In 2004, then D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams announced a plan to build a brand new baseball stadium around Half and O Streets SE to house the newly purchased Montreal Expos. The land chosen for the new baseball stadium was home to one of the largest conglomerations of gay bars and clubs in the city including a couple of strip clubs.
On February 13th, the first of the displaced clubs was able to reopen in SW after much debate about the ordinances restricting the rebuilding of all the clubs. The location chosen for the stadium seems hardly accidental, as this less than picturesque area of the city had been considered too seedy and dangerous for the average citizen, especially at night. Yet, it was the only area where these clubs had been allowed to exist. Queer culture had literally been peripheralized and pushing it out of this area, by way of literally dropping commerce onto it, meant that this section of SE had just been designated for gentrification.
Over the past decade, the D.C. landscape has been transformed both by physical structures and in the dispersal of its population. The city’s gentrification is far from accidental beginning with the plan of Mayor Williams to increase tax revenues for the city. Entire sections of the city have been re-established as middle-income trend spots where there once existed rent-controlled low-income housing and families. This has also meant that historically black neighborhoods, like Shaw, U Street and Columbia Heights, have changed drastically in their ethnic make-up as well as class. While the black exodus moves further east and into Maryland, the landscape of the city becomes de-urbanized and includes oddities like a corporate mall on 14th and Park Streets NW where there was low-income housing 4 years ago. With the higher class and sometimes semi-suburban façade comes an expectation of what types of people will be frequenting and living in these areas. Such assumptions about what safe and higher-class look like have from the beginning been police-enforced.
While gentrification is an intensely complicated and problematic situation overall, I am concerned that it has been an assault on the sexual geography of the city as it had been known for decades. Overt alternative sexualities, like sex work and queer culture, are displaced by gentrification and city ‘beautification programs’. These elements are often correlated to dirty underbelly of the city and not to be seen in civilized or safe areas of town. Sexual elements, however, do not disappear simply because the rent goes up in a neighborhood; after all queerness did not flee the city when the bars were paved over. Visible signs of sex work or queerness is physically pushed beyond the perimeter of “good” areas of the city and into progressively more neglected areas. In D.C., this has meant that street work has been moved further east and closer to the Maryland border as well as literally marching a group of workers to the Virginia border. The pushing is being done by the Metro Police Department’s prostitution unit, which has been given more tools and legislation to combat prostitution. Remember the “prostitution free zones”? They aren’t just saved for major events and tourist attractions but are usually used crack down on groups who have started working within the gentrified zone. I’m sure that those lovely signs are very assuring to the residents of those areas. A fancy billboard in certain areas, I think, could do wonders for real estate values.
Harass, though, is probably a better word than combat, if we’re defining the role of the prostitution unit. Even MPD doesn’t claim to be able to make prostitution end within the District. They don’t even necessarily claim to make life easier for those performing it on the streets. Considering some of the propositioning that takes place by officers, some sexual harassment protections or a decent firehose could really be useful on the streets. Instead, former police Chief Ramsey portrays “those residents who must endure the presence of prostitutes and their paraphernalia in our neighborhoods” as ‘victims’ of prostitution.
The areas that workers are forced to move to are often more residential or industrial but they are also significantly less safe than the areas previously worked. This is because these areas are both geographically and literally peripheral. They are often very low-income if they are residential or highly unregulated and violent. Such policing creates a progressively more dangerous and violent situation for those being regulated. This is ironic considering that so many proponents of the abolition of prostitution sight women’s rights as justification. Yet, it assumes that by practicing sex work a person somehow forfeits their ability to be treated humanely rather than prodded and herded like stray cattle. These tactics, however, assure that the issue remains out of sight and therefore out of mind for the majority of the public. How can this be service and protection?
(Image Credit: StudyLib)
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