Black people are moving out of Washington. White people are moving in. And the only disaster it took was Duhbya, not a class 5 hurricane.
Seriously, this is just the "normal" working of economic forces, as far as I can tell. Even the catastrophic Bush administration doesn't have time to find even more stuff to meddle with.
Some missing context:
- When neighborhoods gentrify, the property owners benefit from higher prices, not residents who rent. Some of those owners are slumlords.
- Foreclosure or inability to pay a subprime mortgage may also keep the older residents from profiting from the rise in property values. Poverty is powerless.
- There's a whole other story in black migration to the suburbs beyond the loss of a familiar cultural milieu: If they move in next to white people, it's likely the whites are going to flee, some because they're racists, some because they have internalized the fear of the racists, some because all the flight ruins their property values.
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