Author Archives: Anna

DCentric was created to examine the ways race and class interact in Washington, D.C., a city with a vibrant mix of cultures and neighborhoods. Your guides to the changing district are reporters Anna John and Elahe Izadi.

February 18, 2011 | 5:37 PM | By

A Different Aspect of the Digital Divide

Flickr: Wayan Vota

Sorry, baby. Your internet is slow!

Everything is nicer in the suburbs, including broadband! Via the Investigative Reporting Workshop at AU:

People who live in low-income areas of the District of Columbia on average get less for their broadband dollar than those who live in the wealthy suburbs — and subscribers in rural areas get the worst deals of all, according to a new study.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University analyzed customer speed tests and surveys around the nation’s eighth-largest metropolitan statistical area, which has a population of about 5.4 million…

The numbers indicate that while people in poor neighborhoods may pay a little less each month for service, they are likely to experience much slower speeds.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Digital Divide, Race and Class
February 18, 2011 | 10:15 AM | By

Metro Really DOES Need Maintenance, ASAP

Flickr: James Calder

Riders wait at Foggy Bottom Metro

Some serious, scary trouble at Foggy Bottom this morning (via Unsuck DC Metro):

After unloading from a train, people were exiting the gates, and a Metro employee was telling everyone leaving the station to take the left hand escalator…So everyone starts trudging up the left, until…

The bottom two or three steps of the escalator literally collapsed! They fell through leaving a gaping hole at the bottom of the stairs. Two or three people fell in. I would say it was about a three foot drop into jagged steel from the overturned stairs, not to mention whatever else is underneath the escalator. The people managed to pull themselves out and didn’t look seriously injured, but one woman was pretty shaken up.

Metro’s response was also less than encouraging. When the stairs first fell through, people started yelling, and one employee (the same one who had told us to take the left hand escalator in the first place) began walking toward the commotion. But then he stopped, turned around, and ran back yelling for someone else to do something.

FILED UNDER: Public Transportation, Metro, WMATA
February 18, 2011 | 8:51 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – Criminal Landlords, White Collar Homeless, Woozy Waiters

Good morning, DCentric readers! It’s finally Friday!

Tenants Fight Back Against Notorious Northwest Landlord Really notorious. Also? Bedbugs and roaches! “Nuyen was the first landlord in the nation to be held criminally responsible for violating lead laws. At the time, he was ordered to get rid of his 15 properties. He has held on to four.” (WUSA Washington, DC)

Homeless ex-mortgage broker Susan Schneider shows housing bust hit agents hard Fascinating: she’s a former broker, he’s a real estate agent– but that’s not why they know each other. “Now that the real estate market is recovering, Paxton sometimes goes from a million-dollar listing for Long & Foster to tying an apron around his pressed chinos and Ralph Lauren sweater to serve in the chow line.” (The Washington Post)

D.C. leaves high school sports ‘running on fumes’ Not just a lack of uniforms/equipment: “Many high school athletic directors and coaches across the District have not been paid for their work last school year, while some are just now receiving the paychecks they expected in July.” (Washington Examiner )

Man accused of stealing slain AU professor’s Jeep arrested again in the District He violated release conditions: “Deandrew Hamlin, 18, was arrested Tuesday in Washington, D.C., after reporting to a counselor he was seeing as a result of a prior juvenile charge, his attorney Brian K. McDaniel said. Hamlin is not permitted to enter the District under conditions of his bond.” (gazette.net)

Metro stations closing for holiday weekend Beware the Blue and Orange lines, this weekend…they need maintenance: “It’s important work, but invisible to riders who know only that for the long weekend it took to complete the operation, the trains didn’t take them to their destinations.” (The Washington Post)

Restaurant Workers Prepare & Serve Food While Ill Problem caused by lack of sick days, plus: “I don’t think any restaurant workers want to make customers ill, or their co-workers or managers, but the problem is that restaurant work is low wage jobs…you can’t afford to take time off because you need every penny you can make,” (WUSA Washington, DC)

February 17, 2011 | 5:55 PM | By

DC Vote Wakes Up John Boehner

Flickr: DonkeyHotey

If you’re really passionate about wresting control of your city from Congress…why not organize a protest at Speaker John Boehner’s apartment, at 7:30 in the morning? Via The Hill:

The protest, organized by the voting rights group DC Vote, reflects a new, more aggressive approach to objecting to congressional influence over the city. Last week, nearly a dozen demonstrators were thrown out of a House hearing on an abortion measure after staging a silent protest…

“It is a shift in strategy,” said Leah Ramsay, a spokeswoman for the group. “We’ve played the inside game on the Hill for years. We came very close to having our delegate in Congress become a full voting member.”

“It’s time to get more aggressive. There’s no other way to look at it, as we see it,” she said.

Capitol Police prevented the protesters from hand-delivering a letter to Boehner on Thursday and police formed a barricade for the new Republican Speaker to walk behind as demonstrators asked him, “Why are you treading on D.C.?” according to Ramsay.

FILED UNDER: Government, Voting Rights
February 17, 2011 | 12:33 PM | By

Yesterday’s Kojo Show was so DCentric

In case you missed it– yesterday, Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour talking to Robert Puentes of The Brookings Institution and John McIlwain of the Urban Land Institute about “Growth and Change in Greater Washington”:

Census data are confirming what Washingtonians already know: Our region is booming, with the suburbs becoming more urban and the city luring residents who once fled the metropolis. We’ll explore the trends behind the data and how we should be responding to maintain a high quality of life in both the city and the suburbs.

The thoughtful trio discussed issues that would be of extreme interest to DCentric readers, including:

- Diversity without integration

- How D.C.’s height limit limits D.C. (taller buildings accommodate more people, increase tax base)

- Complaints from the ‘burbs about Hispanic immigrants who are renters, with multiple people in one home

- How the 30-year, fixed mortgage built the suburbs

- Whether Generation Y will be able to afford homes– could it lead to a major shift in home ownership nationally?

Interesting, right? Go here, to listen at your leisure.

FILED UNDER: Media, Kojo, Race and Class, WAMU
February 17, 2011 | 8:31 AM | By

Tasty Morning Bytes – Rejecting Single Moms, the Homeless Try Twitter and Gassy in D.C.

Good morning, DCentric readers! Here are Thursday’s links:

There’s a D.C. Council Race On. Why Aren’t Any Women Running? “On paper, a gig as an at-large councilmember seems like an ideal job for a working mom. It’s part-time, has flexible hours, and pays extraordinarily well…Why then, aren’t more moms, or women of any sort, interested in the job?” (Washington City Paper)

Gray cautioned on scrapping school vouchers “Mr. Gray used his first opportunity to testify as mayor to emphasize his support for charter schools and again bat down the voucher program, which he called “an experiment.” He said D.C. parents “do have choice. In addition to our traditional public education within the D.C. Public School System, we have what may be the most robust charter school movement in the nation.” (Washington Times)

Single motherhood still rejected by most Americans, poll finds “Cherlin said that for many Americans, the convictions rise not only out of moral concerns but for practical reasons. “Most people aren’t thinking of Murphy Brown,” he said. “They’re concerned about the economic problems of single mothers, and the amount of effort it takes to be a good parent. People aren’t anti-single mother as much as they are pro-two parents.” (The Washington Post)

Black Is a Multiracial Country “The point here is that when we discuss a “beiging of America” as though it’s new, it really ignores the fact that beige people are as old this country. But sometime in the 17th century, for rather embarrassing reasons, we decided to call them “black.” (The Atlantic)

Homeless People Start Tweeting in New Awareness Initiative Powerful idea: “It’s easy to ignore someone when you don’t know or care to know anything about them. But it’s different when that person shows up in your social media stream, telling you about a lonely day on the street or simply wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day.” (Mashable)

Joe Mamo, D.C.’s Gas-Station Master: Meet the guy who owns half of D.C.’s filling stations “By 1987, Mamo had moved to Washington, where an old friend had settled among the region’s large Ethiopian community. This too was “an accidental move,” he says. “I didn’t know Washington that well but I liked it here because it was much more diverse than Chicago. There’s a lot of Ethiopians, a lot of different cultures.” (Washington City Paper)

February 16, 2011 | 4:44 PM | By

Local Tweets About NPR and Anacostia

I used Storify, a neat tool which aggregates tweets (or other snippets of social media) and presents them in one tidy package to pull together local reactions to yesterday’s Morning Edition segment on Anacostia. What you see above is a screen shot of the collection. The full, interactive “story” is below the jump:

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Media, Anacostia, NPR, Social Media, Storify, Twitter
February 16, 2011 | 10:33 AM | By

And Now, Another View of Anacostia, from David Garber

The Morning Edition story about Anacostia which riled some locals.

Yesterday, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a piece about how Washington, D.C. is changing: “D.C., Long ‘Chocolate City,’ Becoming More Vanilla“. The segment was taped in Anacostia, and if social media is an accurate way to gauge local reactions, this highly-anticipated story dismayed and disappointed some listeners who live in Chocolate City.

While the racial makeup of D.C. is changing (everywhere– not just east of the river), some D.C. residents worried that the story showed an incomplete picture of a community which already struggles with how it is stereotyped and viewed. Did journalist Alex Kellogg go to Anacostia with a predetermined narrative in mind, which he padded with formulaic soundbites? A black resident is forced out. A young white gentrifier takes his place. People are robbed and pistol-whipped in an “edgy”, poor, black part of town.

Or is Kellogg guilty of dwelling on a community’s challenges instead of its immense potential? Is it even possible to tell a Ward 8 community’s story in under eight minutes? After speaking with David Garber, one of the people who was interviewed by Kellogg, I wonder if the answer to that last question is…”Maybe not.”

I emailed Garber as soon as I saw his tweets, which denounced the piece. Here’s what I knew about him from reading his blog, “And Now, Anacostia“, before Morning Edition taught me what he actually sounded like; Garber had lived in Anacostia, he was a booster for that community and he ceaselessly tried to counter the negative reactions it inspires. When I type “ceaseless”, I mean it– in 2009, when four men broke into his home during a holiday party and robbed his guests, Garber wrote:

As the night unfolded I was most frustrated that this happened in the presence of my guests, and that they would no doubt think differently about a neighborhood that they had grown comfortable with.

That’s right. Garber wasn’t worried about his safety or that he was a target– he was concerned that people who were already hesitant to visit him in Anacostia had just had their worst assumptions validated. And that’s the biggest complaint I saw yesterday– that Kellogg’s story conveniently confirmed the worst stereotypes about Anacostia. The fact that the story aired on Morning Edition, a respected program which thoughtful people trust for a nuanced take on the news only made it that much more powerful– and painful.

I called Garber yesterday, and spoke with him about Morning Edition, how he was portrayed and what he thinks about gentrification. He had quite a bit to say.
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, Anacostia, Gentrification, NPR, Ward 8