The Caper of the Lingering Anacostia Taboo!

Maybe this is a misperception, but I get the notion that a lot of people in my demographic have a vision that the south/east side of the Anacostia river in DC is some sort of backwards ghetto. Not only the kind of place you wouldn't want to live, but the kind of place you wouldn't want to set foot in. It's common to hear people advise newcomers to "avoid Southeast", as if DC were an analogy for the Old World, in which the south and east were associated with primitiveness and underdevelopment. You might remember the Maine Tea Party's warnings along these lines. Perhaps it's a matter of concern over high crime rates (as if one is likely to be shot on sight), but many people I talk to believe that even the built environment constitutes some kind of depressing slum.  I suppose that, growing up in DC, I bought into some version of that narrative too.

Out of curiosity, I've started going on runs and bike rides across the river to see for myself what lies on the other side.

To my surprise, most of what I've seen looks perfectly nice. Most of it is pretty quaint, and typical of middle-class neighborhoods in the DC area. Admittedly, there is a sizable idle population, and idle minors do tend to cause trouble. And, although it's true that there is not much commercial development to appeal to young urban types like myself, the bulk of the landscape is very pleasant. Nice, quiet, neighborhoods.

You may have known this all along. But if you didn't, here's what you can expect to find:

Dropping the streetview man randomly in another neighborhood across the river:

As someone walking down the street, it was hard to visually distinguish many of the neighborhoods I've been wandering through from the ones near my childhood home in far northwest. Like, say, Hawthorne:

Pretty similar, right? (Though, "nicer neighborhoods" can be usually be picked out by their lack of sidewalks.)

By contrast, this is a typical streetscape inwest Baltimore:

Homey! And this is east Baltimore (seriously, try dropping the streetview guy somewhere random anywhere near the Hopkins' Medical School):

See, now that's a downer streetscape. When 50% of doors are boarded up on a block, and 20% are missing their doorsteps, then the neighborhood can be described as in need of some sort of salvation. But markedly different than what exists in the wider area people like to call "Anacostia" (which, I realize, is different than the neighborhood called Anacostia.)

To fail to understand how livable the neighborhoods across the river is to risk missing an important point concerning the political tensions that were on display this past election cycle, in particular the backlash against "Smart Growth" types. I would guess that many residents in wards 7 and 8 feel like they live in pretty nice neighborhoods as they are. However, the ethos of the Fenty administration and its supporters (in contrast to Gray), is that the south and east of the city are in desperate need of salvation--reshaping, really--both in terms of its values and in terms of its physical environment. Which could only be expected to alarm current residents, who probably enjoy the fact that they aren't being overrun by youngsters (who tend to be Fenty supporters) who stay out late at rowdy bars and who are willing to pay hefty sums for rent, as H street NW, Logan Circle, and U St NW are. Sure, education needs to be improved (given worsening unemployment), and crime needs to be kept down. But it seems to me to be very important to not assume that someone hates his or her life until they personally tell you they do. Otherwise, you're bound to make enemies.