Washington City Paper, January 16, 2020: Causes of Death: Why Is DC’s Homicide Count Rising Again?
By New Year’s Day, nearly every local news outlet in D.C. had the story: The city saw its highest homicide count in a decade in 2019. We lost 166 people—a 4 percent increase on the 2018 count, which was a 38 percent increase on the 2017 count.
Two weeks into 2020, the numbers are holding steady.
Several people City Paper interviewed brought up gentrification when discussing the murder count.
D.C. is the most gentrified city in the United States, according to a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition released in 2019. This is to say, about 40 percent of the city’s low-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013. The study defines gentrification as “an influx of investment and changes to the built environment lead[ing] to rising home values, family incomes and educational levels of residents.”
Gentrification itself isn’t the problem. The issue is that long-time residents are pushed out when development and other economic opportunities move in. That same study says more than 20,000 African American residents were displaced from their neighborhoods by more affluent, white outsiders during that time period.
