THE SUBURBANIZATION OF DIVERSITY?

Via Latoya Peterson's Racialicious essay on gentrification and the D.C. housing market, I found last month's Associated Press piece on the white-ification of Washington, once 71 percent African American, now 57 percent African American. While it's still possible to find rental bargains here inside the Beltway, this is not a buyer's market. Even the dusty old brownstone I live in, which would have to be completely rehabilitated to become attractive to a family expecting modern convienances (it's currently without a dish washer, central air conditioning, weather-proofed doors, and the like), is worth close to $1 million. Luxury condos and rentals are sprouting up all over the city, sometimes right next door to public health clinics and housing projects.

Now, I'm not reflexively anti-development. The Target opening up by the Columbia Heights metro station near my house certainly beats the empty lot that gave the neighborhood an abandoned, dangerous feel when I first moved in. But like many residents, I worry D.C. is choosing a development path that favors big box stores and big box apartment buildings, instead of encouraging local ownership of businesses and mixed-income housing within the beautiful stock of nineteenth and early twentieth century brick homes.

And not surprisingly, a development strategy that focuses on bringing national and multinational corporations into poor and working class neighborhoods is leading to an influx of affluent white professionals working in the private sector. According to the AP, Brookings Institution demographer William Frey predicts the city will be majority white by 2015. Where are priced-out middle and working class black families going? To the suburbs. First white flight turned D.C. brown, and now African Americans are in flight too, this time from astronomical home prices.

Could the result of this pattern, common in metropolitan regions around the country, be a suburbanization of the diversity we usually associate with cities? Part of that depends on whether individual suburban towns pursue policies that encourage mixed-income neighborhoods and affordable housing. But it's strange to contemplate a future in which suburbs -- not neo-liberal cities -- are the locus of American multiculturalism.

--Dana Goldstein