Somewhere to Live
Last year I spent a month and a half in Mission in San Francisco. Mission’s one of the first examples that comes to mind when people talk about gentrification. This neighborhood was once working-class and Latino. Now, it’s getting taken over by Silicon Valley tech. That has consequences for everyone. “People who come here say, ‘I love these murals. You cannot have the art without the artists. We are losing the neighborhood,” the city supervisor laments.
I didn’t feel like I was part of the problem while I was there, since I was just visiting and I was staying with a friend. Okay, my friend was white, but she was also a San Francisco fixture with forty years of experience in local politics. That doesn’t really give her any more of a claim to live in the Mission, but if she was a gentrifier then she was part of one of the early waves, not the wave that was happening right now. She wasn’t a Google bro.
I was still a little bit aware of how lucky I was, and my attitude was to take advantage of everything. Mission may be crawling with millionaires on hoverboards, but there’s still a ton of thrift shops. I took plenty of pictures of the murals on my walk to work every morning, while everyone else in the office was stuck on a train coming from across the Bay.
Now I’m in DC for the summer, and I had to find my own place. I started looking kind of late, because it took a while for my internship to get confirmed. Still, I set a budget of $25 a day, because that’s how much you pay to sleep in a hostel when you get lucky and book in advance. $25 a day * 30 days = $750 per month.
My friends who interned in DC last summer advised me to go up to $1,000, or just get a place outside the city. But I wanted a better deal, and being able to walk to work last summer had spoiled me. I was determined to not spend 2 hours a day on a train.
I went on Craigslist and wasted a lot of time looking at ads for people who wanted you to sign a lease before I realized there was a whole separate section for sublets. I answered a few ads, including one memorable sketchy post from a “Friederike Federiksen” that promised a room for $450 right by Chinatown. He actually responded, saying that he’d prefer someone who could stay for longer.
Finally, I found a queer DC housing group on Facebook, where it just seemed much easier to find things. All you had to do was click a button to message the host, instead of drafting a whole email like you had to do for Craiglist. Plus, a lot of people were talking about themselves in their ads — they wanted to let you know who else you’d be living with. Instant kind-of friends!
I spent a few days at my boyfriend Emmanuel’s house in DC, still figuring things out. Finally, the day before he left for Ethiopia, I signed an agreement for $200 a week, plus utilities. A little over my initial budget, but it’s a good place. Right on the Red line, so getting to work only takes 40 minutes, no transfers or buses involved. My room’s small, but it’s got a window AC unit, and if I want to get work done there’s a desk downstairs reserved for me.
My roommates are great. There’s W, a middle-aged guy who shares his beers with me, wants to buy a tarantula, was a male stripper, and has told me about pretty much every girl he’s dated. There’s L, a gay Latino guy who works at a housing nonprofit. Between the two of them we end up talking a lot about gentrification. W doesn’t feel like a gentrifier because he grew up in DC. We watched a movie about slam poetry in a DC jail, and he recognized the jail and the officers because he’s been there.
L points out that we might be the first wave, but we’re definitely gentrifiers here. This is still a predominantly black neighborhood. Nearby eating options include Chinese take-out on the corner, some fish sandwich place, McDonald’s Pop-Eyes, Subway, and Dunkin Donuts. There is a Chipotle across the train tracks, but no Starbucks yet. When our Internet went out for a day, I had to walk all the way to another neighborhood to find somewhere with working WiFi. People hang out in groups on the corners. Kids (in this sentence, a “kid” can be in their late 20s) ride their BMX bikes down the street in large group that I guess you could describe as a gang, popping wheelies. There’s a girl named Chaudet who walks her dog in a tiger onesie, and everyone knows the guy named Fat Angelo who hangs out down the block is the neighborhood snitch.
It’s only been a few weeks, but I’ve already got some stories. W and Fat Angelo got into a fight because W saw Fat Angelo try to break into his van. Someone tagged the wall of the BDSM club across the alley overnight, but we’re thinking of painting over it because it doesn’t actually look good.
I’m trying to figure out how I want my friends to respond when I share these stories with them. I think I want them to think that I’m cool and edgy because I’m living here, but at the same time I know that’s ridiculous. Living here is just life for most people here. What am I doing, trying to make it into an adventure where I go back to my college dorm in boring Williamsburg at the end?
Some good news: turns out gentrification, the kind where poor black and brown people move out and rich white people move in, isn’t really happening in most of places where people think it’s happening. But then there are other articles with titles like The “Gentrification Myth” Myth warning me that in DC especially gentrification is definitely happening. There goes my strategy of pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
I never went to my Econ 101 or 102 classes, but I’m pretty sure demand and supply work both ways. People like me are driving up demand, which brings prices up, but it’s also the fault of developers and housing people and villains like that for refusing to increase the supply. I don’t know exactly what “high-density” even means, and I don’t want them to tear down all the old historic buildings, but if it’s a choice between the people who live in the buildings and the people themselves, let’s go with the people every time.
Driving through Fairfax, a county just outside of DC that’s the second-wealthiest in the country, Emmanuel asks me if I’d ever want to live somewhere like this, and I think of a line from another article about gentrification: “Most of us believe in a moral imperative to reject the suburbs.”
Except, moral imperatives have consequences for other people. And isn’t it convenient that “the right thing to do” matches up exactly with what I want? The All-American Rejects full narrative “Gives You Hell” music video taught me way back when I was in middle school that suburban life is boring. No white picket fences and lawns for me. I want grit and noise. I hate the word “pioneer”, which is what they call the first gentrifiers to show up in a neighborhood, but I want to be one, because it appeals to my hipster sense of being the first to discover something really cool. After me there will be others, but hopefully by that time I’ll already be somewhere else.
In the meantime, I’ve got to find a place to stay when I come back from Ethiopia in August. I tried the queer housing group and a couple of others on Facebook, but it’s still early for people to be posting about short-term August stuff, and it’s even harder to find something than before because I’m only staying four weeks.
I ended up going on Airbnb, another villain in this housing story that I haven’t even touched on. With Airbnb, I didn’t have to message the hosts back and forth several times, only to conclude that my dates wouldn’t work for them. I put in my dates, and Airbnb shows me properties that are available.
There are still some catches. I want Emmanuel to be able to come over, and if he does, does he count as another guest who I have to pay $10 a night for? You might think you’re getting an acceptable deal at $40 a night when you’re browsing, but then when you go to the page for the specific place there’s service fees adding on another $100 or so. Some hosts offer monthly discounts, so paying for 30 days is actually cheaper than staying for the 25 I need. But, if you book for 30 days, the refund policy is automatically “strict”, which means you don’t get your money back if you cancel, which is scary for indecisive people like me.
After staying up late one night clicking through all 75 listings that I could actually afford, I finally found a place for just $750 and 40 minutes from work in Capitol Heights, one of the neighborhoods mentioned in that gentrification article.
I asked the host, a Chinese girl who manages multiple properties all around the city, about whether Emmanuel could come over. She replied with “You realize the ceiling is only 70 inches, right?” (The room’s in the basement). Emmanuel’s only 6 feet on a good day, so I guess we’ll be fine. Plus, he’s Ethiopian, so we don’t count as gentrifiers, right?
