This is my home town, right here in DC. When I lived off U Street with a bunch of Ivy League yuppies, they delighted in telling me that it wasn\’t my hometown because I had been born and raised on the District line. But my mother\’s mother was born in Southeast DC, in a house on Capitol Hill. Her father was raised in the Irish alley ghetto of Swampdoodle in Northeast DC. His father fought in the Civil War, worked at the Old Soldier\’s Home in Northeast and was responsible for almost accidentally starting a race riot in the early 1900s. My mother\’s father\’s family lived in 16th Street Heights when it was still a white neighborhood–back in the 1930s. My father\’s father grew up in Georgetown, and his parents opened the first hardware store in Brookland (Northeast) before the Great Depression. The family used to feed the homeless population in the back of the store, as well as help out the financially depressed neighborhood. There\’s a street in Brookland named after my family. I\’m more than five generations born and raised; this is my home town. It\’s in me.

But I fucking hate this town. It\’s changing in ways that make me feel sick to my stomach. I used to think that I was just going to stick it out here; as a local, I didn\’t want to be one of the many scared or forced out. But I look around now, and I\’m disgusted by all the changes. It\’s getting worse with very little to outweigh the negatives.

Recently, Rebecca Dana wrote the following in the New York Observer:

The \”Dupont Circle-Adams Morgan-U Street corridor area,” a group of abutting neighborhoods in the city’s northwest region, essentially contains the District’s entire panoply of night-out hotness options. A few local clubs have even started to offer bottle service-just like New York City!-said bachelorette celebrant Katherine Martin. “That means that instead of buying drink by drink, you can get a whole bottle of alcohol for $160 or $200.”

Which may seem cheap to New Yorkers, but in Washington, they explained, it’s not money that matters. “It’s power,” said Ms. [Erika] Orloff, to nods all around. “It’s where you work. It’s who you know. It’s what committees you’re on.”

A few weeks ago I was at work at a bar in the so-called \’U Street corridor area\’ — the area is neighborhood, it has a name, and it\’s called Shaw, but Shaw has negative historical references, and as such, the developers have desperately tried to drop the name of Shaw from the now trendy areas — when two young female students from Trinidad-Tobago waited at our front door for a very long time until we could approve their foreign ID cards. Once into the bar, they tried to order full bottles of wine, which we don\’t serve. They left in a huff. Honey, it ain\’t that kind of joint. We don\’t offer Tight Pussies, either. What we do have are crackheads dropping their rocks in our mailbox, and the neighborhood roughnecks beating the crap out of our staff when there\’s a blue moon. We have to keep one eye on people doing coke in the middle of the bar and another eye on the homeless crackheads trying to come inside and panhandle the customers. That\’s the east side of Shaw. Go west a few blocks, and other than the shootings over parking spaces and the bricks being dropped on white bicylists heads, yes, you can order a full bottle of alcohol. Good for fucking you.

Looking at my city, here in 2006, I\’m reminded of 1968. I\’m currently reading Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos, guy who grew up in DC before the \’68 riots. The book is novel based on the rising racial tensions prior to and during 1968. I wasn\’t there then, obviously, but between all the history reading, talking to my elders, and reading this book, I feel like the city is tensing up in the same way.

Look at the crime statistics in the city over the past few years. Between 1993 and now, the city has definitely improved, but In some neighborhoods,