DCentric

Historic districts are intended to preserve neighborhood landmarks and buildings in the face of redevelopment. But some argue that such historic protections, in practice, actually drive up real estate prices and make neighborhoods expensive. Salon’s Will Doig lays out the arguments, using New York City’s Greenwich Village as an example. The neighborhood received historic designation in the 1960s, long before it became the tony enclave it is today.

D.C. has a number of historic districts scattered throughout the city, with more potentially on the way.

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• Source: Salon
• Via: @housingcomplex

That cost-benefit analysis is tough to pull off. In hindsight, the benefits of saving Greenwich Village from urban renewal in the ’60s ended up outweighing the costs. Today, the neighborhood is tremendously loved and as far from being a “slum” as possible. It’s also a refuge for the wealthy, however, and could house many more people than it currently does. But maybe the biggest problem with expanding the Village’s protected boundaries now is that, in the words of social theorist David Harvey, Manhattan is becoming the world’s biggest gated community. Taking steps that will likely make it even pricier could keep its real estate eclectic, but in the process, help make its diversity a thing of the past.

Read more at: www.salon.com

There are plenty of examples of how developers and entrepreneurs have profited and driven gentrification near the H Street NE corridor. But here’s an example of an investment gone awry. Work began on Capitol Hill Oasis before the housing market crashed. Now 7 years later, the luxury housing project remains empty and half-built. The Washington Post reports on why the project faltered, including financial and construction troubles.

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• Source: The Washington Post

Every day, neighbors walk past, many wondering what has become of Capitol Hill Oasis. The billboard behind the chain-link fence still promises a “private elevator,” parking and “gourmet kitchens.” But the site is silent, except for the occasional sound of a rock crashing through a window, 10 of which are now boarded up.

“Look at what it’s done to the neighborhood,” Steve Robertson, 56, a D.C. Corrections officer who lives several blocks away, said one afternoon. “It’s going to sit there? They knock down whatever. They do whatever they want. What about the people who live around here?”

Read more at: www.washingtonpost.com

Seattle and Portland are among the most popular cities in the U.S., while the least popular is Detroit, according to a new poll by Public Policy Polling. Voters from around the country were asked how much they like 21 prominent cities. D.C. ranks in the middle, with 44 percent of voters saying they like D.C. and 39 percent disliking the District.

The poll found people responded differently depending on their political leanings, gender and race. When it comes to D.C., 40 percent of whites polled had a favorable opinion and 41 percent had an unfavorable opinion. Meanwhile, 56 percent of black respondents liked D.C., while only 23 percent didn’t.

There is a small correlation between how well-liked a city is and low poverty rates, but David Nir of the Daily Kos finds an even higher correlation between how favorable people are toward a city and how white it is.

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• Source: Dailykos

Once I finished a moment’s gloating over where I live, though, I noticed that something else was happening here: a very high correlation (0.7) between how favorably a city is viewed, and how white it is. (Seattle and Portland are also the two cities with the highest non-Hispanic white population percentages according to the 2010 census, while Detroit and Oakland are the lowest and third-lowest.)

Read more at: www.dailykos.com

A longtime clothier on H Street NE will officially be replaced by a Ben’s Chili Bowl. George Butler sold his building at H and 10th Streets NE after selling men’s clothing for more than 40 years along the corridor.

We’ve known that the Ali family, the force behind D.C. institution Ben’s Chili Bowl, purchased the building. But it wasn’t clear whether H Street would get a Ben’s of its own, or whether the Alis would open a different kind of restaurant. Frozen Tropics reports today that a Ben’s will indeed open in the first floor.

Ben’s is as homegrown as it gets, so is having the restaurant replace a longtime H Street shop count as gentrification?

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• Source: Blogspot

It became very clear at a public meeting last night that the first floor will become a Ben’s Chili Bowl.

Margaret Holwill, who live tweeted portions of the meeting, further reports that the upstairs will feature and open kitchen, and a bar (alcohol served upstairs only). But apparently, the grub upstairs will not be what you can get at Ben’s Next Door.

Read more at: frozentropics.blogspot.com

Interracial marriage is at an all-time high. And while Asian Americans are still the most likely Americans to marry outside of their race, there’s been a steady increase in the number of Asians marrying other Asians.

A rise in immigration from Asian countries has widened the Asian American dating pool, but The New York Times also reported that there is “a resurgence of interest in language and ancestral traditions among some newlyweds.”

But Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang points out that many Asians are still marrying across ethnicity and nationality. A University of Massachusetts–Amherst sociology professor who has studied marriage trends found that the number of Asians marrying across ethnicity has risen by 8 percent since 2006.

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• Source: Wsj

Both [Matthew] Cha and [Perry] Manadee essentially found themselves beginning to date other Asians when the option became more practical. (From personal experience, I can say that dating the daughters of your parents’ close friends is not practical.) This coincided with travel to Asia, or attending top universities — where there’s a disproportionately high concentration of Asian Americans — or moving to major cities on the East or West Coast, where Asian Americans cluster. And given that the overall Asian American population grew by approximately 46% from 2000 to 2010, the fastest of all racial and ethnic groups, this also explains much, but not all of the downtick in Asian interracial marriage: The more Asian fish there are in the Sea of Love, the more likely it is that you’ll net one — though not necessarily one from exactly the same coral reef.

And given the spike in Asian interethnic marriage, that’s apparently increasingly okay. Far from obsessing over common language or tradition, most of my other interviewees mentioned the same thing [Mina] Lim did: The general shared experiences and expectations they had with their Asian partners led to a comfort zone in which aspects of life other than race and ethnicity could come to the fore.

Read more at: blogs.wsj.com

Multi-American, our Los Angeles-based sister blog, has this photo of Ethiopian injera bread served on a standard-issue Chinese restaurant plate. The image, part of the site’s “American Snapshot” series, was taken by blogger Calvin Ho while dining in Logan Circle’s Lalibela Restaurant.

This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered a cultural “mash-up” in a D.C. Ethiopian restaurant. A 2011 D.C. rock festival took place primarily Ethiopian eateries, where bands played everything from country western to punk.

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• Source: Scpr

Calvin Ho of the L.A.-based Asian diaspora blog The Plaid Bag Connection encountered this – Ethiopian injera bread, served on a standard-issue Chinese restaurant plate – while visiting Washington, D.C. over the weekend. ”The world we live in,” he tweeted yesterday.

Read more at: multiamerican.scpr.org