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Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City
By Derek Hyra The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Derek Hyra
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-44936-4
CHAPTER 1
Making the Gilded Ghetto: Welcome to 14th Street
Tim Christensen, the White, middle-aged president of the Logan Circle Community Association, enthusiastically describes the new farmers' market that opened at Washington, DC's 14th and U Streets intersection:
Oh, it's really nice. There're produce stands. ... They've really diversified, so they go way beyond produce. So you can get organic, grass-fed meat and all kinds of really interesting pastas and that sort of thing. There's a pasta guy, and he's Italian. ... His pasta is unbelievable. He has this ravioli, duck-egg ravioli, where he puts a duck-egg yolk inside a ravioli package raw and refrigerates it, and he suggests having it for brunch with bacon and hash brown potatoes. It's unbelievable! ... At 14th and U, who would have thought?
Not too long ago, this intersection was one of the city's most infamous drug markets, and was described as such by two African American, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists. Leon Dash designated it the "heart of Washington's drug corridor" during the late 1980s, with its "clusters of drug dealers, addicts and jugglers standing on all four corners of the intersection." Eugene Robinson explained that throughout that decade, "U Street and its environs had become one of the city's most notorious open-air illegal drug markets, offering mostly heroin ... [and] quickly diversifying into cocaine." Today, this once infamous drug market has been transformed into a thriving farmers' market.
Just a block north of the 14th and U Farmers' Market, Shaw/U Street's economic and racial transformation is starkly apparent. For years, the northwest side of the intersection housed the AM.PM Carry Out, an "old school" soul food breakfast and lunch takeout (fig. 1). Like New York City bodegas, the carryouts in DC serve moderately priced food to people on the go. Most of AM.PM's customers were working-class African Americans. In 2010, however, it closed due to "lease issues," most likely escalating commercial rent. In 2014, the former carryout location, under different management, became Provision No. 14 (P14), an upscale neo-American culinary experience where patrons can order a $28 burger of foie gras, truffles, goat cheese, and lobster.
Next to this posh eatery is Martha's Table, a nonprofit social services organization that distributes almost six hundred thousand meals yearly to homeless families and at-risk youth. Martha's has been on this block since 1982. In the mornings, long lines of homeless people, mostly African American, wait to enter Martha's. After eating, many hang around — some even camp out with their belongings all day — to catch up with friends and pass the time until their next meal is served.
Across the street from P14 and Martha's are two luxury condominium high-rises, Langston Lofts and Union Row (fig. 2), built in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Their contemporary urban design, with large exposed steel structures and iron patios, contrasts with the iron bars once covering the windows at the carryout. The condo units offer upscale urban loft living, with large floor-to-ceiling windows, wood floors, open floor plans, granite countertops, and stainless steel kitchen appliances. In 2015, one-bedroom units in the Union Row complex were listed between $350,000 and $500,000, two-bedrooms between $600,000 and $900,000. The base of Union Row's commercial space houses Yes! Organic, a newly established natural grocery market, and Eatonville, an upscale, soul food–style restaurant where urban professionals enjoy pecan-crusted trout, fried chicken, and live jazz.
The first-floor commercial space of the Langston Lofts development is occupied by Busboys and Poets, a bookstore, coffeehouse, wine bar, performance venue, and restaurant all in one, which pays homage to the community's African American heritage. At any given time, Black, White, and Hispanic students, professionals, and urban hipsters use their laptops at communal tables, peruse the bookshelves, or visit with friends seated at the long dark-granite bar, on fabric and faux-leather couches, or at dining tables. The private Langston Hughes Room at the back of the restaurant holds a stage for book launches, poetry readings, and other performances. In this presentation space, the likes of Cornel West, Ralph Nader, and Eve Ensler have spoken on race, politics, gender, and culture to people enjoying a cappuccino, beer, or glass of wine.
Those living in Union Row or Langston Lofts, dining at Eatonville and Busboys, or shopping at Yes! Organic stand in sharp contrast to some of those eating just across 14th Street. Eatonville, Busboys, Yes! Organic, and P14 cater to the more affluent new arrivals — the mainly White but also Black and Hispanic, gay and straight professionals; Martha's serves, and AM.PM once served, the longer-term, low- and moderate-income Black population that formerly was the majority in this community.
From the Dark to the Gilded Ghetto
In the 1960s, a leading Swedish anthropologist, Ulf Hannerz, and a prominent American anthropologist, Elliot Liebow, studied the impoverished Washington, DC's Shaw/U Street neighborhood. Their work resulted in two urban classics: Hannerz's Soulside and Liebow's Tally's Corner. While each explored different sections of Shaw/U Street — Liebow studied a carryout much like AM.PM, and Hannerz a street near the community's geographic center — they both observed severe deprivation. As Liebow noted, the area at the time was nearly all Black and had the city's "highest rate of persons receiving public assistance; the highest rate of illegitimate live births; the highest rate of births not receiving prenatal care; the second highest rate of persons eligible for surplus food; and the third highest rate of applicants eligible for medical assistance."
Despite their setting in a bleak neighborhood environment, these books changed how people across the globe viewed inner-city Black American life. Through their detailed ethnographic accounts, the authors showcased the human side of the ghetto and described the complex strategies people used to organize their lives as they struggled to survive amid concentrated poverty. For Hannerz and Liebow in the 1960s, Shaw/U Street represented, like New York City's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville, the quintessential Black American ghetto.
From the 1960s until the 1990s, Shaw/U Street was a space for understanding what historian Arnold Hirsch coined the "second ghetto," and what Kenneth B. Clark labeled the "dark ghetto." Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto and Clark's Dark Ghetto explained the powerful forces and detrimental outcomes arising from the formation of socially walled-off, impoverished, inner-city Black spaces during the mid-twentieth century. The decisions of White-controlled city councils, planning commissions, and public housing authorities to concentrate high-rise public housing in certain neighborhoods; the decisions of White-controlled banks to redline and deny credit to African Americans; and the decisions of White-operated companies to leave inner-city areas were critical to the downward spiral of these neighborhoods into concentrated poverty pockets. The harmful influence of concentrated poverty on individuals living in these neighborhoods was not labeled as neighborhood effects until years later by urban sociologist William Julius Wilson, but the influence these areas had on dysfunctional behaviors such as crime, drug use, poor school performance, and teen pregnancy, as well as poor health outcomes, were duly noted by Clark.
Yet while Shaw/U Street once symbolized the dark ghetto, today it represents the gilded ghetto. In Dark Ghetto, Clark coined gilded ghetto to describe the similar pathologies of the affluent in the segregated White suburbs. "There is a tendency toward pathology in the gilded suburban ghetto," he wrote. "An emptiness reflecting a futile struggle to find substance and worth through the concretes of things and possessions. ... The residents of the gilded ghetto may escape by an acceptance of conformity, by the deadly ritual of alcoholism, by absorption in work, or in the artificial and transitory excitement of illicit affairs." Clark saw in the suburban ghetto ill behaviors comparable to those occurring in inner-city Black America.
This book, which analyzes the making of the gilded ghetto, uses the term not as a reference to suburban challenges or pathologies but rather to indicate the intricate social and economic redevelopment processes, and outcomes, associated with the twenty-first-century transformation of second ghettos. Once places where poverty, drugs, and violence proliferated, these areas have become spaces where farmers' markets, coffee shops, dog parks, wine bars, and luxury condominiums now concentrate. The transition of American urban "no-go" Black zones to hip, cool places filled with chic restaurants, trendy bars, and high-priced apartment buildings defines the gilded ghetto. My contemporary use and redefinition of the gilded ghetto both references and explains what happens when those who, in the past, would have settled in the suburbs instead choose to reside in the dark ghetto.
This monumental redevelopment trend is occurring not just in Washington, DC, but elsewhere as part of a larger national pattern. The 2000s, compared with the 1980s and '90s, saw an increase in the percentage of low-income minority neighborhoods that were redeveloped. Urban sociologist Ann Owens, who assessed the redevelopment patterns of metropolitan neighborhoods between 1970 and 2010, predicted that persistent racial stereotyping of minority neighborhoods, especially those with a large African American presence, would make those areas least likely to redevelop. While in the 1980s and '90s this hypothesis was true, her data surprisingly revealed that something changed in the 2000s. In the 1990s, only 11 percent of urban minority neighborhoods redeveloped, but this rose to 17 percent in the 2000s. Owens speculated that the increased rate of African American inner-city redevelopment was partly due to the unexpected influx of White residents to these areas. In a subsequent study, urban planners Lance Freeman and Tiancheng Cai provided evidence that supported Owens's hunch and showed that compared with the 1990s, the percentage of urban Black neighborhoods experiencing a significant White influx doubled in the 2000s. As more Whites were willing to move to once impoverished African American neighborhoods, gentrification rates skyrocketed.
A 2015 Governing Magazine report revealed that in the fifty largest US cities, only 9 percent of low-income tracts gentrified in the 1990s, while in the 2000s the gentrification rate increased to nearly 20 percent. Features of the gilded ghetto can be seen in Boston's Roxbury, New York City's Harlem, Atlanta's Sweet Auburn District, Miami's Overtown, New Orleans' Tremé, Pittsburgh's Hill District, Kansas City's 18th and Vine District, Chicago's Bronzeville, Houston's Freemen's Town, San Francisco's Fillmore District, and Portland's Albina community. These Black urban neighborhoods saw open-air, illicit drug markets replaced by gourmet food markets. The "iconic ghettos" are becoming gilded ghettos.
Shaw/U Street experienced tremendous demographic shifts as it redeveloped. In 1970, the community was 90 percent Black; however, by 2010, African Americans comprised only 30 percent of its population. While the proportion of the community's Black population declined, the White percentage rose substantially, particularly in the 2000s. Whites represented 23 percent of the Shaw/U Street population in 2000, rising to 53 percent by 2010. As the community received an influx of Whites, property values dramatically increased 145 percent between 2000 and 2010, well above the city's overall rate during the same time period.
Atypical Gentrification
While this might seem similar to a typical White-led gentrification scenario, it is not. Shaw/U Street is not going through the gentrification experience we have become accustomed to in US cities, in which young artists, mainly White, move into a low-income minority area, the area becomes hip, and then professionals arrive. Next, property values escalate, then the former residents are displaced, and a new neighborhood emerges.
Shaw/U Street's redevelopment processes are much more complicated and complex. For instance, several White newcomers proclaim that they sought this particular community because it represents an opportunity to experience and participate in an "authentic" Black space. Whereas aspects of Black culture have been used to sell music for years, only recently have they been commoditized to market neighborhood redevelopment. The general perception has been that when a neighborhood was coined or labeled Black, it stimulated White flight. Nowadays, in some circumstances, such a designation stimulates a White influx. Inner-city real estate developers name their new luxury buildings after celebrated African Americans, such as Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington. Area restaurants mimic this African American naming game: Marvin, which acknowledges DC-born Motown sensation Marvin Gaye, is one of the most popular eateries along 14th Street. Thus, as the neighborhood redevelops it retains part of its African American identity, and this identity is critical to the making of the gilded ghetto. Rather than abandoning its Black history, Shaw/U Street's revitalization is closely tied to the community's African American past.
In addition, despite huge increases in property values, a sizable low-income African American population remains, living primarily in subsidized housing. Unlike several inner-city communities whose public housing stock is managed by local public housing authorities, a large proportion of Shaw/U Street's affordable housing is owned and managed by area churches, enabling thousands of low-income and working-class African Americans to stay. In 2015, DC mayor Muriel Bowser and US Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro strolled through the neighborhood and touted it as a successful mixed-income model due to its ample stock of affordable housing. Subsidized housing helps to maintain the community's racial diversity. As Novella, a longtime African American resident of one of the church-owned, subsidized developments, declares, "I will be the last fly in the milk bowl. I'm not leaving this community."
On the surface, Shaw/U Street, compared with many DC neighborhoods, appears integrated. Figure 3 displays the percentage of African American residents for census tracts throughout the city. Shaw/U Street clearly has a number of tracts that vary racially, while most other sections of the city contain a very high or low percentage of African Americans. The community contains the underclass — the gangbanger, the homeless, the poor; and the new (upper) middle class — the young Obama political appointee, the lobbyist, the lawyer, the high-tech programmer, and the professional same-sex couple.
Some commercial establishments and public spaces seemingly display racial and economic integration, but delving deeper into the neighborhood's social fabric uncovers more economic and racial segregation than at first glance — diversity segregation. Diversity segregation occurs when racially, ethnically, and economically disparate people live next to one another, but not alongside one another. In other words, on the surface the community looks diverse, but in actuality is socially segregated.
The U Street Neighborhood Civic Association and the Logan Circle Community Association consist mainly of White residents organized to enhance the economic viability of the neighborhood, while Organizing Neighborhood Equity and the East Civic Association are predominately African American and serve the interests of the low-income minority populations fighting to remain there. Only a few associations have a mixed racial and class composition, such as the Convention Center Community Association, which tries to address multiple neighborhood preferences.
Public spaces, such as parks and recreation centers, also tend to be segregated. For instance, a park in the center of the community contains four distinct spaces: a dog park, a soccer field, two basketball courts, and a skateboard area. Most of the dog walkers are White, most of the soccer players are Hispanic, and almost all the basketball players are Black. The only truly integrated park space is the skateboard area, where teenagers of all races help one another with their latest tricks. Rather than a model of social integration, Shaw/U Street is filled with pockets of micro-level segregation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City by Derek Hyra. Copyright © 2017 Derek Hyra. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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