Off-Target

Customers shop in the downtown Minneapolis Target, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003. Minneapolis-based Target Corp. reported an 8.7 percent increase in its third-quarter earnings Thursday, as strong sales offset disappointing results at the company’s Marshall Field’s and Mervyn’s. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

The recent opening of a Target store in Columbia Heights in Northwest Washington, D.C., has aroused a range of emotions among community activists, local residents, and the media, from unfettered praise to cynicism and ambivalence. The store is part of a larger project of developer Grid Properties that also includes a 1,200-car garage, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, and more than three dozen new restaurants. The project is a textbook example of modern, rapid gentrification. One of the biggest concerns for those leery of the project is that it will permanently change the face of Columbia Heights, a diverse neighborhood with a high percentage of Spanish-speaking residents. Critics argue that even if the development benefits most people at the moment, the resulting increases in neighborhood housing prices could eventually push out some of its longest standing residents.

Target is off to a bad start in allaying these worries. Despite the fact that Columbia Heights has a high Spanish-speaking population, the store has no bilingual signs. Given the demographics of Columbia Heights, Target’s decision sends a clear message: This store is for the new Columbia Heights, not the current Columbia Heights. And it can only amplify the concerns of those worried about what the frenzied pace of development will do the neighborhood.

The absence of bilingual signs in the new Target (which has enshrined its interior with red-and-white framed displays of cheerful multiethnic people) is disconcerting given the store’s immediate vicinity. According to the D.C. Office on Latino Affairs, nearly half of the District’s Latino community lives in Ward One, which includes the neighborhoods of Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, and Adams Morgan. (Target is in Columbia Heights but sits just to the east of Mount Pleasant’s eastern border.) The Office of Latino Affairs also estimates that one in three Latinos in the District has difficulty with English. The neighborhood around the new Target abounds with Latino culture. The Tivoli Theater, the nation’s first Hispanic Spanish-language theater, the Mexican Cultural Institute, the Latin American Youth Center, and the Latino Community Center are all nearby, and the area of 14th St. NW immediately to the north contains numerous establishments with almost exclusively Spanish signage. According to George Escobar, media spokesperson for the Office on Latino Affairs, there the more than 50 Latino-based organizations in the District, and they are most heavily concentrated in the Columbia Heights neighborhood

Target’s signage is fodder for community activists who say that the Target and other new stores are being built mostly for the sake of Columbia Heights’ future residents, not its current ones. While Escobar praised Target’s efforts to collaborate with the local community, citing its concerted efforts to hire local Latinos and plans to create “a bilingual capacity” in its workers, he admitted that there is no way to forecast the efficacy of the store’s accommodation efforts. “They have a responsibility to the community. A large portion of their clientele is Latino,” he said. “There have been mixed messages, though. We have to have a wait-and-see attitude with them.” Walda Katz-Fishman, a professor of sociology at Howard University, was less guarded in her assessment about Target’s choice to only display signs in English. “This represents a transition of who is living in the neighborhood. They are not sensitive to the community. The project is for the people who are coming in, not community residents,” Katz-Fishman said. Parisa Norouzi, co-director of Empower DC, an organization that assists lower-income District residents with housing, child services, and government accountability, was also pessimistic about the signs. “The lack of bilingual signs is indicative of who the development project was planned for,” Norouzi said. “If the Target was planned to serve the residents of the community, [accommodations, including signs] would have been a major factor. This is a good example of a major realtor feeling they have no need to serve their community.”

Target Spokesperson Elizabeth Wolf argues that Target’s commitment to diversity is evident in the relevance of items the store carries and the level of respect it gives its diverse guests. Wolf explained that the decision to not install bilingual signs came after the company’s market research and land development team surveyed Columbia Heights’ demographics and commerce trends and concluded that the store does not fit the criteria for bilingual signage. (There are, however, some Target stores that have bilingual signs, including ones in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Texas, and Florida.) And Wolf stressed that Target employs team members who are available to answer question from Spanish-speaking guests. But how accommodating can Spanish-speaking team members be when nothing in the store is written in Spanish? And if a Target is in a neighborhood that contains nearly half a city’s Hispanic population, but doesn’t qualify for bilingual signs, how could it qualify?

Target’s opening will undoubtedly benefit Columbia Heights in certain ways. It will bring jobs to the neighborhood, for one thing, and scads of cheap goods that used to be a long subway or bus ride away. And Target may yet be pressured to change its policies. Councilman Jim Graham, who represents Ward One, said in a official statement that the city is working with Target to accommodate the Columbia Heights residents and claimed the city will bring the signs to Target’s attention. But the store’s decision not to include bilingual signage reflects the deeper fears of certain residents and observers: that the real question about Target and Columbia Heights gentrification isn’t whether it will have short-term benefits, but rather whether, in the long run, it will severely reduce the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the neighborhood by spurring the development of more luxury and upper-class housing. Target’s weak grasp on neighborhood demographics is unlikely to assuage these fears.

Bobby Allyn is an Editorial Intern at Campus Progress and sophomore at American University.

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