Reality Checkpoint

Peter Tatian, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute, said that rising home prices across the city and low interest rates pushed a wave of middle- and upper-income buyers into Trinidad and diversified a neighborhood that has long been almost entirely black.

At the same time, Tatian said, "There's still a significant population that's lower income and dependent on public support. It's a very transitory period in the neighborhood and it's not clear how it's going to end up."

The more recent arrivals include Mark Thorp, 38, a bar owner who saw the neighborhood as a shrewd investment because developers were pushing east across the city, and real estate was comparatively inexpensive. In 2003, Thorp sold his rowhouse in Shaw and used the profit to buy four properties in Trinidad, including a rowhouse in which he lives.

Whatever impression was spun by the checkpoint, he said, will fade over time. "People will end up over here because this is where they can afford a house," he said. "Doesn't economics drive everything?"

On Montello Avenue, a block from where police staged the checkpoint, Montgomery Gray, 25, a real-estate agent, and another investor last year paid $620,000 for what residents say is Trinidad's only detached house, one that was owned by a physician who treated neighborhood patients for decades and is now deceased.

Gray envisions razing the house and building duplex condos. While he worries that the recent violence will "slow the process of moving money into the neighborhood," he remains optimistic. "I already own here; it wouldn't benefit me to give up," he said.

Gray's move to Trinidad was partly inspired by the discovery that a friend, Adrian Roberts, 30, a construction worker, had purchased the rowhouse across the street. Since arriving in 2003, Roberts said, he has noticed fewer young men loitering. He knows that the potential of danger is real, but so are the improvements: sidewalk repairs, the ongoing renovation of a nearby elementary school, homeowners fixing up properties and adding flower boxes.

"It's gotten progressively better," he said. "But it's not going to happen overnight."

The new homeowners and improving property values are only a part of the narrative in Trinidad, a sloping neighborhood bounded on the west by Gallaudet University and Bladensburg Road on the east; by Mount Olivet Cemetery to the north and Florida Avenue to the south.

Nearly two thirds of Trinidad's apartments are rental units, the 2000 census shows. The number of people receiving food stamps grew by 25 percent between 2000 and 2005, before declining slightly. Residents talk of witnessing drug sales, although they say the dealers have grown more discreet. The 5th Police District, which includes Trinidad, recorded 12 homicides during March and April, compared with three during the same period last year.

"The perpetrators come out at night," said James White, 41, a Navy veteran, who was smoking a cigar as he sat outside the apartment he has shared with cousins since moving from a housing development. "You don't want to walk the alleys, you don't go to the ATM machine and flash money."

Former D.C. Police Chief Isaac Fulwood Jr. led the department from 1989 to 1992, when violence in Trinidad was a constant. The recent rash of homicides was stunning, he said, because the whole city is far safer than it was during that era. "When you get seven or eight homicides, it's like 'Great God almighty, what's happening?' " he said. "It's not in the magnitude of the 1980s or '90s, but these are significant problems."