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