This week's City Paper cover story examines gentrification in Columbia Heights from an unusual source: a busy community email list active since 1999. The City Paper writers delve into this email list in search of poignant, funny, and ridiculous stories from a neighborhood in transition. (Oddly, they didn't provide a link to the group anywhere in the story.)

Between a brief contextual introduction and the "Illustrations by Derf" the entire article is drawn from the "columbia_heights" Yahoo group, which is apparently loosely connected to this community website. Through the snippets they extract from the group's sprawling archive (16,897 messages since June 1999) they provide a revealing portrait of gentrification mostly through, well, the eyes of the gentrifiers.

The tidbits include some humorous, some serious. One couple found "tar covered brick" after "taking a sledgehammer to our kitchen wall" to expose the brick. Another resented charges of "re-gentrification": "I ... may be considered wealthy by some but that doesn't' mean that I'm required to live in Chevy Chase." DCist has been engaged in interesting discussions about "waves" of gentrification in the past - with perhaps the year 2000 separating the original gentrifiers with the new-wave, iPod toting "oughts". City Paper also unearths miscellaneous complaints about litter, prostitution, muggings, even overzealous policing. One person who found their message published has even posted a defensive response to their listserv. Aside from being a window into gentrification, the email list has also been a highly successful vibrant forum for open discussion - the list is unmoderated, currently has over 832 members, and in 2004 the number of messages per month ranged from 151 (April) to 384 (August). The 2004 traffic, while healthy, wasn't close to the list record of 642 in August 2002.

For another description of the changes afoot in Columbia Heights, this Washington Blade article from last September says gays are increasingly moving to Columbia Heights in search of affordable housing. The article opens

"With gorgeous Victorian homes in need of a little 'Queer Eye' treatment, plans for retail neighbors like Whole Foods Market and a community organization dedicated to preserving the arts, gays and lesbians increasingly are showing up in Columbia Heights."

Gentrification aside, think you can out-do the City Paper when it comes to trolling massive caches of data? Now's your chance - plunge into the archive and see if you can come up with better anecdotes.