Events: Panel Gentrification in Washington

Joshua Olsen, circulation director of The Next American City, organized this panel with the help of many others, including Charles Buki, Mychalene Giampaoli, Alissa Levine, Mackenzie Baris, Matthew Gilmore, and Jason Rylander. Jemal Woods, a Washington-area documentary filmmaker, provided the recording that made the transcription of the debate possible. TNAC thanks all of them for their hard work.

Last fall, The Next American City, in conjunction with the Washington City Paper and the Loeb Fellowship of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, sponsored a panel discussion on gentrification at the City Museum of Washington, D.C. 

As Adam Gordon, editor-in-chief of The Next American City, stated in his introduction: “the debate over gentrification is where all the big issues facing cities come together, from race relations to real estate, to how cities attract business, to where the people who work at those businesses live.”

Appropriately, the members of the panel came from different professions and different parts of the Washington region. Al Eisenberg, a former chair of the Arlington County Board and current vice president with the Washington Board of Trade, represented Virginia. Maria Maldonado hailed from Casa of Maryland, an activist organization for the Latino community. Then there was Robert Moore, Executive Director of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, which works to preserve affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood, and Jim Abdo, a for-profit developer who turns dilapidated row houses into luxury condominiums. Washington’s Mayor Anthony Williams had agreed to serve on the panel, but he had a last-minute conflict, so he sent Stanley Jackson, his director of the Department of Housing and Community Development, in his stead. Erik Wemple, editor-in-chief of the Washington City Paper, served as moderator.

The audience turnout testified to the importance of the subject matter under debate. The line to enter the City Museum for the event stretched out the door, down the steps, and along the street. After packing the aisles and wings of the auditorium, about a hundred people still had to be turned away.

Defining the Issue

Erik Wemple: I want each panelist to talk about their experience with gentrification. Keep it brief, but poignant.

Stanley Jackson: This could not be a more applicable topic, given the challenges we face in Washington, D.C. But it’s also an opportunity, because we have resources coming into neighborhoods that historically could not get investments, even with incentives. Now we have the challenge of trying to manage these investments in a way that continues to ensure that we are a diverse city. The only difference between gentrification and revitalization is who experiences the benefit at the end of the day. We recognize that there is an indigenous population that needs to be included in any development strategy. And because we don’t have much industrial development, neighborhood development is economic development. Our outflow of middle-class people in the last decades wasn’t because they disliked Washington; it was because crime was going unabated, deterioration of neighborhoods was occurring, schools were sliding. Now is our chance to change all of that. I don’t think we’ll see such an opportunity again.

Jim Abdo: I started Abdo Development back when it was not quite so fashionable to be building luxury condominiums in neighborhoods like Dupont and Logan Circle. My passion for building comes from a passion for historic preservation. I just felt that it was a shame that there was so much historic housing that was just falling apart before our eyes. I remember going into areas where banks would not loan me money to do projects. I would have to leverage against the equity of my own home to make these projects work. To me, it just made sense. Why are we destroying green space outside the city, and adding to traffic problems and adding to pollution, when we have wonderful, beautiful housing stock in the inner city? My goal was to reverse that trend. I am proud of what we do.

Maria Maldonado: Casa of Maryland was started eighteen years ago to deal with the influx of immigrants fleeing South America as a result of civil wars. I am not a planner, so I define gentrification as the ending of one neighborhood and the beginning of a new one. It’s pretty simple. Recently, I have seen gentrification in Silver Spring, Maryland [a high-density suburb on the edge of Washington]. In the last two years, property values have skyrocketed. Even middle-class families can no longer afford to live in these areas. And people who have rented for a long time, and always thought about buying, now find that homeownership is out of their reach. Our answer in dealing with this issue is to organize tenants. Otherwise, immigrant renters are without a voice. There are immigrant families that have been here for twenty years, but the recent homebuyers view them as transients. The answer is to give folks a voice and bring people to the table.

Robert Moore: I want to come at this from a street perspective. Gentrification is a real issue. We see people on a daily basis being forced out. We have senior citizens with health problems who are being forced out by rent increases. When I first came to work in Columbia Heights, you could buy anything in the neighborhood for $100,000. Now you can’t buy anything for $450,000. That has happened in the last two years. Even though in D.C. we have laws that protect renters, it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. People give up. They think that they are going to lose, so they don’t fight, and they get forced out. That being said, the folks that move in are not the bad guys. They come for the diversity. They want to hear the languages and eat the food, but the economic power they bring with them is so powerful that it displaces the very diversity that they’re trying to get. The other thing that worries me a lot is new household formation. If you’re 21 years old, and you’ve graduated from college, and you come home to Columbia Heights, where do you live? There’s no place in Columbia Heights that young people can afford. That may have been your family home, but if you’re trying to form a new household, you can’t find a place. We’re going to be a community of much older people. We’re going to lack vitality, because the younger people cannot afford to be there. Meanwhile, those people that can move in have a disproportionate social impact. Some of the newcomers refer to the people already there as “those people.” We have this real conflict of people moving in and wanting to impose their values on people who have been there for a long time. Everybody wants to buy a house for $100,000 and sell it for $600,000. I have neighbors that come to me and say, “Mr. Moore, can you stop people from banging on my door Sunday morning asking to buy my house?” There are people walking around just knocking on doors and making offers. And it’s forcing people out. 

Al Eisenberg: We stand at a crossroads: one path leads to utter ruin, the other to absolute despair. God give us the wisdom to make the right choice. [Audience laughs.] There is one—it is to blaze a new trail. I’ve seen housing policy from a national level when working as a staffer in the U.S. Senate and on the ground in real terms as a member of the Arlington County Board. In Arlington, we have tried to blaze that new trail. We have required developers that knock down affordable housing in high-density areas to replace the units on a one-for-one basis. But there’s only so much we can do with that. For example, here’s a heartbreaking story. At the corner of Interstate 395 and Glebe Road, there were 700 sixty-year-old housing units, almost all of them occupied by new immigrants and minorities. The structures were sound but terribly obsolete, and there was a lot of overcrowding. The developer wanted to knock everything down. This is where the policy and the heart get entangled. The developer could do something “by right,” according to the zoning, or they could do a planned development that would require a zoning variance. If they pursued the former plan, they could make money without going to the County Board. In the end, we had to vote for the program that knocked down the development. Otherwise, we would have lost any opportunity to incorporate low- and moderate-income housing. This is just one example of how the process creates these heartbreaking situations in community after community.

Uneven Progress

Wemple: I hear a lot of local officials say that things are looking up in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights—we have housing being rehabbed; we have a Target coming in. But last week there was a shootout between rival Latino gangs, and one young man was killed. Is it really progress when you have one-bedroom units that rent for $1,500 but still have gang violence? Is there some connection that is not being made between housing development and crime rate?

Moore: We have an “edifice complex” in this town. We know how to build neighborhoods—just not for the people that live here. We want to bring in new folks, but not invest in the existing residents. People can grow and develop at the same time that we develop neighborhoods.

Jackson: Yes, it is more than bricks and mortar. It is people that you have to include. Often there is an absence of recognition that human capital is crucial. I believe that if you fail to include human capital, you will create the kind of problems we are experiencing.

Abdo: I think the answer is outreach. We want citizens to participate in the renaissance. It is possible to do so and make a profit. We hire minority subcontractors. We bring people into the company and provide apprenticeship programs. This is just good business. It is a shame that not many other developers realize this. The polarization of neighborhoods doesn’t help anyone.

Gentrification as a Regional Issue

Wemple: A few years ago there was an interesting local conflict. Wayne Curry [County Executive for Maryland’s Prince George’s County, which borders Washington, D.C.] and Anthony Williams got into a fight over low-income housing. Curry accused Williams of sending D.C.’s poor into Prince George’s County. Does the city have too much of the burden? Should it be shared more equally?

Maldonado: At Casa of Maryland, we receive a tremendous number of requests for housing from people moving from the District to Prince George’s County. I understand part of the wall Curry was up against. There is a lot of racism at play. Our view is that there should be a regional housing policy.

Jackson: It is important to realize that the District only contains 12 percent of the local population, but has over 55 percent of the public housing and 40 percent of the homeless.

Eisenberg: A regional housing policy is like the Holy Grail. You know it should be there, but it could take a lifetime to find. The question is how much money is each jurisdiction willing to put up, and how willing is each donor to see their money go to someplace other than where it came from. This has got to involve not just the government, but the private investment community, the charitable community, and local advocates. It is definitely the way to go—pooling resources so that you can bring a critical mass of resources together to make things happen.

Questions from the Audience

Audience Member: The neighborhood that I grew up in had six bus lines, and that made it a popular place. What is the role of transportation in gentrification?

Eisenberg: I think that you have touched upon one of the most important adjuncts to the housing question. Transportation plays a role in creating communities that people want to live in. There is a lot of money in the federal transportation budget, unlike the housing budget. Part of the problem is that the housers are over here, and the transportation engineers are over here, and it’s very difficult to get them to interact. But they must, if for no other reason than people have to get from home to job and back.

Audience Member: I’m a Realtor and a longtime D.C. resident. There are a lot of abandoned houses in the District. Why didn’t the city move to develop this inventory? Only after the investors and developers came in did the city realize that there was not enough housing. Why are they scrambling now?

Jackson: Context is important. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy. But now the market is so robust that derelict property owners are paying their taxes because they want to sell the properties and reap a profit. Before, people were walking away from them.

Abdo: I think it is unfortunate that all the abandoned houses did not become affordable housing. It was a missed opportunity. I can tell you that the challenge was not always finding owners of the properties, but finding banks that would invest in purchasing them.

Audience Member: There are many residents that do not want to see neighborhoods completely changed. What can we demand of the city government, and what can we do on a community level?

Maldonado: I think we have to organize. If you don’t have everyone involved, those that you did not involve will oppose you. You have to broaden the discussion to talk about where affordable housing should actually go.

Abdo: There are a lot of things that you can do on a local level to influence private developers. The community associations can talk about what type of retail they want. In Logan Circle, we have retail that provides services and maintains the eclectic diversity of the neighborhood. Developers are driven by profit, but there are avenues that have not been pursued.

Moore: We have made some progress. It hasn’t been all bad. The yuppies who live down the street say, “we’re tired of hearing all these gunshots,” and the people that live in the low-income housing say, “we’re tired of ducking.” These two groups can get together and accomplish something. We all have the same goal.