HOT NEIGHBORHOOD 20010: ANACOSTIA.
Get in now. While the Columbia Heights retail development has garnered lots and lots of attention, the Camp Simms Giant has recieved less. But this could be the catalyst that gets things moving East of the River. Even the Washington Post has taken notice.
The $51 million Camp Simms development includes 75 single-family homes, 125,000 square feet of retail space and the largest Giant Food in DC. Sounds like Mclean Gardens only a few blocks to the east. Time to go east young man!!
March 2, 2006
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10 comments:
SE is like Mclean? YOu mean it's like Mclean, but with more shooting, drug-dealing and sub-standard housing...and without the shopping or places to park where your car won't be stolen.
And in other SE news...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030102762.html
Only near downtown Anacostia is a possible gentrification neighborhood.Further south will not becuase of many factors including wrong type of housing supply. Also the river is a natural boundary for gentrification.
Let's try this again:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/03/01/AR2006030102762.html
Nice blog but you should switch to haloscan comments. Takes only a few minutes to set up.
Hmm, I don't know. You have to have attractive housing to support gentrification. The housing and landscape in that area is just hideously ugly and without any charm. There is still plenty of space west of the river to fill.
Tear it all down.
For the last 30 years development in DC has moved east. no one thought the east end of penn. ave. would develop, but along came the MCI center. H street NE was on no one's (hardly anyone's) radar screen until a few years ago. It only stand to reason that someday...soon... development and gentrification will push across the other river.
"For the last 30 years development in DC has moved east. no one thought the east end of penn. ave. would develop, but along came the MCI center. H street NE was on no one's (hardly anyone's) radar screen until a few years ago"
This is all very true. However, many other neighborhoods (such as Petworth, Trinidad, Brightwood Park, Brightwood, Ivy City) have much more gentrification potential. The Anacostia river is a REAL barrier for gentrification east of the river.
I disagre, David. The river isn't what has been holding back development east of the river. The two reasons people are afraid to cross the river are 1) it's too violent "over there" and 2) there's nothing worth moving for "over there". dcbubble is correct in his point that development has slowly pushed eastward. But I alter paths with him in where and how it will play out for the city.
Gentrification will cross the river, but it will hit the neighborhoods of Ward 7 before it finally creeps down to Ward 8. Camp Simms may be "the hot SE spot" right now, but it's surrounded by neighborhoods like Congress Heights. It's the burned out H Street Corridor without the charm.
Unless, of course, the development at Navy Yard spills across the 11th Street Bridge and the city finally gets to building the Anacostia Gateway.
"The Anacostia river is a REAL barrier for gentrification east of the river."
Gentrification is a somewhat organic process that spreads from one block to the next. In that sense the river is a barrier.
The river is indeed a barrier, however that doesn't mean Anacostia can't revert to the clean, low-crime, close-in suburb it once was. So, while we shouldn't be expecting those same folks looking in say Cap Hill to be persuaded to look in Anacostia once the prices get too high in eastern Cap Hill, we CAN expect the same forces that are getting the inner city to clean up to start cleaning up Anacostia ... When that occurs, Anacostia will again become desireable in the same sense that Arlington and Bethesda are desireable ... not as an inner city neighborhood, but as a close-in suburb.
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