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On Black Friday, while the rest of Virginia storms their local retailers for loss-leader merchandise, Belle and I will pile into the car with our pets and start a week-long drive across the country to our new home in Seattle. The move is the realization of a long dream of ours: to get as far away from Washington, DC as was humanly possible.

I kid! Mostly. We won't miss the political atmosphere, the terrible public transit system, or the sweltering DC summers. But we will be far away from our family and friends, and there are some parts of DC that have grown on me. Here are a few things about the city that I will, in all honesty, miss:

• Ethiopian food: I was a late starter on the joys of intercultural cuisine because I had never grown up around good ethnic restaurants. It wasn't until I got to college that I got to sample all kinds of new restaurants and cooking styles, and that's been a joy ever since. I have a soft spot for Vietnamese food, particularly those savory bahn mi sandwiches. But what DC has that few other cities in the US can offer is a vibrant set of Ethiopian restaurants offering spicy, rich stews and vegetables with a side of spongy injera bread. It's so good, and it'll be hard to match elsewhere.
• Free museums: We don't take advantage of the many museums in DC, which is a shame. It's only when we travel that we've realized just how rare museums with free admission are--especially great ones, like the National Gallery of Art or the Smithsonian. Not to mention DC's free National Zoo! It's hard to beat seeing pandas (or not seeing pandas) for free.
• Journalism: While I'm often critical of DC political journalism, this must be said: there's a lot of it, and that means a lot of opportunities. Since high school, I'd wanted to work in the news industry, and in this city there are plenty of chances. It's a bit of a shock to realize how much thinner the media industry (and, sadly, the job market in the media industry) is outside the Beltway.

A follow-up on last month's gentrification post:

My own relationship with DC has not been particularly positive over the last decade. It's not a immediately romantic city the way I wanted a city to be when I left college. The height limit means that it has no skyscrapers, and the monuments result in a swamp of annoying tourists every summer. Probably snobs in every great city have the same gripes about tourism--sacre bleu!, I imagine a poorly-stereotyped Parisian exclaiming at the horde around the Arc de Triomphe--but it doesn't make it any less frustrating, particularly since Americans are the most tasteless tourists in the world ("you'll get no argument here," sniffs my imaginary French friend, to which I can only respond that at least we're not responsible for Bernard-Henri Levy).

I'm a white, white-collar worker who moved here for school, living just across the river in Virginia. So as a result, my image of the city was (for a long time) a lot like the gentrification version--a mass of tedious political operators schmoozing at Starbucks. I didn't want to live in a place like that, and I wasn't well-positioned to see the DC underneath, or particularly inclined to change my circumstances.

What changed, of course, was taking classes on urban dance. Breaking and popping took me across the river (both literally and metaphorically). Classes and jams got me to travel to parts of the city I don't visit during my average workday. And they brought me into contact with people who lived in DC, who grew up here, who take part in the nightlife and the culture--people from a wide variety of backgrounds and economic classes. Breaking introduced me to new perspectives and let me see DC through their eyes. As someone whose Venn diagram of "worthwhile" intersects almost completely with three other circles marked "interesting," "challenging," and "disruptive," it has been immensely rewarding.

When we talk about multiculturalism, I think there's a sense to which we (and particularly "we" meaning "white people") consider it a duty. Academics do studies evaluating whether diverse neighborhoods are more stressful, or diverse workplaces are more productive, and we nod thoughtfully and probably do not change our minds, because people make most of their decisions on an emotional basis. Multiculturalism is rarely pitched as a pleasurable thing--as something that enriches our experiences. But it is! I may never love DC, but it's because of a multicultural community that I can see why I might like it, and why a gentrified DC would be a real loss.

Gentrification in DC has been the center of some discussion again, following an article in the New York Times on the changes on U St and, most recently, the H St corridor. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a pair of posts on the emotional response to this process, and another on the statistics of DC's demographic transitions:

Washington's black population peaked in 1970 at just over half a million (537,712 to be precise.) It's declined steadily ever since, with the biggest decline occurring between 1970 and 1980 when almost 100,000 black people left the city. Whites were also leaving the city by then, but at a much slower rate--the major white out-migration happened in the 50s and the 60s.

By 1990 whites had started coming back. But black people--mirroring a national trend--continued to leave. At present there are around 343,000 African-Americans in the District--a smaller number, but still the largest ethnic group in the city. I say this to point out that the idea that incoming whites are "forcing out" large number of blacks has yet to be demonstrated.

...

More likely, we are using a local matter as an inadequate substitute for a broader national situation that still plagues us. The fact is that the two parties--those blacks who remain by choice or otherwise, and those whites who are returning--are not equal. In the District, you are looking at a black population that is reeling under a cocktail of an ancient wealth gap, poor criminal justice policy, and economic instability. On the other side, you have a well-educated, and well-insulated, white population with different wants and different needs.

There is much more here to consider about what that means, about what people feel like they're losing. Even as I interrogate the statistics, I maintain that people are not stupid, and that it's critically important to understand why they feel as they do. Black people have not owned much in this country. And yet, in the later years of the 20th century, we felt like we felt like we owned many of America's great cities.

We didn't.

Latoya Peterson, on the other hand, has written about the changes on U St. from the perspective of a DC resident, and what gets lost in the process:

The vision of the city is essentially being dictated to longtime residents from outside interests — or, worse, from the folks who have settled here while Obama is in office, and don't see DC as home. The newer visions for the city are heavily cosmetic and heavily skewed to a younger, moneyed class — which is causing tensions.

It's not just that DC is becoming whiter, in other words, but that it's losing the flavor that made it DC in favor of a kind of generic whiteness--one that offers an easier transition for the kinds of people who move to DC for a few years for a white-collar job, stay for a few years, and then probably move right back out. It's becoming a three-ring binder kind of town.

Belle and I don't live in the city, although I've been spending more time there lately, but we can see it happening across DC. And even in Arlington, you can see the cultural shapes of neighborhoods being smoothed out as the demographics change. In Clarendon, just down the road, it's like a wave of yuppie-dom rolled eastward up Wilson Boulevard, out from the Whole Foods and the Crate and Barrel towards the row of small, slightly disreputable shops around the Metro station. Over the last three years, buildings have been torn down. Businesses have been replaced with chains and upscale eateries. Houses got bigger, and parking has been rezoned to protect property values, and to drive visitors into the garages.

It's not like Clarendon was a historic area the way that U Street is. Development there was historically driven in large part by another artificial factor: the Clarendon Metro. Like Ballston and Court House, it flourished when WMATA opened the station, which is a perfect example of how infrastructure determines destiny. And it has long been a shopping district with its fair share of large brands. But that used to be mixed in with a range of local places, including a decent selection of Vietnamese restaurants. Those are almost all gone now, replaced in part by a CVS and the largest AT&T store I've ever seen.

I am by no means comparing suburban Virginia to the systematic revision of a historically-multicultural urban center, mind you. But I'm glad we're having the conversation. It reminds me of the debate a few years back over Wal-Mart driving family businesses into bankrupty in small towns. Maybe it's just that I moved out of a small town, but I don't really hear that discussion any more, as if the pushback from communities has faded away. It would be a shame for the forces of gentrification to win the same battle of attrition. Because as far as I'm concerned, if the city doesn't challenge you--if it isn't stuffed to the gills with different textures and experiences--why bother living there at all?