I hope your patience with my bama shit was worth it

May 9, 2013 11:38 AM

Political reporter John R Stanton (aka Big John) has been thinking about the gentrification of DC. Late last night, he tweeted up a story about DC in the old days, personified by a junkie named Raymond.
posted by Potomac Avenue (16 comments total)

I think Big John, like many, seriously underestimates the "gentry".
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 11:52 AM on May 9, 2013

The daily beast link is pretty useless. Maybe replace with the actual storify link ?
posted by k5.user at 11:58 AM on May 9, 2013

There's more than one link in the post.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:59 AM on May 9, 2013

I think Big John, like many, seriously underestimates the "gentry".

I'm not sure what he thinks of the gentrifiers, exactly; the conclusion to the story, about being worried about the loss of community, seems a lot less important than the story itself. I'm a DC gentrifier, myself, and I know plenty of people who would help a guy like Raymond out and plenty who wouldn't. We're a mixed bag. I'm also sure that plenty of Raymonds weren't caught by the community, even before the rich white folks started moving in.

I think, ultimately, the point is to remind us what the community, whether poor or gentrified, can be at it's best. That might not have been Stanton's point, but that's what I got out of it.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:00 PM on May 9, 2013

I think Big John, like many, seriously underestimates the "gentry".

I'd also like to add that I think Big John, overestimates the "community" that has changed.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:01 PM on May 9, 2013

Another point may be lost if you don't know that part of DC--it's gentrifying fast as heck (I was on the bleedy edge of it 3 years ago when I live just past that corner in LeDroit Park.)

That corner is still dangerous as shit though, for walking or biking through. Bamas drive fast as hell through there.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:03 PM on May 9, 2013

I live there. I've lived there for a while. I've seen a lot of Raymonds left to die on those streets, then and now. I have not found that wealthier white people are more or less insulated than less-wealthy African-Americans, nor are they less inclined to form a community or be concerned about the people in their neighborhood. Demographics alone don't appear, in my experience limited here to DC, a deciding factor in how willing one is to help out neighbors in need.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:11 PM on May 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

Urban Dictionary: bama
posted by benito.strauss at 12:17 PM on May 9, 2013 [2 favorites]

Just because a neighborhood is gentrifying doesn't mean there aren't compassionate people, sure. But if you didn't grow up where you live now (I don't now, didn't when I lived in LeDroit) you don't know your neighbors in the same way as the people in Big John's hood knew each other back when this story went down. That's the difference, not black or white, but native or non-native. You can get there, but it takes work. I usually don't put in the effort to meet people, and I certainly didn't with the human wreckage in hospitals gowns stumbling out of Howard that I had to cross the street to avoid smelling as I cruised home from work on my bike. I wish I did, and in the future maybe I'll try a little harder to know people.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:18 PM on May 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

Growing up, bama was more like #3, only with a whole lot of racial undertones, it was an ugly word and would get you in a fight if you called someone by it. It meant something like a stupid black hick from the sticks, none of this "can't dress right stuff", it was an ugly word.
posted by k5.user at 12:50 PM on May 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

The demographics of the District have been slowly shifting back-and-forth for the last 100 years. The city is currently seeing a small influx of white proffessional class folks, where fourty years ago they were moving out to the suburbs in droves. Currently the city is also seeing a minor exodus of African-American (mostly professionals) to the suburbs. The white population has not nearly reached the levels that they were prior to the 1968 riots when they actually made up a majority of the city population. This "gentrification" is a shift of about 5% more white people and 15% less blacks to the Ward 4 population over the last 40 years (not to mention the 10% more hispanics, asians, and "other").

So, while I usually do find the talk of "whoa, to the lost community" to be a touch of romantic racism, the truth is closer to it being simply overblown observation bias. Yes, you may now see a few more white people near Howard than you did in the 1970s, but only a handful more, and that doesn't even touch on the question of how long the former residents had lived in the neighborhood in the first place.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:58 PM on May 9, 2013

In my old neighborhood of Kingman Park, the faction of the neighborhood pushing for development that would spur further gentrification (which was most of us) was also the faction that was interested in more community events and involvement. They are far from mutually exclusive.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:31 PM on May 9, 2013

This "gentrification" is a shift of about 5% more white people and 15% less blacks to the Ward 4 population over the last 40 years (not to mention the 10% more hispanics, asians, and "other").

Ward 4 seems like a weird specific place to pull out, since the story happened in Ward 1 and a lot of the conversations about gentrification revolve around communities in that Ward. Ward 1 went from being 60% black in 1990 to 33% in 2010. Hispanic populations increased a bit, but most of the change was white people moving in.

I'm not anti gentrification, by any means, but the change is bigger than observation bias.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:33 PM on May 9, 2013

It was well-written, but as The 10th Regiment of Foot notes, John has a weird fetish for romanticizing The Way Things Used To Be. As someone who lives blocks from the scene, I prefer his colleague Shani O. Hilton's Washington City Paper article "Confessions of a Black D.C. Gentrifier," where she talks about her experiences as a resident in the same neighborhood.
posted by evoque at 2:17 PM on May 9, 2013 [2 favorites]

My old DC neighbor, Maurice, had a longtime partner named Raymond. That Raymond died from HIV complications a few years before I moved to DC, but Maurice was still in active mourning. Every time he got drunk (read: pretty much all the time) he'd launch into a long stories about how he and Raymond used to go to parties in Columbia Heights, Shaw, H Street-a mix of places already gentrified and on the gentrifying fringe. Places that now feel like another world from Congress Heights, where we lived.

When I saw this story here, I wanted it so badly to be about Maurice's Raymond. Turns out they're not the same person, but I imagine that there are similarities in the life trajectories of these two men.
posted by ActionPopulated at 10:30 PM on May 9, 2013

Ward 4 seems like a weird specific place to pull out, since the story happened in Ward 1 and a lot of the conversations about gentrification revolve around communities in that Ward.

You're right, I had the wrong Ward, I was off by a few blocks that area being the confluence of three Wards. I realized this after I'd logged off and gotten home. Ward wide there has been a larger shift in Ward 1, about double the Ward 4 stats, this is even more stark the farther south and west you go in the ward. Still, I find it hard to understand how the community was somehow better at taking care of its own when that same community let Raymond and his brother slide into drug abuse and prostitution in the first place!
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 4:54 AM on May 10, 2013