered Sept. 12 for a dinner marking the opening of the garden. Its limited public hours — Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings through November — reflect its reliance on volunteers. (The website is delawaregardens.org.)

It is fitting that it should open now, toward the replete conclusion of the growing season. The timing shakes up the irrational idea of gardens being for the spring.

 On a hot and clammy day, the slightest breeze causes a ripple of movement through the grasses. The meandering paths lead to a grassy viewing mound and together create 11 discrete beds. The plant beds closer to the barnlike Welcome Center are defined by a matrix of the native grass known as prairie dropseed. The grass is still a couple of years from reaching its full, fine-textured mounds. The distant beds find another organizing grass, two varieties of the little bluestem, upright, dark and destined to become more handsome by October.

For Oudolf, all this is the fruition of a plant world he has been pushing for almost half a century, though each project is unique in its plantings. As he told the filmmaker Thomas Piper in Piper’s documentary of Oudolf’s work, “It’s the journey in your life to find out what real beauty is.”

@adrian_higgins on Twitter

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/how-a-soybean-field-in-middle-of-nowhere-delaware-became-a-buzzy-botanic-garden/2019/09/20/62df5c5a-d8c0-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html

 

Bowser Time!

DC politricks keep on rollin'..........

Big money for the White House and for Congress. Now for D.C. city hall, too?

Close allies of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) have begun amassing large sums of money that could have unprecedented sway over city politics.

They have created a political action committee similar to a federal super PAC, in that it can accept contributions of unlimited size, and are pushing to raise $1 million before the end of the year.

That would be enough to finance the bulk of a mayoral reelection bid three years early, but Ben Soto, treasurer of the PAC and former campaign treasurer for Bowser, says the money will probably be spent long before then, beginning with bolstering her D.C. Council allies on the ballot next year.

“We’re reaching out to folks who are happy with the mayor and who want to support her, and we’ve had a really good response,” Soto said. “We’re doing what we think is best to move the city forward, and it is independent of her.”

How the PAC is being funded, though, is beginning to draw intense criticism for a mayor who was elected by promising a fresh break from the campaign-finance scandal that clouded the tenure of her predecessor.

More than $300,000 has poured into the pro-Bowser PAC, mostly from corporations that either have business before the city or that are actively seeking it, according to campaign disclosures filed last week.

Multiple developers bidding for rights to parcels in the city’s $200 million revitalization of the Southwest Waterfront area, one of the nation’s largest public works projects, have each donated $10,000 or more. So has Phinis Jones, a longtime supporter of Bowser who stands to profit from a development near the mayor’s planned $55 million Washington Wizards’ practice facility in Southeast.

Three men that Bowser has appointed to powerful boards and commissions also have contributed $10,000 each before or after their position confirmations. A fourth has given $2,500, and a fifth is serving as the PAC’s attorney and is paid by the fund.

Health-care companies and their executives have been the most frequent and largest contributors.

Two — a Virginia company and a board member of a health-care nonprofit — have already contributed 10 times the limit allowed to a mayoral campaign of $2,000.

“It’s exceedingly troubling. This is nurturing a lack of reasonable regulation to keep companies from trying to buy government contracts,” said Craig Holman, who lobbies for stricter campaign-finance laws for the nonprofit Public Citizen. “I fully expect the city to run into similar scandals that we saw under the previous mayor: This is on the road to do so.”

Top aides to Bowser and the organizers of the PAC push back strongly on that suggestion, saying there are few similarities between the pro-Bowser PAC and the alleged “shadow campaign” conducted by city health-care contractor Jeffrey Thompson on behalf of the 2010 mayoral campaign of former mayor Vincent C. Gray (D).

“What people were upset about with Vince Gray was that money was given that was not reported,” said Bowser’s chief of staff, John Falcicchio, who is not affiliated with the PAC. “What you have here is an entity that was formed outside the government to promote and expand the mayor’s agenda, and everything they do is reported.”

Bowser cannot legally affect how the PAC spends its money, and it is not affiliated with her office. But she can fundraise for the PAC and has done so twice, appearing at a Dupont Circle steakhouse and an H Street NE restaurant where organizers were soliciting donations.

The PAC spent more than $30,000 on polling this year, Soto said, including questions to gauge the mayor’s popularity.

Under a quirk in a recently revised D.C. elections law, the pro-Bowser PAC can raise unlimited amounts from contributors in nonelection years. Unlike a federal super PAC, the source of all contributions must be publicly disclosed. The existence of the PAC was first reported by WAMU (88.5 FM).

Last week, Soto, the PAC’s treasurer, told The Washington Post that the mayor’s backers were embarking on a fundraising sprint to try to raise $1 million by the end of the year. After that, contributions to the PAC will be limited to $5,000 per person.


In a riff off her campaign slogan last year — a “fresh start” for all of the District’s eight political wards — Soto dubbed the group FreshPAC.

“If there are initiatives that she is taking on that we think are consistent with . . . bringing prosperity to all eight wards, then we’ll help in any way possible,” Soto said.

Among other local contests next year that the PAC could influence will be a race for a full, four-year term for the Ward 8 D.C. Council seat. LaRuby May, a Bowser campaign organizer, won the right to finish the term of the late Marion Barry there last year with the help of more than $100,000 in contributions from Bowser allies.

With the PAC money, May’s connection to Bowser could figure prominently again.
Even before next year, the PAC’s swelling coffers could affect the political dynamics on the council, especially if members think that their votes will be viewed negatively by the mayor and that the considerable resources of the PAC could be thrown behind a challenger.

Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who has sparred most with Bowser as she has attempted to consolidate power in her administration and away from the council and the city’s first elected attorney general, offered a terse response when asked about the PAC. “No comment,” he said.

Soto said it was too soon to disclose who of the six council members up for reelection next year the PAC would back.

But FreshPAC said it will support the “council members who think in the same way” as Bowser, he said. “Or if it’s inconsistent with moving all eight wards forward, their opponent may get our help.”

And there probably will be policy initiatives beyond next year’s council races in which the PAC may become involved, Soto said, including public-relations campaigns.

The concerted effort by Bowser allies to funnel money into the PAC is unique for a mayor in the 40-year history of home rule in the District and a rarity nationwide among big-city mayors.

In Los Angeles and Chicago, super PACs roiled recent mayoral elections with millions in outside spending. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg also worked with federal PACs to further his efforts on gun-control legislation.

Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist, said the pro-Bowser PAC is taking the city in the wrong direction, away from other notable big-city mayors who have recently sought to temper the influence of outside money, including Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D).

Linda Beebe, president of the League of Women Voters of D.C., said the organization has just begun to study FreshPAC and has a series of meetings planned next month about money and influence in D.C. politics. Of FreshPAC, she said, “I am sure this will be part of our discussion.”

Bowser appointees who have contributed $10,000 to the PAC include Frederick Hill, whose experience for a seat on the Board of Zoning Adjustments was questioned; Alan Bubes, a member of the Washington Convention and Sports Authority Board of Directors; and Buwa Binitie, a Housing Finance Agency board member. Messages left for the three were not immediately returned.

Binitie is also among a core group behind the PAC with close ties to former mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), including Jones, Bryan S. Irving, Earle C. Horton III and Soto, who also served as Fenty’s campaign treasurer.

Soto said that because the PAC’s internal polling is showing Bowser as popular in her first year, it was the perfect time to press for fundraising.
“D.C.,” he said, “to me, man, it’s always political season in D.C.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/big-money-for-the-white-house-and-for-congress-now-for-dc-city-hall/2015/10/17/5072bcf2-744b-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html

DC TAG - Keeping It Funded

The on going struggle... from Washington Post -

Parents, students praise D.C. TAG in effort to shore up congressional support

By Emma Brown March 19, 2014

D.C. parents, students and college graduates gathered on Capitol Hill this week to share their praise for a federally funded program that helps city students pay for higher education.
“Coming from D.C., it’s just a real assurance, a faith and a belief in you going on to do bigger and better things,” said Channell Autrey, a 2005 graduate of the School Without Walls. Autrey used the money she received from the program to attend Pennsylvania State University and now works as a public defender in Baltimore.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) convened the roundtable discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building on Tuesday night to draw attention to and shore up congressional support for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program, known as D.C. TAG.
“I thought it appropriate to have it right here where the appropriators are,” Norton said, adding that she wanted members of Congress to hear how TAG has affected real people’s lives. “I’m trying to say: Well, this is the program you always liked, I hope you continue to like it.”
Since TAG’s inception in 2000, more than $317 million has gone to help more than 20,000 students pay for college. Congress appropriated $30 million this year for the program, which provides up to $10,000 per year for students to attend out-of-state public schools and up to $2,500 for historically black universities and private schools in the Washington area.
But Norton has warned that those funds might be in danger because of the D.C. Council’s move to create a new, locally funded college-aid program known as D.C. Promise, meant to offer students additional funds to meet the rising cost of higher education.
Appropriators would see no need to continue funding TAG, Norton argued, if the city showed the ability to pay for its own scholarship program. “D.C. wants to fool with that,” she said. “It must be crazy.”
Greta Kreuz, a local television news broadcaster whose two children attended private schools in Washington, said at the roundtable that TAG has served as an incentive to stay in the city for many families who might otherwise have moved to the suburbs.
Samuel Cuffee, a Coolidge High graduate attending Bowie State University, said he grew up without a lot of role models who had continued their education after high school. “D.C. TAG was just the push that I needed to get into college,” he said.
President Obama included $40 million for TAG in his proposed budget this year, a move that Norton said should help the program as Congress enters budget negotiations.

 Emma Brown writes about D.C. education and about people with a stake in schools, including teachers, parents and kids.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/parents-students-praise-dc-tag-in-effort-to-shore-up-congressional-support/2014/03/19/e72ee39c-af84-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html

Too Many Curbside Dumpsters!!!

  In my area of Columbia Heights, I see contractors use dumpsters as transfer stations for other projects and leave the dumpsters out for months. There needs to be a time limit and a restriction about using the dumpster no parking area for contractor vehicles.

Georgetown seeks ban on curbside dumpsters

By GRAHAM VYSE

Current Staff Writer

October 1, 2014

Georgetown’s advisory neighborhood commissioners voted unanimously Monday night to request that curbside dumpsters be banned — or at least severely restricted — on residential streets in their community.

Commissioner Tom Birch said he and his colleagues still need to take their proposal to D.C. officials, but they said the time had come to prevent dumpsters used during home renovations from taking up so much space in Georgetown.

“We’re all familiar with the use and the proliferation of dumpsters in our neighborhood,” he said. “They’re available for long periods of time. The permits are cheap. They’re easily renewable.” As a result, Birch said, they are taking up an increasing number of parking spaces and jutting out onto narrow residential streets, frustrating residents.

Moreover, most dumpsters may be unnecessary because contractors working on home renovation projects in the area usually have access to waste removal trucks, he said. One resident told Birch her family had renovated four different houses in Georgetown without ever using a dumpster.

As of now, it costs a contractor only $75 for a permit to keep a dumpster on a D.C. street for a month. Birch said the District should consider emulating Old Town Alexandria, where a contractor would have to pay $1,900 to keep a dumpster out for that amount of time.

Commissioner Dennis Quinn said he supported Birch, but he would have “a very keen eye on making sure that policy outcomes are limited to Georgetown.”

Quinn expressed concern about advocating for higher permit fees in other neighborhoods without first consulting community leaders there.

But Birch pushed back, saying “some things will only happen if they’re applied citywide.”

“I would suggest that this problem may be a serious bother to the residents of other neighborhoods across the city,” he said.

Birch also said commissioners would need to be prepared to take on a wide array of dumpster-providing companies in the region that might fight against new regulations.

“I suspect there’s a dumpster lobby out there,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. Concerns about dumpsters in Georgetown have arisen before. Earlier this year, the office of Ward 2 D.C. Council member Jack Evans began working with the community on potential solutions.

http://www.currentnewspapers.com/admin/uploadfiles/NW%2010-01-2014.pdf

School Board Declines To Pay For Lack Of Experience - Teach For America Rejected

Cracks in the empire? And why does a state (Wisconsin) want to pay TFA? What are they getting?

Why one school system is dropping Teach For America

By Valerie Strauss September 1, 2014

The school board in Durham, N.C., has voted 6-1 to end its relationship with Teach For America after the 2015-16 school year, when all of the 12 TFA teachers hired in the past few years will have completed the two years of service they promise to make when joining the organization.
What makes it interesting is what school board members said during a discussion about the issue. The Herald Sun reported that several board members said they did not want to continue a relationship with the organization because TFA corps members are highly inexperienced. (How could they not be? TFA recruits mostly newly graduated college students, gives them five weeks of summer training and places them in high-needs classrooms.) There were also concerns expressed that corps members are required only to promise to stay for two years and though some stay longer, some leave before the two years are up, causing a great deal of turnover in many schools with at-risk students who greatly need stability.
School board member Mike Lee was quoted as saying: “I have a problem with the two years and gone, using it like community service.”

Diane Ravitch, on her blog, noted that Pittsburgh school board had voted late last year not to renew its TFA contract.  In December, I wrote about the decision to drop the $750,000 TFA contract:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Danielle Montoya, regional communications director for Teach For America, said the new vote was the first time any school board had reversed itself on bringing in TFA corps members into a district. Earlier this year, however, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed a line item inserted into the state’s higher education legislation that would have given $1.5 million to Teach For America over two years.

The newspaper quoted board member Regina Holley as saying she did not understand how TFA corps members could know how to handle tough classroom situations with so little training: “I find that a bit outrageous.”

Valerie Strauss covers education and runs The Answer Sheet blog.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/01/why-one-school-system-is-dropping-teach-for-america/?tid=collaborative_1.0_strip_3

Not Just Your Mother Telling You To Turn That Device Off!

 This beyond DC but very much family and the environment - from The Washington Post -

 

Blue light from electronics disturbs sleep, especially for teenagers

By Meeri Kim September 1 at 6:05 PM

Blue light prevents the release of melatonin, a hormone associated with nighttime and sleep. (BIGSTOCK)

 

 

The pervasive glow of electronic devices may be an impediment to a good night’s sleep. ¶ That’s particularly noticeable now, when families are adjusting to early wake-up times for school. Teenagers can find it especially hard to get started in the morning. ¶ As lamps switch off in teens’ bedrooms across America, the lights from their computer screens, smartphones and tablets often stay on throughout the night. These devices emit light of all colors, but it’s the blues in particular that pose a danger to sleep. Blue light is espec ially good at preventing the release of melatonin, a hormone associated with nighttime.

The pervasive glow of electronic devices may be an impediment to a good night’s sleep. That’s particularly noticeable now, when families are adjusting to early wake-up times for school. Teenagers can find it especially hard to get started in the morning. For nocturnal animals, it spurs activity. For daytime species such as humans, melatonin signals that it’s time to sleep.
As lamps switch off in teens’ bedrooms across America, the lights from their computer screens, smartphones and tablets often stay on throughout the night. These devices emit light of all colors, but it’s the blues in particular that pose a danger to sleep. Blue light is especially good at preventing the release of melatonin, a hormone associated with nighttime.

Ordinarily, the pineal gland, a pea-size organ in the brain, begins to release melatonin a couple of hours before your regular bedtime. The hormone is no sleeping pill, but it does reduce alertness and make sleep more inviting.

However, light — particularly of the blue variety — can keep the pineal gland from releasing melatonin, thus warding off sleepiness. You don’t have to be staring directly at a television or computer screen: If enough blue light hits the eye, the gland can stop releasing melatonin. So easing into bed with a tablet or a laptop makes it harder to take a long snooze, especially for sleep-deprived teenagers who are more vulnerable to the effects of light than adults.

During adolescence, the circadian rhythm shifts, and teens feel more awake later at night. Switching on a TV show or video game just before bedtime will push off sleepiness even later even if they have to be up by 6 a.m. to get to school on time.

The result? Drowsy students struggling to stay awake, despite the caffeinated drinks many kids now consume.

“Teenagers have all the same risks of light exposure, but they are systematically sleep-deprived because of how society works against their natural clocks,” said sleep researcher Steven Lockley of Harvard Medical School. “Asking a teenager to get up at 7 a.m. is like asking me to get up at 4 a.m.”

In a 2014 poll, the National Sleep Foundation, an advocacy organization, polled parents, asking them to estimate their children’s sleep. More than half said their 15-to-17-year-olds routinely get seven hours or fewer hours of sleep. (The recommended amount for teens is 8¹ / ₂ to 10 hours.) In addition, 68 percent of these teens were also said to keep an electronic device on all night — a television, computer, video game or something similar.

Based on what parents reported, sleep quality was better among children age 6 to 17 who always turned their devices off: 45 percent of them were described as having excellent sleep quality vs. 25 percent of those who sometimes left devices on.

“It is known that teenagers have trouble falling asleep early, and every teenager goes through that,” said light researcher Mariana Figueiro of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

Figueiro investigates how light affects human health, and her recent research focused on finding out which electronics emit blue light intense enough to affect sleep. When comparing melatonin levels of adults and teenagers looking at computer screens, she was astonished by the younger group’s light sensitivity. Even when exposed to just one-tenth as much light as adults were, the teens actually suppressed more melatonin than the older people.

In another experiment, she had adults use iPads at full brightness for two hours and measured their melatonin levels with saliva samples. One hour of use didn’t significantly curtail melatonin release, but two hours’ did.

So although teenagers may be particularly susceptible, we all should be aware that artificial light can affect our circadian rhythms.

“The premise to remember is [that] all light after dusk is unnatural,” Lockley said. “All of us push our sleep later than we actually would if we didn’t have electric light.”

A study from 2013 found that people who spent a week camping in the Rocky Mountains, exposed to only natural light and no electronic devices, had their circadian clocks synchronized with the rise and fall of the sun. Although there were only eight campers, they all reacted in the same way, whether they considered themselves early birds or night owls. 

So light serves as a cue, but how? It has long been known that the retina contains two types of photoreceptors, or light sensors: rods and cones. The cones allow us to see colors, while the ultra-sensitive rods are used for night vision, motion detection and peripheral vision. But surprisingly, neither of them is the body’s primary tool for detecting light and darkness and synchronizing our circadian clocks.

There’s a third kind of sensor in our eyes, officially discovered in 2002. Called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or ipRGCs, these relatively crude sensors are unable to pick up on low levels of light — from a dim night light, for example — but sluggishly signal light changes.

They are the body’s way of sending ambient light information to the master circadian clock, a huddle of nerve cells in the brain. This clock makes the pineal gland start and stop the secretion of melatonin. The ipRGCs are most sensitive to blue light — that’s why blue light is bad for your sleep.

To counteract the effects of tablets’ blue light, Figueiro and Lockley recommend a free app, F.lux, that automatically warms up the colors on your various screens — more reds and yellows — at sunset and returns them to normal at sunrise.

“The amount of light you need [in order] to see is lower than the amount of light you need to affect your melatonin,” Figueiro said, which means that light-emitting screens can be used at night without disrupting sleep cycles if you put some distance between your eyes and the device. In other words, place the tablet farther away from your face than usual, or watch TV instead. Also, turning the brightness setting down on laptops, tablets and phones should help.

But for teenagers, this doesn’t completely remedy the problem of early school start times. Lockley also blames the early-morning sluggishness of many students on school start times that ignore their changing body clock.

High schools in a handful of cities have shifted their start times to 8:30 a.m. or later. In a University of Minnesota study whose final report was issued in February, researchers who surveyed about 9,000 students at eight high schools found that such a shift correlated with improvements in grades, achievement tests, attendance rates and car accident rates.

In Virginia, Fairfax County has been considering delaying its high school start time until after 8 a.m. In Maryland, Montgomery County has discussed a change but has not decided on one yet.

Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation that middle and high schools delay the start of classes to 8:30 a.m. or later. Pediatrician Judith Owens, the lead author of this policy statement, said that later start times will help adolescents get the sleep they need and lower their risks of obesity and depression.

“Sleep is important for learning, memory, brain development, health,” Lockley said. “We’re systematically sleep-
depriving kids when their brains are still developing, and you couldn’t design a worse system for learning.”

Many Americans may believe early risers are more successful and that people can learn to live on little sleep, Lockley said, but that notion is neither true nor healthy.

“There’s no training people to live without sleep,” Lockley said. “It’s like trying to train people to live without food.”

Kim is a freelance science journalist in Philadelphia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/blue-light-from-electronics-disturbs-sleep-especially-for-teenagers/2014/08/29/3edd2726-27a7-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html?hpid=z4