Moving on up

This weekend, if all goes well, I will be moving to a new apartment in DC. I'm terribly excited to be heading to a different neighborhood. Where I am now has been good, but it comes with its share of annoyances: thirty minute bus rides to the grocery store, a twenty minute walk to the metro, no neighborhood conveniences (stores, etc.) to speak of, no air conditioning, and lots of bike-inhibiting hills in the neighborhood. None of these has made it a bad place to live, per se, but I'm not going to miss these issues. I'll be moving to a basement unit in a townhouse in the historic Kalorama Triangle in the northwest part of the city. The location alone makes the slight increase in rental costs worth it: a four minute walk to the metro, five minutes to the grocery store, and tons of restaurants, bars, and shops close by. Also, my commute to work will be cut in half.

New neighborhood

This has gotten me thinking about urban planning and walkability. My new neighborhood will be extremely walkable. Errands will be able to be done on foot, and leisure (in the form of park space) is only a few blocks away. Kalorama is known as one of the more well-to-do areas of Washington, and neighboring Adams Morgan was named one of the best urban neighborhoods in the United States. Though we have found a really good deal, rent is generally not cheap. This begs the question: why have our most walkable and convenient neighborhoods so priced out the poor, who would benefit most from easy proximity to the necessities of life? We can go back and forth about gentrification, but it somewhat misses the point of the issue. We may not force people out of every neighborhood wanting to be the new Brooklyn, simply because we've already condemned the people there to a poor quality of life by the very design of the city. If it's an annoyance for me, a decently-well-off young person with a professional job, nearly two college degrees, and a decent amount of leisure time, to go grocery shopping, how much more is it a strain on a single mother raising two kids and working two jobs? There's plenty of blame to go around for this state of affairs, and there are frankly very few easy solutions.