Report from Washington, DC
Book Tour day one.
I got off the subway at L’Enfant Plaza and did the normal dance of confusion that you do the first time you encounter a new subway stop. What street am I on? Which direction do I go? I have a really strong internal map that makes it pretty easy to get oriented, but there were no familiar landmarks in sight to help. I was standing underneath a monstrous brutalist building that obscured everything, so I just started walking.
I had been reading on the train down from Baltimore–I’m currently on a week-long tour giving talks about Our Trespasses and the political theology of Urban Renewal–about DC’s Urban Renewal projects. The projects here were some of the first in the nation. They cleared out tens of thousands of residents and about 1500 businesses. Nearer to the National Mall, huge new government office buildings went in, then a canyon was dug for a below-grade freeway. Beyond that, there were a lot of empty lots for many years, until recently.
Standing below that big, boxy office building, I figured I was in the right vicinity. The setting matched what had been reading. I rounded the corner, saw the bridge over the expressway, and knew for sure.
Then I looked up and saw the lettering on that monstrous brutalist building: Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Of course.
HUD was created as a cabinet-level office in 1965 to consolidate five separate agencies, including the Urban Renewal Administration.
The federal department charged with administering housing policy is built on top of land taken by a program that wiped out the homes of at least ⅓ million American families by 1966, so many that they finally stopped keeping records.
From what I’ve been reading, it seems that most of the development to the south of that highway came about very slowly, and then suddenly, all at once.1 There was no shortage of vacant federal land and rubble-strewn asphalt in Southwest DC for several decades following Urban Renewal’s destructions. People still lived in the area, but the environment was profoundly different. One area resident told the Washington Post in 1967, “the people are here, but the town isn’t.” Like their peers in many cities, DC planners overestimated the demand for urban space during an intense period of suburbanization. The result, as in my city of Charlotte, was lots of empty, haunted spaces.
As this essay on Urban Renewal in DC points out, the failure of those projects created an environment ripe for massive development in Southwest one generation later. In the early 2010s, developers saw the profit potentials of the waterfront and began building The Wharf District. Last night, the waterfront, the restaurants and bars, and the sidewalks were all filled with people. This development is all high-end, the rents are astronomical even by DC standards, and the veggie burger and beer I had there were embarrassingly expensive.
What happened to the poor people? Same as ever, pushed out of sight even of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Pastor Shout-outs: I was at two churches Sunday: Woodbrook Baptist in Baltimore in the morning, and Riverside Baptist in SW DC in the evening. Pastor John Ballenger at Woodbrook is a creative and soulful spirit, and I’m grateful to him for opening his pulpit to me today. More from Baltimore to come, where I’ll be over the next two days.
Pastor Mia McClain at Riverside Baptist in DC is a valued friend and colleague in her second year of ministry there. Their congregation made a difficult decision almost a decade ago to sell an aging and expensive building to the developer at The Wharf. In exchange they got a new structure fitted to their needs, and a number of other considerations to help them continue their ministry. Those are the hard sorts of decisions many churches are facing. They are decisions with no perfect answer and many long-term complications. Mia and Riverside are working daily to do good ministry in the new neighborhood going up around them.
One Final Note: Duke Ellington was born and raised in Washington, DC. Here is some of the master’s finest work.
I could be wrong, of course. I know my own city intimately, but tracking all the details in other places can be a challenge.