Editor’s Note:  Vision Zero is an impressive sounding slogan, but whether it will amount to more than that is in the hands of city leaders. The choices they make about how to prioritize public space for those who walk and ride bikes (and scooters), will determine whether cities get safer, or whether the current epidemic of pedestrian and cyclist deaths continues. Alex Baca, a frequent contributor to City Observatory recently testified to the Washington DC Joint Public Roundtable on Vision Zero on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. Her testimony is presented offers a powerful personal and policy case for taking safety much more seriously.

My name is Alex Baca, and I am testifying on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, where I serve as engagement director. CSG promotes walkable, inclusive, and transit-oriented communities in the D.C. region.

It is not difficult to connect the dots between CSG’s priorities and Vision Zero. If people live in the types of places that we encourage them to live—which we do because dense, walkable neighborhoods promote affordability, equity, and environmental resilience—they are likely to bike, walk, or take transit.

I was urged by my colleagues to begin today by telling the council that drivers in D.C. have hit a third of our small staff. I, personally, have crashed my bike in D.C., resulting in a broken jaw and over $20,000 in medical expenses. It’s a privilege for me to say that I don’t care about the cost, because I’m grateful to be alive.

Because, evidently, it took the deaths of two people to call this hearing, and in the time that it took to convene it, two more people have been killed on our streets. That’s an indictment on you all as stewards of this city—stewards who could implement physically protected bike lanes, or signal priority for buses, or cordon pricing, but haven’t. You could have chosen to implement the kind of infrastructure that would have prevented the deaths of four people in less than that many months. But you haven’t. So, today, D.C. residents and organizational representatives like me will have to excoriate themselves publicly to attempt to convince you that safe streets are not a privilege for a class of newcomers but a right to be granted to all citizens without doubt.

Fundamentally, what comprises Vision Zero—evaluation, engineering, enforcement, education, and encouragement—is not technically difficult. It is politically difficult, because it changes the environment for, or takes away from, a constituency of people who drive and park in D.C.

You may not state it publicly, but your actions as a council and as a city demonstrate that your allegiance is to that constituency, not to the people who walk, bike, or take transit on the roads that you control. You have continually stalled on implementing CSG’s proposed parking cashout program—I believe that Allen Greenberg has a detailed testimony for you on how this proposal, considered to be unfriendly to businesses, would save on average 1.6 lives per year. Since building out the 2005 bike master plan, you have not meaningfully implemented any protected bike infrastructure. Notable proposed projects like the 26th Street NW bike lane are in political limbo, while the 16th Street bus lane plans are laughable, given DDOT’s, and your, shying away from removing enough parking to truly create dedicated lanes.

Both MoveDC and the city’s sustainability plan call for a bump to 25 percent in modeshare for pedestrians and bicyclists. So far, the District seems unwilling to achieve this target through any means other than asking people to bike or walk out of the goodness of their hearts. Induced demand doesn’t just apply to highways; women and people of color are more likely to ride bikes when there are protected bike lanes. Bike lanes slow down car traffic, which in turn creates streets that are safer for people who walk.

Though this is an organizational testimony, I began my statement with personal anecdotes, and I would be remiss if I did not reinforce that the city’s failure to take the hard steps to make Vision Zero, or something close to it, puts my life on the line. I began riding a bike for transportation in D.C., and doing so now cuts my costs substantially enough that I am able to afford to live here, on a nonprofit salary, and contribute to your tax base. Breaking my jaw on a D.C. street didn’t stop me from riding a bike. You can’t scare me. But your negligence is no doubt scaring others from making the same choice.

I should also note that I’m the person who sets up the action alerts with clickable form letters that result in what I’ve heard called “spam” in your inboxes. I’m the person who sends the emails to member lists encouraging people to contact you, our elected officials, and the administrators that you appoint, with pleas to take away space from cars, to slow down vehicular traffic, to dedicate space to bus lanes, to build more protected bike infrastructure rather than studying all of the above to death when national best practices for safe streets have long been established.

Maybe the deaths of four people in two months can do what no public input seems to have done, and convince you that you can no longer equivocate on this topic. Road space is limited, and making our streets safe for people who walk, bike, and take transit necessitates that you take space away from cars and their drivers. Cities own their streets: D.C.’s streets belong to you, Council, and to Mayor Bowser. That you won’t—not that you can’t, but that you have repeatedly demonstrated that you won’t—make the streets that you are in charge of safer for people who aren’t driving has left blood on your hands.

This region is growing; we can’t stop people from coming here, one of the few places in the country where you can reliably count on economic mobility in a world that is becoming increasingly stratified. More people will mean more injuries and more deaths unless you intervene. That you must convene a hearing to establish the way to do so is an opportunity that I’m grateful for, and I thank you for this time. But doing this, instead of moving to take space away from cars and their drivers to create dedicated, safe infrastructure for vulnerable road users—the thing that you know you must do—verges on negligence.

I don’t want to compel my organization’s supporters to send you any more emails. I don’t want to use our limited organizational capacity to stage demonstrations agitating over what you already know: That the blood on your hands is a choice. It’s within your capacity to choose a different future.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth has, and will continue to, freely and willingly provided suggestions for dedicated bike and bus infrastructure, transportation demand management, and pedestrian safety. We reliably and consistently turn out people to public meetings and encourage our supporters to submit 3 public comment, in part to give you the political cover you often say you need to make decisions that are perceived as conventionally unpopular.

People who move about [the city] in ways other than driving should not be forced to swim across a river to prove that they need a bridge.

It is difficult for me to conclude this testimony with anything other than a plea to you. People who move about D.C. in ways other than driving should not be forced to swim across a river to prove that they need a bridge.

Thank you for your time. I hope that in the next few months, I will be thanking you for the implementation of safer street infrastructure rather than calling you to the carpet once again for your fearfulness of doing the right thing.

Thank you again.

Testimony to the Transportation and the Environment/Judiciary and Public Safety Joint Public Roundtable on Vision Zero by Alex Baca on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth September 27, 2018,

We’re pleased to publish another contribution from City Observatory friend and colleague Alex Baca. Alex has written about cities while living in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland, OH, and earlier this year authored a three-part review of Derek Hyra’s Cappuccino City. She’s back this month with more thoughts on how we talk about, think about and react to gentrification.

In this year’s Answers issue, Washington City Paper’s annual cover package devoted to sussing out reader-submitted queries about the District of Columbia, one totally over-it inquirer wrote—evidently, in all caps—”When will gentrification end?”

I worked for City Paper from 2010 to 2012, and copy editing fell under my duties as assistant editor. By the time I was a young twenty-something in D.C., the trajectory of the city’s bougiefication was older than I was. Still, many people—including, it should be said, journalists—were living in neighborhoods, like Park View and Bloomingdale, that they claimed they could never imagine looking like or costing what they did. This meant that stories of the friction of cultural change were fresh every day.

It’s easy to get lazy, and fall into tropes, when you feel like you’re perpetually writing about the same thing; when you’re writing about gentrification in a place where it, as most people take it to mean, is happening, there’s the doubly exhausting feature of feeling as if it invades every aspect of your existence—where you live, what you eat, what you do for fun, and how you get around. Still, the word itself, as City Observatory, other publications, and academic research has repeatedly made clear, carries plenty of connotations but does not singularly, definitively mean one thing.

Eventually, when proofing stories, I started circling “gentrification,” “gentrified,” or any other variation and kicking drafts back to writers or editors, asking them to rewrite the sentence, paragraph, or story without using the word. It forced us all to be more clear about what we were talking about—a good thing, because what we were talking about ranged expansively, and included not-so-gentrification-y topics like D.C.’s police chief to then-mayor Vince Gray’s shadow campaign. This exercise also, I think, made the City Paper stories that were explicitly about the particulars of gentrification more credible, more worthwhile, and more truly reflective of D.C. at that time.

It would be inappropriate, and absolutely not in the Answers issue’s spirit, to send—as I would have to a writer—this question back to its asker with a crude markup demanding clarity. We can also reasonably infer what they meant, anyway: “When will gentrification stop?” is as much a plea as an inquiry: When will rents stop rising? When will fancy restaurants, which I don’t want to go to, stop opening? When will D.C. stop the process of becoming something that doesn’t feel like home to me?

Unfortunately, though City Paper’s response takes the question seriously, it does not adequately address its concerns. It instead responds in the fashion of the “cappuccino lens,” my reappropriation of Derek Hyra’s terminology for cultural change. Like the City Paper take in question, Cappuccino City was a missed opportunity, as I wrote in my review of his book:

We cannot craft good policy without first establishing an ideological framework that appropriately considers what is going on in America’s Shaws, so that we can future-proof neighborhoods, cities, and regions for as many scenarios as possible. That necessitates admitting that both increased housing supply and strategies to mitigate physical and cultural displacement have a role in contemporary urban policy. Hyra had that opportunity. He squandered it to double-down on an out-of-date discourse.

The most powerful part of editor-in-chief Alexa Mills’ response is a tremendous statement from Harvard University’s Lily Song, who riffs beautifully on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ landmark “A Case For Reparations”:

“‘I would argue,’ says Song, ‘That we cannot begin to tackle gentrification without a reparations agenda of targeted spatial and social investment and deeper reckoning, reconciliation, and healing that not only takes seriously institutional racism but also the moral/ethical deficiency and complicity among Americans who do not know or choose to overlook our collective history of mass plunder and trauma. It would go beyond simply recognizing the profound injustice of politics, business, or urban development as-usual to actually begin unraveling the system from the core.”

Unfortunately, this is reduced greatly by the fact that it follows this, from Columbia University’s Saskia Sassen:

‘Gentrification might diminish a bit,’ she says, ‘But there is an even more negative force: the buying of properties by national and foreign individuals (who just want a luxury place), speculators who are cleansing their money by buying buildings, and financial firms who can make money off luxury buildings even when those buildings are empty.”

Mills’ response uplifts the argument that we must “begin unraveling the system”—the uniquely American system of which Coates writes in “A Case For Reparations”—”from the core,” but essentially chalks up widening income segregation and homelessness to global capital. It is easy to do this. The super-rich, and the developments that cater to them, are highly visible; that a cabal of luxury apartments stands empty when the majority of renters in the U.S. are cost-burdened can quickly slip to cast the necessary argument to add more housing as gauche and offensive. Moreover, shadowy foreign investors are vaporous things of which we can wash our hands, because they’re not ours. Unfortunately, investments in real estate in D.C. are not as great, or as insidious, as Sassen makes them out to be, as Payton Chung shows for Greater Greater Washington.

Sassen’s take, like Derek Hyra’s blaming of newcomers for rising rents, is a way of pointing to something removed enough from our own lives that we absolve ourselves of the responsibilities Song rightfully demands we undertake. Framing Sassen and Song as she does allows Mills to skate over an actual solution to “gentrification,” offered by The New School’s Mindy Fullilove: “Intervening in this trend involves substantial investments in affordable housing, she says. Many scholars and policymakers concur.” Centering the cultural anxieties of change conveniently glosses over the fact that lots of displacement happens without development; that “gentrification might not drive poor people out of neighborhoods, but gentrifying neighborhoods are where there’s a greater risk that when low-income households leave their apartments those spots will be taken up by wealthier people”; that building more housing for the rich can, in many cases, help the poor. In a 2017 paper called “Supply Skepticism,” Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan explain that substantial investments in both affordable and market-rate housing are needed to bring down its cost. Been elaborates on that here.

Substantial investments in affordable housing are barely possible and hardly popular. Neither is building new market-rate housing. While some renters understandably fear that market-rate construction will lead to displacement, a greater threat to affordability are the residents who have delayed new units in affluent, single-family neighborhoods. If D.C. were to pummel the spoils of its growing tax base into a social housing program, that housing would hardly penetrate large swaths of the city, as a report released this week by the D.C. Policy Center finds:

This mix of the housing structures that favors single-family units in the District is a major factor of exclusion. Even small changes in the mix of buildings can make meaningful improvements to the inclusiveness of the city. Consider the eight assessment neighborhoods in Northwest (Hawthorne, Colonial Village, Woodley, Foxhall, Burleith, Kent, Spring Valley and Berkley) with an average of one unit per building—all single-family homes. These eight neighborhoods, collectively, have 4,876 housing units in 4,748 buildings. Adding a single low-rise multifamily building with 100 units in each of these neighborhoods would increase their housing units by 16 percent while increasing the number of buildings by 0.2 percent.

In D.C., Wards 2 and 3 have evaded or preempted the responsibility of housing the city’s citizens by continuously fighting new construction or instituting regulations like historic districts that make it difficult to build more. As a result, neighborhoods like Shaw, NoMa, and the Southwest Waterfront, zoned for a greater variety of housing types and not so fully occupied by those with the luxury to protest change, are the only places that can realistically accommodate new buildings.

Those places look overwhelmingly different as a result, and the same physics work at a regional level. Because income mobility in the D.C. are is relatively high, people are not going to stop moving there; for many individuals and families, it may be more lucrative to stay. Expecting D.C. alone to shoulder the metro area’s burden for housing proximate to jobs, or transportation, will only exacerbate and accelerate the scarcity of affordable units.

Song’s call to unravel the system could easily begin with a reevaluation of what we deem as acceptable, what we permit, and where we permit it. We can begin that work today. We could choose to commit to radically inclusive fair-housing policies in our cities, especially as the federal government dismantles funding and protections for that work. We could institute a land-value tax. We could choose to pay out financial dividends to our residents, be more generous in our voucher systems, or legitimately institute reparations. We could cease funding roadways and funnel that money instead into public transportation. We could permit, in places zoned exclusively for single-family homes, denser housing. We could ban parking minimums. We could do all of these things, and more, quite swiftly.

I’ve argued such points since 2010. To be sure, in the intervening years, no American city has shown that it can successfully balance affordability and demand with existing policies. But we haven’t tried the things listed above, or more radical ideas beyond them, not because they are impossible, or because they don’t work. Rather, we’ve avoided them because they are unpopular to those with financial wealth or the wealth of time to protest. And they require a vastly different set of organizational goals than our municipal governments—which tend to fixate on growth and economic development—currently possess.

My frustration with Mills’ answer stems from the fact that the media has a great responsibility to do right by this topic and by the many others, like education, health, and transportation, whose fundamental truths—for example, adding more housing to increase affordability—are often counterintuitive, nearly always unpopular, and require keeping politicians accountable. City Paper has in its lifespan done a masterful job covering the shifts, jabs, and discomforts of an in-demand region that’s hurtling toward an unfamiliar future; it answered a similar question in 2014 in a much more appropriate way. More and more stories nationally are explaining how and why where we live changes as it does—without falling back on gentrification as shorthand, and often alongside reporting on specific ways to make housing more affordable. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, more and more pro-housing policies are emerging nationally: California’s SB827, Minneapolis’ citywide allowance of four-plexes, Buffalo’s elimination of parking minimums. These policies are not, and cannot be, panaceas, because there is no one reason that housing in America is inadequate. But they are a desperately needed start. D.C.’s own entreé, the amendments to its Comprehensive Plan, commanded a record thirteen-hour hearing last week that questioned fundamentally whether neighborhood stability or affordable housing is more important. The amendments to the Comp Plan that pass will guide the District’s land use in coming decades. If the Comp Plan does not provide for a citywide increase in new housing, D.C. will become even more expensive and exclusionary.

As Daniel Herriges writes in a series of posts for Strong Towns about how to address both gentrification and concentrated poverty, “The relevant fact is that marginalized people tend to be excluded from economic opportunity whether or not their neighborhoods are gentrifying in some particular sense.” Gentrification, as we understand it, is not going to stop. Additionally, the U.S. is sorting and segregating faster than ever, and so the gravity of what gentrification is has only grown weightier; we can sense it in a way that we could not decades ago. One of our many moral responsibilities as a society, I believe, is to ensure enough places to live, as well as wages high enough to make a reasonable fraction of those places to live within the reach of most people. But even in the best-case scenario, one in which as many people who choose to be housed are as safely and affordably sheltered as possible (perhaps by the kind of massive social housing program increasingly occupying the imagination of leftist commentators), the discomfiting nature and seeming unfairness of change is likely to persist. 

Mills writes that though many have dedicated their careers to understanding gentrification, “none can predict the future.” But predicting the future is not the point. No one is ever going to be able to foresee in clear-enough detail what comes next, so we instead must plan to be resilient enough to staunch blows that we won’t recognize until they hit. We have not yet truly committed to attempts to building cities that work for the many, not the few. It’s time to try.

City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. This is the first installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Baca. Parts two and three are available as well.  Alex Baca has worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland. She’s written about all of the above for Washington City Paper, CityLab, Slate, The American Conservative, Cleveland Magazine, Strong Towns, and Greater Greater Washington.

In Race, Class, and Politics In the Cappuccino City, Derek Hyra claims to invent a new lens through which to assess gentrification in rapidly upscaling cities, using Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood as the ground for his ethnographic research. But his conclusions are substandard repackagings of existing scholarship, and mislead those interested in housing policy—at a time when we desperately need clarity.

In the next few days, City Observatory will address how Derek Hyra’s Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City doesn’t stick its landing. This first installment discusses the conflicts within the structure of Hyra’s arguments, which reappropriate longstanding academic terms to culminate in his coinage of the sensationalist term “living the wire.”

Part I:  A New Premise?

Discussing gentrification, a term affixed to so many things that its intrinsic meaning is nearly meaningless, does not often result in cohesive and objective narratives. So it’s remarkable that the April 2017 release of Derek Hyra’s Race, Class, and Politics In the Cappuccino City spurred something of a thematically unified discussion around neighborhood change both locally within Washington, D.C., and at a national level.

Hyra, an associate professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs who heads its Metropolitan Policy Center, received a great deal of attention last year for his splashy retelling of the process of gentrification in Shaw, a center-city neighborhood in D.C.: from The Washington Post, from NPR, from DCist. Washington Business Journal, Next City, and Greater Greater Washington lent their platforms to excerpts of Hyra’s book. Shelterforce ran a flattering review of Cappuccino City, while CityLab published the requisite Q&A. D.C.’s NPR-affiliate institution The Kojo Nnamdi Show broadcast a live discussion with Hyra in May, and, in the following months, his speaking engagements in the D.C. area and beyond did not slow. Hyra’s coinage of “living the wire”—which is, as his publisher puts it, when “whites in their 20s and 30s seek[ing] the titillation of living in a community with a hint of the urban grit of the Baltimore ghetto portrayed in the TV series The Wire”—is too slick of a shorthand not to catch on in a media environment that treats high rents as a symptom of fancy toast.

In both Cappuccino City and The New Urban Renewal, his 2008 book on gentrification in Bronzeville and Harlem, Hyra favors ethnography, a qualitative research method designed to explicate social and cultural interactions. The strongest ethnography is longitudinal, allowing researchers to deeply and seriously engage with their subjects repeatedly over time to draw out personal stories—in all their complications and contradictions—that may not be so richly illustrated through data analysis alone. Ethnography, from Tally’s Corner and All Our Kin to Gang Leader For a Day and On the Run to, yes, even Second Life, has long been deployed by academics to understand the nuances of human interaction.

Cappuccino City opens with a literature review. In it, Hyra purports to operate on a different level than typical gentrification texts, which often settle into two camps: production (which, in his words, “tend[s] to assume that public policies and economic circumstances encourage investments and attract newcomers to once economically neglected communities”) and consumption (wherein those identified as gentrifiers drive the process through their tastes as consumers). Because, in Hyra’s assertion, “we know much less about how global and federal forces interact to explain urban redevelopment patterns, and why upper-income Whites are now attracted to formerly low-income African American communities,” he attempts to create his own scholastic space midway between consumption and production theory. Hyra’s work is based nearly entirely, with the exception of some data tables in Cappuccino City’s appendix, on his recorded interactions with Shaw residents in restaurants, community centers, and on basketball courts.

Hyra uses two structural devices to draw out his argument. The first is the illustration of the “gilded ghetto,” a term initially used by Kenneth B. Clark in Dark Ghetto to equate pathologies ascribed to “inner-city Black spaces” to those “of the affluent in the segregated White suburbs,” such as “an emptiness reflecting a futile struggle to find substance and worth through the concretes of things and possessions.” Hyra warps Clark’s original intent of the “gilded ghetto” for his thesis, using it “not as a reference to suburban challenges or pathologies but rather to indicate the intricate social and economic redevelopment processes, and outcomes, associated with the twenty-first-century transformation of second ghettos”:

“Once places where poverty, drugs, and violence proliferated, these areas have become spaces where farmers’ markets, coffee shops, dog parks, wine bars, and luxury condominiums now concentrate. The transition of American urban ‘no-go’ Black zones to hip cool places filled with chic restaurants, trendy bars, and high-priced apartment buildings defines the gilded ghetto. My contemporary use and redefinition of the gilded ghetto both references and explains what happens when those who, in the past, would have settled in the suburbs instead choose to reside in the dark ghetto” (7).

This has, in Hyra’s telling, happened as a result of consistent, calculated efforts of “black branding” on the part of privileged neighborhood stakeholders. He argues that those efforts, such as Cultural Tourism DC’s development of the Shaw Heritage Trail signage, occurring in concert with relatively wealthier, whiter, better-educated individuals choosing “to reside in an ‘authentic’ urban community whose energy and edge are based on preexisting stereotypes of the iconic Black ghetto, where Blackness, poverty, and crime are associated with one another” (19), results in “living the wire.” Hyra’s pairing of “living the wire” with “black branding” is Cappuccino City’s second structural device, and the book’s primary explanation for why white people choose black neighborhoods.

If production scholarship—once again, in Hyra’s definition—“tend[s] to assume that public policies and economic circumstances encourage investments and attract newcomers to once economically neglected communities,” then the reappropriation of “gilded ghetto,” alongside his twin justifications of “black branding” and “living the wire,” looks straightforwardly consumptive, resting on the theory that “cultural tastes and preferences shape gentrification patterns.” Despite Hyra’s claims to create a new paradigm, Cappuccino City operates firmly within the boundaries of the consumption premise of gentrification, conforming to the popular notion that cocktail bars, restaurants of a particular caliber, boutique shops, and the people who frequent them are drivers of gentrification.