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.
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