Around the City

Urban affairs, neighborhoods, subways and the people who are affected by them all.

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January 4, 2011 | 1:42 PM | By

Metro’s Resolution for 2011: Working Escalators?

DCentric

These "Precision Escalator Products" were sitting next to the elevator at the Tenleytown/AU station, yesterday.

Finally– some good news, especially for those with mobility issues, who are extra-inconvenienced when a Metro escalator is broken (via WAMU):

Metro is focusing extra attention on its problematic escalators, a frequent source of complaint from riders. The transit agency is starting the new year with a newly appointed general superintendent for elevator and escalator programs.

Veteran engineer Rodrigo Bitar has been assigned to the position. His task: to oversee the repairs and upkeep of hundreds of escalators and elevators that Metro has failed to maintain.

In October, six passengers at the L’Enfant Plaza station were injured when the brakes on a Metro escalator malfunctioned. After the incident, a system wide inspection found additional problems with various Metro escalators.

Bitar will be charged with shepherding repair work laid out in an agency assessment made public earlier this year.

Rodrigo Bitar has previous experience with Metro; in the past, he was the “Director of Quality Assurance and Warranty”. If there’s anything that I encounter on a daily basis in this city that needs some QA– it’s Metro. Go Rodrigo!

FILED UNDER: Public Transportation, Access, Metro, WMATA
January 3, 2011 | 4:58 PM | By

Losing a Home Thanks to a Meter

Flickr: vpickering

This is not a Ford 500 in Columbia Heights. It is a Lincoln in Georgetown. I have Flickr-failed you!

Once I left my building and tried to hail a cab, I realized it was too cold to be outside without a scarf or gloves. I’ve lived here for 12 years, but my California roots are easily misled by bright sun. I was extra relieved when a cab driver waiting next to CVS waved me over to his “new-fashioned” cab. When I think of a “Taxi”, I think of massive American sedans, like Crown Victorias, their Mercury-twins and old Lincolns. Any smaller, more modern car, whether it be a Toyota Camry or a Ford Taurus feels “new”. This cab was so “new” I couldn’t even identify the model. I slid in.

“Boy, am I glad to see you. I’m cold!”

He smiled and quietly asked, “Where to?”

I told him my destination and looked at the front, passenger-side visor. For once, it was flipped downwards and the driver’s name and photograph were perfectly visible. Nine times out of ten, when I am in a cab, I notice (with great annoyance) that such crucial information is deliberately obscured by other papers or cards, paper-clipped on top of helpful details like the name of the cab operator. This name looked French.

“D’oĂą venez-vous?”, I asked hopefully. I usually don’t have a language in common with Cabbies in D.C. besides English; in a different city to our North, whenever I splurged on a big yellow ride, I practiced everything from Punjabi to Greek .

The question was a catalyst for transformation in the front seat. The man who had cordially agreed to make a left on Park, and take Reno road to blah, blah, blah was brought to life.

“I am from Haiti!” he exulted. He did not ask me how I knew French, which filled me with childish delight. I looked like I might speak French! Zut alors! He did ask me, “How did you know?”

“Your name. Jean P____.”

“Yes! That is my name!” He sat up straighter in his seat, eyes twinkling in the rear view.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Immigrants, Money, Taxicab Conversations
December 29, 2010 | 10:33 AM | By

D.C.’s Top Tweeps 2010 and the Digital Divide

Flickr: Alykat

Sculpture in Congress Heights by Anne Allardyce

Over at Congress Heights on the Rise, East of the River blogger The Advoc8te takes issue with the “popularity contest” that The Washington Post is hosting for D.C.’s Twitter royalty in “Why I won’t be voted “DC’s Best Blogger” in the DCTweeps Contest “:

How can you expect voters to participate in the election process when they don’t have the basic tools to participate? How can you vote in a contest if you don’t even know it’s going on?

As a blogger, a social media consultant, and as someone who spends about 75% of her waking hours online, I understand the ease and convenience of holding these types of contests using online surveys and Twitter. The technology is here to stay, no doubt about it. However, in communities such as ours where a good portion of the population still doesn’t have access to reliable and/or affordable Internet service and where most homes do not have a computer or access to one, a big part of the population becomes disenfranchised, even in purely entertainment contests such as this one. How do we expect residents who exist within the confines of the digital void to participate outside of it? How do we expect residents from outside of the community to learn about what’s inside the community if there is such a digital divide?

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FILED UNDER: The People, Digital Divide, Privilege, Race and Class, Social Media
December 28, 2010 | 4:31 PM | By

More on Brown-on-Black Racism

Flickr: Chaymation

My “DMV Masala“-post– which was about my interaction with an African-American cab driver who was interested in my ethnicity because her own niece was half-Indian– inspired four of you to comment! That’s no small feat here at DCentric, where I’m more likely to hear crickets than reader reactions– I kid, I kid. I hear silence, not bugs. Anyway, one comment from American RogueDC deserved to be highlighted:

I remember very well having my heart broken by a co-worker (an Indian woman) whom I thought was a friend. We had worked together for more than ten years. One day, while viewing some photographs she was sharing of her female relatives taken during her baby-shower (I in fact had just given her my gift for the baby), I said, “You should introduce me to some of your nieces.” Her reply was simple, “You are too dark!” Until that moment, my being an African-American man who is only slightly darker in skin tone than her had never “seemed” to be a problem.

How painful, to be so crudely and immediately rejected by a long-time friend. The first thing I wondered was whether the woman was first- or second-generation.

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FILED UNDER: The People, DCentric, Immigrants, Race and Ethnicity, Racial Divide
December 27, 2010 | 5:01 PM | By

“Did you have a nice Christmas?”

Flickr: Mr. T in DC

Christmas tree in Columbia Heights.

I stood at the customer service counter, wondering if anyone would notice me amid the shopping carts and baskets which surrounded me, each heaped with spurned gifts, returned merchandise that needed to be put-back. The lights were already dim in this part of the store, a testament to how slow my normally chaotic neighborhood had become due to the threat of snow. After several minutes, a tall, striking young employee approached me to ask if I needed help. I said that I needed to make a return.

Wordlessly, he rounded the carts and positioned himself behind the counter. I handed him my receipt and he scanned it, then reached for the tchotchke I was returning. He tossed it in to a giant bin behind him without looking. “$21 will go back on your card. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Did you have a nice Christmas?”, he mindlessly asked.

And because I have no boundaries, I replied, “I don’t really celebrate it anymore. Some years ago, my dad went in to a coma on the 23rd of December and passed away on the 29th. We buried him on the 31st. So the holidays just haven’t been the same after that.” My cheeks were hot by the time my explanation trailed off awkwardly. I should’ve just said, “Yes, thanks for asking!” and walked out.

My answer had snapped him out of his exhaustion, haze, reverie. “That’s deep.”

“Do you think you’ll ever celebrate it again?”, he asked. I stared at him, and for the first time, I really saw him. He was too pretty for retail. He looked like he should be the supporting actor on a sitcom, the one-liner-spouting son with an easy smile, filling out a fake nuclear family on some set in L.A. I had noticed him before, but only in the most cursory way– he stood out from the other employees. While they shuffled, slouched and grumbled, his posture was flawless. While they layered tee-shirts and sagged their pants, he always wore a designer crewneck sweater and a trim, shiny belt with a giant French logo for a belt buckle. The latter could’ve been a fake, but if it was, it was a great one. No fraying threads or tarnished metal in sight. He took his appearance and his comportment seriously.

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FILED UNDER: The People, Columbia Heights, Gun Violence, Race and Class, Teens
December 27, 2010 | 10:50 AM | By

Be Careful with Your Boxes

Flickr: mark sebastian

Some presents are way cuter than others, right? Anyway, be careful about when you put this box out!

In case you missed it, this story from WAMU’s Jessica Gould has some timely and wise advice:

Burglaries in Washington are up 14 percent in December compared to a year ago. And D.C. police are urging residents to be careful as they put away their Christmas packages.

Assistant Police Chief Alfred Durham says Santa Claus isn’t the only stranger who wants to slip into your house this season…And Durham says those big boxes are like red flags for burglars.

“So why not keep those packages or the packaging inside the home until trash collection day? That way folks who are doing these casing neighborhoods will not see that, ‘Hey, here’s a good target — they have a brand new 42-inch flat screen TV,’” he says.

Durham also advises residents to keep their doors locked and their alarms on.

This makes so much sense, but it’s not like it would occur to most people that breaking down a box to remove clutter inside the home and putting it outside is a great way to broadcast to the world that someone got a brand new TV, laptop or toy. Be careful, out there.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Crime, WAMU
December 22, 2010 | 3:33 PM | By

DMV Masala

Flickr: Josep Tomas

Black and brown.

I walked outside yesterday and felt abnormally grateful for the traffic clogging Irving Street at lunch time. I needed a cab and there were several, stranded in front of me.

The middle one had a female driver, so I chose her. Once I slammed the door, I was surprised; the interior smelled like auto parts, dust and WD-40– a combination which immediately transported me three decades in to the past, to my father’s garage, a place where I learned the difference between a flat and Phillips screwdriver before I figured out the alphabet. I checked my sexism immediately and felt bad for the dissonance I was experiencing at the shock of such a scent combined with a female driver. I knew better than that.

“Thanks for picking me.” She smiled wryly. She was middle-aged and African American, with thick, bouncy curls. Some of her facial expressions reminded me of Loretta Devine, which secretly delighted me. Devine was the best part of one of my favorite seasonal guilty pleasures: “This Christmas“. Stop judging me. I liked it before Chris Brown did that. Oh, you’re judging me because it’s a mediocre film which over-relies on holiday cliches to make its point…sure, I deserve that. Carry on!

“I’m not going to lie,” I began. “I thought it was cool that you were a female cab driver. I don’t usually get those.”

“Yeah, we’re rare.” She studied me in her rear view mirror.

“Are you Indian?”, she asked.

“My parents are–”

“And so are you!”, she declared, emphatically.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The People, Immigrants, Race and Ethnicity, Racial Divide
December 22, 2010 | 10:44 AM | By

A Vigil in Brookland for Raj Patel

thisisbossi

Last Saturday, Raj Patel was murdered when he chanced upon a robbery happening in the corner store he managed, in Brookland. Last night, the community which appreciated him held a vigil in his memory. We Love DC was there, and unimpressed with MPD’s excuse for its absence:

Mr. Patel’s son, nephew and brother were present, and have asked that any further donations not be made to the family, but rather to Brookland causes, businesses and churches. Mr. Patel’s nephew explained that while the donations were generous and welcome, that the family knew that Mr. Patel would have wanted that money to go to the people who would need it this holiday season within the Brookland community.

I was disappointed at the lack of representation from MPD, who did not send anyone to the event. I received an email from Commander Greene of the Fifth District last night who said that they had not been made aware of the vigil, and had they known, they would have sent someone to attend and speak to the group, but that they were unaware. Given the large number of posts on area listserves, as well as flyers throughout the neighborhood announcing the event, I find it troubling they were not organically aware of the event, and would have needed an invite.

NBC 4 has more; the murder has not been solved.

FILED UNDER: The People, Brookland, Crime, Gun Violence, Immigrants
December 21, 2010 | 11:42 AM | By

Welcome to D.C., our Rent is High

Flickr: NCinDC

Isn't hunting for an apartment the *worst*? And now, it's even more difficult!

Bad news for renters in D.C. via the Washington Post– our median rent is the third-highest in the country…right after San Jose and San Francisco. Oy.

Those from more distressed areas who have come here chasing jobs find waiting lists, more stringent credit checks and rents triple what they left behind.

In local apartment buildings, rents jumped 8.2 percent — about twice the long-term average — to $1,643 this year as vacancies disappeared…The area’s vacancy rates are the second-lowest in the nation, after New York City.

“There’s been a structural shift from owners to renters in this country in the past few years,” said Gregory H. Leisch, chief executive of Delta Associates. “It’s the most rapid shift I’ve ever witnessed in the 40 years that I’ve been in this business.”

While the high foreclosure rate helped push more people into rentals nationwide, that factor was less influential in the Washington region, many economists said. Instead, the local rental market is thriving mostly because the area added jobs more quickly than the rest of the nation during the recession, luring newcomers who were unable or unwilling to purchase a home here.

I know some might say we’re already “there”, but I hope D.C. doesn’t become an enclave for just the wealthiest and the luckiest (here’s looking at you, Manhattan).

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Money, Real Estate
December 20, 2010 | 3:01 PM | By

Gentrifying with “Towers”– and How They Fail in Columbia Heights

Flickr: Mr. T in DC

Apartment building in Columbia Heights, D.C.

This is a few days old, but I felt compelled to post it– Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism blogged a response to Lydia DePillis’ feature in the City Paper on building height restrictions in D.C.

“the part that really stood out to me was this graphic…outlining where Lydia thinks the height restrictions should be lifted…Anyone familiar with DC geography will notice that the area most insulated from change – Northwest DC – is the richest part of town, full of desirable white neighborhoods. The areas where DePillis advocates lifting the height limit – neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River figure prominently in the graphic – are far blacker and poorer than the rest of DC…

But still, the fact that the only incremental steps towards redensification we can take will disproportionately displace black families is something that should be recognized and discussed. If upzoning poor neighborhoods is the only way to get the city to allow dense development, then so be it, but we shouldn’t pretend that these sorts of half-measures won’t have consequences.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Columbia Heights, Gentrification, Race and Class