Sep 17, 2004  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

police have been more aggressive at cracking down on the neighborhood’s crime but Bruett says he has not always felt that this was the case.

“The first year we didn’t have much luck getting them to acknowledge the problem,” he says.

A spokesperson for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department did not return a call by press time.

Other Columbia Heights residents, like David Swaney, a 40-year-old high school teacher and owner of a Victorian rowhouse on Monroe Street, says he has always felt safe in this area.

“I feel very comfortable here,” Swaney says. “I don’t look over my shoulder very often. I think more crime happened to me in Dupont than in Columbia Heights.”

Bruett say there was some initial tension between the new gay residents and some members of the community, but blames the acrimony on drug dealers who “felt they owned this end of the street.”

“Now we know who they are and they know who we are and we go our separate ways,” he says. “Every time a house is sold, it becomes less and less like the old neighborhood.”

Inevitably, some tension arises when a well-established racial or ethnic neighborhood is suddenly experiencing an influx of wealthy gay homebuyers.

Linda Goode Bryant, a co-producer of the PBS documentary “Flag Wars,” a P.O.V. film that explores such a dynamic in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood, said typically when more affluent people buy a home in a relatively old, established community, their primary focus is on protecting their new property. Such protections takes on a number of forms, chief among them is getting city lawmakers to make their new neighborhoods an historic district.

Such a move has an immediate impact on the established community. Goode-Bryant says the cost to maintain one’s home usually goes up considerably after such action is taken. The new prices have a direct impact on African-Americans who have been in that community for a long time and are more likely to live on fixed incomes and retirement benefits.

Gay D.C. residents willing to refurbish large rowhouses in Columbia Heights are helping fuel demographic changes there. (Photo by Luis Gomez)

“What we observed in documenting ‘Flag Wars,’ and this is typical in similar neighborhoods, is that you have two groups: the old-timers and the newcomers,” Goode-Byrant explains. “The old-timers say you improve the neighborhood by ensuring all the neighbors needs are met. Newcomers arrive and believe you come to the neighborhood to protect the house, the architecture. One of the reasons tension arises when these transformations are happening is because it comes from those different intentions as to how one