A new project by a California-based sociologist examines how certain D.C. neighborhoods have gentrified over time, relying in part on a perhaps-unorthodox tool for such a task: Google Street View.
As part of broader research about how formerly incarcerated men experience urban change after they return to their communities, Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor at the University of California Merced, and several of her students are analyzing what they call “indicators of gentrification” in the District. Those indicators include changes in both socioeconomic data — income, education levels, housing prices — and visible evidence of neighborhood reinvestment, such as large-scale development, signs controlling traffic and discouraging purported disorder, and homes with new landscaping or patio furniture. The latter is what the team is using Google Street View to assess.
“The goal is to understand what does gentrification look like,” says Golash-Boza. “I’m trying to understand why people think or say [an area] is gentrified when quantitative indicators [such as changes in median income] are there but relatively minimal.”
Various studies in the past several years have found that D.C. is among the most gentrified cities in the U.S., and that the changes happening in the city have led to the displacement of low-income residents. The team’s work, however, is focused on scoring neighborhoods for gentrification by “walking” down blocks in Google Street View. Ultimately, they hope to draw connections between their findings and neighborhood data on policing and returning citizens.
While the work remains ongoing, the team has already released an overview of demographic shifts in the District, including racial changes, and two “story maps” of specific census tracts in Navy Yard and Brightwood Park. The idea for using Google Street View, Golash-Boza explains, was inspired by previous research by Stanford University sociologist Jackelyn Hwang, who has used that tool to study gentrification in Chicago and Seattle.
Golash-Boza grew up in Northwest D.C. and has witnessed the city change. “I got curious about this discourse [where] people will tell you D.C. has gentrified — and I was like ‘maybe that’s true in some ways, but maybe there are ways it hasn’t changed,'” she says. “[In] a lot of neighborhoods people describe as gentrified, the median income hasn’t changed that much,” despite other shifts.
In addition to Navy Yard and Brightwood Park, the team is looking at Barry Farm as well as the area around the intersection of East Capitol Street and Central Avenue SE. They’ll be evaluating which visible indicators of gentrification — new development, street beautification, commercial spaces like coffee shops and restaurants — correlate with socioeconomic data available through the U.S. Census Bureau.
“What’s most interesting to me is that there seem to be very different pathways to neighborhood change,” says Golash-Boza. Brightwood Park, for example, “started as middle- to working-class and then declined, which made gentrification possible.” But Navy Yard’s transformation looks a lot more dramatic by comparison: so-called “urban renewal,” public-housing demolition, mixed-income redevelopment, and even the birth of a taxpayer-funded Major League Baseball stadium, Nationals Park.
The researchers are looking at public and private investment in neighborhoods, from school and library modernizations to home renovations. “The basic trend I see is that public investment in Washington, D.C., has led to the accumulation of wealth for whites and the disaccumulation of wealth for blacks,” says Golash-Boza, who is also working on a book about how the capital has changed in recent decades, based partly on interviews with formerly incarcerated residents. She hopes teachers and other community members will use her team’s findings and provide feedback.
