Children of suburbia are returning to parts of DC their families once fled. --Washingtonian, April 2006

The riot began at 14th and U streets on the evening of April 4, 1968.  Hours earlier, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot standing on a motel balcony in Memphis. Soon, Washington was aflame. Up and down Seventh and 14th Streets, Northwest, and out H Street, Northeast, stores were looted, builidngs burned. Plumes of smoke were visible for miles. The National Guard was called in...

What followed were years of despair and disinvestment. Despite efforts of the DC government to package and sell parcels to developers at deep discounts, there were few takers... Back then, they called it the ghetto, or more politely the inner city. Either way, the  meaning was the same: impoverished neighborhoods where white America had contained its black underclass.

At the time, I weas writing for the Wahsington Post about the "urban renewal" of the "riot corridors." There was so little interest in redevelping the inner city, it was left to the church-sponsored nonprofits to do somthing. Eventually, a few low-income midrises and high-rises went up. That was about it.

Then something surpreising happened on the way to urban renewal. Black people who could leave for the suburbs did so, and the inner suburbs replaced the inner city. Later, white "urban pioneers" started moving in, slowly at first... People are returning to neighborhoods their grandparents fled...It is a new day, in a different city...

(story is not on-line)