I've lived in DC for a bit under three years. For much of that time, cabbies taking me to the various places I've lived have idly remarked that they would've refused to drop me off in that neighborhood a decade ago. Yikes. But beyond that bit of anecdotal data, I don't have much of an opinion on the Great Gentrification debates. My house is now within walking distance of a new Target, Best Buy, Marshall's, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. That's very convenient. But I've had a car, so such shopping was never terribly inconvenient. Which is why, as a matter of redistribution, the upside of having this center in a historically poor neighborhood and placing it atop a metro station would seem to be progressive -- folks who didn't have access to these goods, at these prices, suddenly will. The argument for mom-and-pops is too often made by people who mean "cool indie music stores in Austin" and too rarely mean "bodegas with six rotted bananas and aisles of marked-up, stale cereal in Columbia Heights." I've got my problems with Wal-Mart, but they have to do with employee benefits and monopsonistic pricing practices -- not the fact that they give consumers extraordinary levels of choice they've never had before. On the other hand, the issue of property prices soaring and kicking out current residents is a fair one. This isn't really moving towards a point, save to recommend the argument in the comments of this Citypaper post as an interesting read, and to link to Rob Goodspeed's old post on the research around gentrification and displacement.
