Although she has lived in Shaw her entire life, today is Urica Lewis’ first visit to Azi’s Café on Ninth Street NW. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t know her community: Warm and engaging, she waves to a group of teens, points out neighborhood landmarks and catches up with her high school math teacher at Azi’s. But the café is just one of a host of changes that have descended on Lewis’ neighborhood in recent years – changes that she is excited to see but hesitant to embrace wholeheartedly.

“I want to stay here,” explains Lewis. “I want to enjoy what’s here. But I’m considered low-income, which makes me feel like I’m an outcast. And I know that’s not the case because I’ve been here before these changes happened – I was born here.”

Lewis’ grandmother and mother moved to Shaw from Columbia Heights before she was born. She grew up in the Lincoln Westmoreland Apartment complex on Seventh Street, attending Seton Elementary School and Coolidge Senior High School in the 1980s and ‘90s, during what she calls “the worst of times.”

“Growing up in Shaw was exciting and dangerous at the same time,” she says. “It was nothing compared to what it is today. I can recall when it was crime-ridden, and there were a lot of drugs. So during my time growing up, that’s what I was surrounded by … And I didn’t appreciate my neighborhood the way I appreciate it today.”

Lewis credits her mother with providing her the comfort and protection she needed to escape the dangers of Shaw’s streets in those years. But while she avoided prostitution and drug use, Lewis did become a teen mother – a circumstance that, instead of curtailing her success, inspired her to make a better life for her daughter, Asia, and herself.

Lewis completed high school and college with Asia at her side, and after five years working at Howard University Hospital, she changed her career path to focus on her true passion: affordable housing.

With her early motherhood and adoption of responsibilities, Lewis also developed a mature understanding of her neighborhood. She researched Shaw’s history, discovering a stunning legacy of black America that had been all but forgotten by the time she was born. Lewis learned of a thriving community that had been built by and for blacks in a segregated city. It is this inheritance of black achievement that Lewis doesn’t want left out of Shaw’s current revitalization. She got involved with the housing advocacy work of One DC and now works for Enterprise Community Partners (an organization that supports affordable housing nonprofits) to help Shaw’s black residents stay in the neighborhood their ancestors established for them.

“This is my history,” she explains. “I’m supposed to continue my legacy here. I know that I’m supposed to take in these changes, but [they need] to benefit everyone of every culture and every income. And that’s not the case.”

Although Lewis has a college degree and a full-time career, like many young professionals her income falls below the standard for determining low-income residency. She can’t afford to purchase a home priced according to that standard in Shaw. Therefore her fight for truly affordable housing has taken the form not only of testifying before DC Council and educating her neighbors, but of trying to change the general perception of what low-income really means.

“I believe there’s a stereotype about low-income people,” she says. “I think that if people meet people such as myself and other educated people who are not making a lot of money, they’ll see that we’re just like someone who’s making $70,000.”

Lewis doesn’t know if her own legacy will always involve the affordable housing fight, but that struggle has empowered her to follow the path of her greatest role models, some of whom, like Carter G. Woodson and Mary McLeod Bethune, lived in the neighborhood she longs to continue to call home.

“A lot of the things I’ve had to deal with in life have made me the person I am today,” she says with a joyful confidence. “I know I have a purpose on this earth. I know I’m supposed to leave a legacy.”