Posted on 04/18/2016 8:44:37 PM PDT by ghosthost
The last time I was in Baltimore, back in the ‘90s for a gun show, I missed the turn for the B/W Parkway South and ended up in West Baltimore. A white guy in a sports car with a Sons of Confederate Veterans sticker on the rear window, on streets where mine was the only car and people were just walking all over the place. I saw the sign for I-95 South and I took it. Fast. Never went back.
The only place that I’ve ever seen this NOT work is DC ... It may take thirty years but I think DC will be some yuppie paradise by 2050.
There are successful gentrification stories in many older cities around the country, though DC may indeed be an extreme case. The thing that makes DC an outlier is, again, its small size. It has been one of the staples of the debate for many years to point out that DC's exotic numbers on negative indicators such as crime, lousy schools, welfare dependency, etc. largely reflected the fact that the city, being constitutionally limited in size, was never able to annex the close-in suburbs. The metro area as a whole looked, and still looks, reasonably normal on SES indicators (very affluent, actually), while the District proper, with the bulk of the older, inner-city housing, looked like a basket case. As the inner city neighborhoods gentrify, the reverse will eventually be true. DC proper may become (is becoming) a remarkably prosperous and attractive core city, with the problems pushed out into the 'burbs. In all things DC, you have to look at the metro area as a whole, and not just at the District.
This transformation is happening faster than most people realize. There is still a long way to go, but whole sections of the city are almost unrecognizable from what they were even ten years ago, let alone 20 or 30. On the east side, Capitol Hill and Brookland are booming and expanding, and the entire Anacostia corridor is coming to life. It is astonishing how many people in the suburbs have never discovered the National Arboretum or Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, and those are just two of the quality destinations that line the river. The walking/jogging/biking trail will be finished all the way up to Bladensburg this summer. The Anacostia is going to become the region's accessible riverfront, and in 30 years the neighborhoods all along the corridor will be highly desired. Several Anacostia neighborhoods are already rebounding; the major impediment to rapid change is, of course, the over-concentration of government low-income housing. But that will gradually be phased out.
Anacostia in 10 years will be a destination neighborhood. Frederick Douglas used to walk from Cedar Hill, his estate in Anacostia, to work downtown. The yuppies will do it on bicycles, but it's too close in not the rebound.
And where will the deadenders go? Probably Baltimore, where they will feel at home in a political culture that still thinks expansion of welfarism is the path to prosperity.
In my 3.5 years of living in Arlington (I left in the summer of 2013)....I had a couple of chances to go across the river into Anacostia.
Right before the river, is the Nationals Park and the new ‘burb’. I have to agree....it is fast becoming a yuppie paradise and it’s population will 90-percent non-black very shortly.
Across the river, the Saint Elizabeth’s medical grounds is treasured territory and any month now...it’ll be sold or swapped for some massive development. Within twenty to thirty years...DC won’t be the same town.
As for where the locals go? I think they will just walk over the line to Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties. Both, I think, will become marginalized and drug-thug urbanized zones. I’ll even go and predict some kind of national cop force has to be sent into the area by 2030 and actively help the local cops fix the problem.
Baltimore, I’ve pretty much given up on, and consider it to be in Detroit-status (with New Orleans and half of Memphis)....with no chance of recovery and the only positive for Baltimore will be this international airport that they run. I have doubts that the harbor for cruise boats will still be there in five years....as people decide there’s too much crime in the inner city.
Starting at the confluence with the Potomac and moving upstream, you have Fort McNair; the future site of the DC United soccer stadium on Buzzard Point; the new Nationals Park; Yards Park and the waterfront recreation area; the remarkable redevelopment of M Street; the Navy Yard; the future site of the planned Anacostia Bridge Park; the marinas along Water Street; historic congressional cemetery (a popular dog walking and biking destination); the soon-to-be-redeveloped Stadium/Armory area; Langston Golf Course, the Arboretum, Colmar Manor Park ... and presto, you're at Bladensburg, and the new Bladensburg Riverfront Park (at which point you can access an extensive suburban MD trails system). The point is, the entire length of the river is a continuous belt of attractive locations, now linking up with continuous hiking/biking trails. People (other than the fishermen and boaters, who have always known it) are rapidly discovering the river as recreational corridor.
Moving back downstream on the other side, there is a soon-to-completed hiking, jogging, biking trail running along the river all the way back from the Bladensburg Riverfront Park though the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and Anacostia Park down to the South Capitol Street Bridge and Fort Bolling. Up on the ridge, the St. E's site is being developed as the new home of DHS, which will transform that section of Anacostia.
You have more familiarity with the area than most, but most people on the west side and in the burbs have no idea of the potential of the Anacostia corridor. The Anacostia is going to be DC's accessible riverfront. The entire length is rapidly becoming easily accessible parks and recreation. When the old LBJ era housing projects are phased out, it will become yuppie heaven.
The Anacostia was a working river, with ports and industry which contributed to the general grime as the east side crashed in the bad years. The housing along the river was originally small and working class in character, which now means "affordable" for young professionals. It will never rival Kalorama, Cleveland Park, or Spring Valley for the prestige housing market, but these areas are going to become a mecca for young people who like the idea of stepping out their front door onto a major riverfront recreational area within 1-5 miles of the Capitol, depending on how far upriver you go.
You are right. It is going to transform the way people perceive the east side, and it will change the way Washington lives. An accessible riverfront through the heart of a major city should be golden. This will be, once the yuppie to junkie ratio hits the tipping point. The crackhouses will become Starbucks, the parks and bikepaths along the river will fill with little kids, and the folks in Fairfax and Montgomery who are still spending four hours a day in their cars will be kicking themselves.
Anyone who've seen the HBO series The Wire knows very well why Baltimore is failing: the very way Baltimore is run makes it very different from the rest of the state of Maryland, and as such when white flight happened after the riots of the 1960's, the city quickly fell into ruin. Today, Baltimore is essentially the Detroit of the East Coast; if they had the proper form of government, Baltimore could have easily become a bedroom community for the many Federal employees who work in Washington, DC.
I had a chat with a 65-year old guy while working in DC area (2010-2013), who had grown up in Baltimore and lived there until the early 1990s....giving up on it at that point. He always had passionate feelings for the city from the mid-60s to the mid-70s. He pointed out several obvious things.
A high speed rail service between DC and Baltimore....like some monorail service along I-95, could make the trip in 25 minutes and attract thousands to the Baltimore area, while working out of DC.
The whole bay area would attract lots of people....if safety and security could be assured (but he noted, you’d have to quadruple the current cop force).
With major sports in the bay-city area....and talking the “Bullets” into returning....there would be all kinds of tax revenue for these yuppies to spend their hard-earned cash.
But he ended the conversation with you can drag a “dead horse” to race-course. If you started to fix any of the symptoms here, you’d have to find people to hire for real work, and there just aren’t people around who would skip drug-testing and give you forty honest hours of work a week.
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