Ownership, Opportunism, and Open Doors

In Washington there are new, shiny apartment buildings going up in neighborhoods that haven’t enjoyed growth for decades. That isn’t to say that they enjoy this particular brand of development; the influx of wealthy young professionals into black, working class communities is always a bumpy transition. In every glass-walled, terraced condo building that opens, a row of restaurant and shopping chains sprouts up in the street-level storefronts, like invasive mushrooms popping up between the roots of a non-native tree transplanted into a forest.

I am standing in the laundromat with a hushed, yet bustling crowd of latina matrons. Our activities ebb and flow with the cycles of our machines—intervals of plain-faced, stare-at-the-wall boredom alternating with interminable stretches of folding shirts and balling socks; apathy in stillness and in motion. The owner, Korean or Chinese, passes through, weaving between the broken-wheeled, weirdly stunted wire carts meant for shuttling our laundry between gaping machines.

“Not many white people come in here.” Apparently the array of nearby condos, a mere block in any direction, do not stimulate business of this kind.

“This neighborhood is changing fast,” I say, appealing to him to share more. “It might be bad for private business owners.”

“Bad for people who rent, good for people who own.”

I don’t ask if he owns the squat, run-down building we are standing in.

Another day in the city I come across an absurd sight: an opulent, U Street condo building newly erected, its street-level windows still frosted and waiting to be infested with the pernicious Mexican restaurant chains and cell phone provider outlets that flourish symbiotically in this habitat. One narrow, glass-paned corner retail unit is already occupied, however, and it is a jarring sight; the high-ceilinged space, a choice slice of fertile ground, is home to a shoe repair shop, strewn with leather and smudged work benches under the recessed bank of florescents twelve feet above.

What an enigma. Shoe repair is hardly a trade in high demand among the District’s new rich, who upgrade from 46- to 50-inch plasma TVs without thinking twice. The art of extending the useful life of our possessions is fading, supplanted by the increasing ease of replacement and accumulation.

This disorienting storefront, like an installation on cognitive dissonance, is brought to me by a quirk in the system. New condos: bad for businesses that rent, good for those that own.

Across the street, the Open Door Church of Philadelphia stands with plastered over windows and a doorway that has been completely blocked by a stack of whitewashed cinderblocks — a tragically ironic contrast to its name. At the base of its walls, leafy creepers shoot through the concrete and hold the façade in a slowly tightening stranglehold. How many more years of proliferation will these opportunist vines need to pull the whole structure back into the earth? I can’t help but think that long before that can happen, the whole lot will be demolished to make way for a new condominium, and a new generation of invasive species will preside over a different sort of urban decay.

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