Good piece. The CP article was a bit puzzling -- none of the indicators of decline are rooted in statistical evidence other than the specious Census results. Overall crime is down in the District (despite concerns about a slight uptick). Choosing the best available school options for families is often a complicated process. Lower cost/tax exurbs struggle to accomodate the schooling demands of new residents as much as DC struggles to maintain its base.

Aside from interviewing such a narrow DC expat sample, they also touch on a key problem with education in DC -- special ed students drain an inordinate percentage of overal DCPS budget (through no fault of the students or their families). Not to sound callous, but it sounds like win-win for such families to move to communities where they are better served.

I liked the way the CP piece focused on the (bad) decision to emphasize condos over families.

"D.C. will retain many families because of its uniqueness and the unrivalled amenities contained within its borders"

What unrivalled amenities? The schools are still way, way, worse than those in MD and VA (and a school modernization is not going to change that that much). Recreational facilities in the District are far fewer and way worse than those offered by the surrounding counties. DC's social services are hardly unrivalled by VA and MD. Many of the great features of DC (museums, culture, etc.) are available to VA and MD residents.

What does DC offer a family that VA and MD cannot? I'll grant that city living is more appealing to many, and shorter commutes are obviously nice, but when you stack up all that you get with 500k in VA and MD, versus what you get in the District, especially when you have kids, it's difficult to say DC offers its families "unrivalled amenities".

There's a reason why few even well off people stay in DC once they start having kids. It's still way more expensive than VA and MD. Especially if you think that sending your kids to DCPS is not an option, as most people think.

FWIW -- Last week the city completed its first ever formal challenge to the Census. Once submitted (later this week or early next week)it is highly likely that the US Census DC population estimate will be revised substantially upward -- probably showing DC's first sustained period of population growth since the 1940s (with -- it is important to note -- strongly superior demos). The real significance here is that the city has at long last managed to get its act together to challenge the obvious flaws of the interdecenial estimate.

Matt F's right. The land cost at McMillan (et al) will be the highest factor. That land cost will not be low, even if the city owns it. It will be judged as a market value asset.

Reid's right. The city continues to bleed families: Lack of acceptable schools, relatively unsafe neighborhoods, and, where schools are good and neighborhoods are safe(r), the cost of living greatly exceeds that in Lorton, and it is rising at a rate faster than Lorton.

DCist is right: The census didn't at all capture the population uptick, let alone the baby boomlet, in my Dupont neighborhood. Patterson knows this, thank heavens.

Ah, never mind then, didn't know that about those areas.

Hi, I'm Mike. I co-wrote the City Paper article.

Couple points to make:

I'm rather agnostic on what's going to happen with the count in the end. I don't think the Census Bureau's dim estimates/projections are absolutely right, just that they might be more right than the District would like to admit.

Ryan's analysis here skips over one of the main points I made in the article, which is that the District's household size has been shrinking for years and is not expected to increase until the end of the decade. Even then, the District's top demographer told me that the only reason they have to expect household sizes to increase is blind faith that the school system will improve.

That means that the District will need tens of thousands of new, occupied housing units just to compensate for the smaller households. I believe the city estimates that 7,000 new housing units have been built since 2000--that's a start. Certainly you can add in a few thousand rehabbed units, but there's still going to be a massive need for housing if the city wants 100,000 new residents. (Check a Brookings Institution report released last month on that point.)

The passage that Ryan quotes is more illustrative what happened in the District from the '70s into the mid-'90s, not so much what is happening today, but the consequences of that cycle are certainly what still plague the District's schools and makes families reticent to settle here today. Don't read too much into the rising percentages of children; that has as much to do with death rates as births. Keep your eye on net increases in the child population. And those still doesn't mean much if parents move out once those kids are middle-school age, which is a fairly common occurance. (Let alone what's happening "around the periphery, in the thousands of townhomes and single-family houses that dot the District," where black flight continues apace, with *no* DINK and SINK households to replace them.)

And I don't quite see the silver lining in the Maroneys' tale. Very few families are willing to put up with what they did. I have to agree with the commenter who points out that D.C.'s amenities are far from unrivalled when it comes to raising a family in the city. I love cities, I love the District, but it doesn't do any good to sugarcoat reality. I don't quite follow whether you're arguing that the District doesn't need families or what, but if the city is going to grow its population like it wants to, it does need them. And it has done very little to bring them or keep them here. That's what this story was about.

I agree with Mike, that the city does need to attract families in order to reach its population goals.

The demographics in DC are interesting, to say the least. The metro area is growing, but it's increasingly difficult for most families to purchase property anywhere near D.C., let alone inside the city. Maybe my wife and I could afford a $350,000 1BR condo in the District... but who wants to raise a family in a tiny, expensive apartment. Sure, we could go into the real estate business, buy a condo and rent it, eventually selling it. But where do you live in the meantime? Yeah, out in the exburbs. Unless you have a helluva awesome job in the area, why stay more than a few years?

That's the big problem, isn't it? I'm not an expert on D.C. demographics, but I'd be interested to see some figures on how many people stay in the District for a significant period of time... Has this figure remained the same over time, decreased? I'd think it hasn't increased... but I don't know.

Some interesting questions to ponder, and while the real estate boom is making a lot of people wealthy, it's going to make it impossible for more people to move to the District and make it their home (for good).

also almost all the people on my block have lived there for at least 10 years. Not sure how idicative of DC as a whole, but I thought I'd throw it out there....

My sense as someone who watches the real estate market (In that, I'm just as qualified as the next homeowner) is that in NW DC (and Capital Hill), prices range from $600-$700 dollars per square foot for a very desirable neighborhood, to $250 per square foot for a violent-crime hotspot. That means that a 1200 sf dwelling in an "affordable" neighborhood (where most of us would not want to raise children) is now about $300,000. DC's AMI is something like $50K, while the area AMI is about $80K, right?
Let's run some rough numbers: $50K/yr, after taxes, equals something like $2,500/month. A 280K loan at 7% costs about $1900/month to service the principle and interest. Add in taxes and insurance, and you've left less than $500/month for food, medical, transportation- and everything else. This is what's driving out the less-affluent. People talk about gentrification as a black/white issue- it's not. It's a money and comparative value thing.

Right you are, Raw. I was considering spaces of a size that a family could fit and remain in (a smallish 1200sf), and trying to set a wide price bracket. The specific areas I had in mind when I chose the numbers are Kalorama/Dupont and Pleasant Plains, aka Columbia Heights East. I chose these because both are family neighborhoods, and they reflect the price and income poles of the city.

I'll admit I didn't consider other quadrants of the city. I didn't do so for the very reason that you point out- the vast majority of people don't think of them. I guess I could have talked about Brookland or Takoma Park. But those who move into NE, SE, or SW still get hit with the non-housing comparative value concerns (schools, etc)

I was struck by the comment in the article about how DC's population is declinging in part due to the flight of poorer, but larger, black families.

I thought the article should've delved into whether these families are generally more of a contributer to DC's coffers than a drain. Instead, it took the easy way out and didn't go there.

Don't get me wrong. I believe strongly in affordable housing and diversity and all that. And I certainly don't mean to denigrate the lower income folks. I dislike how the article sniffed at the concept that cities need money to run on and that single yuppies bring in more of it than lower income people do.

I guess I thought the author had an unrealistic or ultra-leftist view of things. If you think about it, just calling white, educated, professional people "yuppie" is pretty derogatory.

Delrayder
http://delradius.blogspot.com/

I second the comments from Delrayder. I too would love to see affordable housing for working class families. But, then, the answer to affordable housing is quite simple: make the literally acres of affordable housing in NE and east of the river reasonably safe (using, in part, the tax revenue of the much-maligned yuppies).

But let's face reality. A city can't survive on the income from liquor stores and parking tickets. It takes real income earners to support a city.

You can call them yuppies if it makes you feel superior. But yuppies pay for city services. And, to be perfectly blunt, a welfare mom with five kids does not. In fact, in economic terms she and her family are a burden on the city. And, statistically speaking, at least one of her children will most likely end up being part of the very expensive crime problem in DC. It takes the income of the much-hated yuppies to make up for the city services that she is consuming, and will in all likelihood continue to consume for as long as she lives in DC.

That's not to say all poor people suck and are leeches on society. Far from it. I was raised in what most people would think was abject poverty. And I know my family was a drain on the local economy for a brief period. But we worked our way out of that and went on to become productive taxpayers.

Sadly, many in DC have no such goals. When you see three generations of a family of welfare recipients in the same public housing complex in DC you realize that this sort of mentality and reality is simply unsupportable, from a basic economic standpoint.

A city populated primarily by poor people that contribute little or nothing to the city is simply unsustainable. Period.

The City Paper ran a fascinating article a year or so ago. It detailed the fire and ambulance runs that had to be done on a daily basis to deal with the drunks and panhandlers on H Street NE. The cost to the city was staggering. Some repeat 'falling out' drunks cost the city literally tens of thousands of dollars a year.

I'm not sorry at all to see these folks pack up and move anywhere else they want to go, as long as I don't have to support them.

H Street NE is improving literally by the day. The much-hated yuppies are moving in. And it's the much-hated yuppies that will turn the huge financial drain that is H Street NE into a profitable tax-generator for the city. In addition, we'll get a terrific neighborhood resource, with actual restaurants and shops that don't suck and that you don't risk life and limb to get to.

"Yuppie" is almost always used in a derogatory manner, and is usually shorthand slang for someone with no soul, someone who is greedy and self-absorbed above all else.

In stories about gentrification it's almost always used that way.

The 50 k a year family can still live in DC. They just can't afford to buy a house on Capitol Hill proper, in Georgetown, Dupont, etc. They can probably rent in many areas of the city, albeit probably not as easily as years past.

Cost of living in DC is not uniformly rising. The cost of owning property in DC has skyrocketed up from the artificially low basement levels we had primarily because of our crack-smoking mayor, his policies, and the international joke our city became.

Actually rents have not been rising nearly like housing sale prices have. In fact, in some areas rents are actually decreasing over, say, three years ago.

And I hate to be a hard-ass, but if a couple only makes $50,000 a year then they need to realize that living in any major city downtown area isn't going to be possible if they have two or more kids. It's just an economic reality, and that's nothing new. There are a number of suburbs where 2 BR apartments that are affordable for a family in that income group. And as several posters have accurately pointed out, the 'burbs have a lot of amenities for families that DC doesn't really have.

No, the financial obligations of having kids is not irrelevant. Part of the decision to have kids has to be economic. And, yes, it probably means leaving the inner city, for many people. It's been that way for decades, probably longer.

But that is not the death knell for the city.

As for Dupont being a bohemian community, that's a good point, but peace corps types, artists, and students don't fund a city. People with actual sizeable salaries do.

I too wrote a (very long) response to the City Paper article. It doesn't get into the issues as much that Mike D highlights in his response above, although I intend to cover that in another blog entry. However, you will see that something I wrote in 2003, published in themail at www.dcwatch.com, discusses all those issues and many more--it's included in this blog entry:

http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2006/05/its-demography-reaction-to-city-paper.html

As I mentioned in the entry, it would have been far more helpful to those of us who raised (and raise) these concerns all long, for the City Paper to have done such an article 3 years ago, rather than today.

Furthermore, and I say this as a quite faithful City Paper reader (although much less so today) for the almost 19 years I've lived in DC, the City Paper doesn't cover DC issues that well, at least not in comparison to how the Baltimore City Paper, the Philadelphia City Paper, and the Philadelphia Weekly cover their respective cities.

This is but one more example. You go for the cute, somewhat smart ass headline, and a pretty glib coverage of the issues, etc. (Not that I expect you to write an academic-like exegesis the way I do...)

You don't think that advocates know how important it is to rebuild the city's insitutions and quality of life? We do, and we don't seem to be getting the kind of traction we need to make it happen. More thoughtful articles in your paper would help. (Bring back Mark Jenkins' "Streetscapes" column!)

E.g., this is from an op-ed piece I wrote comparing DC to Philadelphia, which ran in the Philadelphia Daily News in 2003:

"Sure, you need to improve municipal services and public safety. But in Washington, our crime rate is going up, our public schools aren't great, and the improvement of most city services seems to have stalled. Even so, demand for housing in the center city is strong - thousands of new units are being constructed, houses vacant for years are being renovated, and our neighborhood commercial districts are beginning to turn around."

Do you think I am happy about that? And what kinds of cover stories ran in the City Paper from the time this op-ed ran in late October 2003 to today?

I'm responding to Mark's comments.

First off, Hillman is right. Yuppie is almost always used to denigrate young (typically white) kids who went to college and now have jobs, god forbid. Ironically, the people who use the term most slanderously are almost always yuppies themselves. How many non-yuppies write for the city paper? And buying your pansies at Garden District instead of Lowe's doesn't make you blue collar.

Second, who are the other "leeches on society" you refer to?

Third, Dupont gentrified and the Bohemian crowd moved to other places, like Logan Circle, Shaw, Del Ray and Clarendon, which is a good thing. Cities are living organisms, and gentrification/urban renewal is highly desirable. In fact, from what I've read, SE DC has been begging for investment, because the people want jobs. Enjoyment of crime and blight is a luxury of people who aren't stuck in it.

At the end of the day, too many people place too much emphasis on place, believing that Dupont must be bohemian or Shaw must be black. And it's not healthy or accurate to say someone is "urban" or "hip" because they live at U Street and "poor" or "ghetto" because they live in NE or "boring" or "suburban" because they live in Arlington. Cities are more complex than that, and people are too.

Delrayder
http://delradius.blogspot.com/

I think the question everyone is asking here is "what makes a healthy city?" The population of a city is irrelevant; whether it can provide good schools, high quality of life and low crime while still breaking even financially is the real mark of a healthy city. I can assure you, that even if DC dropped to 400,000 people but fixed its schools and lowered the crime rate, there wouldn't be a single abandoned building in the city.

Whenever I compare consolidated sales data and RE listings, I find a bit of a contradiction. Searching MLS, there is literally nothing 1BD+ below 200K in DC West of Anacostia and not super deep in NE. When I look at sales data in CP, there are some places listed as having sold for less than 200K, some for substantially less than 200K. Any idea where to look for those properies.

Don... $2.2 million is not representative of the inner burbs. Pick up a paper and look at home prices in Arlington and Alexandria... and I don't mean Old Town or Lyon Village.

you want to fix the school system, heres a list:

1.abolish the teachers union-its a shame the government leaders put salaries and pensions of union workers above the education of the kids

Something a lot of people don't know is that private schools, for the most part, pay less than public schools. Seriously. Sure, the super-prestigious academies that your kids will never go to pay more, but your average parochial school pays shit. Pay shit wages, get shit teachers. Any teacher who can cut it works for public schools because they pay more because they're union. Cut the pay (which is what anti-union types really mean), and you'll decrease the quality of education, not increase it.

2.embrace school choice-why are some parents being forced by their elected officials to keep sending their kids to these dysfunctional public schools when these same elected hypocrites send their kids to private schools

OMG, some public officials are hypocrites, let's burn down all the schools!!!11eleven! If people want to send their kids to private schools, go ahead. If they want to increase their taxes to fund vouchers for (non-religious) private schools, fine, so long as those schools agree to give up the right to expel problem students. See, part of the reason why DC schools have problems is because they are, in part, the dumping grounds for every problem student in the district. Is little Johnny raising hell at St. Mary's of the Apocalypse? No problem, just expel his sorry ass. The school is under no obligation to educate him. Public schools, however, ARE. I guarantee you that if you offered 100% tuition reimbursement to private schools so long as they promise admission on a first-come, first-serve method and dropped the ability for easy expulsions, NONE would take DC up on the offer. They know how expensive it is.

3.change the cirriculum-why are high schoolers still required to take finger painting before graduating? did you know Ballou high still has a typing class with ACTUAL TYPEWRITERS! kids should be required to learn about finance, credit, law, technology and other things that matter in todays world.

WHERE are kids taking finger-painting? Or is that your equivalent of Reagan's imaginary welfare queens? I personally never took an art class outside of middle school - just a couple of music classes in high school. I think learning the basics - art, history, math, sciences - with life applications is a lovely idea, though.

4. rebuild the schools-if we can find 700 mill for a baseball stadium (which I am still a big supporter of) then we can find money to start building new high schools first and then work are way down

I agree with you on this, 100%. Will you support the taxes to pay off a $3 billion bond?

5.completely disruptive kids from the school system. peer presure still exist and no one once to be the uncool nerd in class thats trying to learn while the cool (dumb) guy gets all the props for hindering everyone in clas from learning by being the class clown

Hey, great idea - find the kids with the most problems and the highest likleyhood of trouble down the road, and expel them! Isolation will work wonders for these kids!

So what could be done to fix the schools? First, acknowledge that DC is a poor school district, and there are going to be a LOT of kids with home problems. They need extra care and extra attention, and that means extra money. Don't expect the same bang for your buck as happy, wealthy suburban districts, where private nannies, tutors and coaches pick up a lot of the slack. Second off, cut the administrative costs. Don't the DC public schools spend an obscenely high percentage of the budget on administrators? Hire more teachers and put the money into their classrooms. Part of this includes continuing to aggressively shut down ineffective, redundant schools.

And most importantly, recognize that systemmic problems like those in DC's public schools will take a generation to correct. Try some patience.

To Eastside Yuppie and Logan Resident:

Thanks for the kinds words. Sadly, we've been cowed into being unable to state the obvious in DC, mostly by the race and class baiting that was so heartily endorsed by our crack smoking mayor for so many years.

I'd love to see a city where there was safe, affordable housing in cool neighborhoods for all, even the very poor, and everyone else.

But that just isn't how cities run. You can't run a city just on liquor store and parking ticket revenue while doling out tens of millions to subsidize people's apartments, their health care, their crime habits, etc.. At some point you are just out of money and your city is a rathole.

A good many families in DC are consuming tens of thousands more in city services than they will ever contribute. Saying so doesn't make you a racist or a classist. It makes you honest.

Sure, it'd be great to have a utopian world we we could all work for Greenpeace (or better yet, not work at all), then come home to our lavish subsidized apartment in a trendy neighborhood.

But that's not reality.

And I'm sick to death of being called a racist and such for pointing that out.

And, ironically, trying to run a city filled primarily with poor people hurts the poor more than anyone else. That's a fact that seems to be lost on the fear and division-mongers amongst us.

The point about the schools is interesting. Yes, I'd love terrific schools. But I'm no fool. I know that 40 years of entrenched arrogance and laziness in the school system ain't going away in my lifetime (note: I'm not saying all teachers and school employees fit this mold - certainly not - but I've met enough that do to know that it's a regular pattern).

I'll never forget when I was mugged in front of my own home about 10 years ago. The three muggers were residents of a large public housing complex two blocks away. The cops were very familiar with them. They and their parents all lived free at public expense, and apparently had since the kids had been born.

It's an odd feeling - knowing that your taxes are supporting the very group that just held a gun to your genitals and informed you that they had the power to make sure you were the last in your family line.

Yes, an effort should be made to provide what we now call 'workforce' housing. That's a laudable goal. And, frankly, it should come at the expense of those that have lived free at my expense for 20 years or longer while making no real effort to actually work or contribute to the city.

There'd be plenty of SAFE affordable workforce housing in literally hundreds of blocks of housing already existing in NE and east of the river if we'd just get rid of the little hooligans running the streets of the city with little or no interference from the police.

But, then, so many police in DC (again, not all) have the same DC mentality - they aren't here to help, they are here to collect a city paycheck and go home.

To Hillman and Delrayder:

No arguement from me that cities need taxpayers to foot the bill- that's obvious. Likewise about the straw-argument re: welfare mothers. I will argue, though, that we shouldn't exhibit triumphaism about displacing those of relatively limited means and ability- it's distasteful. I say this as someone who's actively taken legal action to displace more than one economically marginal family, though obviously not because they were economically marginal, but because they were dangerous to the community.

The point I was trying but apparently failed to make with my posts is that all those with lesser disposable income are being forced out. That's not healthy now, nor does it bode well for your (and my) future. Given the right population sample, any of us could fall on the wrong side of the bell curve. And, hey, I come from a family of doctors and lawyers (and JD/MDs), but my grandparents were teachers and sports coaches. Where should these folks live? Is it in the interest of those they serve (us) to saddle them with a 3 hour daily commute?

The point I made about welfare mothers is not a strawman argument. It's a very real fact of economic life in DC.

I don't know what 'lesser disposable income' means exactly, but I guarantee you that a middle income person can still find housing in DC. It just probably won't be in a trendy area like Logan, Capitol Hill, etc. But it may be - given the number of rent controlled apts in these areas.

Can a family on a low income find housing in DC? Maybe yes, maybe no.

DC could lose half of it's low and moderate low income population and they'd still be an unusually large portion of the population. Fact is the poor were grouped here artificially because of the suburban flight in the '60s (and, before that, from the mass immigration of the very poor into DC as a symbolic capital after the Civil War). Yes, that artificial constraint is changing. But it was artificial to begin with.

I'm not quite sure what triumphaism is, but if it means that I'm not afraid to show that I'm happy when the losers that held me up at gunpoint while sucking down my tax dollars may see their free ride ending, then count me guilty.

Fact is the 'burbs need to start shouldering their share of the poor and moderate poor.

Workforce housing is an issue in DC, but our emphasis on caring only for the very poor while demanding nothing in return has actually ruined things for the workforce folks. Why? Our moderately price neighborhoods are now unsafe and ruled by the very thugs whose families sucked down our tax dollars unsupervised and uncontrolled for the last forty years.

"I'm not quite sure what triumphaism is, but if it means that I'm not afraid to show that I'm happy when the losers that held me up at gunpoint while sucking down my tax dollars may see their free ride ending, then count me guilty."

We're obviously both concerned about what I'll broadly term the environment of our city. I would say that your focus is on the above, whereas my focus is on preventing the next generation of "losers". An example of what I find wrong: In a neighborhood I know well, a DCPS after and evening care center was recently shut down. Formerly, it had offered a supervised environment for children (many of single-parent families, on wellfare and section 8) a supervised environment while the head-of-household was off at work, or doing drugs, or whatever. Now that it's closed, these kids have no supervision. They run wild in the streets 'till all hours, and increasingly do vandilism and serve as drug mules. I'm talking about children aged 4 to, maybe, 14.

It's incredibly short-sighted not to think about what these kids are, and aren't learning, and how that impacts all of us.