City planners have long tried to remedy “white flight” (the migration of traditionally white members of the professional and business-owning classes to the suburbs) by creating cityscapes that attract and accommodate discriminating dwellers. While such planning and development can certainly offer benefits like reduced crime or better transportation options, it also raises important concerns about identity, preference and displacement.  With my Levitt Research grant, I decided to look into these issues as they affect two neighborhood’s in the Nation’s capital city, Shaw and Anacostia.



Shaw began as a bustling community of newly-freed African-Americans in the last half of the 19^th century. By the 1920s, the neighborhood had more than 300 black-owned businesses, including a bank and a luxury hotel. Home to Howard University and the jazz halls that made Duke Ellington famous, the neighborhood had a thriving cultural and intellectual scene as well.

However, desegregation meant the opening of doors for the neighborhood’s black professionals and many of them migrated to the suburbs. Race riots in 1968 were the final draw for many neighborhood businesses and the crime rates increased dramatically.

When city planners tried to improve the neighborhood, they met with neighborhood elites. The resulting plan that made the neighborhood more attractive to new professionals and other members of the upper-classes, but it failed to include any sort of protection for longtime residents of less means. Today, the neighborhood is full of newly-arrived, and often white, professionals and the once-vibrant culture of the old neighborhood is quickly fading as rents rise and residents age.

Anacostia on the other hand was a middle-class and mostly white neighborhood until the “white flight” phenomenon occurred. The influx of relatively low-income African-Americans changed the neighborhood dramatically and relatively quickly. However, racial tensions being what they were, this dramatic change made it hard for the neighborhood institutions to keep up. The lack of institutional support structures (e.g. strong schools) and the abundance of pre-existing poverty resulted in high crime and scarce (licit) commercial activity.

In the past two decades, city leaders have argued for a major-league soccer stadium, a light-rail system, and a riverfront development in Anacostia. They also recently opened a nearby baseball stadium and trumpeted it’s potential benefits for the neighborhood. But it remains to be seen whether many of these projects will be realized and, even if they are, whether or not they will benefit area residents.

For my project, I’m looking at history, theory, current events and even just talking to affected people in an attempt to figure out how various factors determine the transformation of these places. I hope that if we can identify and understand the dynamics at work in these neighborhoods, we will be better able to develop structures of governance for them that hold in balance the values of the founding and preservation processes. 

Graphic is used courtesy of the District Chronicles.

City planners have long tried to remedy “white flight” (the migration of traditionally white members of the professional and business-owning classes to the suburbs) by creating cityscapes that attract and accommodate discriminating dwellers. While such planning and development can certainly offer benefits like reduced crime or better transportation options, it also raises important concerns about identity, preference and displacement.  With my Levitt Research grant, I decided to look into these issues as they affect two neighborhood’s in the Nation’s capital city, Shaw and Anacostia.

Shaw began as a bustling community of newly-freed African-Americans in the last half of the 19^th century. By the 1920s, the neighborhood had more than 300 black-owned businesses, including a bank and a luxury hotel. Home to Howard University and the jazz halls that made Duke Ellington famous, the neighborhood had a thriving cultural and intellectual scene as well.

However, desegregation meant the opening of doors for the neighborhood’s black professionals and many of them migrated to the suburbs. Race riots in 1968 were the final draw for many neighborhood businesses and the crime rates increased dramatically.

When city planners tried to improve the neighborhood, they met with neighborhood elites. The resulting plan that made the neighborhood more attractive to new professionals and other members of the upper-classes, but it failed to include any sort of protection for longtime residents of less means. Today, the neighborhood is full of newly-arrived, and often white, professionals and the once-vibrant culture of the old neighborhood is quickly fading as rents rise and residents age.

Anacostia on the other hand was a middle-class and mostly white neighborhood until the “white flight” phenomenon occurred. The influx of relatively low-income African-Americans changed the neighborhood dramatically and relatively quickly. However, racial tensions being what they were, this dramatic change made it hard for the neighborhood institutions to keep up. The lack of institutional support structures (e.g. strong schools) and the abundance of pre-existing poverty resulted in high crime and scarce (licit) commercial activity.

In the past two decades, city leaders have argued for a major-league soccer stadium, a light-rail system, and a riverfront development in Anacostia. They also recently opened a nearby baseball stadium and trumpeted it’s potential benefits for the neighborhood. But it remains to be seen whether many of these projects will be realized and, even if they are, whether or not they will benefit area residents.

For my project, I’m looking at history, theory, current events and even just talking to affected people in an attempt to figure out how various factors determine the transformation of these places. I hope that if we can identify and understand the dynamics at work in these neighborhoods, we will be better able to develop structures of governance for them that hold in balance the values of the founding and preservation processes.