DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Navy Yard is a failing experiment in gentrification.

The high-end apartment complexes in which neighborhood newcomers live are all carbon-copied, with their rooftop pools, twenty-four-hour gyms, stainless steel appliances, floor-to-ceiling windows for natural light. The easiest way to distinguish between them is by their scandals: do you live in the one that had Legionnaire’s bacteria in the pool, or the one opposite, where the Iranian agents got raided? Perhaps the one up the street where Representative Cuellar got his car stolen? (They took his sushi, too.)

“Carjackings have become a joke,” Elissa de Souza, a Navy Yard resident and community activist, tells me. “If one person stole a car and they were strictly punished for it, would the others really do that? These people know that there’s no accountability. Just a slap on the wrist. So why wouldn’t anybody and everybody join in on the fun?” There were nearly 1,000 carjackings in DC last year — 2024 is maintaining the same pace, with eighty-four in the first two months.

You might think a rise in violent and property crime and decrease in employees going into the office would result in a price drop in the rental market: you’d be mistaken. Rents for studio apartments here remain at around $1,800 a month, with most one-bedroom apartments still north of $2,000. A lawsuit from the DC attorney general suggests an explanation: it accuses fourteen large residential landlords of delegating price-setting authority to an outside company, which uses “a centralized pricing algorithm to inflate prices.”

If renters are fairly stuck, businesses have started to flee. A Navy Yard franchise of Swingers, a putt-putt golf bar, opened and closed within a matter of months. Chic athleisurewear store Lululemon has also turned heel. “I did talk to the manager of Lululemon and it was really sad,” de Souza says. “They had to shut down because of crime. They were just robbed at gunpoint too many times.”

Will neighborhood residents follow? “I would have to get a car if we moved to Virginia,” a Capitol Hill staffer who lives in the area tells me. “I’ve had two different friends get held at gunpoint on the Metro during the day and don’t want the risk of that happening to me, especially with how many late nights there are working on the Hill.”

We need a total and complete shutdown of Washington until… well, maybe forever.