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Bobby Foster Jr. can often be found reading the paper on a wooden bench outside Murry’s grocery store on the corner of Sixth and H streets NE in Washington, D.C.

“The sun shines over here this time of day,” says Foster, a retired cook. “It’s always good when the sun shines.”

Murry’s has been an anchor in this neighborhood for decades — during the crack wars of the 1980s and the urban blight that followed, when most other businesses packed up and left. Foster has been somewhat of an anchor, too. He’s lived here for 54 years.

But now, this neighborhood and hundreds like it across the country are changing. Every other shop is a new restaurant, high-end salon or bar.

The neighborhood is gentrifying.

That’s been a dirty word for 30 years, since the middle and upper classes began returning to many urban cores across the U.S. It brings up images of neighbors forced out of their homes.

But a series of new studies are now showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well — and that those residents may not be moving out after all.

Even Foster is conflicted by the change he sees happening around him.

“Some things are good; some things are bad,” he says. “But sometimes the good outweighs the bad.”

Gentrification burst into the social consciousness on Aug. 6, 1988, with the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York City’s East Village. Residents carried signs saying “Gentrification is class war.” Police carried batons. The bloody battle that ensued left more than 100 people injured.

The protesters’ fury centered on the idea that the poor would be made homeless so the rich could live in their neighborhoods, destroying whatever character they may have had.

Lance Freeman, the director of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University, says that’s what he believed was happening, too. He launched a study, first in Harlem and then nationally, calculating how many people were pushed out of their homes when wealthy people moved in.

“My intuition would be that people were being displaced,” Freeman explains, “so they’re going to be moving more quickly. I was really aiming to quantify how much displacement was occurring.”

Except that’s not what he found.

“To my surprise,” Freeman says, “it seemed to suggest that people in neighborhoods classified as gentrifying were moving less frequently.”

Freeman’s work found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn’t.

He says higher costs can push out renters, especially those who are elderly, disabled or without rent-stabilized apartments. But he also found that a lot of renters actually stay — especially if new parks, safer streets and better schools are paired with a job opportunity right down the block.

That squares with a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

“We’re finding that the financial health of original residents in gentrifying neighborhoods seems to be increasing, as compared to original residents in nongentrifying, low-priced neighborhoods,” says Daniel Hartley, a research economist with the bank.

He looked at the credit scores of original residents and found that they went up — regardless of whether they rented or owned — compared with residents who stayed in nongentrifying neighborhoods.

“There may be these kind of side benefits to gentrification that we’ve been less focused on, that can actually help the original residents of the neighborhood,” he says.

As for Bobby Foster, he says he’s staying. He and his family own their home.

Some days, he says, he’s very concerned about what will happen to the beauty salon across the street from his bench. Its owners often do elderly people’s hair for free.

“They are beautiful people,” he says. “They’ve been here as long as I’ve known this place.”

But he says he also likes the new people, too. He wasn’t sure he would, but he says he likes that they sweep their stoops just like his grandma did.

“The people are still good,” he says with a smile.

Two months ago, city officials announced a new retail apartment complex was coming to the corner of Sixth and H streets NE. Murry’s will be closing and a Whole Foods will take its place. Foster says he just hopes that Whole Foods will put a bench out front.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Cook County, Ill., Sheriff Tom Dart walks the halls of his jail every day. With 10,000 inmates, this place is a small city — except a third of the people here are mentally ill.

Dart has created some of the most innovative programs in the country to handle mentally ill inmates, hiring doctors and psychologists, and training staff. But if you ask anyone here, even this jail is barely managing.

“I can’t conceive of anything more ridiculously stupid by government than to do what we’re doing right now,” Dart says.

Fifty years ago, states began shutting down asylums in favor of community mental health centers. It was a major policy shift in mental health, allowing patients to go home and live independently.

Over the past decade, though, states have cut billions from their mental health budgets, shuttering clinics across the country. The result is thousands of mentally ill people funneling in and out of the nation’s jails. In many cases, it has sent the mentally ill right back where they started — locked up in facilities that are ill-equipped to help them.

You can see the problem every morning in the intake center in Cook County, where 250 new inmates, arrested overnight, are stuffed into bullpens.

‘It’s Staggering’

Elli Petacque Montgomery is the deputy director of mental health policy for the sheriff’s office. She and her staff screen all the inmates for mental illness.

It’s not the hostile, angry men at the front of the cages, bickering with jail staff and pushing each other for more elbow room that interest her. It’s the men in the corners — men who come to jail and manage, despite the noise and commotion, to fall asleep.

“I’m kind of curious about this guy in the blue,” says Montgomery, pointing to a man sitting quietly on a bench. “Now, is he dazed because he’s on drugs or because the voices in his head are louder than what’s happening around him?”

On this morning, one inmate after another has a problem. One man tells her he’s going to kill himself because he thinks he’s already dead. Another guy explains that the voices tell him to hurt people.

“To walk in and feel like every other person I’m interviewing [is] mentally ill on any given day, I can’t wrap my brain around it,” she says. “It’s staggering what we’re really dealing with.”

Most of these men are here on minor offenses. Police have picked them up for small crimes like acting out in front of restaurants, sleeping in abandoned buildings or possessing drugs. They’re people with nowhere to go and nowhere to get medication. Some of them will stay for a few days; some for a few weeks. But statistically almost all of them will be back.

While these men are here, the jail’s responsibility is to keep other inmates from hurting them, and them from hurting themselves. But jail staff say what really happens deep inside this jail is a far cry from actual treatment.

‘We’re The Leaders?’

Inside the women’s psych ward — a place rarely seen by the public — a long sterile hallway with a row of green doors leads to a community area where 20 women are sitting in chairs. Some are rocking; some are pulling out their hair. Many are staring into space.

“You see people who are so profoundly ill that you understand that this is not the place for them,” says Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, head of mental health for the jail.

But here and throughout much of the country, there’s nowhere else for them to go. City and state governments nationwide have cut funding for mental health services. In the face of budget shortfalls, Chicago officials closed six of the area’s 12 mental health clinics in the past three years. Illinois officials closed three of the area’s state hospitals. Private clinics are also struggling for funding.

Without medication or counseling, these inmates wind up in front of police. They’re brought here to this ward, which resembles something from the past.

The jail’s chief psychologist, Kenya Key, steps inside a small, dark room behind the community area. It has padded walls, a drain and a light — nothing else. It’s called the quiet room.

“It’s never used as punishment,” Key explains. “The purpose of it is to decrease stimulation.”

There’s nothing to write with in this room, but the walls are covered in writing — slurs written with blood from fingertips or scratched into the walls with fingernails.

“The majority of the patients who are put here are in a state of very high agitation and escalation,” Key says. “While we do have those patients that will ask, ‘Can I go to the quiet room?’ [with] the majority of patients, it’s a forced intervention to help the patient de-escalate.”

In the men’s psych ward down the hall the scene is similar. Some men are locked into rooms where they pace back and forth for hours in smocks. One man’s wearing just a blanket. One man had been tied down in an empty room during the night with leather straps.

“Full leather restraints are used when a patient does not respond to any other intervention,” Key says, “which means they are literally restrained to the bed.”

Officials acknowledge what’s happening in these wards is reminiscent of the mental asylums of the last century. But they say the only other option is to lock the mentally ill in solitary confinement for weeks on end.

This is, after all, a jail. And this is one of the few in the country with doctors and nurses, psychologists and correctional officers trained in how to handle psychotic episodes. And there are rules: Inmates can only be forcibly medicated with a doctor’s orders. Leather restraints and padded rooms have time limits.

Still, Sheriff Dart says he’s confused by the compliments he hears from other jail administrators.

“On the one hand they’re speaking so highly about what you’re doing,” he says, “but it’s depressing as hell when they tell you you’re the leader. I feel as if we’re doing the bare minimum, and we’re the leaders? No, this is not good.”

The confusion about what is supposed to be happening in this jail is apparent when correctional officers talk. They often switch between calling the men inmates and patients in the same sentence.

‘I Don’t Think They Know’

Once inmates are willing to eat, shower, dress and sit calmly, they move from the psych ward to Division 2, just across the road.

In one room of that facility, a group of inmates is standing by the television while 40 or so others mill about a row of bunks. Three of them say they came to the county jail to get back on their medication after their local clinic closed.

“Sometimes I would even commit a crime just to make sure I would get my meds,” says inmate Joseph DeRiggi. “Here there’s a little more understanding because they know us: ‘OK, DeRiggi, we know what you’re on. You’re good.’ That’s just the way it is.”

But jail is an expensive place to get medication. It costs almost $200 a night to house a mentally ill person here; health clinics cost a fraction of that.

Plus their cases clog the courts with largely minor offenses. That lengthens jail time for everyone. The average stay is now eight days longer than it was a few years ago. Adding eight days costs county taxpayers $10 million more every year.

As Dart makes his way through Division 2, he pauses to say hello to many of the inmates he recognizes. They cycle in and out. Dart stops at the bunks. His frustration is palpable.

“Here you have a population clearly identified as mentally ill, and you’re releasing them to the street with nothing,” he says. “This isn’t left or right, conservative or liberal talking. What do you think is going to happen?”

Dart is a former prosecutor. He wants criminals punished. But he says he had no idea when he took the job of sheriff that he would also become the state’s mental health provider.

While he’s talking, a man in the back of the room starts walking in circles. He’s saying he’s God, and that he’s going to make everyone disappear. Now the other mentally ill inmates around him are getting agitated.

Three officers with mental health training slowly surround him. They don’t say anything; they just nod their heads agreeing with him. On cue, the officers start walking and the inmate instinctively starts walking with them. He doesn’t know it, but he’s headed back to the psych ward.

Dart barely pauses. He sees it every day.

He says he understands that money for community health centers is tight. But he says doing it this way is costing more.

“Clearly our society had determined that the state-run mental hospitals were abhorrent, that my God, our society cannot tolerate this, we’re much more advanced than that,” Dart says. “I just find the irony so thick that that same society finds it OK to put the same people in jails and prisons.”

But then he shakes his head and changes his mind.

“I know people care,” he says, pausing. “I don’t think they know.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On a recent Friday evening in Langley Park, Md., police officer Juan Damian drives his patrol car past fast food restaurants, discount stores and Hispanic groceries.

Damian estimates that at least two-thirds of the people here are undocumented, and that has made it a magnet for robberies over the years. Gangs know undocumented day workers are especially lucrative targets, he says. Their pockets are often stuffed with a day’s or even a week’s worth of wages. The street term for these men: “walking ATMs.”

Damian says workers are afraid to leave the money where they live because they may be sharing an apartment with a dozen or so others.

A thief will “see people walking down the street, ask them for the money and rob them for whatever they have, get in the car and leave because they don’t call the police,” Damian says.

The Prince George’s County Police officer is concerned with stopping sometimes deadly assaults and robberies, not with their immigration status, and insists he will never ask a victim whether he or she is here legally. But it’s been hard to build that trust. So in the past couple years, Damian and community leaders have come up with other ideas. They’ve beefed up patrols and trained other officers to understand it’s possible for a man wearing dirt-covered pants to have been carrying hundreds of dollars in cash. And they’ve been turning to local banks.

Casa de Maryland, a local advocacy group, has been holding seminars for immigrants to show them how to open bank accounts. The group brings residents together with banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Capital One.

“Banks have been happy to partner with us,” says George Escobar, the director of health and human services for Casa de Maryland. “They have a big and easy base for them to do a lot of bank account enrollment.”

Because this community, a suburb of Washington, D.C., is a portal — where thousands of immigrants start when they first come to the states — new people are always coming. Escobar says his group constantly schedules new seminars. On some nights banks will enroll hundreds of new customers.

“The demand is overwhelming,” Escobar says. “At all of our clinics, the bankers are completely busy and can barely deal with the demand of people coming to enroll with them.”

It’s actually not illegal for undocumented immigrants to open a bank account. Lots of foreigners bank with U.S. financial institutions. Immigrants need their passport or ID and a U.S. taxpayer identification number, which you can get regardless of your status.

The banking efforts mixed with community policing seem to be working. Numbers are hard to come by for a crime that victims are afraid to report. But according to police data, known robberies at least have been cut in half in the past five years in this one area. And police say the number of arrests is up, too, meaning immigrants have come forward to describe their attackers.

Dora Escobar, who’s not related to George, came to the U.S. several decades ago from El Salvador. She now owns nine popular check cashing businesses. Recently people milled about inside one of her stores buying phone cards and talking. She says she worries about her customers at night and hopes they open bank accounts.

“It’s worrisome,” she says in Spanish, “but with an ID they can open their own accounts.”

She says she’s appreciative of the recent police efforts to protect the people in the community, but most undocumented workers still do not trust the police.

“It’s working,” she says, “but there’s more work to be done.”

Community leaders hope if they can get the cash out of people’s pockets, it will keep the entire community safe, whether they are here legally or not.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As part of a new series called “My Big Break,” All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

On Jan. 18, 1990, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was arrested for possession and use of crack cocaine in a hotel room during an FBI sting.

Meanwhile, at The Washington Post, intern Bill O’Leary was waiting for his first real assignment.

“I had been administrative staff at the Post. It’s pretty much clerical, background work. And I was anxious to get out on the street with a camera,” he tells NPR’s Arun Rath. “An editor comes running in and says, ‘There’s a rumor that the Mayor has been arrested.’ For this to be happening was a monstrous local story.”

Staff photographers were quickly dispatched to the FBI office at Buzzard’s Point to cover the developing story. Two people were left behind.

“Just me and one of the older photographers who had been going through a divorce and had asked for light duty,” O’Leary says.

Their editor sent them to Barry’s house as backup in case the other photographers missed him.

Shortly after O’Leary and his colleague arrived at his home, an FBI SUV pulled up and four men exited the vehicle. One of the individuals was Mayor Marion Barry.

O’Leary raised his camera to take a picture, but an FBI agent got in his way and started to push him back. But then a competitor for Channel 4 News started running up, shouting questions at the mayor. The agent turned toward the commotion.

“At that instant, I get off this one picture — BAM! — with a punch flash, direct strobe, hideous in the middle of the night,” he says.

O’Leary rushed back to the office and developed the photo in the darkroom.

“I finally start to unwheel it from the spool, hold it up to a light box, and there it is. It’s clear, it’s sharp, it’s properly exposed, and it’s the mayor,” he says.

It was the lead picture in the Jan. 19 issue of The Washington Post.

“It was magic,” O’Leary says. “That was my big break.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.