Gentrification in D.C. means widespread displacement ...



AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY - SCHOOL YEAR 2020-2021WELCOME TO AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY!What is AP? Congratulations on accepting the challenge of an AP course! You have selected to take a course that is as challenging as it is rewarding. “AP” stands for “Advanced Placement,” which is a term used to designate courses that are nationally standardized and managed by an organization called “College Board.” College Board ensures that AP classes across the globe are taught using the same challenging curriculum that they develop in conjunction with college professors across the country. The goal of all AP classes is to develop rigor in critical thinking, analytical, written expression and time management skills that college will demand of all students. The class focuses on 3 main themes: 1) the role of geography in human life, 2) the impact of humans on their environment, and 3) the tensions between globalization and cultural diversity.Why take AP? Competitive colleges around the country look to see that you have challenged yourself in high school and look very favorable upon students who have accepted the rigor of AP classes in high school. Moreover, students who perform well on the AP exams are often eligible for college credit! In addition, McKinley requires that all students take two AP classes before they graduate.What will the AP exam look like? All AP courses end with a nationally standardized exam. Our exam is comprised of two parts: 60 multiple-choice question (60 mins) and three Free-Response Questions (75 mins) and will take place on Tuesday, May 4, 2021.__________________________________________________________________________________________SUMMER 2020 ASSIGNMENTThis assignment can also be found on the McKinley websiteDue: August 31, 2020 on a shared google doc. Share your document with kim.stalnaker@k12..Teacher: Ms. StalnakerQuestions? Email me at kim.stalnaker@k12.Purpose: The purpose of the summer assignment is to introduce you to some of the concepts we will discuss in class and get you thinking both globally and geographically. The summer assignment has three parts as explained below. Article Analysis: Read two articles from The Washington Post entitled, “Gentrification in DC means widespread displacement,” and “Go-go’s fight against gentrification is just getting started. This is what it sounds like and complete the tasks below. Instagram activity: Follow me on Instagram at aphumangeostalnaker and respond in the comments section to at least 3 posts. If you don’t have Instagram, share your email with me so I can send you the posts via email. When you respond in an Instagram post, make sure you include your first and last name so I can give you credit. Task #1: ARTICLE ANALYSISRead two articles on gentrification in DC and how DC residents are responding.“Gentrification in DC means widespread displacement,” The Washington Post, Marissa Lang, 26 April 2019“Go-go’s fight against gentrification is just getting started. This is what it sounds like,” The Washington Post, Chris Richards, 8 May 2019.Type your answers to the following questions in a google doc and share them with me. Please use MLA format (Times New Roman, double spaced, 12 pt font, etc.) You must write at least 3-7 sentences per paragraph. Use evidence from the articles to support your answers.Article 1: Geographers analyze spatial relationships and patterns in specific regions of the world. Spatial relationships help us understand how people interact, relate, and connect with each other over a geographic space. In analyzing these connections, a geographer can start to identify patterns, which help us understand our world. In the DC region, we are currently experiencing a period of economic growth. This growth has caused changes in spatial relationships between new residents and native Washingtonians. These changes can be observed in our geographic space. Using quantitative (data and statistics) and qualitative (what can be observed) data from the first article, explain the changes in these spatial relationships that DC is experiencing and how it differs from other regions of the country. Article 1: Based on your analysis of the changes in spatial relationships in DC, how would you define gentrification?Article 1: The changing spatial patterns based on DC’s economic growth have both positive and negative effects. Identify and describe one positive and two negative effects of this growth on the city. Article 1: As the city of DC changes, it also impacts the surrounding areas in the DMV. Explain how gentrification is also impacting the suburban areas of the DMV. Article 2: Geographers examine various elements of culture, such as music, food, religion, and language to understand a culture’s “sense of place.” This “sense of place” often distinguishes one region in the world from another. Using information from the second article, discuss how Go Go music represents a “sense of place” for native Washingtonians. Article 2: Based on your analysis of the connection between DC culture and Go Go music, explain why protests against gentrification center around Go Go music.Your opinion: Geographers analyze two concepts related to culture: 1) The interaction of people contributes to the spread of cultural practices, and 2) Cultural ideas, practices, and innovations change or disappear over time. Which of these two concepts do you think most applies to the changes happening in DC and what is your opinion of the impact of these changes? Feel free to discuss how these changes impact you and /or your family.4527550190500Gentrification in D.C. means widespread displacement, study finds?Low-income displacement and concentration in the Washington region, at the census tract level, from 2000 to 2016. (Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity)By?Marissa J. Lang, April 26, The Washington PostIn most American cities, gentrification has not pushed low-income residents out of the city they call home, according to a?study. But Washington is not most cities. In the District, low-income residents are being pushed out of neighborhoods at some of the highest rates?in the country, according to the?Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, which sought to track demographic and economic changes in neighborhoods in the 50 largest U.S. cities from 2000 to 2016. “For all the talk of gentrification happening in cities all over the country, what we found is that it really isn’t,” said Myron Orfield, director of the institute, founded at the University of Minnesota law school to investigate growing social and economic disparities in American cities. “Washington is one of the few places in the country where real displacement is actually occurring. It’s quite rare.”More than 38?percent of District residents, including about 35?percent of low-income residents, live in census tracts — geographic areas smaller than Zip codes that contain a few thousand residents — that are growing economically. But low-income people who live in those areas are at the greatest risk of displacement, the report says.The study, conducted over several months and released April?10, comes as gentrification and its consequences are being discussed with renewed urgency in the nation’s capital.Earlier this month, two neighborhood disputes revealed deep divisions in areas undergoing rapid demographic change. In one incident, a noise complaint?briefly silenced the hallmark go-go music of an electronics store in Shaw, while in the other, Howard University students?asked their new neighbors to stop treating their campus like a public park.Neither incident occurred in the area of the District where, according to the study, the most intense displacement has been happening: Ward?6. According to researchers, Ward?6 — which includes Capitol Hill, Navy Yard, the Southwest Waterfront and parts of downtown — has had?some of the most dramatic changes?in the District. In portions of the Kingman Park and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, nearly 75?percent of the low-income populations have vanished, census information shows. In the Navy Yard neighborhood, about 77?percent of residents were identified as low income in 2000. Sixteen years later, that population dropped to 21?percent.Most of the people pushed out of these economic hot spots are black and low income, according to the data. The number of District families headed by single mothers or those without a college degree also has declined.“Since 2000, the same neighborhoods have seen overall population growth of 19?percent, and white population growth of a staggering 202?percent,” researchers wrote. “A huge swath of the city is experiencing gentrification and displacement, stretching from Logan Circle to Petworth, and including neighborhoods like Shaw and Columbia Heights.”In places such as the Shaw neighborhood, where the go-go music controversy played out, low-income populations have dropped by as much as 57?percent.The study divided neighborhoods into categories based on who is moving in and who is moving out:●Areas experiencing “growth” were defined as regions that were economically expanding while also increasing their number of low-income residents.●Those experiencing “low-income displacement” — like District neighborhoods — were losing low-income people while growing economically.●Areas experiencing “low-income concentration” were experiencing an economic decline and an uptick in low-income residents.Cities struggling with “abandonment” were losing low-income people and suffering economic decline.“There are organizations spending millions of dollars fighting gentrification in cities and neighborhoods that aren’t actually seeing any displacement,” Orfield said of the national data. “We wanted to build this database to show people where that’s actually happening.” Pockets of the District have had an increase in low-income residents, but those areas are what researchers call low-income concentration zones because they are not also experiencing economic growth, according to the study.Several of these zones are east of the Anacostia River, in Wards 7 and 8, where poor areas appear to be getting poorer, researchers said. In neighborhoods such as Good Hope and parts of Greenway, low-income populations have grown by about 60?percent. “This may reflect an intensification of racial and economic segregation within the city proper, as individuals displaced from a set of gentrifying neighborhoods are concentrated into a nearby set of declining neighborhoods,” the study says.Areas outside the District were more prone to this phenomenon, data shows. About 437,000 residents of the city’s suburbs live in areas where low-income populations have increased by as much as 70?percent since 2000. Those areas simultaneously lost about 30?percent of their white residents, according to the data.Parts of Prince George’s County were the most likely to experience these demographic changes, researchers said. “The rents are less affordable for poor people in these declining areas not because the rents are going up,” Orfield said. “It’s because the poor people who live there are increasingly worse off.”Los Angeles is the only other U.S. city that comes close to the District’s levels of gentrification, researchers said, and its displacement rates are higher.Go-go’s fight against gentrification is just getting started. This is what it sounds like.righttopGo-go band ABM performs at the intersection of 14th and U Street NW. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)By?Chris Richards, Pop music critic, May 8, The Washington PostGo-go is many things. Dance music, party music, proudly local community music, black music, sacred music. And when it feels like all of those things at once, it’s a model of everlasting life.For decades in Washington, go-go bands have been blending songs into songs, stitching them together with congas and timbales, building a rhythm that feels indestructible and infinite. It’s all by design. When the late Chuck Brown minted this music back in the 1970s, he said he was trying to keep people on the dance floor with a nonstop beat that “just goes and goes.” In 2019, the metaphor couldn’t feel more urgent: In a white America that still wants black people silenced, removed, jailed and erased, go-go says, “Continue.” So when thousands of Washingtonians assembled beneath the orange sodium-vapor light of 14th and U Street NW on Tuesday evening, the beat went on, ecstatic and triumphant. It had to.This was the third protest concert held at this very spot since a noise dispute seven blocks away first made national headlines back in April. If you missed it: Central Communications,?a MetroPCS vendor in Shaw, had long been a local landmark, famous for pumping go-go tunes from its storefront on 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, but was recently forced to nix the music after a single complaint from a resident of the Shay, a neighboring luxury apartment complex. Rightfully outraged, the community rallied around the social media hashtag #DontMuteDC, and before long, the District’s indigenous funk music was percolating outside Central Communications again.But that wasn’t the end of it. With the District ranking as the most aggressively gentrified city in the country, #DontMuteDC has become a national news story, with?the New Yorker,?NPR,?the Atlantic?and?Slate?collectively giving go-go music the most media attention it has received in years. The go-go community knows that the country is still listening, so on Tuesday night, District natives assembled en masse to hear the music of go-go greats Backyard Band and ABM at a protest concert that organizers had playfully dubbed “Moechella” — a nod to the Coachella music festival, hybridized with some local slang.The bands set up their drums right there on the sidewalk — no stage, no risers — but the bad sightlines made for good times. You could see only the people around you, which meant you could see the city: women in lawn chairs, babies in strollers, 20-somethings in “RESPECT THE LOCALS” T-shirts, shirtless teenagers on skateboards and straight-from-the-office types in pleats and pumps, SmartTrip cards swinging from their lanyards as they swayed to the rhythm. Black Washington was making itself seen — and when Backyard Band launched into its anthemic “Pretty Girls,” it was making itself heard, too. This had to be one of the most astonishing singalongs to ever shake the walls of the city.And in that indelible moment, it was hard to remember how go-go’s stature had ever been tarnished in the first place. But since the 1980s, neighborhood feuds have occasionally seeped into the city’s nightspots, giving the music a reputation it never deserved. In 2010, D.C. police began circulating a “go-go report,” highlighting upcoming go-go performances for tighter policing, essentially criminalizing the music itself. Venues began to shutter, and bands took the District’s signature music out to the suburbs. Go-go was “violent.” And then it was gone.How can a vibration of air be violent? How do you criminalize a sound? I once put these questions to Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson, leader of go-go veterans Rare Essence. He said that in the District, violence was most likely to erupt in places where young people from different neighborhoods tended to cross paths: at school, on the Metro, at shopping centers and inside (or outside) the go-go. “And they’re not shutting down the first three,” he said. Back in 2005, Rare Essence lost its legendary Saturday night residency at Club U — a venue tucked inside the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center on 14th and U — when a deadly assault in the building finally forced the club to close permanently. Rapid gentrification had already been sweeping go-go venues out of the city, but in that instant, “Black Broadway” seemingly transformed into “The New U” for good.So for Tuesday night’s protest concert to shut down traffic at that very intersection felt momentous in and of itself — like a reclamation. But there were still reminders of what go-go is up against. All you had to do was look up — into the wide-open windows of the neighboring Louis Apartments where a few residents chose to spend the night watching television instead of coming downstairs to meet their neighbors. But if you looked around, you saw young people everywhere, which hopefully dismantled any ideas that young Washingtonians have abandoned go-go as their parents’ — or grandparents’ — music.Despite more than a decade in the game, ABM still counts as a younger go-go band, and they’ve clearly mastered the fine art of go-go alchemy, absorbing music from the outside world and translating it into go-go’s hyper-communal rhythm. When the band covered Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed,” it didn’t sound like a Mariah song anymore. It was go-go. Same for Backyard’s pummeling set-opener, “Hello.” For many Washingtonians, it used to be a ballad by a British lady named Adele.When the drums finally went quiet about 9 p.m., Backyard bandleader Anwan “Big G” Glover seemed as enchanted as everyone else on the block. “It’s beautiful to see all our people out here like this,” he said in his serrated baritone. Then, he encouraged his fellow Washingtonians to lobby local lawmakers for better schools, better health care, more affordable housing. As euphoric as the past three hours had felt, he knew this wasn’t a victory lap. D.C. natives still have so much more to fight for. It goes and goes. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download