Washington, D.C. always felt different. Every summer my mother sent my sister and me from Detroit to spend time with our grandparents, aunts, uncle, and cousins. For a few weeks each year, 446 Buchanan became our second home. Some of my favorite memories happened around one table. Before dinner, we'd cover my grandparents' round wooden dining table with newspaper. Earlier that day we'd visited the seafood market to buy shrimp, crab legs, and live blue crabs. My Aunt Dana, the

Another significant place in my early life was my grandmother’s house. Not far from my childhood home on Detroit’s east side stood Granny’s brick duplex. A sheltered porch stretched across the front, covered in green outdoor carpet that reminded me of freshly cut grass. Potted flowers lined the steps from the sidewalk to the front door, and the brick porch railings became one of my sister’s, cousins’, and my favorite places to climb. Inside, however, there was no climbing, ru

The first place that taught me what home really means. Before I understood gentrification as policy, I understood it as a feeling. It was the eerie feeling that something was wrong, even when the adults around me tried their best to protect me from it. When you are a child, you rarely get the full story. You get the softened version. The watered-down explanation. You learn to read what people are not saying. In 2008, I learned to read the look on my mother’s face. I did not u