Twenty-five years ago, they began to move the folks out. ‘You can get a nice house in the suburbs for only $25,000 and your children can go to good schools. Your neighborhood is beginning to change, you know,‘ said the real estate people. So the white folks moved out, and the poor folks moved in. They had to fix the houses as best they could, ‘cause the landlords didn’t.
“Now the real estate people are back, only this time they’re singing a different tune. ‘We’ve got some real treasures in the city. And for good prices, too. Better get in before they go up.’ And the white folks are doing it. But it was the real estate dudes who moved everybody out, and it’s them moving ‘em back. And it’s them making a buck every time they do.”
Thus spoke an old black man, a bricklayer who is a neighbor of mine in Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C. This historic neighborhood is the original site of the Columbian College that eventually grew into George Washington University, and also of the estate of Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who lent his name to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The long blocks of white granite row houses have been home to Supreme Court justices, cabinet officers, and senators. In years gone by, this hilltop neighborhood, which resembles the fashionable hill districts of San Francisco and Boston, was the proposed site for the rebuilding of the White House.
But that was then and this is now. The spine of Columbia Heights is that section of Fourteenth Street which was a major action area in the 1968 riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. The neighborhood that razed itself and has never been rebuilt cannot win, because it doesn’t sit at the table where the game is played.
Nor has it since its transition in the fifties, when it went from being a neighborhood of white government workers to being a hand-me-down for the influx of rural blacks who came on the heels of the flight to the suburbs. Such a transition took place in many neighborhoods across the country in that period. Now many neighborhoods which became dumping grounds for the poor face pre-emption by the first generation that was raised in the suburbs: the young, white professionals who have been attracted to the convenience and the once-great architecture of such close-in neighborhoods. Of such stuff is the back-to-the-city movement made.
My neighbor was attending a Saturday afternoon community meeting with the city’s housing department, a youthful officialdom which, like the city itself, is predominantly black. This is one of the ironies of life in Washington, D.C., and one of the best measurements of the extent to which all the most effective actors in this drama have been drawn into a charade. The supreme victory for the powers who pull the strings behind the scenes, but never show their faces, is to manipulate the oppressed into the role of oppressor--and so confuse everyone else that we must constantly ask ourselves if these bureaucrats are actually evil or just caught up and incompetent. For how could they appear to be so removed from people whose origins are so similar to their own?
Indeed, the painful reality that must be grappled with in examining the back-to-the-city movement is that, in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, blacks are crushing other black and poor people just as surely as the young white professionals are.
Nevertheless, in the same way that those who paid taxes for the war in Indochina were directly responsible for the death and destruction they financed, so the people buying Victorian row houses cheap are holding the other end of the noose that is strangling their tenants (rarely their owners). Not many taxpayers would have held and fired the weapons their taxes purchased; not many of the new urban immigrants would assume the responsibility that has been delegated elsewhere for carting out the furniture of the evicted poor. The tenants may have been dutiful rent-payers for twenty years, but they have been supplanted by those who can lay out higher rent or a down payment.
The “back-to-the-city” movement, which even has its own national interest organization, is merely this decade’s euphemism for the urban renewal of years gone by, a program labeled “urban removal” by those who suffered its consequences. It is, of course, somewhat neater, though not cleaner, and involves private enterprise to a greater extent. But other forms of warfare have been modernized in these ways, too.
For it can be said of these displacing acts that the more they can be described in terms of aesthetics--alleged to be morally neutral changes, stripped of political consequences--and the more they can be removed from the political purview of people, the greater the likelihood that the common opinion of such acts will be that they indicate progress and culture.
In Washington, Columbia Heights stands on the brink. The destruction of 1968 is not yet far enough from our minds that the mention of an address in the neighborhood doesn’t trigger an immediate association. Many buildings are still boarded up. There are vast expanses of cleared lots, where once there were homes and businesses. Little has been rebuilt.
But among the back-to-the-city people, many of whom had their origins in the surrounding suburbs, the mention of the area more and more frequently draws an admiring confirmation: “Smart,” they say. “Getting in early. Good investment. It’ll be the next to go.”
Indeed, the pace of property turnover has quickened each year, and prices edge upward. The pressures are given rise by the renewed interest in some of the only available and untouched buildings and land in the city. The pieces begin to fall into place. Like ducks in a row, neighborhoods are being picked off, one by one. A 1954 Supreme Court decision on urban renewal legislation,
Berman v. Parker, applies:
…we have the problem of the area which is not a slum but which is out of date... “blighted” or “deteriorated”... it fails to meet what are called modern standards....
Aesthetics aside--for I judge them a diversion where injustice is concerned—--will clean, mended clothing serve our purposes just as well as something off the rack? Are the poor entitled to live in, even to own, what they can afford?
Their emotional ties to the society of the neighborhoods that middle-class people label “blighted” are often very strong. Even the few white residents of Columbia Heights who have lived in other Washington neighborhoods emphasize the important role that street life plays in the neighborhood. Residents of other “renewed” areas where earlier residents have been driven out now comment on how quiet the streets are and the extent to which suburban life has pervaded their neighborhoods. The vital and interesting atmosphere is now mysteriously gone.
But it is not a mystery to everyone. To the thousands of blacks and Latinos who have been pushed out, things are very clear. Over a third of those who have been forced out from center city communities are Latinos, and for many of them, there is an additional barrier of language in learning to cope with their situation.
The physical symbols that restoration or renovation is taking place work on two levels: the grate across the door and the bars over the windows go up everywhere, until it looks as though they had been set around the entire neighborhood. The neighborhood changes until a person of the “wrong” color at the “wrong” place at the “wrong” time is immediately suspect.
Revolution begins, Che Guevara once said, when people stop allowing others to write history for them. If there is laissez faire history making, then it can also be said that it was laissez faire capitalism that created not only the slums, but Berman vs. Parker’s “out-of- date” areas as well. The economics are well-known: the tax drains and write offs, the defaulted loans and mortgages, redlining, abandonment.
Although there is often anger in such areas, and certainly despair, rarely is it channeled into meaningful political activity. Rather, resources must be directed to an effort, often unsuccessful, to find other shelter. Despite the relocation requirements that federal programs must meet, most people find their own shelter. If not, it can mean being “set out” with all one’s possessions, which are usually picked over by passers-by while the hunt continues. People have also seen their belongings hurled from the windows of upper floors and destroyed by landlords who did not want to transport them down to the street. The trauma of moving can be debilitating if coupled with a sense of failure for not having met obligations and not having provided for one’s family.
While one of the major goals of all renewal efforts has been the rehabilitation of existing housing, it has offered little hope for those of little means. It has meant that those who earn a living with their hands and backs have been hired to rehabilitate or clean houses they can never live in. The newspaper and magazine stories that typify the publicity of the back-to-the-city people never highlight the successful completion of a home by a large, poor, maybe fatherless family.
If written, such a story would probably detail the labor of several brothers and uncles, sons, and cousins. They work nights and weekends. Maybe one of them has a small business or knows a trade.
But the characters in such stories are usually young, white, childless couples. Probably they both work, and they contract out almost all the renovation work. (Where the work has been done by the landlord, the poor tenant has less hope, for the costs incurred will raise rents beyond all reach.)
The usual reply to an attack of this kind is to cite the “urban homesteading” program as an example of the opportunities available for those who are willing to put “sweat equity” into a home. This type of program apparently has put houses back into use in some cities in a significant way.
But in others this has not been so. In Washington, D.C., for instance, a very small number of houses have been made available, and those are not within the reach of low-income families.
Nor has rehabilitation always meant the imposition of Berman vs. Parker’s “modern standards”. In some cases, rehabilitation has brought restoration to historical accuracy, again a question of aesthetics. Such restoration is not found in poor neighborhoods, where the absence of flush toilets or other utilities is not considered historical accuracy. Restoration remains a function of wealth.
What, then, of the common aspiration to the security of ownership of land and shelter? How is this accessible to the poor, when their limited resources cannot compete in our system? In what way can the poor begin to write their own history against the odds? It seems clear that the despair and political isolation of the poor make any but cooperative actions futile.
We must take the long view here. What happens in such neighborhoods does not happen accidentally. It has been publicly said that what must happen in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights is the building up of a tax base. The people who live there are not expected ever to comprise that tax base, as long as their incomes remain stable. Thus, projects are planned that assume the immigration of high and middle income households which pay high taxes and require low public maintenance. The private and public decisions that launch the renewal effort analyze primarily economic benefits. These decisions have, over the years, produced a pattern of policies and programs that tend to homogenize neighborhoods in an upward fashion.
We must examine the pursuit of diversity also. If the transition to homogeneous neighborhoods that push out the poor is being criticized, what is being touted as a goal?
Diversity, certainly, but not only diversity in people’s backgrounds or occupations, but diversity in the ways a neighborhood is used. An absence of enclaves and a strong emphasis on cooperative values. Diversity has been called an act of charity to the rich and good political strategy. This is probably true. Certainly wealth carries burdens, just as poverty does.
But if a catalyst in the seizing of events is the decision to work co-operatively with those who share our circumstances, then mixing the neighborhood becomes an end. The means of affecting real change comes from achieving control over one’s own neighborhood, one’s own destiny. For the poor, this means control of ownership, something that is out of the reach of most unless it is sought cooperatively.
The Washington, D.C. housing campaign, described elsewhere in this issue, and the creation of a neighborhood land trust, were a response to an under standing of how all these issues fit together. William Pitt, writing in the 18th century, said,
…the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.
Modern urban versions of this cottage fill our cities. But not only may the state enter and take the property away for “renewal,” rarely to be given back to the original tenant, but top dollar rules. We work for the day when this is not so.
When this article appeared, Mary Ellen Hombs was a city planner living in the Community for Creative Nonviolence in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Beyond the Monuments, a book about Washington neighborhoods.
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