Capitol Hill - Impervious to Gentrification, Progress

Before the Nats game last night I met a friend on "The Hill" for a drink at a well known bar across the street from Eastern Market.  My journey through the hood got me to thinking about how far the area had come since my first journey there in 2001.  The answer was simple - it has possibly gone backwards.

Tunnicliff's now has ahi tuna on the menu and sleek downtown-ish feel inside, but is an outlier when it comes the neighborhood as a whole.  It's like the part of DC that time forgot.  Better yet, it's the part of DC the city forgot to update, maintain or care about. 

I've never been all that enamored with Easter Market - it's mostly people selling shit other people threw away the day before and the market smells like an open sewer.  The overall feel of the place is bathroom in Mexico-ish. 

I'm one of the few people not blinded by the faux visceral experience of shopping at a market like Easter Market.  Privileged white people think its neat to pretend to go to the market like billions of poor people around the world who are forced to do so due to severe poverty, lack of a strong centralized government and a general absence of the sophisticated distribution of foodstuffs we enjoy in America.  It's a wonder people have not grown wise to the place, but then again there's a pride inside people for things I'll never understand (think Starbucks people over-paying for coffee and being happy about it to the point of incessant bragging).

My walk through the area was as it was in 2001 - a little scary, but mostly just dirty, dingy and out of date.  Every other house was tended to while all the others looked rundown and uncared for.  Nothing screamed "people here love this neighborhood." It's almost 12 years later and nothing much has changed on Capitol Hill while many other neighborhoods in DC have completely reinvented themselves (U Street corridor, H Street etc et al). Why?

I'm guessing it has something to do with the transient nature of hill staff and others who choose to live there.  They don't buy, they rent for a bit and then move on.  Landlords collect rent checks, refuse to reinvest in their properties and feel no pain as places to lay your head near the Capitol are in high demand.  General infrastructure such as sidewalks, curb and gutter are the city's problem and only fixed when some kind of political or property value pressure is applied.  I don't think Capitol Hill can bring either of those. 

Where's the investment in real estate you see everywhere else?  Big mixed use buildings so plentiful everywhere else have evaded the one area they'd be most likely to flourish - a place where people need to rent, not buy.  I know that the process is slow, but is it decades slow?  Other neighborhoods have proved it doesn't take that long. 

Now I know why when my Capitol Hill friends come visit me in Clarendon they practically race home to start packing.  What's convenience matter when you have to sacrifice any hint of quality? 

Comments

[L David]

I highly doubt anyone who chooses to live on the Hill is dying to move out to the middle of nowhere, aka Clarendon.

[drew]

I feel the same way all I can see is yuppie admiral akbar screami its a trap at the top of his fishy lungs

[L David]

Nice post, Brad, though I pretty much disagree with all your takes. It's too bad your knee-jerk conservatism blinds to you the qualities (and true ills) of Eastern Market. It's a nice little place...completely ruined by all the selfish assholes in the city who decided it's the perfect place to bring their double-wide strollers and giant St. Bernards. And you're really scared walking through the Hill west of 11th? Especially compared to H St and U St? Give me a break. For all its flaws, the Hill is a great 'hood. It is a unique 'hood.

[Brad Kanus]

L David,

I'm sure you didn't know this, but I'm an internationally certified third degree black belt minister of opinion and whatever I say - goes. It does not matter if my thoughts and opinions on a place are countered by the majority of the population - if I say - so it be.

[17thStreet]

Given the new information about your black belt I am going to choose my words carefully. Undertanding that you are always correct, I am going to suggest you woud be more correct on this topic by approaching it from the opposite angle. The problem with Capitol Hill is not the transience - most of those houses that look uncared-for are not group houses full of interns. The problem is not that developemnt has avoided the Hill, it's the the Hill people fight it off constantly. Capitol Hill is full of long-time residents - the last of the Cave Dwellers of DC lore - who don't keep up their houses because they think everything is perfect just as it is, or was - 30 years ago. I know of plenty of parents of my high shcool friends who are still there, where they were in 1979. And as for mixed-use development, again, you would be more correct this way - these same people live and breathe to prevent any such development - witness the nearly life or death battle over the Hine School property, on Penn Ave across from Eastern Market metro, a natural place for intense development, yet plans for the site have prompted folks on the Hill to fight the proposal as if it were a combo playground/nuclear-waste dump. Really, Capitol Hill is possibly the most annoying neighborhood in the city. While Dupont uses Adams Morgan as the example of the ultimate evil to be avoided, Captiol Hill uses - everywhere; nothing on the Hill should change ever. (Notice how quickly Eastern Market got rebuilt after fire, to be just exactly what it was before, by a city that can barely get anything done right or timely.) I support your overall dislike of the Hill, because of course, you are right, but I want you to be right in the right way.