The Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., gets pretty crowded on weekends. If you walk down 18th Street at night, you have to dodge hoards of drunken 20-somethings between their second and third bar of the night. My friends from grad school lived on Calvert Street last year, in the top floor apartment of a beautiful row house—that is, until their landlord raised the rent and they couldn't afford it.
That wasn't a surprise. While pockets of Adams Morgan used to be known for crime, the area is now a fairly well-heeled part of town, with a median income of more than $61,000—too high even to be "eligible for gentrification," according to a recent Census tract analysis. The rents, as my grad school friends sadly know, reflect the changing times.
But there was a time when Adams Morgan battled the most unjust aspects of displacement with strong community activism—and, briefly, won. One chapter from its storied past shows how some of its residents fought to keep and stay in their homes in the 1970s. Their ultimately fleeting victory nevertheless had long-term ramifications in the changing urban landscape in D.C., and offers lessons for taming rising rents all over the country.
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