The Shay’s retail problem illustrates what’s wrong with gentrification in Shaw.
There are better ways for the city to harness new interest in a richly historical areas.
On Thursday evening, one of my best friends ordered a craft whiskey cocktail alongside a combination salad and rice bowl festooned with half-smoke sausage slices in Northwest Washington, DC’s Shaw neighborhood. 30 years prior, Shaw was best known to me as the place where my mother bought me 32 ounce bottles of Lustre’s Pink Oil Moisturizer to tame the naps in my thick and matted African-American hair after her doctor’s appointments at Howard University Hospital. I remember those trips also including her purchasing me five chicken wings (fried hard) and neon yellow fried rice slathered in mambo sauce from somewhere on Georgia Avenue.
As The Notorious B.I.G. would say, “things done changed.”
No, I’m not here stomping my feet and crying about the idea that gentrification is happening in the Nation’s Capital.
Affluent millennial whites moving to the seat of power for the free world have raised the racial economic inequality in the city to a level where six-figure white median household incomes are three times greater than that of black families in the city. The time for working class black folks folks jive talkin’ like George Clinton on the appropriately titled “Chocolate City” while walking down U Street is done. Now, apologies to Cardi B, but DC’s making some very cross-racial and cross-cultural “money moves.” What has me more worried than caterwauling about the situation is in thinking about the cultural structure, context, and evolution of where not just Shaw, but the city in general, is headed.
On the silliest, yet necessary of levels, I like examining the quality and necessity of new stuff in what is yes, as full disclosure, a city of which I am a native born African-American — and, moreover, a neighborhood in which I am a new resident. There’s an entertaining-to-ponder gap between how Shaw’s gentrifying millennials and long-established residents can relate to how goods that now exist in our environs can satiate and unite our likely divergent “essential,” “niche,” “mainstream,” and “underground” existential and cultural needs. Ultimately, discovering the overlap in this complex Venn diagram relates to discovering how a redeveloping Washington, DC can best manage economic explosion and cultural change, plus deliver sustainable housing and retail services.
As a tremendous example of how this works best, putting a barbecue smokehouse in a reclaimed auto garage is amazing. Foodies like the Meaty Palmer (turkey, pork belly, avocado, tomato, chipotle aioli) at 203 Florida Avenue NW’s DCity Smokehouse, but for me The Brisket Champ is the winner. I’m a sucker for fried onions, what can I say? Iconic DC radio/video personality Donnie Simpson’s son having a stake in the muffins we eat, holistic and Afro-Centric tea-sipping being a hip thing we do, and walking past our neighborhood bar/theme-driven destination on 7th Street has been fun to point out to my tourist friends. Moreover, an artisanal pastrami sandwich and ice cold draft kombucha from the Glen’s Garden Market located in The Shay Apartments, by nature of being food, also impressively succeeds as where Shaw fills “essential,” “niche,” “mainstream,” and “underground” spaces.
Ah yes, The Shay. The year-old “curated,” “place-made,” mixed-use, luxury apartment-meets-hipster retail, and live-work lifestyle concept Shay Apartments brought Warby Parker to walking distance of my front door. Thankfully, they cured my mightily failing eyesight with affordable and and “vintage-inspired” prescription glasses. But, insofar as everything else there, it’s a mixed bag.
The Shay is a hotly-debated story at the epicenter of the fire of controversy surrounding the Shaw neighborhood’s evolution. I’m not an architect, and the only things I’ve ever curated are a nightclub’s ambiance and a few hundred Spotify playlists. But, I will say that before you outfit someone in artist-designed, handmade-to-order, and waste-reducing sneakers, “urban commuting” friendly messenger bag, “technical cashmere” sweater, and selvedge denim aimed at “dreamers and makers,” they need to have a sense of comfort, home, and community first. To that end, retailers Bucketfeet, Chrome Industries, Kit and Ace, and Frank and Oak that provide those aforementioned goods are moving from the retail spaces that occupy The Shay’s ground floor by January 2018.
In 2016, JBG Executive Vice President Robin Mosle noted about the company’s then-evolving The Shay Apartments and their retail spaces that, “If you think about it, retail is shrinking, the Internet is taking over and these smaller independent retailers are trying to connect with their neighborhoods. And they want to make sure that if they’re making an investment in bricks and mortar, it’s going to be in a place where there will be like retailers and in a neighborhood that can relate to their brand.” Regarding The Shay’s retailers, she noted, “I think they see a life and an energy in D.C., and they saw a great opportunity in D.C. to do something that was a collection, so to speak, of retailers that were in a more intimate format and more neighborhood based. This is underground, this is artisanal, this is the creative class.”
And yet now they’re all closed.
There’s a metaphorical cart, and there’s a metaphorical horse. Regarding what has been the failure of what JBG’s Mosle noted above, when the cart is put before the horse, and you implore the horse to gallop forward, the thoroughbred will soon be sauntering around with a bruised nose (and the human beings riding said metaphorical horse will have bruised egos and humanity to boot).
Here’s how you put the cart behind the horse.
There’s only so many places for so many dollars. Business and society booming is a bittersweet notion that’s waylaid by the fact that even the stretchiest of dollars eventually expanding to their maximum spending capacity is the curse. A possible solution to this issue lies in realizing that for as much as new people in new places are attracted by the idea of DESIRING new things, they NEED stable staple things. More significantly though, those who are being displaced still have needs and desires that can be capitalized upon by celebrating their wanting a sense of DESIRING to NEED visit where they once lived and worked. The lure of maintaining a socio-cultural and financial part-to-whole relationship to the new “luxury” ethos of a middle-class area has been proven to be significant in areas like Brooklyn. Though certainly bittersweet, an equitable, sustainable, and yes, peaceably gentrified community can be realized in Shaw.
If you’re going to open The Shay in the neighborhood that The Shay occupies, or be a commercial or residential real estate owner, operator, or developer in general in Shaw, then there has to be a conscious inclusion of black-owned business. Given the nature of the circumstances, putting white people in black places and (unintentionally) excluding non-renter black faces from the front-facing high-end/high-quality retail mix is egregious. Moreso because there are black people with black dollars (though not necessarily still in DC proper) that still spend (and would like to support successful black people) that are still available, this is a noteworthy concept to consider. Also, as economic growth in the city occurs, dollars earned by black people coming to or living in Shaw are likely to equal or exceed the dollars held by white people moving to the neighborhood.
Regarding facts that everyone should know but likely few are well aware: Nielsen noted in 2013 that by 2017, the buying power of America’s black community would be $1.3 trillion. The same study noted that African-Americans also make eight times as many shopping trips as Americans of other ethnic backgrounds, and eight times out of ten will engage with goods and services that are directly marketed to us.
It’s entirely possible that by 2020 that the percentage gap between white and black DC residents will mirror something close to the demographics of 1920, when 75 percent of DC’s population was white, and 25 percent was black. Given that the city’s Asian and Latino populations are also rising, the number of black residents of Washington, DC could eventually be even smaller than a quarter of the city’s population in-full.
Median home income and rental rate per resident figures have grown by an average of 50 percent in the past 40 years in the District, with a 2016 Washington Post story noting that “D.C. area rents have grown by 86 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1980 while real incomes of renters have risen by only 33 percent.” Add into this the fact that DC’s current median household income hovers around $100,000 a year, and ultimately a situation arises in Shaw wherein where affluent white people living in “North End Shaw” will literally replace middle class African-Americans living on “the east end of Black Broadway.”
In the midst of an unprecedented economic boom and showcase of racial privilege, there’s a need for solutions in not just Shaw, but in the Nation’s Capital overall. Yes, gentrification is a curse. But intriguingly, it’s the gifts apparent within said curse that ultimately define the best multi-racial, socially beneficial, and excitingly engaging opportunity for DC as a city redefined by wild changes to emerge as its best cultural self.
