Please Read! Confessions of a Black D.C. Gentrifer

Courtesy of Washington City Paper

Well written and thoughtful article about the current face of "gentrification" in DC and East of the River -- a black face.  Really great piece.  May be the best article I have read on the subject, definetly the most accurate.

Go HERE to read the full Washington City Paper article, Confessions of a Black D.C. Gentrifier by Shani Hilton.

Excerpt:

If you ask Aisha Moore about gentrification, her first inclination is to scoff.

Moore, a black resident of Congress Heights, says her Ward 8 street is “100 percent black” and that’s not likely to change soon.

“Nobody leaves,” she jokes. “On my block, if new people bought a house, it’s because an old lady died.”

Yet Moore isn’t from D.C. and has only lived in the city since 2002, after she finished an undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, her boyfriend bought a house in Congress Heights and she moved in with him in 2009.

Which, by every metric except one—skin color—makes her as much of a gentrifier as the young white residents unloading moving vans near U Street NW every weekend. As we talk, Moore says she’s frustrated by the dozens of stories that feature handwringing over D.C. becoming “less black,” because they paint an incomplete picture.