It's a Change, Not a Conspiracy

The third house had been left to a man -- a veteran who didn't pay his property taxes. When he was finally evicted, I, and many of his neighbors, offered to help him fight his eviction. We found lawyers willing to take his case, offered to lend him money or accompany him to court. But he refused our help and his house was sold.

Despite his idiosyncrasies (he kept two lawnmowers in his living room), he was an asset to the neighborhood -- a handyman who raked leaves and cut grass, and often took on small projects for neighbors like repairing a porch or installing a door. Many of us miss him. In the end, however, he lost his home because he didn't pay his taxes, not because of gentrification.

Often when a house sells in Takoma, the longtime owners are people whose children have left the area or don't want to live in the family home. The people who sell -- like the man I bought my first house from -- can make 10 to 20 times what they paid. Some get enough money to live comfortably in retirement homes here. Others go down South (the man I bought from did) to build the house they've always wanted.

In many cases, the newcomers to Takoma are white. Andthe word "newcomers" used among blacks is often code. But a fair number are black couples seeking a stake in the city. Still others are interracial couples looking for a welcoming community. A number are homosexual, some of them wanting a good place to raise their children. What most have in common is that they're young and have the money (and the time and energy) to restore houses left to deteriorate because of poverty, indifference or the incapacity of aging owners.

Some of these new residents simply eat and sleep in Takoma, sending their children to private schools, joining private swimming pools in Montgomery County, and enrolling their children in soccer teams outside the city. But many more walk anti-crime Orange Hat patrols, join our 25-year-old community group, attend monthly Police Service Area meetings and support our library branch. They organize meal brigades when babies are born, tutor students at Coolidge High School, collect food and clothing when neighbors suffer a fire. They started the Takoma Theatre Arts Project, which brought music, plays and dance to the long-dark local theater.

A few even send their children to neighborhood schools.

To be honest about it, though I love the community I've found, it wasn't the one I was looking for. When I first bought in Takoma in the late '80s, I wanted to live in a predominantly black neighborhood, one that reminded me of Bloomingdale, where I'd grown up.

And I don't mind admitting that I still miss aspects of that neighborhood. In the early '60s, Bloomingdale was still a place where men would no more go to church without a tie than walk out of the house naked. It was a place where people said hello to each other on the streets and sat on their porches talking over the fence when hot summer nights finally cooled. It was a place where adults kept the children in line because they knew their families.

By the '70s, however, that sense of community had been battered by a heroin epidemic. In the '80s and '90s, crack and the violence associated with drug trafficking hammered the community again. Residents grew accustomed to having to show the police ID to enter the blocks where they lived, and men joked about the latest shootouts in the barbershop.

As hard as it is to accept, the black communities many of us grew up in (and romanticize in memory) are gone. Those neighborhoods would have changed anyway, even without drugs, the permissiveness of the '60s, and deviant behavior masquerading as black culture. The truth is nothing stays the same.

Whites aren't moving into Takoma or Bloomingdale or Petworth because of any conspiracy. They're moving for many of the same reasons that blacks pined to enter those neighborhoods in the years after World War II, when it gradually began to become clear that segregation was ending in Washington: They want room for their families, houses that have character and an easy commute to downtown.

It's anybody's guess as to whether blacks might one day be a minority in this city, as they were some 50 years ago. But if it does happen, it will be the result of many forces, not anyone's "plan."

Author's e-mail :

dnicholson6@excite.com

David Nicholson, a Washington writer, is a former editor and book reviewer for The Washington Post.