NW v. NE

Even though this week is a short week it has been pretty hectic - mostly because I moved last night to a safer part of town - I've had too many instances happen where I was previous living that this opportunity to move to a safer location came up and I knew I had to take it. Already I am a lot happier where I am living.
Which started me thinking about Town and Regional Planning last year and I how I thought things were changing in Inner cities and they are - poverty is just being pushed out instead of in.

For me to get to Mt. Rainier, MD (first stop outside of DC, NE) I would have to wait at least a half hour for a bus (because who can ever know when it is going to decide to show up), take the bus for a twenty minutes to get to the metro (that was 1.3 miles away but it was too risky to walk, even in the morning), take the metro to one stop, transfer and wait, take the metro twenty minutes into the city. All in all by the end of my stay in Mt. Rainier I was taking nearly 2hours out of my day (one way) to go 5 miles into the city and would be late for work.

To get home I would have to leave work early, commute and transfer on the metro and then run to the bus because if I did not make the 5:30 bus I would have to wait until 6:30 for the next one to go to my house all because I was too afraid to walk the 1.3 miles. Going home would take a little over an hour.

I should not have to be afraid but I was and now where I am living I only have to walk .5 miles to the metro through a nice section of town or walk .2miles to catch a bus and it all brings me to work in under a half hour and I am neither late nor need to leave early.
It baffles me that cities constantly say they are looking for ways to improve the system but the people in Mt. Rainier are angry. They are frustrated that they have to wait up to an hour sometimes to catch a bus home and that there isn't work near them. I was talking to one woman while waiting for the bus a couple weeks ago and I mentioned that I might try taking a bus from Ft. Totten (the stop before mine, NE) and she looked at me and said "Do not take a bus there, you will get raped".
Where I am living now (Friendship Heights, NW) is right near my friends at AU and a couple of work friends and the AU girls told me that the worst act of violence they've heard of in our neighborhood (in the past 3 years) is this man who will sometimes run around pinching a girl's butt.
It is ridiculous that because I am a white female who was previously living in a black community would constantly have to worry about being raped, mugged, chased, etc. but now that I am in a white community my biggest concern is a man who might try and pinch my butt.
Obviously I still have to be careful and keep my guard up because I am in a city but my risk has gone down significantly and all I had to do was move 7 miles West of Mt. Rainier.

It is also really frustrating that the predominantly white areas of DC have a bus stop at every corner while the black areas have one maybe every half mile and they are usually located in the 'better' parts of town.

Anacostia is said to be the worst neighborhood in DC (SE) and I was talking to someone from AU who mentioned that the first say of orientation he was brought on a tour of Anacostia where people yelled at the group constantly saying they needed to "go back where they came" and would be warned at intersections to not go down certain streets because they would not "come out the other side".

Anacostia from the 2000 Census was 92% African American (http://www.servinghistory.com/topics/Anacostia::sub::Demographics) - Mt. Rainier, African American and Hispanic are the predominant races (http://www.city-data.com/zips/20712.html) and in Friendship Heights 84% are white (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/neighborhoods/guide/show/subarubia).

Anacostia Average Income: $28,934
Mt. Rainier: $46,913
Friendship Heights: $145,460
(All incomes gathered from city-data.com)

I did not realize the income level was jumping to nearly 100K...

I feel as though I could rant all day about inequalities and how neighborhoods and cities should not have that much disparity in only a few miles radius but it happens and we all know it happens but yet there does not seem to be much being done.
The one good thing I noticed in Mt. Rainier was this Co-Op called 'Glut' - organic and vegetarian everything and my grocery bill would often be under $40 dollars for a week - but I would have to walk quite a ways and by the end of my stay in Mt. Rainier once I got home I stayed home and did not venture past my bedroom.
Now I can leave at 5 o'clock on a Sunday and get my groceries and not have thoughts and concerns flooding my head about safety. Some of them will be there but not all.

I have to keep telling myself that I was not defeated by Mt. Rainier - our system is flawed and one person living in an area will not change the years and history of backlash of pushing poverty around to wherever is seen fit. My friend that helped move me last night is living in Georgia/Petworth which is still NW but on the edge of NE and has a few sketchy parts. She was even freaked out by the area I was living, especially hearing the sirens go off literally every 10 minutes.

My brain is flustered but hopefully living in a better area will at least ease one of the topics running through my mind.