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Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.
Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.
Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
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December 20, 2020
I don’t think my written review or this handy meme summary can adequately convey how important this book is to my ongoing understanding of urban planning under neoliberalism, and the many ways our field fails Black people relegated to the margins of gentrified cities.
In Black in Place, Brandi Thompson Summers catalogs the “ongoing neoliberal project” of the H Street NE corridor in Washington, D.C. The corridor has had many lives, including its current gentrification following years of disinvestment. I was most struck with her definition of H Street as “the most ordinary of D.C.’s riot corridors.” While this is not the core focus of Thompson Summers’ work, I think she offers one of the most nuanced histories of the 1968 uprisings I’ve seen, going to great lengths to explain the underlying conditions that led to the riots as a meaningful act of political protest, despite our media’s longstanding sensationalist coverage of urban rebellions. The 1968 riots are particularly formative in Thompson Summers’ history of H Street, as they led to much municipal handwringing, aka numerous plans and reports about how to rebuild the corridor.
I think Black in Place has an incredibly useful response to a pressing question many planners ask when working in “overplanned” communities like H Street: if all these plans, revitalization projects, and community visioning exercises have occurred, why are the only “effective” plans the ones that led to gentrification? The answers are damning, but also illuminating if we hope to do better moving forward. H Street’s most recent set of revitalization plans took place during the advent of the urban tourism industry, which thrives on a cultural economy. In the cultural economy, cities attract residents and tourists by commodifying their various cultures into “authentic” experiences designed for elite consumption. This rampant commodification of all elements of society is essential to neoliberalism, another core “reason why” the current H Street plans were effective. In the neoliberal city, DC leaders and developers formed public-private partnerships that primed neighborhoods for speculative reinvestment and the production of “authentic, diverse” spaces. :( On H Street, these public-private partnerships came with significant capital to move the needle on the corridor’s development trajectory, such as tax increment financing dollars, Great Streets investments, and other funded plans. As broader societal changes made it profitable to invest in H Street, all of a sudden, there were few of the “insurmountable obstacles” that hindered revitalization plans in earlier decades.
For those working to decode the co-opted language of urban redevelopment, Black in Place offers the incredible gift of translation. Black in Place clearly defines the terms, logic, and value systems of the “neoliberal project of gentrification.” In this project, diversity transitions from a social justice ethic to an aesthetic lifestyle amenity, at the same time that DC itself is transitioning from “a chocolate city” to “the city of amenities.” When quoting developers, elected officials, planners, and other key players in H Street’s gentrification, Thompson Summers makes it clear that these players are defining “growth” as profit, “success” as higher occupancy rates or property values, and “diversity as the disinviting of Black residents.” Thompson Summers correctly illustrates how diversity is operationalized in neoliberal cities as a race-neutral policy that is the “healing” solution for black space, by giving it a “proper use.” This helps us understand the moralistic framing of many gentrifiers, planners, and developers, who see enforcing “diverse” aesthetics on (formerly) Black space as a “cure” for government disinvestment. Thompson Summers even has a term for this: black aesthetic emplacement, “a mode of representing blackness in urban capitalist simulacra, which exposes how blackness accrues a value that is not necessarily extended to Black people.” In layman’s terms, black aesthetic emplacement is the process by which cultural and spatial creations of Black people are depoliticized, airbrushed for their most exceptional histories, made into an aesthetic, and then sold to the highest bidder. This process is intended not to provide Black people with “cultural capital”, but to achieve raised property values and other neoliberal measures of success, while simultaneously displacing the very people who contributed to said success.
This pattern of displacement applies to both Black residents of H Street, and the nuanced Black history of the corridor. This book describes the historic preservation and cultural tourism initiatives on H Street, which have in effect created an “official history” for the corridor rife with nostalgia. Thompson Summers lays out how in this function, nostalgia replaces nuanced memory, by creating a neighborhood that had a “momentary period of black degeneracy” in between its past and future (present?) glory. This is tied to the tourism industry’s push towards the Disneyficiation of cities, and the idea that the core urban problem is “an image crisis that needs to be fixed”, not rampant disinvestment in Black spaces and exploitation of the Black people living in them as part and parcel of racial capitalism. The revisionist official history of H Street indicates *which* Black histories preservationists seek to return to: often, “approachable histories” of respectable or exceptional Black people. These histories are often considered the “heyday” or “golden era” of a neighborhood. Thompson Summers posits that by working to preserve/officially mark “the heyday” of a community, we’re ascribing a moral and financial value to a certain time period, and negating other time periods marked by disinvestment. This made me question how my own support of historical preservation work may be playing into this value system, which at its worst, can justify gentrification and displacement as a way to “return the community to its former glory.”
Black in Place also takes up a key question for planners in “the city of amenities”: what does authenticity even mean?!? In Thompson Summers’ definition, authenticity was created on H Street at least in part by commodifying Black cultural signifiers as part of a “diverse” corridor grounded in white spatial comfort. H Street’s “diversity” can become an amenity due to the abnormality of any kind of integrated space in American life. In this way, H Street serves as an example of Elijah Anderson’s cosmopolitan canopy, a “self-contained, social, exceptional space where people interact easily and ‘appreciate’ diversity.” In the cultural economy, these cosmopolitan canopies are amenities for elite consumption. In Thompson Summers’ description of how the annual H Street Festival is a prime example of this consumption, I was struck by how she laid out the neoliberal logics undergirding this festival in its current form--it functions as both an open house for potential investors, and a “guilt eraser” for white gentrifiers given the manufactured showcase of diversity.
Black in Place drives home that this diversity is manufactured through the intense surveillance and containment of Black mobility on and through H Street. Thompson Summers uses the H Street streetcar as an example of how modern transit investments are often less concerned with benefitting the needs of transit-dependent riders, and more concerned with providing amenities to support transit-oriented development, which is known to increase property values. With this framing she captures the two transit systems on H Street: 1) a “streetcar to nowhere” that primarily functions as an investment vehicle, and 2) a major transit hub where riders can transfer between a number of different bus routes, but are policed if they linger in “the wrong ways” as they move through H Street. This duality extends to the entire corridor, where elite actors are committed to “unseeing” Black people actively being displaced or marginalized within the corridor. Unseeing is a really dynamic concept: it allows new residents and visitors to “unsee” the Black poor in order to maintain the myth of gentrification as healing a place; it allows historians to “unsee” Black histories that are less respectable, thus absolving the state of its role in disinvestment; and most crucially, actors can “unsee” what Thompson Summers calls the “excess of blackness” left after black aesthetic emplacement has its way.
So, where do planners go from here? In her conclusion, Thompson Summers points to recent uprisings in post-chocolate cities as a guide--she’s centrally asking what we can learn from people’s movements that are imagining and building new ways for us to be in relationship with the land and with each other. I’m currently learning from housing justice organizers here in Raleigh, and this has been invaluable as I work to improve a field that rarely designs policies to center people on the margins of planning. I’m also mindful of Thompson Summers’ note to avoid the logic that “people with problems are problems”, as it’s a mentality that allows displacement to be seen as a “solution” to a space’s challenges. I think housing-first models are great examples of rejecting this mindset in our work, as are planning interventions that take housing out of the speculative market--as Black in Place notes, the market incentivizes gentrification and displacement due to its unending need for higher property values. I look forward to being a continual student of cooperative economics and social housing models that resist commodification of housing and neighborhoods, in hopes that I can better advocate for these models in my work. Finally, as a Black planner, I have a distinct responsibility to ensure my work is accountable to and supportive of the vast Black communities where I am living and working. I’m thankful to be growing my network of Black planners who are equally committed to building our politics and ethics as practitioners, including through my firm’s Black Employee Resource Group, who I will be discussing this book with very soon! I think Black in Place underscores how essential it is that Black planners interrogate our roles in the development process, lest we become “ideal Black neoliberal subject[s]--monetizing Black history while at the same time attempting to increase investment dollars...thereby defining the successes and failures of Black [communities] according to the logic of the market.”
In summary: I would highly recommend this book to any planner, as I think our field has much to learn from Thompson Summers’ strong sociological and aesthetic critique of the communities we are shaping. In the urge to move away from “overplanned” communities and towards equitably planned ones, I think it’ll be essential to understand the limits of diversity, and the dangers of capitalizing on the cultural economy.
In Black in Place, Brandi Thompson Summers catalogs the “ongoing neoliberal project” of the H Street NE corridor in Washington, D.C. The corridor has had many lives, including its current gentrification following years of disinvestment. I was most struck with her definition of H Street as “the most ordinary of D.C.’s riot corridors.” While this is not the core focus of Thompson Summers’ work, I think she offers one of the most nuanced histories of the 1968 uprisings I’ve seen, going to great lengths to explain the underlying conditions that led to the riots as a meaningful act of political protest, despite our media’s longstanding sensationalist coverage of urban rebellions. The 1968 riots are particularly formative in Thompson Summers’ history of H Street, as they led to much municipal handwringing, aka numerous plans and reports about how to rebuild the corridor.
I think Black in Place has an incredibly useful response to a pressing question many planners ask when working in “overplanned” communities like H Street: if all these plans, revitalization projects, and community visioning exercises have occurred, why are the only “effective” plans the ones that led to gentrification? The answers are damning, but also illuminating if we hope to do better moving forward. H Street’s most recent set of revitalization plans took place during the advent of the urban tourism industry, which thrives on a cultural economy. In the cultural economy, cities attract residents and tourists by commodifying their various cultures into “authentic” experiences designed for elite consumption. This rampant commodification of all elements of society is essential to neoliberalism, another core “reason why” the current H Street plans were effective. In the neoliberal city, DC leaders and developers formed public-private partnerships that primed neighborhoods for speculative reinvestment and the production of “authentic, diverse” spaces. :( On H Street, these public-private partnerships came with significant capital to move the needle on the corridor’s development trajectory, such as tax increment financing dollars, Great Streets investments, and other funded plans. As broader societal changes made it profitable to invest in H Street, all of a sudden, there were few of the “insurmountable obstacles” that hindered revitalization plans in earlier decades.
For those working to decode the co-opted language of urban redevelopment, Black in Place offers the incredible gift of translation. Black in Place clearly defines the terms, logic, and value systems of the “neoliberal project of gentrification.” In this project, diversity transitions from a social justice ethic to an aesthetic lifestyle amenity, at the same time that DC itself is transitioning from “a chocolate city” to “the city of amenities.” When quoting developers, elected officials, planners, and other key players in H Street’s gentrification, Thompson Summers makes it clear that these players are defining “growth” as profit, “success” as higher occupancy rates or property values, and “diversity as the disinviting of Black residents.” Thompson Summers correctly illustrates how diversity is operationalized in neoliberal cities as a race-neutral policy that is the “healing” solution for black space, by giving it a “proper use.” This helps us understand the moralistic framing of many gentrifiers, planners, and developers, who see enforcing “diverse” aesthetics on (formerly) Black space as a “cure” for government disinvestment. Thompson Summers even has a term for this: black aesthetic emplacement, “a mode of representing blackness in urban capitalist simulacra, which exposes how blackness accrues a value that is not necessarily extended to Black people.” In layman’s terms, black aesthetic emplacement is the process by which cultural and spatial creations of Black people are depoliticized, airbrushed for their most exceptional histories, made into an aesthetic, and then sold to the highest bidder. This process is intended not to provide Black people with “cultural capital”, but to achieve raised property values and other neoliberal measures of success, while simultaneously displacing the very people who contributed to said success.
This pattern of displacement applies to both Black residents of H Street, and the nuanced Black history of the corridor. This book describes the historic preservation and cultural tourism initiatives on H Street, which have in effect created an “official history” for the corridor rife with nostalgia. Thompson Summers lays out how in this function, nostalgia replaces nuanced memory, by creating a neighborhood that had a “momentary period of black degeneracy” in between its past and future (present?) glory. This is tied to the tourism industry’s push towards the Disneyficiation of cities, and the idea that the core urban problem is “an image crisis that needs to be fixed”, not rampant disinvestment in Black spaces and exploitation of the Black people living in them as part and parcel of racial capitalism. The revisionist official history of H Street indicates *which* Black histories preservationists seek to return to: often, “approachable histories” of respectable or exceptional Black people. These histories are often considered the “heyday” or “golden era” of a neighborhood. Thompson Summers posits that by working to preserve/officially mark “the heyday” of a community, we’re ascribing a moral and financial value to a certain time period, and negating other time periods marked by disinvestment. This made me question how my own support of historical preservation work may be playing into this value system, which at its worst, can justify gentrification and displacement as a way to “return the community to its former glory.”
Black in Place also takes up a key question for planners in “the city of amenities”: what does authenticity even mean?!? In Thompson Summers’ definition, authenticity was created on H Street at least in part by commodifying Black cultural signifiers as part of a “diverse” corridor grounded in white spatial comfort. H Street’s “diversity” can become an amenity due to the abnormality of any kind of integrated space in American life. In this way, H Street serves as an example of Elijah Anderson’s cosmopolitan canopy, a “self-contained, social, exceptional space where people interact easily and ‘appreciate’ diversity.” In the cultural economy, these cosmopolitan canopies are amenities for elite consumption. In Thompson Summers’ description of how the annual H Street Festival is a prime example of this consumption, I was struck by how she laid out the neoliberal logics undergirding this festival in its current form--it functions as both an open house for potential investors, and a “guilt eraser” for white gentrifiers given the manufactured showcase of diversity.
Black in Place drives home that this diversity is manufactured through the intense surveillance and containment of Black mobility on and through H Street. Thompson Summers uses the H Street streetcar as an example of how modern transit investments are often less concerned with benefitting the needs of transit-dependent riders, and more concerned with providing amenities to support transit-oriented development, which is known to increase property values. With this framing she captures the two transit systems on H Street: 1) a “streetcar to nowhere” that primarily functions as an investment vehicle, and 2) a major transit hub where riders can transfer between a number of different bus routes, but are policed if they linger in “the wrong ways” as they move through H Street. This duality extends to the entire corridor, where elite actors are committed to “unseeing” Black people actively being displaced or marginalized within the corridor. Unseeing is a really dynamic concept: it allows new residents and visitors to “unsee” the Black poor in order to maintain the myth of gentrification as healing a place; it allows historians to “unsee” Black histories that are less respectable, thus absolving the state of its role in disinvestment; and most crucially, actors can “unsee” what Thompson Summers calls the “excess of blackness” left after black aesthetic emplacement has its way.
So, where do planners go from here? In her conclusion, Thompson Summers points to recent uprisings in post-chocolate cities as a guide--she’s centrally asking what we can learn from people’s movements that are imagining and building new ways for us to be in relationship with the land and with each other. I’m currently learning from housing justice organizers here in Raleigh, and this has been invaluable as I work to improve a field that rarely designs policies to center people on the margins of planning. I’m also mindful of Thompson Summers’ note to avoid the logic that “people with problems are problems”, as it’s a mentality that allows displacement to be seen as a “solution” to a space’s challenges. I think housing-first models are great examples of rejecting this mindset in our work, as are planning interventions that take housing out of the speculative market--as Black in Place notes, the market incentivizes gentrification and displacement due to its unending need for higher property values. I look forward to being a continual student of cooperative economics and social housing models that resist commodification of housing and neighborhoods, in hopes that I can better advocate for these models in my work. Finally, as a Black planner, I have a distinct responsibility to ensure my work is accountable to and supportive of the vast Black communities where I am living and working. I’m thankful to be growing my network of Black planners who are equally committed to building our politics and ethics as practitioners, including through my firm’s Black Employee Resource Group, who I will be discussing this book with very soon! I think Black in Place underscores how essential it is that Black planners interrogate our roles in the development process, lest we become “ideal Black neoliberal subject[s]--monetizing Black history while at the same time attempting to increase investment dollars...thereby defining the successes and failures of Black [communities] according to the logic of the market.”
In summary: I would highly recommend this book to any planner, as I think our field has much to learn from Thompson Summers’ strong sociological and aesthetic critique of the communities we are shaping. In the urge to move away from “overplanned” communities and towards equitably planned ones, I think it’ll be essential to understand the limits of diversity, and the dangers of capitalizing on the cultural economy.
July 5, 2022
Complex ideas explained Ned in understandable terms with tangible examples. Other than some weird repeats of the same sentence here and there, well written and engaging. I learned a lot.
December 16, 2021
This was a hard read. When reading this, you'll have to sit through some really awful takes on development, transit, and placemaking. Yet, even with that, I would buy this for others and recommend it as a text to challenge your views and understand the H St corridor specifically.
I feel like even the act of critiquing this book is mildly fraught, and I want to be careful in what I say. I am new to DC; much like Summers, I don't have decades of perspective to draw from. What I do know, though, is from an accessibility and developmental perspective. I believe in a DC that is more navigable, more open, and less segmented. Summers sees this as a threat, perhaps rightfully so given the unfair card Black residents have been dealt since the 1960s (and long, long before that, but the book focuses on the post-60s development). Still, I am not convinced that some of the concepts she disavows are inherently bad. While their impact may have been, due to whatever lack of leadership on the municipal level, we must remain open to transformative placemaking.
While the author does not set out to characterize what H St should look like, her solutions on the issue remain sorely needed throughout the book. Summers gives no sense for what her "correct" H St should be, other than bemoaning failed attempts to redevelop the corridor following civil rights related riots in the 1960s. (To her credit, the context on these riots is really fascinating, and she rightfully critiques anyone who says they are a reflexive response to the assassination of MLK rather than centuries [!] of mistreatment and injustice.) These attempts, in her view, were mostly organic and community-driven, yet they were stunted by DC's Black leadership, apparently complicit in efforts to disregard the corridor. To Summers, the contributions of pro-development mayors like Anthony Williams are deemed too capitalist and "postracial", a representation of the direction that DC absolutely should not go in, while critiques of corrupt leadership (Marion Barry) are batted down as racist. It is complicated because, by most accounts, Williams saved DC from insolvency and prepared the city for demographic and economic changes that have occurred in many metropolitan areas since the 2000s. The question of who this growth is serving is complicated, and it is certainly not me nor is it the longtime Black residents of DC. But, in a general sense, development is good.
The most valuable parts of this book address the use of Black culture as an aesthetic in the redevelopment of H St — something that is seen and not heard, where Black "greats" like MLK are lifted up while the countless Black residents who call the corridor home are set aside. She rightly introduces the concept that new gentrifying residents ignore Black residents and see them as an accessory to the area, where diversity is an accessory and not an embodiment of actual people who remain marginalized and have needs that are not met by the DC government. Summers immortalizes the feelings and thoughts of longtime H St residents, shares photos of gathering places that have since evolved for the worse, and adroitly outlines the clash between old and new business owners. Importantly, she acknowledges that longtime Black business owners have lived through H St in many of its iterations, while newer non-Black entrepreneurs have a lot more capital at their disposal and don't have to "live" with the neighborhood; they can come and go as they please, and its greater financial strength is their asset until it's not (in which case it can be abandoned).
For Summers, who came and left H St in the 2010s, the redevelopment of the area was shocking in scope and in displacement. Yet, for the 180ish pages of the book, an "alternate direction" for the corridor is never outlined. She "others" it by referring it to the Atlas Corridor, a rebranding literally nobody uses, and paints it as a completely foreign and evolving place even though she herself is a gentrifier (much like I am today in another part of DC). What should H St look like? Should it continue to provide what she calls a ghettoized economy? Should it not be dense, should it have lots of parking, should it remain an unvisitable place? By "unvisitable", I am referring to the construction of a bridge at the intersection of N Capitol St and H St, one which she rightfully says separated the corridor from the rest of the city at the expense of a previously functioning underpass. Summers complains about the streetcar (rather ridiculously and extensively), bemoans new housing, and has critiques ready for nearly every new type of business on the corridor. She reserves special disdain for places like bookstores, artisan shops, and "custom coffee houses" — a new term even for me, the type of gentrifying consumer who loves the neighborhood. For Summers, farmhouse aesthetic is out, well-lit restaurants are out, places with "modern" technology like iPads are definitely out, and parks are good (until murders happen there, then they are bad).
You would think, by reading this book, that the entire population of the broader H St area drives along in their gas guzzling cars and requires street parking for their three-hour-long hairstyling appointments, nail salon visits, and visits to public spaces (because access to privacy is a "solely bourgeois privilege" — no, literally). Summers claims that the removal of parking spaces for streetcar construction dramatically inhibited the ability of Black-owned businesses to be successful; then, in the same stroke, she claims that the X2 and 90/92 buses are the veins of the city. If H St was so walkable and navigable and transit-accessible, why do we need parking spaces? She never answers this question, but don't fear: parking spaces are still available on H St for anyone who needs them. Paid parking is bad, free streetcars are worse; the $2 X2 bus (which runs along H) is for the proletariat while the free streetcar is bourgeois.
During one of Summers' many complaints about the new businesses in the area, she critiques bookstores as inaccessible (compared to Walmart, which is apparently good), and paints them as an embodiment of what is bad about the evolving neighborhood (just like those custom coffee houses, right?!). It reminded me that I first saw a copy of Summers' book at Solid State Books, a Black-owned bookstore in the new Apollo development she critiques for some time (ironic!). It is displayed next to Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital, an excellent and more nuanced perspective on the evolution of DC. While she may prefer that H St reverts to a car-centric neighborhood with little density, permanently stuck in the 1950s or the early 1960s when it appears she thinks the area was at its peak, I don't. The contributions of the deaf-serving Starbucks and the Wydown coffee shop, both reflective of the needs of the nearby Gallaudet University, are great! I think Solid State is a great bookstore. I think the new restaurants and bars are exciting and bring a new influx of money to the region to be used for new development. I think that some of the mixed-use developments need some work, and should have more affordable rents for businesses and residents alike. It is OK to accept some new things and reject others — but Summers doesn't do that. She remains the ultimate NIMBY, convinced of a better future that never had a chance to be borne out, stubbornly disdainful of the present and everyone involved in creating it.
Here are some general comments/objections I had to pieces of the book. These quotes really stuck out to me:
- "The impetus to 'make places' in the modern, post-industrial, information-driven city is to produce a livable, walkable, entertaining, and 'cool' city. But for whom?"
Summers paints placemaking as exclusive, while that is not true. Brookings' model for transformative placemaking is a good place to start — it aims to nurture a built environment and economic ecosystem that is beneficial for the people already there, one that is steeped in identity and correct history. The opposite inclination from placemaking — to accept communities that are strictly residential or improperly mixed, maybe? — is not a good one, but you wouldn't know it from this book.
- "In conjunction with efforts to rebrand the former 'riot corridor' as a distinct cultural, culinary, and entertainment destination come increased police surveillance, higher-priced restaurants, streetcar track construction, bike lanes, and exorbitant parking meter fees that disinvite patrons and customers of the service businesses that once overwhelmingly populated the corridor."
Phew! This one really got me — I had to toss down the book and think about it for a minute. There are no bike lanes on H St. Trust me! And what is wrong with parking fees? DC parking is underpriced, yet there appears to be this dichotomy where cycling is perceived as white and vehicle use is perceived as Black, yet so is transit use. How is living in a navigable neighborhood a bad thing? How is having consequences for drivers a bad thing? Twice recently when I was on the streetcar, drivers blocked the path. There's a lot I can say about the streetcar's faulty development, but I will say this — you don't need to drive to H St! You don't need to park on H St!
- "Where some of the culinary metaphors (latte, cappuccino, s'mores, etc.) used to describe DC's changing demographic landscape signal a shift to whiteness, 'post-chocolate' is open-ended; the term doesn't postulate what color or colors are next."
Summers posits that DC is not a Black city anymore with the concept of "post-chocolate", which is not true and should not be true. I disagree that those culinary metaphors (which I have never heard in relation to DC) signal a shift to whiteness, as if "marshmallow" is the end result. DC is less Black, and those reasons are complex and owe to many factors; DC is not unique in this regard.
- "In 2003, Mayor Anthony Williams introduced a plan to attract 100,000 new middle- and upper-middle-class residents to DC in an effort to make the city economically solvent. The trouble was that Williams realized much of the land in DC was exempt from taxation...and the millions of Maryland and Virginia residents who worked in the city did not have to pay a commuter tax. So, he implemented pro-growth policies and pro-development practices that irrevocably changed the built environment in order to generate revenue, despite the negative impact on DC's most vulnerable populations."
Why is this a bad thing?
- "By encouraging more tourists and affluent residents, Williams successfully shifted the tide and enabled DC to (partially) gain control of its finances. Of course, the consequences of these actions proved to be most harmful to the working-class and poor black population."
Why is this a bad thing?
- "[Performance-based parking] provides protection to residents and businesses by applying strict parking restrictions in residential neighborhoods and brief curbside parking meter limits to encourage high vehicle turnover...To limit the length of time vehicles are able to park on and around H Street disproportionately encumbers certain small businesses, like beauty salons, whose services often require two- to three-hour commitments."
If you are receiving a two-to-three hour haircut, you can afford paid parking.
- "Desire for retail businesses like Whole Foods Market, which replaced Murry's, that serve an upper-middle-class customer base rather than service businesses that cater to a largely working-class Black consumer exposes a clear contradiction of neoliberalism: approval for individual and entrepreneurial endeavors alongside the growth in policing and restricting groups that have historically demonstrated significant levels of entrepreneurialism."
This was a funny one to read. Earlier on, she paints Murry's as a bad grocery store with unhealthy frozen food, middling produce, sky-high prices, *but* as a place that is great to hang out at. Make it make sense! Why should expensive, low-quality community grocers be the best possible outcome for Black consumers? Her critiques of Whole Foods are spot-on in that it is wrongfully attempting to assume H St's identity without any of the financial/cultural connections, but she is incorrect that it is an especially expensive or inherently bad spot. It is a good thing that Whole Foods is in a neighborhood with a high Black population.
- "For many years, many Black Washingtonians have talked about 'the Plan' to remove Black people from DC, and while there is little evidence to suggest an explicit strategy to do so, changes to the lived environment seem to favor residents with more access to capital."
Summers mentions this earlier on without refuting it, and then inherently suggests that such a plan could exist. How absurd.
- "What history must be effaced to brand the neighborhood after a formerly segregated theater?"
Nobody is calling the neighborhood this!
- "Revitalization efforts...attract a different class of customers and tourists; those interested in improvements to lifestyle (bike lanes, farmers' markets) as opposed to equitable social and economic opportunities. This distinction between presumed Black and white interests also highlights struggles over entitlement between the new crop of residents, who have considerable education and access to resources and have invested their time and energy into the remodeling of the area, versus the old guard, who experienced the neighborhood's most challenging periods when they lacked adequate financial support from the government and other entities."
Bike lanes and farmers' markets are not classist.
-"There's nothing alarming about the naming of public space after an ethnic group that inhabited the area in the nineteenth century, but again, the context under which NoMA and H Street are changing adds a different meaning. The naming dictates how the space should be remembered in case its history is overshadowed by contested events and populations."
I thought this was especially weird — she is mad that the park was named Swampoodle, after the neighborhood where Irish immigrants lived in alley housing for decades and were pushed out by the development of Union Station. For Summers, one group is OK but another is not. She is intent that the Black community be remembered a specific way, but DC's other groups are unacceptable.
- As an example of a project that "[satisfies] the needs of middle-class gentrifiers": the sale of a barbershop on 13th and H "to make way for a mixed-use development, thereby reflecting an ongoing trend on H Street where small, Black-owned businesses are being replaced by developer-driven, mixed-use projects."
This one got me. She really does not like developers. How many more people were able to live in the area and contribute to the economy when this development was constructed? A lot!!!
- "Insight Property Group (which oversaw the destruction of Murry's grocery store and the H Street Storage facility"
Murry's literally shut down before the land was purchased, if I remember correctly. Anyone who says a storage facility is a good use for this corridor is terribly incorrect.
- "Saleem's suggestion that the local government agency provide grants to entrepreneurs along the corridor revises the role of the state as a caregiver to a body of management in which the state dictates the aesthetic boundaries of urban space."
She is correct to critique that Black spaces are considered lower-class aesthetically, and that white preferences often dictate trends. In terms of providing aesthetic guidelines to businesses, I don't see the harm, particularly if they are new.
- Quoting someone else, she says: "Access to privacy becomes a solely bourgeois privilege"
This is really absurd. She claims that using 8th and H as a meeting spot is because privacy is bourgeois and gathering on street corners is in, and nobody else will understand that.
- "The District continues to focus on transit-oriented development on H Street despite the presence of popular bus routes that already exist on the corridor, which is an indicator that such development is about more than providing transportation."
Correct that the streetcar is also an aesthetic choice, incorrect that more options are inherently bad.
- "The DC streetcar represents 'carefree travel' for white, upper-income, mobile tourists, residents, and consumers, while the bus represents travel as labor for the largely transit-dependent, poor and working-class Black District residents."
The streetcar is free. It provides easy access to Union Station. It has many faults, but it is free (unlike the X2), and if it works for your route, you should use it! When I am in the area I take it because it saves time and energy sometimes.
- "None of the new development projects that have been recently constructed or are slated to be built provide space for those on the street to sit."
It is not the job of developers to do what the city should have done. Yes, the area should have more public parks — maybe the corner of 8th and H now that it is vacant?
I feel like even the act of critiquing this book is mildly fraught, and I want to be careful in what I say. I am new to DC; much like Summers, I don't have decades of perspective to draw from. What I do know, though, is from an accessibility and developmental perspective. I believe in a DC that is more navigable, more open, and less segmented. Summers sees this as a threat, perhaps rightfully so given the unfair card Black residents have been dealt since the 1960s (and long, long before that, but the book focuses on the post-60s development). Still, I am not convinced that some of the concepts she disavows are inherently bad. While their impact may have been, due to whatever lack of leadership on the municipal level, we must remain open to transformative placemaking.
While the author does not set out to characterize what H St should look like, her solutions on the issue remain sorely needed throughout the book. Summers gives no sense for what her "correct" H St should be, other than bemoaning failed attempts to redevelop the corridor following civil rights related riots in the 1960s. (To her credit, the context on these riots is really fascinating, and she rightfully critiques anyone who says they are a reflexive response to the assassination of MLK rather than centuries [!] of mistreatment and injustice.) These attempts, in her view, were mostly organic and community-driven, yet they were stunted by DC's Black leadership, apparently complicit in efforts to disregard the corridor. To Summers, the contributions of pro-development mayors like Anthony Williams are deemed too capitalist and "postracial", a representation of the direction that DC absolutely should not go in, while critiques of corrupt leadership (Marion Barry) are batted down as racist. It is complicated because, by most accounts, Williams saved DC from insolvency and prepared the city for demographic and economic changes that have occurred in many metropolitan areas since the 2000s. The question of who this growth is serving is complicated, and it is certainly not me nor is it the longtime Black residents of DC. But, in a general sense, development is good.
The most valuable parts of this book address the use of Black culture as an aesthetic in the redevelopment of H St — something that is seen and not heard, where Black "greats" like MLK are lifted up while the countless Black residents who call the corridor home are set aside. She rightly introduces the concept that new gentrifying residents ignore Black residents and see them as an accessory to the area, where diversity is an accessory and not an embodiment of actual people who remain marginalized and have needs that are not met by the DC government. Summers immortalizes the feelings and thoughts of longtime H St residents, shares photos of gathering places that have since evolved for the worse, and adroitly outlines the clash between old and new business owners. Importantly, she acknowledges that longtime Black business owners have lived through H St in many of its iterations, while newer non-Black entrepreneurs have a lot more capital at their disposal and don't have to "live" with the neighborhood; they can come and go as they please, and its greater financial strength is their asset until it's not (in which case it can be abandoned).
For Summers, who came and left H St in the 2010s, the redevelopment of the area was shocking in scope and in displacement. Yet, for the 180ish pages of the book, an "alternate direction" for the corridor is never outlined. She "others" it by referring it to the Atlas Corridor, a rebranding literally nobody uses, and paints it as a completely foreign and evolving place even though she herself is a gentrifier (much like I am today in another part of DC). What should H St look like? Should it continue to provide what she calls a ghettoized economy? Should it not be dense, should it have lots of parking, should it remain an unvisitable place? By "unvisitable", I am referring to the construction of a bridge at the intersection of N Capitol St and H St, one which she rightfully says separated the corridor from the rest of the city at the expense of a previously functioning underpass. Summers complains about the streetcar (rather ridiculously and extensively), bemoans new housing, and has critiques ready for nearly every new type of business on the corridor. She reserves special disdain for places like bookstores, artisan shops, and "custom coffee houses" — a new term even for me, the type of gentrifying consumer who loves the neighborhood. For Summers, farmhouse aesthetic is out, well-lit restaurants are out, places with "modern" technology like iPads are definitely out, and parks are good (until murders happen there, then they are bad).
You would think, by reading this book, that the entire population of the broader H St area drives along in their gas guzzling cars and requires street parking for their three-hour-long hairstyling appointments, nail salon visits, and visits to public spaces (because access to privacy is a "solely bourgeois privilege" — no, literally). Summers claims that the removal of parking spaces for streetcar construction dramatically inhibited the ability of Black-owned businesses to be successful; then, in the same stroke, she claims that the X2 and 90/92 buses are the veins of the city. If H St was so walkable and navigable and transit-accessible, why do we need parking spaces? She never answers this question, but don't fear: parking spaces are still available on H St for anyone who needs them. Paid parking is bad, free streetcars are worse; the $2 X2 bus (which runs along H) is for the proletariat while the free streetcar is bourgeois.
During one of Summers' many complaints about the new businesses in the area, she critiques bookstores as inaccessible (compared to Walmart, which is apparently good), and paints them as an embodiment of what is bad about the evolving neighborhood (just like those custom coffee houses, right?!). It reminded me that I first saw a copy of Summers' book at Solid State Books, a Black-owned bookstore in the new Apollo development she critiques for some time (ironic!). It is displayed next to Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital, an excellent and more nuanced perspective on the evolution of DC. While she may prefer that H St reverts to a car-centric neighborhood with little density, permanently stuck in the 1950s or the early 1960s when it appears she thinks the area was at its peak, I don't. The contributions of the deaf-serving Starbucks and the Wydown coffee shop, both reflective of the needs of the nearby Gallaudet University, are great! I think Solid State is a great bookstore. I think the new restaurants and bars are exciting and bring a new influx of money to the region to be used for new development. I think that some of the mixed-use developments need some work, and should have more affordable rents for businesses and residents alike. It is OK to accept some new things and reject others — but Summers doesn't do that. She remains the ultimate NIMBY, convinced of a better future that never had a chance to be borne out, stubbornly disdainful of the present and everyone involved in creating it.
Here are some general comments/objections I had to pieces of the book. These quotes really stuck out to me:
- "The impetus to 'make places' in the modern, post-industrial, information-driven city is to produce a livable, walkable, entertaining, and 'cool' city. But for whom?"
Summers paints placemaking as exclusive, while that is not true. Brookings' model for transformative placemaking is a good place to start — it aims to nurture a built environment and economic ecosystem that is beneficial for the people already there, one that is steeped in identity and correct history. The opposite inclination from placemaking — to accept communities that are strictly residential or improperly mixed, maybe? — is not a good one, but you wouldn't know it from this book.
- "In conjunction with efforts to rebrand the former 'riot corridor' as a distinct cultural, culinary, and entertainment destination come increased police surveillance, higher-priced restaurants, streetcar track construction, bike lanes, and exorbitant parking meter fees that disinvite patrons and customers of the service businesses that once overwhelmingly populated the corridor."
Phew! This one really got me — I had to toss down the book and think about it for a minute. There are no bike lanes on H St. Trust me! And what is wrong with parking fees? DC parking is underpriced, yet there appears to be this dichotomy where cycling is perceived as white and vehicle use is perceived as Black, yet so is transit use. How is living in a navigable neighborhood a bad thing? How is having consequences for drivers a bad thing? Twice recently when I was on the streetcar, drivers blocked the path. There's a lot I can say about the streetcar's faulty development, but I will say this — you don't need to drive to H St! You don't need to park on H St!
- "Where some of the culinary metaphors (latte, cappuccino, s'mores, etc.) used to describe DC's changing demographic landscape signal a shift to whiteness, 'post-chocolate' is open-ended; the term doesn't postulate what color or colors are next."
Summers posits that DC is not a Black city anymore with the concept of "post-chocolate", which is not true and should not be true. I disagree that those culinary metaphors (which I have never heard in relation to DC) signal a shift to whiteness, as if "marshmallow" is the end result. DC is less Black, and those reasons are complex and owe to many factors; DC is not unique in this regard.
- "In 2003, Mayor Anthony Williams introduced a plan to attract 100,000 new middle- and upper-middle-class residents to DC in an effort to make the city economically solvent. The trouble was that Williams realized much of the land in DC was exempt from taxation...and the millions of Maryland and Virginia residents who worked in the city did not have to pay a commuter tax. So, he implemented pro-growth policies and pro-development practices that irrevocably changed the built environment in order to generate revenue, despite the negative impact on DC's most vulnerable populations."
Why is this a bad thing?
- "By encouraging more tourists and affluent residents, Williams successfully shifted the tide and enabled DC to (partially) gain control of its finances. Of course, the consequences of these actions proved to be most harmful to the working-class and poor black population."
Why is this a bad thing?
- "[Performance-based parking] provides protection to residents and businesses by applying strict parking restrictions in residential neighborhoods and brief curbside parking meter limits to encourage high vehicle turnover...To limit the length of time vehicles are able to park on and around H Street disproportionately encumbers certain small businesses, like beauty salons, whose services often require two- to three-hour commitments."
If you are receiving a two-to-three hour haircut, you can afford paid parking.
- "Desire for retail businesses like Whole Foods Market, which replaced Murry's, that serve an upper-middle-class customer base rather than service businesses that cater to a largely working-class Black consumer exposes a clear contradiction of neoliberalism: approval for individual and entrepreneurial endeavors alongside the growth in policing and restricting groups that have historically demonstrated significant levels of entrepreneurialism."
This was a funny one to read. Earlier on, she paints Murry's as a bad grocery store with unhealthy frozen food, middling produce, sky-high prices, *but* as a place that is great to hang out at. Make it make sense! Why should expensive, low-quality community grocers be the best possible outcome for Black consumers? Her critiques of Whole Foods are spot-on in that it is wrongfully attempting to assume H St's identity without any of the financial/cultural connections, but she is incorrect that it is an especially expensive or inherently bad spot. It is a good thing that Whole Foods is in a neighborhood with a high Black population.
- "For many years, many Black Washingtonians have talked about 'the Plan' to remove Black people from DC, and while there is little evidence to suggest an explicit strategy to do so, changes to the lived environment seem to favor residents with more access to capital."
Summers mentions this earlier on without refuting it, and then inherently suggests that such a plan could exist. How absurd.
- "What history must be effaced to brand the neighborhood after a formerly segregated theater?"
Nobody is calling the neighborhood this!
- "Revitalization efforts...attract a different class of customers and tourists; those interested in improvements to lifestyle (bike lanes, farmers' markets) as opposed to equitable social and economic opportunities. This distinction between presumed Black and white interests also highlights struggles over entitlement between the new crop of residents, who have considerable education and access to resources and have invested their time and energy into the remodeling of the area, versus the old guard, who experienced the neighborhood's most challenging periods when they lacked adequate financial support from the government and other entities."
Bike lanes and farmers' markets are not classist.
-"There's nothing alarming about the naming of public space after an ethnic group that inhabited the area in the nineteenth century, but again, the context under which NoMA and H Street are changing adds a different meaning. The naming dictates how the space should be remembered in case its history is overshadowed by contested events and populations."
I thought this was especially weird — she is mad that the park was named Swampoodle, after the neighborhood where Irish immigrants lived in alley housing for decades and were pushed out by the development of Union Station. For Summers, one group is OK but another is not. She is intent that the Black community be remembered a specific way, but DC's other groups are unacceptable.
- As an example of a project that "[satisfies] the needs of middle-class gentrifiers": the sale of a barbershop on 13th and H "to make way for a mixed-use development, thereby reflecting an ongoing trend on H Street where small, Black-owned businesses are being replaced by developer-driven, mixed-use projects."
This one got me. She really does not like developers. How many more people were able to live in the area and contribute to the economy when this development was constructed? A lot!!!
- "Insight Property Group (which oversaw the destruction of Murry's grocery store and the H Street Storage facility"
Murry's literally shut down before the land was purchased, if I remember correctly. Anyone who says a storage facility is a good use for this corridor is terribly incorrect.
- "Saleem's suggestion that the local government agency provide grants to entrepreneurs along the corridor revises the role of the state as a caregiver to a body of management in which the state dictates the aesthetic boundaries of urban space."
She is correct to critique that Black spaces are considered lower-class aesthetically, and that white preferences often dictate trends. In terms of providing aesthetic guidelines to businesses, I don't see the harm, particularly if they are new.
- Quoting someone else, she says: "Access to privacy becomes a solely bourgeois privilege"
This is really absurd. She claims that using 8th and H as a meeting spot is because privacy is bourgeois and gathering on street corners is in, and nobody else will understand that.
- "The District continues to focus on transit-oriented development on H Street despite the presence of popular bus routes that already exist on the corridor, which is an indicator that such development is about more than providing transportation."
Correct that the streetcar is also an aesthetic choice, incorrect that more options are inherently bad.
- "The DC streetcar represents 'carefree travel' for white, upper-income, mobile tourists, residents, and consumers, while the bus represents travel as labor for the largely transit-dependent, poor and working-class Black District residents."
The streetcar is free. It provides easy access to Union Station. It has many faults, but it is free (unlike the X2), and if it works for your route, you should use it! When I am in the area I take it because it saves time and energy sometimes.
- "None of the new development projects that have been recently constructed or are slated to be built provide space for those on the street to sit."
It is not the job of developers to do what the city should have done. Yes, the area should have more public parks — maybe the corner of 8th and H now that it is vacant?
March 16, 2022
This book expanded my views of H St. and enhanced
my understanding of the history of my neighborhood. It’s a denser text and can get very academic at times. I’d still recommend to anyone with interest in gentrification or any newcomer to DC. It paints a detailed picture on how things came to be. Other reviewers provide reasonable support and critiques to where the author lands. Overall, it made me think and better understand the space around me - that gets a 5 stars from me.
my understanding of the history of my neighborhood. It’s a denser text and can get very academic at times. I’d still recommend to anyone with interest in gentrification or any newcomer to DC. It paints a detailed picture on how things came to be. Other reviewers provide reasonable support and critiques to where the author lands. Overall, it made me think and better understand the space around me - that gets a 5 stars from me.
Read
February 28, 2020305.8 S955 2019
January 13, 2025
A bit too academic for vacation
Read
January 14, 2020Great book about civil unrest in DC after MLK was killed and the rebuilding of the community that displaced African Americans from their neighborhood in the name of “diversity.”
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