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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

And the kids in many of those 10 story apartments would all crowd into Janney.  But so what, as long as GDS, the Aces and their developer cronies get to pocket the profits...[/quote]

Umm. Yeah. Kids living on apartments get to go to "your" neighborhood public school.

Is that what this is all about, now that the neighborhood has taken back Janney and mostly rid itself of out of bound kids, let's make sure they don't get back in by buying or renting an apartment three blocks from the school?  I've been reading this ridiculous NIMBY chain for months now and finally realized what it's about. Should have figured, given the neighborhood's sorry history on race. [/quote]

Let's leave the NIMBY and race-baiting invective out of it, as well as the moralizing.  (Yes, we've all heard so much about GDS's unique and storied history on integration, Eric Holder on the board, etc., etc.).  Instead, let's get practical.  Upper NW public schools are bursting at the seams today.  They're overcrowded even just with families who live in their school zones.  With more and more large projects in the area, whether GDS PUD Commons, the project just announced at Fannie's site, or visions of more 10-story multifamily buildings along Wisconsin (some of which will have parents with school aged kids), just where exactly is the school capacity to educate all of these new students?  [/quote]

It's the history of our neighborhood. And it's not very far in the past.  Helps explain the present. [/quote]

Racially-restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948.  The free black community around Fort Reno was destroyed by the Feds in the 1920s and replaced by Wilson and Deal which were created as public schools exclusively for white students.  None of the current residents concerned about overdevelopment and the city's refusal to add infrastructure as needed lived in Tenleytown during that time.  Nor, with a very few exceptions, did their families.

FWIW, many neighborhoods in DC had restrictive covenants during the first half of the 20th century.  This wasn't a distinctive Tenleytown thing -- DC was a Jim Crow society.

[/quote]

The history is relevant because it's the reason why the single family home parts of Tenleytown are still overwhelmingly white, and the reason that Janney is almost 75% white and just 10% black in a city that is majority black and with a school system that is even more so.  Of course, new apartments will change those numbers because there just aren't enough whites around to keep Janney at those demographics forever.  Apartments with new residents can break the historical demographic pattern that does date back to the neighborhood's explicitly segregationist past. [/quote]

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