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The purpose.

This website is a final project for HIST 390, the Digital Past, taken at George Mason University in the fall semester of 2012.

The background and the question.

After several years away from the DC area, I found myself driving through Southeast DC -- a markedly changed Southeast DC. For someone who has been in and out of the DC area for the past 25 years and considers it home, the differences were astounding. With Nationals Park taking up a prominent position in the neighborhood, it was impossible to deny that things were different in an area of DC that not too many years ago I would have been afraid to drive in after dark. People were bustling about and new construction was everywhere. Yes, things had definitely changed, at least superficially, in Southeast; but what effect had Nationals Park truly had on the people who live near it? Had more than just the scenery changed?

Where to start?

So now that my interest had been piqued, I started researching by doing a quick check of Wikipedia. There was surprisingly little about the ongoing revitalization efforts in Southeast but I did find several useful sources. Now that I had information at my fingertips, I needed a way to sift through all that info to quantify change.

The parameters.

I needed to focus my research. To see what impact the stadium has had on Southeast, I needed a time range for before-and-after comparison and I needed tangible statistics to analyze. Since the first whisperings of Washington getting a team started when Major League Baseball purchased the struggling Montreal Expos in 2002, I decided that all graphs, charts, and data sets would, whenever possible, cover the period from 2002 to present day. Geographically, I decided to limit data to Ward 6 (which includes as least a part of zip codes 20024, 20001, 20002, 20003, and 20004) and its corresponding police district, District 1. This geographic area covers Nationals Park and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding it. Based on my research and data mining, I decided to focus my data collection on crime rates, median household income, ethnic diversity, and property values.

Wordles

This is a Wordle from the article "The spatial impact of revitalization on the likelihood of homeownership: a
look at Washington, DC" published in the Journal of the Community Development Society in 2011. The article is a before and after study of revitalization projects in DC between 1990 and 2000. It was helpful in focusing my research on issues like homeownership, household income, and property values within the boundary of Ward 6.

This Wordle is from the blog: JDLand: Near Southeast DC Redevelopment, a blog developed by a Southeast DC local who wanted to track the changes happening in the area around Nationals Park. The blog was started in 2003, prior to construction starting on the stadium. This Wordle is not as useful for narrowing the scope of my research but is very useful for looking at how the face of Southeast DC is changing. The prominence of words like park, water, theater, forest, and skating seem to indicate a quality of life increase in green space and amenities. Also interesting is the relative prominence of the word "finally." Are projects taking too long? Is change eagerly anticipated? So many questions....

Introduction

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Word Mining

Sep 1, 2007

Apr 13, 2009

The changing face of Southeast

Pictures taken from the Nationals Park press box looking northeast.