Matt Ortega

Columbia Heights has a new neighbor:

I also believe the attenuated period of adjustment has something to do with my new neighborhood, Columbia Heights. It’s charming and colorful, and just dirty enough to be interesting. The mix of people reminds me of Hyde Park and Humboldt Park, two neighborhoods I’m very familiar with in Chicago, while the look and feel reminds me of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn: brightly painted rowhouses with front yards, some meticulously manicured, others overgrown with weeds. And with awesome burritos right down the street, I’m home.

Columbia Heights is also undergoing gentrification/urban renewal/whatever. Bling to the west; blight to the east. All of the expected big box names — Target; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Staples; Starbucks; Marshalls — lumped into a shiny boring complex. My housemate tells me it opened only two months ago.

The Columbia Heights neighborhood was my first home in D.C. It was a spacious house just north of the 13th and Harvard intersection until rent was to be raised. The massive restoration on 14th Street was cited as a major factor in the rising rent. So there you have it: I was gentrified out of Columbia Heights.

Apparently I was not the only one:

Overheard today from one of the hosts of a yard sale, who was explaining to a customer that the Columbia Heights group house holding the sale was being forced to move because the property had been sold: “we’re being gentrified out of the neighborhood we were gentrifying.”

Just days after leaving the neighborhood, there was a terrible shooting outside the Columbia Heights Metro around the time I would be coming home from work.