Last night my housemates and I were a bit freaked out because approximately everyone in our neighborhood of Columbia Heights has been mugged at gunpoint within the last 48 hours (only a slight exaggeration, unfortunately), and because one of my housemates heard gunshots nearby later in the night.

So when I got to work today I searched Google News for “Columbia Heights,” hoping the Post or some other local outlet would have coverage of the mini-crime wave. And, in a case of almost painful predictability, instead the first hit was this Post piece from today headlined “A Rapid Renaissance in Columbia Heights”:

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 piece quotes D.C. Council member Jim Graham, saying things that make him sound more like some sort of caricatured oligarch than a community leader:

…Graham acknowledged that ginning interest was difficult in a crime-addled area defined by acres of vacant lots. "This was before the red-hot real estate market and a very different Columbia Heights," he said. "This was a neighborhood where we had tried to get McDonald's, and they said they wouldn't consider it. Today, we'd rather not have McDonald's."

Yet, even with the new construction, Graham acknowledged that Columbia Heights is still too risky for some national retailers. "They can't convince themselves that this is going to work," he said. "There is no Saks going to be located there. There is no Whole Foods."

No Saks and no Whole Foods? Why the hell did I move there?

The Post article pays lip service to the idea that all this development is being done with the neighborhood’s poor and middle-class folks in mind. This is something we always, always, always hear when a long-neglected neighborhood catches the eyes of developers.

Keep in mind that Columbia Heights was for a long time a genuinely dangerous neighborhood, and in some respects still is. Two kids were shot within a day of each other last summer, one of them fatally, at 14th and Girard—four blocks south of the epicenter of this Incredible New Revitalizing Shopping Mecca That Will Benefit Rich And Poor Alike. To the reporter’s credit, this is mentioned in the piece, but take a look at how the story is structured: it takes 23 grafs—23!—before a member of the community is quoted. And this in an article with opening grafs that sound like they were written by someone from a PR background: the development signifies a “new world”; it’s going to “eras[e]… scars”; it’s a “renaissance.”

I’m not trying to be the kid from your freshman dorm who makes sweeping, ill-informed pronouncements against capitalism or gentrification or development. All I’m saying is that the fawning tone of the Post’s coverage is rather shameful. You can’t write a piece like this and take so long to let the people from the community get a word in edgewise. And you can’t dump a billion dollars into an area—a good portion of it devoted to big-box retailers—and not expect it to have a nasty impact on those with real roots there, those with a true stake in the neighborhood’s direction (that is, people who aren’t me or the numerous other young, working-professional types who have flocked to the Heights for the low rent recently). Columbia Heights is going to be unrecognizable in five years.