I’m too poor to be happy.

Every time I go into the Kentucky friend chicken on U Street in DC I don’t know if I’m going to get my crispy friend chicken or shot. I guess that’s most fast food restaurants in the hood. I don’t live in the hood. Actually my neighborhood is going through a gentrification: the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses.

When I first moved to DC six years ago from Texas, I lived in an okay neighborhood. I felt safe and the rent was cheap. I knew I didn’t want to live in SE DC because everyday somebody is getting shot or killed. I never ever wanted to drive through SE DC because I got enough gangsta points growing up in the wards of Houston, Texas and projects in San Antonio. I thought the entire point was getting out of the ghetto but I guess the yuppies understood a different story. Most of the buildings and houses in the ghetto aren’t owned. If they are owned, the estimates are really cheap. It’s actually a lot more expensive to live in the ghetto. Shit to have car insurance in the ghetto is like three times as higher to have insurance in 90210. But freedom in America for the poor, especially black poor has never been cheap.

My neighborhood has rapidly changed in the last six years. First, my rent has gone up a hundred dollars. When I first moved into the neighborhood the Convention Center was still in construction. Now it’s up and running and hosting events like “American Idol.” When I first moved into the neighborhood you couldn’t throw a rock down the street in any direction without hitting a crackhead or a pre-op tranny. The alcoholics hung outside the liquor store begging for change. I felt my neighbor hood was full of character. It wasn’t violent or anything. I never got robbed but I often dress like a homeless person so I knew I was safe. Besides, the rent was cheap. I knew if I wanted to score some weed at three in the morning it was like shouting for my cousin “Ray Ray” outside my window. I liked where I lived. Then the white people started showing up. It was the first sign. Six years ago when I first moved to the neighborhood I would walk through my neighborhood and not see one white person. It was strange to get off the metro and have five or six white people follow me home. I would clinch my bookbag close to me. I would wonder what the hell they wanted. Growing up in the hood the only white people were the ones with black babies or the ones who came to the ghetto to score drugs.

Yet, part of me welcomed the white people because I knew when they arrived meant business would follow. In six years, the neighborhood has gotten a grand movie theater, five new banks, three CVS stores, and six condos have risen from unpiloted grounds. Then my rent went up a hundred dollars.

In the past weeks my neighborhood has witnessed a new grocery store. It’s fucking gigantic. It has a dry cleaner, Starbucks, poet café, restaurant and cooking lessons on Tuesdays. At first I laughed when it finally opened it doors. My first thought what were they going to do with all the prostitutes who solicited just a block away. I thought what was going to happened to the homeless alcoholics pissing on themselves outside the AA building that has a liquor store right next door. It’s like having a Krespy Kreme donut shop in a gym.

When I first visited the grand grocery store, I knew the prices were going to be higher. I was used to my old grocery store. It was only a few blocks from me but it always had some type of sale. Yes, most of the cashiers are some ghetto bitches that no matter who they cursed out still kept their jobs. AT the new “promiseland” grocery story, when I walked through the doors everybody had a smile on their face. They welcomed me. I walked through the new grocery store and they had people with free sample platters. I knew at my old grocery store four blocks away that could never happen because the homeless people would think they were at home. I didn’t want any free samples. Actually I was freaked out how happy everybody was, smiling like they were happy to be at their minimum wage job. I chuckled because I knew it wouldn’t last for long.

Three weeks later, I walked to my old grocery store and I started noticing all these suspicious flyers on the telephone polls. The flyers boasted in red letters on white cardboard paper, “The selling of drugs or sexual solicitation is illegal. No selling of drugs and solicitation during the hours of 9 am to 5 am”

I laughed at the thought if buying crack in the ghetto was ever legal. I laughed at the thought of the set aside hours of illegal business. I wonder did the drug dealers and prostitute waited until 5am to start their day. Shit, the best drugs I got were usually early in the morning. Chris Rock said, anyone at an ATM at 3 in the morning taking out more than two hundred dollars wasn’t up to any good.

I also noticed in my neighborhood, the cops patrolled the streets twenty four seven. I remember growing up you never say a damn cop when the real shit was going down. A black person only saw a cop when they were getting arrested. IT felt sort of sad that a once cheap rent neighborhood never got its due. That those who lived through its worse now were outpriced and just transferred to another ghetto. It’s like ghettos are never recreated or destroyed, just transferred. If my rent goes up again this year, I am moving back to the ghetto. In this economy, I am willing to risk a bullet for cheaper rent.