8 development projects that will transform DC this year
http://www.elevationdcmedia.com/features/devprojects_011315.aspx
DC is constantly gentrifying building new housing, especially condos. However, almost none of it is affordably priced.
When I was in high school taking the Metro into DC each day from the suburbs, Gallery Place was a neighborhood you did not want to get off at: boarded up buildings, drug deals, homeless. "Chinatown" was barely perceptible, a few Chinese restaurants. Today anchored by the Verizon Center this area has become a hub of nightlife. Similar total makeovers have occured all over DC with many more to come.
Ironically, the founding fathers believed strongly that the nation's capital should not be a place for the wealthy and privileged. A fan of the anti-urban French philosopher Rousseau, Jefferson agreed that big cities were often a place where immorality took root:
"The mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body."
For over a century DC was a sleepy southern town, even a backwater. How times have changed.
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