What Is Gentrification?

In 2001, President Bill Clinton signed the Federal First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit. This idea came out District of Columba Economic Recovery Act, which was put in place to encourage middle income to settle down in D.C. In a 2005 study by the Fannie Mae Foundation discovered that a third of the run-up in housing prices between 1997 and 2001 were a directly caused by this new tax policy (Frank Ruta,) meaning that gentrification is not just something that randomly happens but something that can also be sanctioned by the government itself, and this is how it first moved into U street.
Modern Day U street has plummeting crime rates and is back to being a bustling neighborhood. Even with these positive changes, the members who originally made up
Colonization is when a group of people come in and inhabit an area with the purpose of settling and/or resource exploitation, and this is what is happens in gentrified communities. When people with higher income move into a community it causes rent to rise for existing members, since housing changes in order to cater to the new people who could afford to pay more. When this happens, instead of aiding the existence of minority businesses, since now there are more people with spendable income, these businesses are simply replaced. Ethnic supermarkets become Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, expensive restaurants and hair salons move in and the neighborhood becomes unaffordable to the people that previously called it home. It is true, crime rates drop, schools become better, the neighborhood becomes cleaner but only because white people bring attention to the neighborhood with their privilege. None of these benefits are enjoyed by its true population but by its new one. Minorities in the communities are pushed out because they can no longer afford to live there and with that, all the existing problems of the community that are there because of the systematic racism that is prevalent in our society are just moved to another
When segregation put them there they prevailed and built community of enablers, until the daily boulders placed on the shoulders of the black community through systematic oppression, inequality in unemployment, schools, housing segregation, police brutality and finally the assassination of one of the most historically important leaders Martin Luther King, finally caused the community and henceforth U Street, to collapse. However instead of addressing the problems of crime and poverty facing this community, nothing was done until gentrification began. Poor black communities are not worthy of help from the government until white people move in, and blacks are left to migrate into another socioeconomically depressed area that the government refuses to help