Upscaling Downtown

Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Brett Williams

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780801421068
• eBook ISBN: 9781501711626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In Upscaling Downtown, anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnography of a changing urban neighborhood that she calls "Elm Valley." Located in Washington, D.C., Elm Valley was one of the first neighborhoods to draw middle-class property owners back to the inner city, but a faltering housing industry halted what might have been the rapid displacement of the poor. As a result, Elm Valley experienced several years of stalled gentrification. It was a period when very unlikely people lived side by side: black families who had migrated to the nation's capital from the Carolinas decades earlier, newly arrived refugees from Central America and Southeast Asia, and more prosperous whites. For Williams, a ten-year resident of Elm Valley, stalled gentrification offered a rare opportunity to observe how people 'with varied cultural traditions and economic resources saw and used the neighborhood in which they lived.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Revisiting the Symbolic City
• 2. Reinventing the South
• 3. The Meaning of Home
• 4. The Struggle for Main Street
• 5. Tele-visions of Urban Life
• 6. The Invention of Community
• References
• Index