The neighborhood’s transition is exemplified by the new retail and community services popping up along streets still lined with liquor stores and check-cashing spots offering payday loans. There’s Olivia’s Cupcakes, Big Chair Café Bar & Grill, urban-wear boutique District Culture and the Anacostia Art Center, where “The Vagina Monologues” was playing recently.

“Anacostia was really stigmatized during the 1980s and 1990s when D.C. was the murder capital of the country,” said Jacques Edelin, a Realtor with UrbanLand Company in Washington. “It was associated with the public housing, crime and drugs that were all concentrated there. That perception has been changing.”

Soon, an elevated bridge park similar to New York’s High Line will reconnect the communities of Capitol Hill and Anacostia. The project, a collaboration between the Washington government and nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River, will use the old bridge pillars as a foundation for a new public park with pedestrian and bike paths, fruit orchards and playgrounds.

In New York’s Brooklyn, buyers priced out of neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Prospect Heights are heading to Bedford- Stuyvesant in droves.

‘Priced Out’

Elaine Bodian, 24, a barista at Daily Press, a café on Franklin Avenue, moved to the area about two years ago.

“I got priced out of Prospect Heights,” said Bodian. “The best part of Bed-Stuy is the young feeling. There are a lot of people moving in, and there’s a lot of energy.”

Prices in the neighborhood where Myrtle Avenue was once referred to as “Murder Avenue” jumped more than 44 percent last year, compared with a 2.6 percent jump in Brooklyn as a whole, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. And while the precinct that includes Bed-Stuy still has one of the city’s highest rates of violent crime, murders fell to 11 in 2014 from 71 in 1990, according to New York City Police Department data.

Bed-Stuy, once synonymous with crime and racial tension, as portrayed in the 1989 Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” has undergone a transformation since 2008, said Janece McFadden, a neighborhood native who returned four months ago after living for six years in Georgia and North Carolina.

Neighborhood Changes