Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

In Upscaling Downtown, anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnography of a changing urban neighborhood that she calls "Elm Valley." Located in Washington, D.C., Elm Valley was one of the first neighborhoods to draw middle-class property owners back to the inner city, but a faltering housing industry halted what might have been the rapid displacement of the poor. As a result, Elm Valley experienced several years of stalled gentrification. It was a period when very unlikely people lived side by side: black families who had migrated to the nation's capital from the Carolinas decades earlier, newly arrived refugees from Central America and Southeast Asia, and more prosperous whites. For Williams, a ten-year resident of Elm Valley, stalled gentrification offered a rare opportunity to observe how people 'with varied cultural traditions and economic resources saw and used the neighborhood in which they lived.