The Trunk

So the discussion about shopping patters suggested something I hadn’t quite grasped before. DC’s young gentrifiers are, even as gentrifiers go, disproportionately well-connected to the internet. Indeed, I wonder if Amazon isn’t partly responsible for the pace of gentrification here. In the neighborhoods that are currently gentrifying, the retail corridors were destroyed in the 1968 riots and never really came back; it’s no joke living in a neighborhood like that without a car… . unless Amazon delivers bulky stuff to your door. Most of the affluent “new” people I know in DC are like my husband and I: they order everything they can over the internet. We don’t need much in the way of brick-and-mortar retail; what we need is bars and restaurants, and maybe a salon or two. If you are not so thoroughly web-ified, you almost certainly want a much more retail-heavy commercial district. And while many of the “old DC’ residents are of course on the internet and social media, many others cannot afford broadband connections, or credit cards—and given their older age skew, many others probably simply aren’t that comfortable with, or interested in, shopping online.