Recently, the good people of Vice ruffled some feathers in DC with their article about why DC is the worst place in these United States. Now, the article struck a cord with the folks at DC media and culture sites dcist.com, Prince of Petworth, and Brightest Young Things, who published their own offended rebuttle pieces. There were some good points on both sides, but I would like to offer my own thoughts that go beyond the politics, the high rent, and questioning the natural pro-NYC loyalty.

DC is neither the best place to come if you are a young and idealistic millennial, nor is it the worst city in the United States. I am here to call out all of the journalists who write articles about DC, judging the city and by extension the people who live in it. Please stop comparing DC to New York, we aren’t trying to surmount it as the mecca for art, food and metropolitan culture in America. Yes, we are aware that our rents are unsustainably high and climbing, you really don’t need to remind us. Please explain local DC government corruption to us one more time in a listicle, oh wise ones. We get it, DC isn’t perfect. But there are so many wonderful things that can’t be captured by one person in one article.

I arrived in DC almost five years ago, stepping from my grandparents’ minivan onto the campus of American University. I spent most of the next four years on or around AU’s campus in the wooded, suburban neighborhood of Tenleytown in Northwest DC (with a brief sojurn in Beijing, China). After graduation, I moved east to a gentrifying neighborhood called Petworth. I spent a very tough six months underemployed as a Master Carpenter for AU’s student theatre 26 hours a week, supplementing with other odd theatre jobs on the side, before I found a job doing graphic design at a global health contractor. (“Design” is a generous term for what I do, mostly it’s working with templates and fixing a lot of really terrible Powerpoints.)

So this really is a segmented and personal musing on the DC experience. I don’t pretend to be a native DC-er by any means, or speak to the experience of every DC resident. I am a young, white, cis, straight lady working a white collar job. There is a lot of violence in DC that honestly flies right by me, and I try really hard to be cognizant of that. I am the minority and my DC living has been full of doors opening in my face. I also don’t intend to make DC my personal home, which makes my point of view more cynical.

I’m gonna go in depth into two particular subjects that have shaped my DC experience: Blind Ambition and Gentrification. Please treat this is my early goodbye to a city that I love and call home. A fumbling goodbye to a city of passionate people testing their idealism in the political heart of America. A city of passionate and compassionate people fighting to keep that heart alive and beating. This is a finger momentarily placed on this pulse, before walking away knowing more about its own circulation.

Blind Ambition

No one comes to DC for the money or the fame. There is money here, but I don’t think anyone comes here to get rich in the same way people flock to New York, its most oft referenced analog. Vice paid particular attention to the unflattering moniker “the Hollywood for ugly people,” but DC doesn’t really fit that mold. Primarily, DC is more about the culture of competition than it is about the celebrity. Very few people really show up in DC expecting to make it big and get recognized at the local Starbucks. Sure, there are thousands of interns working on Capitol Hill who would eat a baby to get into a Senate seat, but there are also thousands of anonymous idealists willing to be thrown in jail over the Keystone XL pipeline. DC is all about ambition.

In some ways DC is perfect for someone like me. I have always been incredibly career oriented and ambitious. There is not a doubt in my mind that in the Harry Potter-verse I would’ve been a Slytherin. (I do like to think that I would’ve been one of the ones that would’ve stood with Harry and the others in the Battle of Hogwarts, but I digress.) When I was thirteen, I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t just want to be a writer, I wanted to win a Nobel Prize and be the youngest person in the world to do so. I spend the better part of a year researching and writing the beginning of a book about Marie Antoinette. The project was abandoned when I had to put more effort into the politics of middle school friendships, but it was neither the first nor the last time I grabbed hold of an idea and pursued it with blind ambition.

Fast forward five years or so. When I was deciding where to go to college, I looked at the list of the best universities for International Relations in the country and crossed off everything that was larger than 8000 students and not located in or near a major city. I visited about fifteen universities that summer, and found American University in Washington, DC. A lush, contained campus that was metro accessible from the best downtown center in the world for international politics. The student body was liberal, engaged, and oriented for success. My spidey senses tingled at the mention of summer internships and I knew I would be headed for success.

American University is unique among the universities located in the Washington, DC area. It has a campus-unlike George Washington University- allowing students to find semi-affordable housing on our own rather than rely on astromically high dorm prices. It has no sports program of note-unlike Georgetown-so the student body lacks any sense of school spirit beyond the occasional surge when we are named “Most Politically Engaged Student Body” in the Princeton Review (again). Unlike George Mason University and University of Maryland, it is a private university and has a much smaller student body. And unlike Howard University, it has no reputation or cultural identity outside of DC. More than half of the student body goes abroad in their undergraduate career, and over 85% of the students held at least one internship before graduating.

I wouldn’t say that I flourished in college. I have a lot of regrets about how I did it, but I still graduated with a relatively impressive resume. Then I didn’t find a job. I didn’t find a job for six months. I sat in cafes and applied for job after job, my Chrome filled with idealist.org tabs of jobs that I was interested in. I stubbornly refused to apply for unpaid internships, justifying it by saying that I served my time at two unpaid internships that I had in college. I was smart. I looked great on paper. I had two internships, wrote a senior thesis, made the Dean’s List, and knew two languages. Sorry to be the millennial cliché here, but I had lost some of the work ethic that had gone along with my pre-college blind ambition and I thought I deserved a job.

The reality of DC set in. There are a lot of jobs in DC, which makes it especially tempting to ambitious recent graduates looking to work for NGOs. Competition is incredibly fierce. I had an advantage because I had internship experience and had connections. In six months, I had four interviews. One of them was just an informational networking interview set up by a family friend. Two of them were for the job that I currently hold. Most of the time I wouldn’t even hear back. It is incredibly frustrating. Writing cover letter after cover letter. Watching your savings account sink into your rent every month. Justifying staying on at what was your part-time job in college. In the end it was a mix of luck, an incredible act of friendship, and my ability to use the Adobe Creative Skills (thanks yearbook class!) that got me the job I hold today.

Prestige matters a lot in DC. People like to judge you. When you meet someone at a bar, the first thing they ask you is “What do you do?” It has become a kind of sick joke for people who live in DC. We hate it, but do it anyway. Sometimes the words slip out before you even figure out a name. Sometimes I reply with “I eat food” or “I play volleyball once a week,” just to knock people off-kilter. The assumption is that you will define yourself by your job, and then the individual can categorize you accordingly. Person I can network with. Person of interest. Person I will come in conflict with so I should probably stop the conversation right now. It has an incredible effect of stalling conversations, because honestly, no one should want to talk about work.

But that’s the weirdest part. People in DC really like to talk about work. Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing. One of the beautiful things about DC is that there are so many passionate people who are entirely committed to their causes. But generally it is an exhausting process. It is hard not to measure your own sense of self worth against the other young professionals. A girl I know from university (who is very book smart and works incredibly hard) just got promoted to become a program coordinator at a conservation agency. A friend of mine is a Senior Analyst at an Asia-focused trade organization after working there for a year and a half. I am happy for him, but it is so hard to look at that success and not feel like you are completely inadequate.

I constantly feel like I am behind the curve. I am 22 years old, but in my mind I am 28 and have never achieved anything. I have no master’s degree, no papers published in national journals, no international development field experience, no bylines on news articles. I feel like I am stalled, and I need to accelerate like crazy to catch up. Ask any other 22 year-old across the country, and they will not feel the immediate urge to cover up the fact that you are still figuring it out. That you don’t want to go to grad school yet because you have no idea what you would actually study there. I have so many things I want to learn, but DC is a city of specialization.

Usually an existential crisis like this comes at 30, when you realize that your 20s have flown by and all your friends are living in the suburbs with their spouses and spawn. Part of it is the way my own brain is wired, but a lot of it is DC (although I have heard that New York is similar). People here care. A lot. They care about themselves, and they care about the big picture in a way that combines to form a heady mix of arrogance and true passion.

The Meteoric Rise of the Yuppie (aka Gentrification)

But somehow the same passionate people are managing to erode the foundations of DC in the one of the fastest and most destructive examples of gentrification in the nation. DC has evolved into a strange and contradictory amalgamation of art, music and politics. The hipster, craft beer-drinking, bike riding, foodie culture has been embraced. Shuttered and blackened buildings have been turned into bars that serve craft beers and expensive flatbreads. The city sits on a teetering foundation of classic wealth inequality and racial tensions that is played out on every bus ride and in every bar.

When I was a freshman in college, my best friend lived in a house on the top of 13th street, in a neighborhood called Columbia Heights. His house was the edge of my bubble, and most of my friends wouldn’t venture past our little college enclave in the very northwest corner of the city. I would have my friend meet me at the bottom of the hill, and walk back with me so that I could use him as a buffer against the men who ambled in groups surrounded by a cloud of marijuana smoke. In those days, the safety of the streets varied by the block and the dim street lights provided no reassurance for my 18 year-old self.

My friend’s house was old, with a staircase that creaked through four levels of hardwood floors. The first year they lived there, the members of the house found a bottle of wine under the porch, which we named porch-wine and drank at our Thanksgiving potluck. My friend and I spent that summer sitting on his roof, looking over the expanse of the city and sharing six packs. I was working as a research assistant at the university, and interning downtown for no money. We would walk to a hole in the wall place across from Howard University’s campus and eat excellent vegan soul food, or walk to Adams Morgan and smoke hookah in a lair where the owner knew us and gave us free mint tea. It was an excellent summer.

Now I live seven streets east and several blocks north of that house, in an area that would have been inconceivable three years ago. It is an “up-and-coming” neighborhood, that was recently hailed as the Bushwick of DC. To get to work every morning I walk out of my basement apartment, and walk down a street that has a very large complex of public housing buildings, two boarded up houses and an abandoned church. I walk through groups of young men loitering in clouds of marijuana smoke slumped against cars along the sidewalks. I will get some muttered remarks about my ass or my hair, and sometimes a ‘Good Morning’ or two. I walk across Georgia Avenue, a major road lined with a seemingly superfluous number of nail salons, take-out joints and mechanics.

As soon as I cross Georgia Avenue, I am walking on a street where there are multiple white families with young children, and a man who sits on his porch and plays the Spanish guitar. Generally rather safe and pleasant. If you continue to travel West you will walk through Columbia Heights, which has become a booming neighborhood with a Target, a multitude of nice bars and restaurants, and a shrinking Hispanic population.

This Columbia Heights is a very different. The men who lined the streets north to south have been pushed out by new bike lanes and brighter street lights. The vegan soul food place has moved to Maryland and was replaced by a vegan soul “bistro.” It is like being in a weird Twilight Zone with extremely disappointing vegan mac and cheese.

I have no qualms about my identity in this neighborhood. I am a 20-something white recent graduate, with a white collar job. I want to live in a place with cheap rent, bars that aren’t always crowded with douchebags, and a sense of community. It’s not necessarily the safest area in the city. But most of the families on my street have lived there for over ten years, and everyone is extraordinarily friendly. It has a sense of community that I haven’t found in other areas of the city that I really appreciate.

When you dig farther into the details, I have drunk the K(c)ool-aid to the max. I bike to work. On Saturday mornings I go to the neighborhood gourmet coffee shop that roasts their own beans. I prefer to do all my shopping at Trader Joe’s, and secretly wish there was one closer to me. I get almost all my news from The New York Times, and hang out with people who often start conversations based on the latest episode of This American Life. I’m a pretty stereotypical DC liberal yuppie, and it is pretty damn depressing.

DC inevitably comes up in every national conversation about gentrification. It is the dark underbelly of all those listicles proclaiming DC as one of the “X Best Cities for 20-somethings,” and the Brightest Young Things article does a great job of pointing out that many of the benefits afforded to millenials in the District are not distributed among the greater population. Families that have lived in their homes for ten, twenty or fifty years are being bought out so that a developer can turn their row home into a set of one to two bedroom luxury condos for people like me. (Not that I can afford these new condos anyway.) DC has a rich heritage, and it is under attack.

A friend and I went to a panel earlier this year where five members of various DC communities discussed gentrification. They all expressed different versions of the same things: It’s not inevitable, gentrification is a form of violence against people of color, and it’s not enough for young white people like myself to just think critically about ourselves and feel guilty. Being guilty doesn’t help anyone. One of the panelists mentioned an email that she received from a neighbor, that blamed several houses (owned by larger families of minorities) for “ruining” the neighborhood. Pray tell, how does someone who has lived in the same house for years and years ruin a neighborhood that you just moved into?

If anything, that family has probably had their neighborhood services (trash, upkeep of community centers, quality of schools) neglected by the local government until their property values fell and perpetuated the cycle of neglect. At a certain point the government would seize properties and sell them to developers who would knock down the family homes in order to build large luxury apartment buildings or condos. The developers would market the neighborhood as “up-and-coming”, and the property values would slowly rise, then skyrocket, raising property taxes as well. Neighborhood services would magically reappear, but it is too late for that family. The property taxes have exceeded the family’s (or retired folks’) ability to pay and they would have to move out to more affordable (and less visible) homes in suburbia. Poverty is pushed into enclaves like Prince George’s county Maryland, and the city no longer has to deal with it. The neighborhood becomes a bustling center of small business (good for commercial taxes!), shiny condos (all the better to house those young professionals that will pay DC income taxes!), and white people (lower crime statistics!). (For a more nuanced depiction of gentrification, there are dozens of articles engaged in a spirited debate on the subject if you look online. One great clip is Spike Lee’s reaction to the gentrification of New York.)

Contract With the Community*
50% From the Neighborhood
50% People of Color or Under the Poverty-Line
20% Ex-Offenders
$15 Minimum-Wage

In a lot of ways gentrification tries to bring people like me a lot of things that we don’t want or need. I don’t need a luxury apartment, I need housing that I can afford. I really like bike lanes, but I am also in favor of expanding and improving the public transportation options in my area. I really like food, and I like supporting local businesses, but it would be nice if those new restaurants that have been cropping up would contribute to the community by providing employment to the people that live there. So many of the problem’s stem from DC’s growth model, which made attracting people like me its priority while leaving behind the communities that formed the bedrock of the city. This is the dark side of being one of the best cities in the country for millenials.

*Above: St. Louis-based writer Umar Lee’s employment plan for counteracting gentrification, originally published in the Huffington Post.