Gentrification in D.C. means widespread displacement, study finds
April 26, 2019 at 8:05 a.m. EDT
“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.
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