When the topic of slums in Washington is brought up, one often hears about a particularly bad neighborhood within a few blocks of the White House and Capitol. Mount Vernon Square is that neighborhood, though it’s cleaned up considerably in recent years and is no longer the sort of place reasonable people should fear. Spurred in no small part by big projects like the new convention center, Mount Vernon Square has gentrified to the point where a new row house on a nicer block can run for $400,000. That’s not to say the neighborhood is a burgeoning Georgetown. In fact, it’s probably gentrified less than some of the other neighboring parts of town, and there remain some feelings of hostility - normally when BeyondDC is in a neighborhood taking pictures one or two people might ask what’s going on; an unusually high number did so in Mount Vernon Square, and one man became quite upset.
Physically Mount Vernon Square doesn’t quite match other first-ring neighborhoods like Logan or Dupont Circle. It suffered severely from racial tensions of past decades and as a result was gutted more seriously than other neighborhoods. It’s populated by more public or otherwise poor housing and is the only place close to downtown where you’re likely to find sizable surface parking lots.
