Exposing the legal and bureaucratic underpinnings of gentrification: Municipal property transfers through alley closures in Washington,DC

The property underpinnings of gentrification

Geographic scholarship is extensive in its explanations of the political, economic, and cultural drivers and impacts of gentrification. Many scholars point to the movement of capital as the engine of this cyclical process, while others focus more on consumer-driven lifestyle factors that draw individuals to move to and invest in certain neighborhoods (Gibson, 2007; Lees et al., 2010; Ley, 1996; Rose, 1984; Slater, 2011; Smith, 1979, 1996). A large thread of scholarship documents the outcomes of gentrification, focusing on the physical and cultural displacement experienced by low-income communities, particularly communities of color, as they are priced out or are politically and culturally silenced in their longtime neighborhoods (Howell, 2016; Hyra, 2015; Martin, 2007; Mirabal, 2009; Newman and Wyly, 2006). Implicit in these studies of the causes and effects of gentrification is the notion that those who own property have the means and power to make claims to and shape urban space. However, the integral role of property ownership in gentrification is more often taken for granted than critically analyzed.

Some scholars are more explicit about property ownership as a form of power that enables a right to the city, or the right of ordinary people to shape urban processes. Property ownership is powerful not just for those who perpetuate gentrification, but also for those who contest it (Wideman and Lombardo, 2019). In the context of dispossession caused by gentrification, Blomley (1997, 2008) argues for a recognition of collective property as a way to legitimize the rights of the poor as they challenge displacement. Thorpe (2018) also calls for a recognition of non-legal property claims, such as sense of ownership through labor, community, and self-expression, as ways urban residents can control urban space and even shift formal property regimes.

While geographers agree that property ownership is foundational to the processes of enacting and contesting gentrification, few studies investigate how property is actually acquired. This article points to the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms by which property transfers occur. It focuses on one form of property transfer in particular: the closing of public municipal alleys and the subsequent reverting of land to abutting private landowners. This case of alley closings shows that the process of transferring property may appear straightforward on paper, but in practice can be contingent upon the political priorities of the individuals involved and their knowledge of navigating municipal law and bureaucracy. In focusing on how real estate developers acquired public land in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, this article exposes the uneven and opaque mechanisms that can characterize municipal property transfers. It demonstrates how difficult it can be for ordinary urban citizens to interrupt the legal and bureaucratic processes that contribute to gentrification.

The logics of land-use law and municipal bureaucracy

Critical urban and legal scholars have highlighted ways that municipal laws governing land use can have discriminatory effects that infringe upon residents’ right to the city (Low and Smith, 2006; Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). City ordinances, such those as those prohibiting being in parks after dark, for example, deny the rights of homeless people to be in public space (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Mitchell, 1997). Others such as zoning can result in the exclusion of lower-income people, and by extension many racial minorities, from living in residential areas zoned for single-family houses (Delaney, 1998; Ford, 2001; Rothstein, 2018). That the societal impacts of laws are unevenly influenced by and distributed across space is a hallmark of legal geography studies (Blomley et al., 2001; Braverman et al., 2014; Delaney, 2010).

Some scholars of legal geography point out that while the usage of law may be politically motivated, and may result in forms of discrimination, land-use laws themselves are not fundamentally political (Blomley, 2011; Valverde, 2011). Because land-use logics are understood as politically neutral in courts, they nearly always prevail against more abstract claims, like those of citizenship. Therefore, working within the logic of the law, instead of only challenging the enforcement or outcomes of laws, is essential for defending the rights of people in urban space (Blomley, 2011; Valverde, 2005). In the case of Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, the more effective arguments against alley closings would be those that worked within the logics of the alley-closing law. They would be those that used the law’s language and sought to prove alleys were “useful and necessary.” They would not be those that claimed—however true—that alley closings would change land-use patterns which could result in loss of affordable housing and displacement of local businesses. In other words, in the law’s eye, an alley’s value was tied to its usefulness or necessity in the present, not to hypothetical claims that the maintenance of public alleys would prevent future development.

While legal geographers may agree that urban citizens must work within the logics of land-use law, few have examined the on-the-ground challenges of engaging the language and logics of the law. This necessary process is made difficult when it is unclear to the public which laws are at the root of a problem. In municipal governments with decades or even centuries of laws on the books, multiple laws may simultaneously influence the same outcome, therefore making it difficult for members of the public to know which law to attach to which phenomenon they observe in the world. Laws that may be understood to have been replaced by newer and more effective modes of governance still linger and can exert influence. Laws may exist for decades without being employed or contested and suddenly find relevance and politically convenient applications far from the intents of those who originally legislated them. (Perez, 2016; Valverde, 2011, 2012; von Benda-Beckmann, 2014). Alley closings in Washington, D.C. are a prime example of this phenomenon. Made possible with a 1932 law designed to allow the closing of unused streets, alley closings were carried out for decades without controversy (House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, 1973; United States Congress, 1932). ² Only in the mid-1970s did the law resurface with different motives: to acquire land for development.

Aside from knowing which law to challenge, it can be difficult for the public to know how to challenge it. The institutional organization of urban governance is often inflexible and difficult to navigate. Multiple types of institutions concern urban property, whether those that govern land or those that govern infrastructure (Sorensen, 2018). Each municipal institution has its own jurisdiction and its own processes for public engagement. Thus, to intervene in decisions about property transfers and land use in their neighborhoods, urban citizens have to understand the organization and operation of municipal government—where applications for different land-use changes go, who comments and when, and how decisions are ultimately made. These bureaucratic barriers are underexamined in legal geographies, yet they are critical for understanding how laws get implemented and to whose benefit. This article draws attention to the bureaucratic barriers urban residents face when intervening in the legal matters that affect their lives.

Methods

This article is based on a close reading and cross referencing of documents including D.C. Council records, court cases, laws, city planning documents, local newspaper articles, and correspondence from West End residents, elected representatives, and developers. Especially useful for accessing the opinions and experiences of the people involved were letters and testimonials found in the records of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City and the papers of John Wilson, the D.C. Councilmember who represented the West End during the 1970s. Both of these collections are at the Special Collections Research Center of the George Washington University Libraries. Many other essential documents were found in the D.C. Public Library Special Collections and the District of Columbia Office of Public Records.

Why alley closures in the 1970s

The legal possibility of closing alleys meant little without the political and economic motivations for land acquisition that emerged in the mid-1970s. The 1970s were an era of transition in the nation’s capital. In 1967, the city acquired from Congress partial control over its own affairs with the creation of the D.C. Council and appointment of its first mayor. By late 1973, the city had achieved “Home Rule,” under which residents were granted—for the first time—the right to elect their local representatives. For alley closings, this political transition meant that after 1974, the approval process for closing alleys was mediated by locally elected officials, not distant Congressmen, for the first time. The motivations to deny or grant alley closings became tied up in the new government’s larger agendas around the city’s land use, property taxes, and provision of housing. While the election of a majority-African American government in 1974 marked a civil rights victory, this new government inherited a city still reeling from the racialized social and economic devastation of 1950s urban renewal, white flight, and the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination (Asch and Musgrove, 2017: 382). On top of local developments, the national fiscal crisis and retrenchment of federal funds for cities left cities all over the country cash-strapped (Phillips-Fein, 2017). For D.C.’s government, there were now new political and economic motivations to carry out the existing legal process of alley closings, which would result in new construction and higher property taxes.

Washington, D.C. was also a landscape of uneven development and racial and economic inequality in the mid-1970s. Middle-class African Americans could finally access the suburbs just as more wealthy whites moved into the city. The city remained majority African American, as it had been since the late 1950s, but the Black population peaked around 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1952, 1972). By 1975, more white residents were moving into the city than out; approximately two thirds households moving to D.C. between 1970 and 1975 identified as white (Wells, 2014). As in other American cities during the 1970s, activists and scholars diagnosed gentrification in D.C.’s neighborhoods (Asch and Musgrove, 2017: 382; Smith, 1996; Williams, 1988). These demographic shifts created a city of stark inequality in which many residents were either poor and Black or affluent and white.

The gentrification of the 1970s was not just a movement of people but a revaluation of property. With the devaluation of urban land in the postwar years, the 1960s had seen massive speculative buying of properties. By the early 1970s these property owners began to turn a profit on their investments as white professionals returned to the city. Some speculative buyers flipped their properties and sold them to newcomers. Others, however, continued to sit on properties without investing in them. Thousands of these properties took the form of deteriorated, and often vacant, houses. In other cases, property owners demolished existing housing stock and replaced it with vacant lots and parking lots (Wells, 2015). The housing picture in the city was one of stark extremes: those with means—mostly whites of the professional class—moved into rehabilitated row houses whose cost was beyond what longtime residents could pay. Those without means—mostly low-income and African American—faced a housing crisis as the supply of affordable and livable housing stock continued to decrease. By 1975, the city had an estimated 22,000 vacant structures in overcrowded neighborhoods, while roughly 260,000 families could not afford or access decent places to live (Wells, 2015: 2).

In response to the housing crisis, the D.C. Council passed a series of progressive housing reforms in its first year, 1975, including eviction moratoriums, condominium conversion restrictions, limited-equity cooperative provisions, and a short-lived speculation tax (Huron, 2015; Wells, 2014). Despite these reforms, legislators were hesitant to move beyond the dominant paradigm that the private real estate industry would be the solution to the housing crisis (Wells, 2014: 90, 123). The assumption of the private market as the normative provider of housing was not unique to Washington, D.C. National legislation, including the Housing Act of 1968 and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, also provided private market subsidies as the solution for affordable housing, rather than providing housing itself.

The D.C. Council desperately relied on private developers to upgrade existing housing, and it actively courted residential development in the city, even as it was wary of speculators flipping properties simply to make profits (Wells, 2014). The D.C. Office of Housing and Community Development even published “The Developer’s Handbook,” a 70-page guide designed to assist developers in acquiring permits and government approval (District of Columbia Office of Housing and Community Development, 1975). The Council was eager to accommodate private developers who promised housing of any form, and alley closings were one way they could do so.

Accommodating the private real estate industry was important to the Council for another reason: it relied heavily on the real estate industry for financial investment and political backing. While D.C. had achieved Home Rule, which allowed it to control its political processes, its budget was still tightly controlled by Congress. Thus, Washington, D.C. was a city with limited financial means and without a manufacturing or commercial base. The private real estate industry could be counted on to invest in infrastructure, and it therefore held a powerful position. By the late 1970s, the real estate industry was the largest contributor to local campaigns (McGovern, 1998: 210; Wells, 2015: 1053). For example, Councilmember Jerry Moore, the chair of the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs, which had the most say in alley closings, received more than three quarters of his 1976 re-election campaign funds from members of the real estate industry (Barker, 1977). Alley closings became another way that Councilmembers could appease this politically powerful group.

Legal barriers to stopping alley closures

In the midst of new construction and the influx of white and wealthier residents, some longtime residents of the West End remained. This mixed-race group of longtime owners and renters already felt the pressure of new development by the time developers began applying to close alleys in the mid-1970s. While these residents may not have given their alleys much thought before, they quickly surmised that alley closures would not only remove space for everyday functions like parking or garbage collection, but could usher in new land uses from which they would not benefit. Closing alleys was a way for developers to acquire property, and residents knew that property transfers were the underpinning of gentrification that was happening all around them Figure 1.

In July 1976, the Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC), a group of local commissioners elected to represent neighborhood concerns to the D.C. Council, learned of an application to close an alley in the block bound by K Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, 25^th Street, and 26^th Street. On the consolidated properties made possible by the alley closing, the applicant intended to build a hotel. Because neither the ANC nor neighbors had received the required 30 days’ notice of the committee’s meeting, they had only one week to put together a response. West End residents and one of the ANC commissioners wrote letters of opposition to Councilmembers, including Jerry Moore, the chair of the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs. Moore, an African American pastor and the Council’s lone Republican, had a political career focused on transportation issues, not comprehensive land-use planning (Milloy, 2018). The letters outlined residents’ fears that a larger structure would bring more traffic to the area and would put out of business longtime local shops like the barber shop, dry cleaners, and shoe repair shop (Alcorn and Pini, 1976; Loikow, 1976). Some noted that the new construction resulting from the alley closing would require the demolition of existing lower- and moderate-income residential buildings currently on the site, exacerbating the lack of affordable housing in the neighborhood (Alcorn and Pini, 1976).

Despite residents’ last-minute scrambling to oppose the alley closing, the D.C. Council ruled quickly in favor of development and ordered the alley closed (Moore, 1976b). Residents were outraged that the Councilmembers did not even read their concerns into the record (ANC Commissioners, 1976). It seemed that the members of the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs had already made up their minds to allow large-scale development, no matter what residents said. However, nowhere in their letters of opposition did residents or the ANC commissioner mention how residents used the alley or what role the alley played in their lives. They neglected to explain why the alley in its current material form was “useful” and “necessary”—the legal requirements to keep an alley open. In focusing on the potentials of increased traffic, fewer services, and loss of affordable housing, residents expressed the concerns that were already part of their everyday discourse in a gentrifying neighborhood. In clearly articulating how new development might affect them, they likely thought they were making the most compelling case. Yet, they failed to recognize the gap between their everyday discourse and the legal discourse. No matter how strong or clear their arguments were, they did not prove that the alley had not been “rendered useless or unnecessary.” Thus, the Council encountered no legal challenge to the alley closing.

Around the same time, just one block north, on the block bound by Pennsylvania Avenue, M Street, 25^th Street, and 26^th Street, a developer named Oliver T. Carr, Jr. applied to close portions of an alley to build a mixed residential, commercial, and retail development (Moore, 1976a; Precious, 1986). He intended to straighten other parts of the alley to serve as a divider between his new development on the west side of the block and the row of houses on the east side of the block fronting Pennsylvania Avenue and 25th Street. In this case, residents would already have been familiar with Carr’s plans to transform the West End into a high-rise landscape. He had been buying up properties in the neighborhood, and after years of lobbying the Office of Planning and Management and the Zoning Commission, he had convinced them to develop a comprehensive plan and implement a zoning change to allow for high-rise, mixed-use residential and commercial buildings in the neighborhood (Anders, 1974; Demetriou, 1973; District of Columbia Office of Planning and Management, 1973; Lippman, 1974). In 1975, he was consolidating his properties according to the existing legal means to do so: alley closings.

When residents learned of the alley-closing proposal, they were ready to respond, and they were better organized than their neighbors to the south. This group of Black and white owners and renters hired a lawyer, attended public hearings, and wrote to D.C. Councilmembers. Most active were Sylvia Kohrn, an African American woman whose family had, for 51 years, owned an integrated apartment building for moderate-income families on 25^th Street; Rabbi Philip L. Rabinowitz and his wife Sylvia, who owned and had resided in their home for thirteen years; Geraldine and Christine Garner, African American sisters and homeowners; and Barbara Williams and Bessie O’Neale, two African American women in their seventies who had rented on the block for sixteen and seventeen years respectively (Kohrn, 1975; O’Neale, 1976; Rabinowitz and Rabinowitz, 1976; Williams, 1976).

At the public hearing before the Committee of Transportation and Environmental Affairs, Kohrn emphasized that Carr was notorious for abusing the process of alley closings: “He is a promoter of alley closings. He has been aptly called ‘Alley Ollie’ Carr” (Kohrn, 1975). Rabinowitz claimed that the straightened alley would make it impossible for him to steer his car into his own garage (Rabinowitz and Rabinowitz, 1976). George Bason, the lawyer for the block’s residents, emphasized that every resident of the block opposed the alley change (Bason, 1975). He presented affidavits from eight residents and property owners, in which they unequivocally opposed the straightened alley for the increase in traffic, noise, and pollution it would cause (O’Neale, 1976; Rabinowitz and Rabinowitz, 1976; Williams, 1976). Bason argued that Carr was trying to make residents’ homes unlivable so that he could ultimately force them out (Bason, 1976).

Unlike residents to the south who emphasized the hypothetical effects of potential development when opposing the alley closing on their block, Kohrn, Rabinowitz, and their neighbors made appropriate arguments that directly engaged the law at hand. They focused their opposition on the usefulness of the current alley shape for maintaining a low-traffic environment with minimal noise and pollution and on the necessity of its current configuration for allowing access to garages. Yet, they still were not successful. Carr responded to these objections by working directly with the disgruntled residents to make accommodating adjustments. He provided an easement on his proposed straightened alley to provide ample access to Rabinowitz’s garage, and he provided a buffer area between his proposed development and another resident’s property (Carr, 1976; Figure 2). To alleviate residents’ concerns about an increased volume of service trucks behind their homes, Carr even offered to record a covenant with the Register of Deeds prohibiting loading docks and vehicular entrances where access could already be gained from the alley (Carr, 1976). Carr’s cooperation in providing distance from noise and providing resident access to what would become private land essentially negated residents’ claims that their public alley in its existing form was necessary.

With the residents’ acceptance of these modifications and without a compelling legal reason to keep the alley open, the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs recommended that the full Council approve the alley closing. Carr could reconfigure the alley and build a mixed-use development up to ninety feet tall on the site. The Committee estimated that Carr’s new development would raise property taxes from $50,000 per year to $385,000 a fact important for understanding why the Council was inclined to accept Carr’s proposal (Moore, 1976a).

For longtime residents hoping to curb the ongoing development in their neighborhoods, fighting alley closings was extremely frustrating. If, like the West End residents south of Pennsylvania Avenue, they made their arguments too broad by focusing on how new development would negatively affect affordability, traffic, and community, then they made compelling but legally irrelevant arguments. If, like residents north of Pennsylvania Avenue, they made narrow arguments about the “usefulness” and “necessity” of their alley, as the law dictated, then they raised points that could be easily be refuted with simple modifications from the developer. Neither option left room for residents to successfully prevent land transfers and subsequent large-scale development on their blocks.

For the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs, it was easy to dismiss resident concerns—no matter how legitimate— by focusing on whether an alley had been legally proven useful or necessary. Indeed, when the Committee discussed Carr’s application, Moore, the Committee’s chair, reminded the other committee members that they were “bound to act in accord with the legal requirements governing such matters” (Moore, 1976a). Moore emphasized the politically neutral nature of the law; their job was simply to follow the law’s logic. Without a legal obligation to keep alleys open, the D.C. Council could easily transfer public land to private developers, a move that promised financial benefits for both the city and the real estate industry.

Bureaucratic barriers to stopping alley closures

Residents also faced bureaucratic barriers to keeping their alleys public. It was obvious to all involved that at stake were comprehensive land-use issues, not actually concerns about alley use or necessity as thoroughfares. However, alley and street closing applications were required to go to the D.C. Council’s Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs, a committee not designed nor prepared to have anything to do with comprehensive planning.

West End residents, ANC commissioners, and even the Committee on Transportation and Environmental Affairs itself agreed that the Zoning Commission would be better suited to decide on neighborhood land-use issues. Ann Hume Loikow, one of the West End’s elected ANC commissioners, argued that the developers should be required to apply for a zoning change rather than “request what on the surface appears to be a rather innocuous closing of a small piece of public alley space.” The advantage of a zoning appeal would be the requirement of a more thorough assessment of the benefit of the development to the neighborhood and the city (Loikow, 1976). Residents who opposed development would also have been familiar with the process of a zoning appeal; residents of the nearby Dupont Circle neighborhood had recently achieved a zoning change that prevented high-rise development in parts of the neighborhood (Washington Post, 1974).

The committee agreed that it was inappropriately being asked to decide matters of neighborhood land use via a policy that was designed to be a localized street-closing procedure. In the case of Carr’s proposed development, Councilmember Moore expressed his opinion—the same as Loikow’s—that many of the concerns should have been directed to the Zoning Commission (Moore, 1976a). In a letter to Marion K. Schlefer, president of the influential anti-development group the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Councilmember Betty Ann Kane acknowledged outright that “alley closings are a very limited and crude tool out of context of all considerations that go into such matters [of comprehensive land-use planning]” (Kane, 1980). Residents had to convince a transportation-oriented committee that was not inclined to hear arguments about development, and the committee was forced to listen and respond to—or ignore—resident concerns outside of its jurisdiction.

Not all residents even got to the stage of trying to convince the Committee of Transportation and Environmental Affairs. While the official procedure for closing an alley required a public hearing before the Committee, the D.C. government rarely gave sufficient notice to those who would be most affected. For example, the law required that owners of abutting property be given notice of the proposed alley closing and public hearing by registered mail (House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, 1973: 676). However, renters, who did not own properties, were not sent a written notice. In addition, because developers often had already bought the abutting properties, nearby property owners—even those on the same block—were not always given direct notice. Interested citizen and civic groups, including the ANCs, were often informed quite late in the process, if at all.

If not sent a written notice by mail, the only way for a resident or interested party to learn of an alley closing was from a notice published in the D.C. Register, the legal bulletin of the city government. The notice, from the Office of the Surveyor, was required to run for fourteen consecutive days and advertise the time and place of the public hearing. However, these notices were often vague or hard to find, even if one happened to read this legal bulletin. Mrs. James H. Rowe, of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, wrote to the Office of the Surveyor in 1978 asking that it make announcements of alley closings easier to read and understand (Rowe, 1978). She asked, for example, that the office consider the simple and seemingly obvious addition of the names of streets and alleys to be affected as well as the square and lot designations. Without these basic geographic locators, it was impossible for residents and neighborhood groups to know if they would be affected by the listed alley closings. She also asked that the notices be printed in larger type, as they were easy to miss. In response, the Surveyor replied that since public alleys did not have names, they could not be identified, and that adding a written description of the location would incur too large a printing cost. Using larger type would also be too expensive. Instead, he proposed that she call the office to ask the location of the alley closing each time a notice appeared (Koch, 1978). While the Surveyor was not wrong to suggest that printing longer and larger notices would be too expensive—he provided calculations for Mrs. Rowe showing that the cost could surpass $1500 per alley closing—his response highlights the bureaucratic barriers to effectively ensuring public input. The cost of printing alone meant that the public was poorly informed of alley-closing applications, and transfers of public property to private hands could easily proceed without opposition.

It was not until 1983 that some of these bureaucratic barriers to public engagement were removed. By the early 1980s, developer-initiated alley closures had become so common and controversial that Councilmember Moore introduced a new law to curtail alley closure abuse. It still allowed the D.C. Council to “close all or part of any street or alley which it determines is unnecessary for street or alley purposes.” However, the law strengthened requirements for announcing public hearings to oppose alley closures. Applicants for alley closures now had to notify by mail every property owner on both sides of a block adjacent to the alley, and they had to post notices on all entrances to the alley. With this second provision, block residents who did not own property would be notified. To ensure these notices were mailed and posted, applicants also had to submit post office receipts and photographs of posted notices to the D.C. Council. The Council was still required to publish announcements of public hearings in the D.C. Register, and they now also had to give notice to the ANCs in whose area the alley closing would occur (Council of the District of Columbia, 1982). These provisions in the new law helped ensure that affected members of the public would be properly notified and be given an opportunity to object.

The new law also empowered the city to charge fair market value for alley property that it owned. Money received for the land would be deposited in the General Fund of the District (Council of the District of Columbia, 1982). In other words, the D.C. Council used its power—nearly ten years after the city achieved Home Rule—to charge money for its own land. In the preceding decade of gentrification, the highly unusual situation that the law required the Council to give away the city’s alley land for free meant that the Council could easily appease real developers. With the new law’s passage in 1983, the D.C. Council eased its facilitation of property acquisitions that underpinned gentrification. Closing alleys remained a way for real estate developers to consolidate parcels of land, but it was no longer as easy to do without objection nor as lucrative.

Conclusion

As in many American cities, the gentrification that occurred in Washington, D.C. neighborhoods in the 1970s was the result of devalued urban land, speculative investment, and an increasingly privatized housing supply. Scholars agree that underpinning all these factors is the ownership of property. Yet few have examined how those who turn a profit on their properties acquire this land in the first place. This article examines the legal and bureaucratic means by which municipal property acquisition occurred in the 1970s, perpetuating gentrification in neighborhoods like Washington, D.C.’s West End. In focusing on the process of one type of municipal property transfer—the closing, or privatization, of public alleys—this article also exposes the legal and bureaucratic barriers that residents faced in challenging land-use changes in their neighborhoods.

While Washington, D.C.’s unique relationship with Congress means that the city was—and still is—disempowered when it comes to enacting legislation and generating revenue, the lessons that West End residents learned from trying to stop development-driven transfers of property are applicable in any city. Ordinary urban citizens who want to contest gentrification must do more than identify the potential harms that will come their way—no matter how acute those may be. They must engage with and interrupt the processes of property acquisition that dictate who has power over the neighborhoods, communities, and services they care about. In order to do so, it is necessary to understand the place-based specificities of elected officials’ political motivations, the logics of land-use laws, and the complexities of municipal bureaucracy.