All You Need is Shopping

The entrance to the new Target store in Columbia Heights, Washington, D.C. (Credit: Sommer Mathis/ DCist.com)

The Washington Post generally provides its readers with comprehensive coverage of gentrification in Washington, D.C.—articles that acknowledge the complexities inherent in rapidly changing neighborhoods. One recent story followed a group of immigrant families that banded together to keep their homes after their apartment building was converted into condominiums. Another examined two girls from neighborhoods undergoing tumultuous demographic shifts who won an essay-writing contest about gentrification. The paper also ran a two-part series that effectively examined the culture shock that has resulted from young, wealthy, white professionals flocking to what had long been a black neighborhood.

Given all this top-notch coverage, you wouldn’t think that the Post would publish a piece that emulates the hyperbolic language of real estate developers and that largely ignores the impact of gentrification on those most likely to be on the losing side of the equation—the established, longtime residents of affected communities. But yesterday, the paper did just that in an article that examines a long-awaited Target that opens today in Columbia Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Northwest D.C. where luxury condos are sprouting up and a new shopping center, developers hope, will draw people from all over the District. Written by Post reporterPaul Schwartzman, the piece takes a substantive, well-rounded look at what the future holds for Columbia Heights—that is, if you’re an upper-middle class shopper. (Schwartzman was contacted for this article but wouldn’t speak on the record.)

The article’s headline alone, “A Rapid Renaissance in Columbia Heights: Retail-Based Renewal A Contrast to ’60s Strife,” sets up a rather shameless juxtaposition, as though the opposite of poverty and violence were shopping. Things get worse in the body of the piece:

To stand at 14th Street and Park Road in Northwest Washington is to behold a new world created at whiplash speed.

A billion dollars’ worth of development, including a Target-anchored shopping center opening tomorrow, is rising in Columbia Heights, erasing the last vestiges of scars left by riots that ravaged the neighborhood 40 years ago.

And the renaissance is all by design, one intended to create a new city within the city and keep Washingtonians from traveling to the suburbs to splurge.

Even within the rush of construction that has swept across the District, Columbia Heights’ renaissance is singular, not only because of its scope but because of its locale, a residential neighborhood that is among the region’s most economically and racially diverse.

The language is breathless and PR-ish: A “renaissance” is afoot as a “new world” is “created at whiplash speed.” This would be bad enough, but it’s not as embarrassing—or offensive—as the assertion that while things used to be bad, the new shopping center is “erasing” Columbia Heights’ troubled past. Schwartzman is a journalist, not a developer, and yet he writes as though he truly believes that, thanks to a few new shiny buildings and big-box retailers, Columbia Heights—a neighborhood still plagued with crime and home to pockets of persistent poverty—will be reborn as a happy shopper’s paradise.

Schwartzman claims that rapid development will further the causes of diversity and cross-cultural understanding in the neighborhood. “Columbia Heights’ rebirth is not only about the arrival of bricks and mortar at a crossroads that long struggled to recover from the looting and arson that followed Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination,” he asserts. “It’s about the blending of cultures and classes.” To balance his doe-eyed optimism, it would have made sense for Schwartzman to quote someone—anyone—from the neighborhood, the D.C. government, or a housing non-profit who, say, fears that rising housing costs could lead to re-segregation. Those concerns would certainly be justified. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute recently released a report concluding that Washington, D.C. has “two economies,” a robust one for the well-off and white, and a faltering one for the poor and black. Even as “the number of jobs in the District has increased and median household income has risen,” the report notes, employment among blacks is falling, poverty is “at the highest level in nearly a decade,” and the gap between high-wage and low-wage earners has never been wider. But instead of addressing these disparities, Schwartzman instead decides to accept the premise that a new shopping center will pave over the decades-long problems that have hampered Columbia Heights and its residents.

Almost as telling as Schwartzman’s overheated language and glib treatment of the neighborhood’s persistent problems is how Schwartzman and his editors have structured his story. A key component of news writing is not just who is quoted in an article or what details are mentioned, but how far down in the piece certain elements appear. The general rule is that the further down something shows up, the less important it is. (Every new journalist has the “inverted pyramid” formulation, in which a story’s most important details go near the beginning, endlessly drilled into his or her skull.) Near the beginning of his story, Schwartzman quotes two political figures who have thrown in their lots with the area’s redevelopment and speak approvingly of it (though one does lament that the neighborhood is still considered too risky for the likes of Saks or Whole Foods), then quotes the president of Grid Properties, the developer behind the new shopping center, who, shockingly, is also excited by what’s going on.

It’s not until 23 paragraphs into the story that a resident of Columbia Heights is quoted. And though Schwartzman does mention, in passing, the neighborhood’s issues with crime and poverty and the fears some have about its rapid makeover, this is all pushed to the end of the story—complaints from residents are relegated to the final 250 words of the 1,466-word piece.

To be sure, it would be ludicrous to argue that every story about Columbia Heights’ revitalization must be written entirely from the point of view of its longtime residents, or that gentrification in this and other cases always hurts the poor. (For one thing, Target will definitely bring some new jobs and cheap goods to Columbia Heights.) But ultimately residents have to be a big part of a story like this one, and the question of how the poor are impacted deserves equal time with other concerns. But Schwartzman is too focused on Columbia Heights’ developers and potential shoppers to provide his readers with the larger picture.

And what is that larger picture? The article itself hints at it. Schwartzman writes that the neighborhood’s proportion of black residents is decreasing and that the median income of home buyers in Columbia Heights shot upward between 2000 and 2005. But he proceeds to almost completely ignore the question of how these changes will impact those with the greatest stake in the neighborhood. Will some folks be priced out? Has there been pressure on people to sell row houses and apartments their families have inhabited for generations? Columbia Heights is going to get more expensive. It’s going to get whiter. Without a doubt, these changes are going to greatly impact a diverse, high-crime community where rich young people live in newly renovated row houses that sit on the same blocks as public housing projects. But the Post’s coverage of this momentous moment in the new Columbia Heights is star-struck by construction cranes. The paper would do well by its readers, and by the vulnerable residents of Columbia Heights, to avoid this sort of myopia in the future.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor of Campus Progress.

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