The recent clean-up and regeneration of the notoriously polluted Anacostia River in Washington DC has propelled it to the status of a new green icon in the revived US capital. While many see its revitalization as an opportunity for equitable planning and racial reconciliation in the highly segregated Chocolate city, gentrification—already at record levels—is reaching poor neighborhoods like Anacostia, threatening to displace its most vulnerable residents and dilute the cultural legacy of this historically Black community.
Gentrification West and East of the River
According to a recent study, Washington DC now has the highest percentage of gentrifying neighborhoods in the United States. Most of these are situated West of the Anacostia River, with places like Navy Yard currently ranked as the city’s fastest-growing neighborhood following a decade of river clean-up and urban green renewal. While its supporters point to the compact, transit-oriented development as a model for sustainable economic and demographic growth, the area has seen dramatic influx of wealthier, whiter residents that has displaced lower-income and/or minorities.
The 2010 Yards Park in Washington, DC., 2019. Photo © Isabelle Anguelovski
Pedestrian bridge in the middle of Yards Park, on the Anacostia River in SE Washington, DC., 2010. via Mr.TinDC on flickr
Meanwhile, new developments East of the River may bring similar effects to previously unexposed working-class neighborhoods like Anacostia, where half of DC’s African American population resides. Site of the first African-American settlement of freedmen in post-civil war Washington and once home to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, its history is laden with the African-American struggle. During the 1950s, its Black residents were evicted by urban renewal policies and relocated into mass public housing units, and ensuing decades of housing segregation policies and urban renewal interventions caused poverty rates to soar well into the 1970s and 1980s, still remaining one of the highest in the District.
11th Street Bridge Park and more
This wave of green projects is new to neighborhoods East of the River. In 2006, the city had announced the demolition and redevelopment of the historic 1940s Barry Farm public housing complex into a mixed-income development with large green and recreational areas, but it is yet to be completed. Almost adjacent to it, Poplar Point will soon feature a new 70-acre park, and plans are also underway to revamp the environmental and recreation offerings of the lineal Anacostia park.
Demolition of Barry Farms public housing development. Photo © Isabelle Anguelovski
But perhaps the most significant project underway is OMA’s 11th Street Bridge Park, a new $50-60M bridge connecting Navy Yard to Anacostia scheduled to break ground in 2020. Supported by the 2018 Equitable Development Plan (EDP) and led by a local non-profit Building Bridges Across the River, it has been touted as perhaps the best model of green, inclusive, healthy, and housing rights-centered infrastructure planning in the United States, with the promotion of African American arts and culture and environmental education at its center. Notably, it aims to avoid the gentrification and displacement that occurred with similar projects like the New York High Line, the Chicago 606, or the Atlanta Beltline, by implementing measures like workforce training for local residents, support for small business, community land trusts for affordable housing, and partnerships with local lenders and nonprofit developers such as MANNA and LISC.
A green bridge to gentrification?
Amidst this wave of green development, interviews with different community organizations and activists from Anacostia reveal the risks of potential gentrification, not to mention lingering environmental concerns such as the heavy lead contamination at Barry Farms not addressed by the current redevelopment plan.
Some have referred to the 11th Street Bridge Park as a “bridge to gentrification” given that it offers a physical path to the other side of the river that caters to the young creative class with “gateway” projects like the MLK gateway, Reunion Square, and a host of hip cafés and bars.
Slated for 2023, the 11th Street Bridge Park structure will use of a former Anacostia River crossing as a three-acre platform for public spaces and help connect Wards 7 and 8 to the rest of the city. Rendering Courtesy of OMA + OLIN via Washingtonian
Such developments raise important questions about who will be able to own land and homes, and who will be able to rent at affordable rates when aggressive developments have fully materialized in Anacostia. In this sense, greening and sustainability along the river and in neighborhoods East of the River run the risk of drawing new pathways for racialized capital accumulation and displacement.
Equity as land ownership and political power
On the one hand, using a green development like the 11th Street Bridge Park to steer the generated funding towards a community land trust model with affordable housing measures is a smart strategy. In a country where the inter-racial wealth gap is enormous—median White families are projected to own 86 times more wealth than Black families over the next 5 years— building equity and housing rights is deemed essential to achieving socio-economic mobility. But some activists question the ability of a land trust model to address this deep wealth gap and build greater equity for African American families.
There are also many Anacostia residents—middle class African Americans in particular—who value a future in which they can enjoy the environmental services of the park and river while having a chance to stop at an attractive sit-down restaurant like Busboys and Poets that features African American art and events. Greener neighborhoods with embedded representations of Black culture help strengthen the power of the Black community and encourage wealthier, educated Black families to move in, further stratifying the gentrification analysis beyond white vs.Black, and ties political power to financial security.
Putting a stop to new green colonialism
But no matter what level of equity planning is embedded into urban greening interventions in the South East, a number of local activists and residents still see urban greening as paving the way for a new frontier of dispossession and displacement. Grassroots movements such as OneDC or EmpowerDC are playing an important role in empowering residents and building community-wide wealth and political clout.
Green projects in Anacostia activate the commodification of greenness and the profit-driven consumption of race and ethnicity through the “cool” multicultural events and venues that they spawn. That such projects are envisioned and driven by white (if progressive) leaders supported by global banking institutions like Chase Bank or designed by international design firms reveals who holds the reins of power in the development of South East DC.
Protestors block a gentrifying space-finding bus tour in Anacostia via Washington Business Journal
While Black displacement might not be a problem yet, we should consider the recent advent of mass displacement in neighborhoods like Shaw and NorthWest DC. In Anacostia, house prices are going up so high and so quickly—median sale prices have multiplied by 2.5 between 2014 and 2018—that the majority of African Americans will likely lose out.
To prevent this, residents and community groups are asking that development should be led by the community. Some also argue that the $50-60M cost of the bridge could be easily reverted into funding for community-initiated green projects and initiatives, while investing more minimal funding for the renovation of the existing Anacostia Park and Trail in the East.
Towards emancipatory greening for Anacostia
Ultimately, bringing a bridge and other green improvements to the SouthEast reveals the risk of overlooking existing landscapes of place-making, everyday resistance, and resilient support networks by and for African-Americans.
For some, the greening of the Anacostia river bank represents a hidden form of white supremacy that disregards its history as a refuge for Black families during segregation and since then as a site for everything from joyful celebrations to police brutality. Recognizing this duality is essential in understanding the resistance and skepticism of residents.
A view of the rapidly-developing Navy Yard area from Anacostia Park. Photo by Tyrone Turner/WAMU
As researchers, we call for a new abolitionist politics of recognition, healing, and care through which the river would be reimagined and revived by and for the residents themselves. Building on K. McKittrick’s work (2011), there is indeed a risk that green projects fail to recognize the “practices of Black place-making outside of normalized and official cartographies of power” – and reconciliation. Emancipatory green spaces need to be included so that people can spontaneously tell stories—sometimes uncomfortable ones—that provide them with positive relationships of care and recognition.
East of the Anacostia River, it is a profound racialized inequality that makes greening and sustainability a double-edge sword for Black residents. Despite promises of equity, this outsider-driven, top-down greening approach is underpinned by an unbearable whiteness—whether intentional or not—–that aims to activate former no-go zones through a conveniently packaged but obscured version of Black culture.
In contrast, an abolitionist green practice would unapologetically operate from the centrality of land recognition, redistribution and control for residents. Should urban greening projects consider the incorporation of land reparations, as some residents argue? How can we rehumanize urban landscapes in a way that values the soul, memory, history and agency of its residents?
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