Where the Poor Go

I'm adding a new link to the gentrification section, and as I was rereading the page I remembered what struck me about it before. The piece is basically a dialogue about being gentrified out of neighborhood, and about being gentrifiers. Somewhere in the middle there is a section where they discuss what can happen to the poor who can't pay the suddenly sky-high rents when large areas gentrify. Now people who sell their houses can always move to another neighborhood (even if that does mean the suburbs), and middle class/lower middle class renters can either stretch to make the high rents, or move someplace less desirable, but the poor don't have many choices.

I remember living in a crappy flat (great neighborhood of Notting Hill) in London during a college semester abroad. Four of us lived in this one bedroom (there was an extra bed in the living room) flat with plywood floors. Frequently our kitchen ceiling would get wet spots in one corner and water would drip down. The first couple of times this happened we called the landlord and she resolved the issue. At first we were puzzled, but then we learned that the 2nd floor was split up into tiny rooms each occupied by a non-English speaking Eastern European family, and with a single shared bathroom above our kitchen (apparently there was a problem with the shower curtain). We were shocked. We had thought we were roughing it by squeezing four people into our place, and then we found out that like fifteen people lived upstairs.

Now this does connect to DC, and to illustrate this fact I'll relate an experience I had while house shopping in the District. I went to look at a place I'd seen an ad for online. The house was a three story wood frame located on Gales (Rosedale neighborhood of Capitol Hill). After arriving for the open house I discovered that the structure was currently employed as a rooming house. Now as I mentioned, this place was was huge, so each renter did have his/her own room (there were no families living here), so the surprising part was not overcrowding, the rent each person paid. As a rooming house, the structure operated without leases, and charged rent weekly, rather than monthly. The price was $125 a week (I lived in a group house at the time and my monthly rent was $425). Every dining room/living room/library had been converted into a bedroom (leaving only the kitchen and the three bathrooms as common rooms). So these guys (most of them had been there over a month) were forking over $500 a month to live in a bedroom (many with severely warped wooden floors, and the occasional broken window) and have access to a bathroom and a kitchen (with a giant hole from chasing a mysterious plumbing leak). The house was listed for $205k. I'm sure it sold. The slumlord, um, I mean landlord (at the time of the open house) had plans to move his tenants into another building, so no one was made homeless in the transaction.