Gentrification and the Movement for Housing in Washington, D.C.: Participatory Action Research Project Linking Classroom and Community.

This interactive presentation will share the participatory action research project that we have been involved in since 1999. The first phase was completed by a partnership between Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, a community-based movement building organization, and a group of grassroots and scholar activists representing Trinity Towers residents, including the Trinity Towers Tenant Association, and several Howard and American University graduate student volunteers. The project explored the housing crisis in Columbia Heights and Trinity Towers intensifying in 1999-2000 as the gentrification process spread throughout northwest Washington, DC. We sought to uncover the root causes of gentrification and the housing crisis and to ensure that the community's voice was heard and is part of the solution. The second phase was collaboration between CoRAL/Georgetown University and Project South that developed from conversations between Walda Katz-Fishman and Sam Marullo, scholar activists teaching and working on issues of social inequality and social justice at Howard and Georgetown Universities. Four undergraduate students enrolled in The Contemporary City, a course taught by Professor Marullo, joined a Project South team composed of a sociology doctoral student/community activist and a grassroots community activist to design and implement a participatory action research follow-up -- 2000 to 2002. It documented the organizing success of the Trinity Towers Tenant Association and the deepening housing crisis in the Columbia Heights neighborhood because of ongoing gentrification. The documentation from the first phase was published as a pamphlet The People's Story -- Trinity Towers & Columbia Heights… Gentrification and the Struggle for Housing in our Neighborhood.. The second phase documentation is a web page that is temporarily located at: www.projectsouth.org. The text from the pamphlet and the web page are attached and... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]