There were plenty of trees and grass and sun in “the Village,” but when I called the police after our apartment had been robbed for the third time, they brought an entire van full of officers to investigate.

Though it’s been 11 years since my mother moved out of the Village, I still drive through it whenever I’m in town, and I’ve seen a lot of changes.

From the mid-1990s until the last few years, the violence and crime deterred middle-class Washingtonians from planting stakes in the area. But as real-estate prices soared, more and more prospective home buyers began making their way to parts of the city they wouldn’t have dared even drive through in the days of my youth.

So as I tour the 10 square blocks of my old stomping grounds, I’m not surprised to see fresh paint on buildings that were once peeling. It doesn’t shock me that the old tennis and basketball courts have been leveled to make way for town houses, or that the gully filled with earth, trees and trash next to the basement apartment where I was raised has given way to new homes.

Still, I remember how we used to explore that great wide ditch as if it were a real jungle. Runoff from sewage pipes had created a tiny stream at its bottom, and we tried to navigate the water on an old wooden door that had been tossed into the gully long before we were born.

I remember nearly running over my father when I turned the handlebars too far left as he was trying to teach me how to ride a bike, and sledding down 38th Street with him when the street was covered with solid ice during one of the city’s harshest winters.

I remember the small forest of bamboo shoots behind one of the buildings that my best friend, Butchie, and I broke off to use as swords in imaginary duels. I remember when we discovered a syringe on the ground next to a Dumpster, having no idea what it had most likely been used for.

One friend went to jail around the same time that I went to college. Two others went to funeral homes: one was stabbed because of a neighborhood rivalry, and the other was shot during a dispute over a girl. My memories are very mixed.

The other day I saw a music video by a D.C. recording artist whom I recognized as the kid with a locker near mine in high school. One of the scenes in the video showed a man pointing at a T shirt that read keep D.C. black. For a moment I wondered what this meant, until I remembered the way years of low interest rates and a nationwide home-renovation trend had begun to change the racial makeup of my hometown.

Now what used to be an undesirable neighborhood has become unaffordable for many of the people who grew up with me. Most of my friends who still live in the area have been forced into Prince George’s County (just across the Maryland border), as rent and mortgage prices are now far beyond what they can afford.

I know that many African-Americans view these events as proof that racism is alive and well. But I believe that in the end, the shifting demographics of the Village are all about money.

The bottom line for me is that there is nothing left of myself in the blocks and buildings where I went from embryo to young man. The faces I pass on the streets of my childhood are unfamiliar. Friends who got in trouble with the law are back on the streets now, but they live elsewhere. My old girlfriends live far away from the playgrounds where we once walked hand in hand.

The neighborhood I remember is long gone, except in my mind, where it will live as long as I can remember it.

I will pass on this memory to my own children when that time comes. I hope they will do the same for their own offspring, keeping it alive without the need for deeds, permits or appraisals.

I left my ‘hood more than a decade ago. But I’m making sure that it will never leave me.