URBAN BLIGHT WINDOWS

Just as opening a retail business or a restaurant works to revitalize a neighborhood, a closure is a deathly sign of decline. In Columbia Heights, things were safe enough to grow - and rich and poor alike benefitted. While activist reformers try to blame discrimination, in a business with slim margins, theft means bankruptcy. In response to a retail rival’s possible move to the city, Target opened a grocery store in 2010, pushing along competition in a city where neighborhoods with high crime are also neighborhoods with no grocery stores. There were robberies and murders, and even a gang war in the nearby projects, but the city worked to keep the remaining crime out of the papers because business was booming, condos were going up, and people were moving in. The move, said then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, was “both the catalyst and the capstone to an unprecedented economic resurgence in Columbia Heights – where nearly $1 billion worth of new housing, retail and office space has moved through the development pipeline since 2001.” Then, after fighting to slowly bring commerce and foot traffic back, the neighborhood celebrated the opening of a Target superstore in 2008. When our first group of friends moved there we knew when visiting that we would be unable to get a taxi to bring us home at the end of the night. In 2004, when I moved to the city, it was changing but progress was slow. In Washington, D.C., the Columbia Heights neighborhood struggled for years, mired in death, drugs, and the gangs that dealt freely in both.

URBAN BLIGHT WINDOWS

Far more ominous than a sign of how bad things have gotten, darkened windows and shuttered doors reveal just how much worse things are going to get. While it’s insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there’s more in store. The Golden City is joined by nearby Sacramento and Los Angeles, where retail crime has spiked, but across the country as district attorneys from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas have declared they won’t defend citizens from theft, the story has gone much the same. The brazenness is out of control, is goaded on by the normalization of masks, and is directly enabled by district attorneys and other politicians. Early Monday evening, at least nine men and women smashed cases and stripped shelves in San Francisco’s high-end Neiman Marcus store, fleeing with a fortune in designer handbags.

Urban blight