Inside a Gentrifying Atlanta Neighborhood

Between 2008 and 2011, I lived in the Mount Pleasant area of Washington, D.C. A Target and Washington Sports Club had recently been built next to the nearby Columbia Heights metro station, a move that to many signaled the official tipping point in the neighborhood’s latest evolution. Once, not long after I’d moved in, two young black men were sitting on the metro car I boarded, pointing at every white person who got on and loudly, calmly declaring: “Gentrifier. Gentrifier. Gentrifier.”

I have nothing new or insightful to say about gentrification, save for that I have been a contributor to it, and I don’t feel good about that, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling, and really, it doesn’t matter how I feel, because I’m not the person anyone should worry about in this equation.

There is a very good, very thoughtful, very touching long read in Atlanta Magazine that examines the history of an Atlanta neighborhood through the lens of one family that made it their own, and the white dude who moved in next door.

How gentrification really changes a neighborhood – Atlanta Magazine

“I can’t say that excavating the past has alleviated the sense that I somehow confiscated a family’s valued possession, but I suppose it wasn’t atonement I sought; rather, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity and relay a family’s history that my very presence had threatened to wipe away.”

I didn’t think I needed another gentrifier’s perspective on gentrification, but in this case, I did. Miss Anna, a mother of nine and the neighborhood figure at the center of this profile, sounds like a badass worthy of a novel; for now, this will have to do.

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