Structural causes
Issues of racial inequality and gentrification are not unique to D.C., but they are particularly intense in the District. Once known as “Chocolate City” due to its majority-Black population, the demographics of the District have changed dramatically in recent decades, with Black residents accounting for only 45 percent of the city’s population in 2022. “If you look at D.C. in the year 2000, for example, there were no low-income white neighborhoods. So gentrification in D.C. is always a racialized process,” said Tanya Golash-Boza, the executive director of the University of California, Washington Center and the author of Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap.
When higher-income, primarily white residents move into redeveloped neighborhoods, its is thus Black residents who are displaced, said Golash-Boza. Compared to their white counterparts, Black residents of the District are more likely to live in poverty and be unemployed, disproportionately live in neighborhoods that experience higher rates of homicide, and even lack sufficient access to health care. All of these factors contribute to a sense of “relative deprivation,” said Golash-Boza. “The idea is not just that you’re poor, but also that you can see other people around you with more,” she said.
The Navy Yard neighborhood in southeast D.C., for example, has experienced radical change in the past 20 years. In 2005, Navy Yard had a similar profile to Anacostia, the area of D.C. just across the Anacostia River. But in the intervening years, it has experienced rapid redevelopment, becoming a site for a Major League Baseball stadium, luxury apartments, and trendy restaurants and bars. Not only have the primarily Black residents that used to live in Navy Yard been displaced, the residents of Anacostia—which has been hardest hit by rising violent crime rates—can look across the river and see development that isn’t occurring in their own neighborhood.