From the streets of America's capital, abolitionists, musicians, Supreme Court justices, and famous
politicians have made their mark on the city and on the nation.
Washington D.C. is so imbued with black identity, locals call their home Chocolate City.
Chocolate City looks much different today than it did a half-century ago.
Well, D.C. has changed. It's different now.
There's a lot of white people walking around.
Fenty has a big lead among white voters and Chairman Gray has a big lead among black voters.
And there is a racial subtext to some of the issues in this race.
The folks who actually look like me are moving to other parts of the country.
They can no longer afford to live in D.C.
The question has become impossible to ignore as goes the neighborhood.
There goes black D.C.
This is the neighborhood called Anacostia.
It's far removed from the Washington D.C. visited by tourists.
Even many district residents say they've never stepped foot east of the river.
Anacostia is more than 90 percent African-American in stark contrast to the rest of the city.
It's a place of contradictions.
Anacostia is plagued by the highest unemployment in the city and a violent crime rate that makes it fodder for the local nightly news.
Bullets ring out then a running gun battle.
Fights break out at a southeast Washington high school sending five students to the hospital.
But it also has charm, a historic main street, single family Victorian homes,
and hilltop views of D.C.'s most famous landmarks.
Here we are in what used to be called Rosie's Row.
And as you see these houses have now all been renovated at one degree or another.
An expert in urban policy, Howard Croft moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago.
He anticipated being part of an emerging, vibrant D.C. community, a mix of class and race.
That never happened.
The city really cared it could come over here and buy it properly like this and make decent deals.
I think rivers form a barrier.
When there have been plans in terms of the redevelopment of the city, the focus has been west of the river.
D.C.'s inner city is expanding and along with it, wealthier whites have been displacing low-income blacks.
Since 1970, the city's black population has plummeted by 40%.
I think that people wake up in the morning and say, how can they get rid of black people in the city?
Some people may wake up in the morning and say that.
The areas that people saw as critical to diversify Washington D.C.'s economy to make it something other than the sort of government plantation.
Those areas have been occupied by black people and by low-income people.
Croft is watching to see if Anacostia is next.
And that, of course, has been a kind of bar restaurant that's always been on the verge of always opening up and it never opens up.
He has heard the rumors for years and he's seen one redevelopment project after another fail to come to fruition.
Croft is dubious that meaningful change is on the way.
It's happening. It's happening. Hard life. Look at that.
I never noticed it when I come across the gate to bus, but it's new. It's interesting. It's well.
But even he finds it hard to ignore the telltale sign.
A person called me the other day to tell me, you know, run down to 15th Street and Good Hope Road.
There are, there's a crew of white people jogging up the street.
He said, they're here.
I mean, it tells you something about Americans and the race in America.
I mean, it's like, whoa, there are white people here.
You've never seen that five years ago.
I'm renovating houses over here and hoping that a more diverse array of folks comes over here.
David Garber grew up in the D.C. area, but he had never spent any time east of the river.
Then, three years ago, he discovered Anacostia and decided to move here.
I chose Anacostia originally because it's an up-and-coming neighborhood.
It's got a lot kind of going for it right now. The prices are really low.
People's reaction when I first moved here was interesting because people thought I was a police officer.
Just thought I was somebody here trying to make a quick buck.
I'm the total minority in the neighborhood right now. I mean, it's not very racially diverse.
With a background in real estate, Garber began renovating and selling abandoned homes,
something there's no shortage of in this neighborhood.
He started with the biggest eyesore he could find.
Oh, Tisha! I don't even know what to say. It looks so totally different.
It's my granddaddy house.
My roommate's called it the rotting cinder block. It's what it used to look like.
I wanted to give it a little more dignity.
Are you selling all this red skin stuff?
Garber thinks one of Anacostia's selling points is its tightly knit community,
but he also believes the neighborhood needs an infusion of new people with disposable income.
You got like the bargain yard sale over here.
I think that some gentrification actually needs to happen in Anacostia
so that we have a little bit more economic diversity.
But it has negative connotations. I mean, people hear redevelopment or gentrification
and they sort of recoil and don't want the neighborhood to change
from what they have known it as for the last 30 or 40 years.
I'm not a believer in, you know, the answer is to put up barricades
to stop people from the suburbs from moving back into the city.
I think the challenge, however, is, you know, how do you build the city,
you know, for the people who live in the city?
Croft does think his neighborhood is long overdue for change,
but he says his neighbors have seen what change means across the river
and that's not the kind of change they want.
They don't want to be kicked out of the neighborhood. They don't want to be displaced.
So is this a real yard sale?
That may explain the anxiety some of Garber's neighbors are feeling as he discovered today.
And I just thought I, you know, be neighborly.
Yeah, no, I appreciate it.
He's not for us. He just wants to sell the house, you know, like us.
She was just talking to some of the guys and they said that I'm not on their side
and that I don't like black people or something.
And I mean, that's so ludicrous, but I don't really give it much credence.
Like I know what my intentions are.
There's evidence everywhere you go in D.C. that D.C. is becoming richer and whiter.
You can go in any number of neighborhoods and you see specialized stores that have come up.
You see bike paths on the road that didn't exist previously.
Sabia Prince is writing a book about African Americans and their responses
to the current demographic changes taking place in D.C.
The fact that we have this first African American president right here in this city
where this gentrification and tensions are proliferating in the way that they are,
it is very ironic that it's happening now.
That's all you can say about it.
Washington D.C. has been an important urban center for African Americans for centuries,
but it's always been a segregated city.
Washington D.C. reached its largest population in 1950.
A little over 800,000 people resided here.
Shortly thereafter, the population began to decrease very rapidly,
particularly between the decades of 1950 and 1970.
At the same time, we were also seeing an increase in the African American population.
Urban whites began to flee the cities to chase the suburban dream, then a national trend.
By 1970, the black population peaked at 71 percent, and then it started a precipitous decline.
Croft says at the beginning, this was because many blacks with the financial means were fleeing the city too.
I think they moved the suburbs for similar reasons for why white middle class people moved to the suburbs,
which is they could get more for their housing dollar.
The crack epidemic shattered D.C. neighborhoods,
but in the last ten years, a revitalized economy has changed the landscape of the city.
Cafes and boutiques now occupy once abandoned commercial districts.
Luxury condominiums are popping up across the city.
D.C. is luring a young, white, affluent crowd.
Some people have dubbed that white urban discovery, where people are experiencing shorter commutes,
closer proximity to their workplace, and to their friends and people that they work with,
where they're really building a sense of community that's centered in D.C.
For the first time in over a half century, D.C. is experiencing a population increase.
More than 40,000 whites have moved into the district this decade.
Now the numbers are increasing. Now we're talking about a wave, more than just a trickle.
But the black population has continued to drop.
During the same period, 27,000 blacks left the city.
Prince thinks this current black migration out of the district, unlike the earlier years, is not voluntary.
Although there are a lot of people that are talking about a renaissance in Washington and how things are improving
and they're getting better, we definitely know that inequalities have increased.
That affects gentrification because gentrification is about having access to investment money
for improving your home or for starting your own business.
African Americans have borne the brunt of the country's economic slowdown.
Today, the unemployment rate for blacks in D.C. is more than twice as high as it is for whites.
And the average yearly family income for whites is $92,000, compared to just $35,000 for blacks in the district.
We're going to see some ramifications of that. What is that going to be?
It's going to be perhaps higher poverty, but if that also goes along with evictions,
housing policy is definitely playing a role in the potential displacement of African Americans in a number of different ways.
That's the reason for the protest here today.
The Shaw neighborhood was once the heart of black D.C.
In 1970, over 90% of the population here was black.
Today, Shaw is a much different place.
Personally, I find that I can come and work in neighborhoods like Shaw every day,
but I can't afford to live in neighborhoods like Shaw.
And I grew up in Shaw.
Gentrification has made it so that the folks who actually look like me are moving to other parts of the country.
They can no longer afford to live in D.C.
Robinson's hunt for affordable housing took her across the river.
I live east of the river, and I actually view that as the final frontier,
because I see gentrification taking hold over there as well.
And I see white people walking their dogs out there.
I know the neighborhood is about to change.
I try not to feel resentful, but in reality I do.
This is my city, this is my home, and I refuse to move.
If there's a single sign the city is serious about bringing change to east of the river,
it's here at St. Elizabeth's, a sprawling former hospital campus.
This will be the future home to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
a project that will bring 14,000 good-paying government jobs
and possibly new residents to the area.
Next door is the Barry Farm Public Housing Complex.
In 1867, following the Civil War,
Barry Farm was designated as property where freed slaves could purchase land and build a home.
This is the oldest community of blacks in D.C.
Next year, the city will begin to level Barry Farm.
It's part of a new effort to clean up the district's crime-written public housing.
This multi-family building, it has 104 units in it.
In its place, the city plans to build housing for people of mixed incomes.
But before that can happen, all the residents will need to be relocated.
I think people are on the floor.
Meetings between the Barry Farm tenants and the city has become tense.
Shelters being closed down, what they're doing there,
tearing them down, making them art galleries, condominiums.
It is coming across this bridge.
And we're trying to fight to keep this land right here.
The pathways to employment are many.
More people come on the job, stay two days,
find out that they've worked hard as hell in the lead.
After spending three months trying to get the job.
The other part of the idea is, before you get to that point,
you have to put out the effort.
I think it's kind of a sin to suggest that people in the community
lack effort or can't match the effort.
Now that you're quiet, no, no, no.
Because that's the subtext of what you're saying.
I wasn't trying to be kind of a sinner.
I was just trying to share with people.
Hi, Ms. Wills. How are you doing?
This is Calphani Turei calling from the Barry Farm Resident Council.
Calphani Turei is a doctoral student.
He's doing his dissertation on the history of the Barry Farm community.
My mother had a college degree from Rutgers University.
But I still grew up in a poor community.
And so I feel committed.
I feel committed to provide as much help as I can
to protect the interests of the people here.
He's spending his summer knocking on doors.
We know the community is about to be knocked down.
But you know, this community is historic.
Turei is collecting the oral histories of the residents
as a way to chronicle the life of the community
before it disappears and is replaced by a new neighborhood.
And so you spent almost 40 years here.
Wow, wow, wow.
The Barry Farm is changing.
And there's a lot of feelings about how this community is changing.
And I don't want to go.
I literally don't want to go.
What are you doing to fight this?
We can't do this.
This isn't the first time Barry Farm has been raised
in the ongoing struggle to provide adequate housing
for the city's underclass.
In the 1940s and 50s, the district faced a growing need
for high-density, low-income housing.
The Barry Farm community of homeowners was declared a slum
and converted to the Barry Farm Public Housing Project in 1954.
Then seen as the solution to housing the urban poor,
Barry Farm today is plagued by some of the highest levels
of poverty and violent crime in the district.
This individual was shot 19 times.
Again, this is another fallen soul in the community.
Despite the crime, Turei, like other residents here,
shares the belief that dismantling the community again
and not ultimately solve the problems facing the poor.
I'm looking forward to the meeting tonight.
I know Rodney is probably not going to recognize me.
Turei, who shaved his head because of the summer's record heat,
is working closely with Linda Miller,
president of the Barry Farm Resident Council.
Linda Miller was raised in the heart of D.C.
on the other side of the river.
She has lived at Barry Farm for more than 30 years.
So I grew up at, all I see right now,
I'm not being prejudiced, but all I see is white people.
I see a handful of black people.
I also see a lot of condominiums being built up.
I don't see where this house is being built for affordable housing,
especially for the poor people.
It seems like we are just being pushed out.
Miller is concerned that Barry Farm residents,
herself included, are not displaced.
And we're trying to fight for this land what we do have,
because we got to have somewhere to live.
No matter what color you are or what,
give us something affordable where we can live for our children,
our future children.
The city has promised that every resident at Barry Farm will return.
The better way to say this is no one is going to be displaced.
As part of the renewal project,
the city is offering assistance to residents
to increase their chances of moving back.
Don't start from a place that I can't,
or they're trying to keep me at it.
Start from a place that, yes, I can.
And then I can get there, and you can with a lot of hard work.
You hear things like, you know, people wanting to rebrand the area.
You know, you have middle class and sort of new black middle class
kind of want to totally rebrand the area and things like that.
It'll definitely make the area more attractive.
It might create more economic development opportunities,
bring new homeowners into the area,
increase the tax base so that we can have more services
on this side of the river.
Charles Wilson, an attorney, moved to Anacostia four years ago.
It's a valid concern that residents who currently live there,
on whether they'll be able to actually come back.
Wilson is the leader of a group of young professionals
who have moved east of the river.
Every second Saturday of the month,
they meet here at Anacostia's newly opened Big Chair Cafe.
Let's just talk about Anacostia for right now.
Imagine what this block would look like.
It should be brick, you know.
It should be as many abandoned places as you see now in Anacostia.
Let's be frank, the city has not always been trying to Anacostia.
The only way to change that is to get more people to come over here.
Young black professionals are definitely leading the way
of that quote unquote gentrification in this part of the city.
Wilson says when he looked around the city, he saw a few examples of that.
You know, the vibrant activity in those communities
are typically young white homeowners.
It would be great to have young black homeowners
be able to take advantage of an area like this
and improve the quality of life over here.
Maintaining black character and black leadership in a city
that is becoming increasingly white is important to Wilson.
The question is, is it possible?
That remains to be seen.
Logic would tell you yes, young whites will follow that gentrification wave.
But I begin to wonder if this will be the middle class black area of D.C.
over the next 20 years.
For the city at large, the experts say the whitewash will continue.
The African American population will be a minority population
in the District of Columbia within the next 5 to 10 years.
That is the prediction by demographers.
Howard Croft doesn't see that slip below 50 percent.
As a reason for concern in and of itself.
It may be down to 50 percent.
It may be down to 45 percent.
But I think there's always going to be a substantial black presence in D.C.
What worries Croft is that he's seen it all before.
I lived in a neighborhood that was in Quilter and Renaud.
That was considered a slum neighborhood.
And there was the capital, there was the state capital.
And then there was the black community.
And they wanted to expand the state capital.
And the way to expand the state capital was to kick us out.
And it really was the sort of first time in my life I had...
...ever seen the people that I respected.
It was the first time in my life I'd ever seen them humiliated.
My commitment is how do people currently live in Barry Farms benefit?
And my fear is that you will have a token number of people who live in Barry Farms now
be able to return.
But that probably a majority of people will not be able to return.
Two art gallery openings in downtown Anacostia attract big crowds.
The exhibit takes on the issue of the day, gentrification.
I've been in D.C. for almost six years and I've definitely heard a lot of negative things about Anacostia.
I think it was really great that we had this event to come to tonight.
It's kind of embarrassing we haven't been here sooner, but honestly it's good to be here now.
Barry Farm Day is an annual event, a chance for people to come together for food, fun and family.
Like all residents here, Linda Miller is facing uncertainty.
After spending a lifetime in D.C. she doesn't know where she'll live.
But she says she's not asking for much.
Well this is my home, it's a roof over my head and it's where I feel very comfortable and safe.
It doesn't look like much, but I love it. It's my home.
