Collages on Gentrification

D.C’s violent and racist history of gentrification is embedded in every brick, every column, and every street we walk. H Street Corridor was once a flourishing, predominately Black, up-and-coming business district, fully equipped with a new streetcar and promising growth for the community. Nonetheless, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the community was stripped of its chances to grow as white flight and disinvestment followed the protests. The brutal and racially targeted divestment that overtook H street left its community with no capital or means to succeed. In the early 2000s, years after leaving the corridor impecunious and without means, wealthy business owners were determined to buy out the low-cost H street buildings and “refurbish” the community, by picking and choosing the aspects of Black life they could capitalize on, and displacing the rest. By 2006, numerous buildings were bought out and began to be restored in the vision of the white and wealthy. New restaurants and coffee shops begin lining the streets, all the while rent prices soared and life-long residents began facing the brutal truths of gentrification. Even buildings that had remained empty for decades were being reopened, like the Atlas Theater, which was reopening as a performing arts center for the benefit of the new community while their neighbors watched the few resources that did exist for them slip through their fingers like sand. These changes could’ve been made decades prior to support and aid the original residents, but there was no money in that. The influx in interest led to billions of dollars being reinvested into the corridor, only once the demographic of citizens had bigger pockets and paler complexions. Life-long residents and business owners have been priced out and replaced with mediocre recreations of a once thriving and lively neighborhood, leaving us with a flimsy illusion of what could’ve been to citizens that weren’t given the privilege to imagine such a future. — Maddy Langan