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Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
The news came as absolutely no surprise to most observers of the city of Washington, but it still managed to produce banner headlines and an outbreak of hand wringing. Which, I suppose, should also have been no surprise, in a city where issues of race and income lade every public policy discussion. Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released new data on its 2006 state population estimates, which included details on sex, age, and race. As it has continually done since cresting at over half a million nearly forty years ago, D.C.'s black population dropped. This annual occurrence gained new significance in the mid-1990s when the white population, which had itself been dropping since the 1950s, reversed trend and began to tick back up. Its significance increased still more in recent years, when it became clear that demographic trends would return the black population to the minority in this city sometime in the next decade or so (albeit without any other majority taking its place).
The news outlets struggled to place the news in the appropriate context. Many drew a comparison with rising “minority” populations—and you’ll find that this designation rapidly gets difficult to use with any consistency—in areas surrounding the city, the suburbs, but few noted that in both cases the demographic changes constituted reversion to the national (or at least the urban) mean. In Fairfax County, new minority population growth pushed the black population there closer to the national average, while in the District, the drop in black population meant a move in the other direction (though D.C. is much farther away from anything like demographic typicality—blacks in the city still outnumber whites by 100,000 people). The Washington economy is very attractive, and people from across the nation are drawn here; it stands to reason that metropolitan demographics will continue to lose their regional distinctiveness as time goes on.
Some papers sought explanatory factors, and most reached for high housing costs. It’s certainly possible that they're a factor, particularly in the center of the city, where the housing boom of the early 2000s meant skyrocketing prices, a building boom, and population growth. Still, data seem to suggest that the greatest declines in the black population are taking place east of the Anacostia River, which also happens to be home to the cheapest housing stock anywhere in the immediate metropolitan area, including Prince George’s County. In 2006, median home prices in the three zip codes east of the river sat in the mid-$200,000s, while the median price in Prince George’s zip codes adjacent to the District were generally in the upper-$200,000s. The median price for the county as a whole in 2006 was $340,000. Looking at housing prices alone, one might be excused for assuming that lower income individuals across the metropolitan area were pouring into eastern Washington. It's also noteworthy that recent population losses in eastern D.C. have come with stagnant or dropping average incomes in those wards, suggesting that it’s not the poorest who are leaving, but those on the other end of the spectrum. Looking at the odd way that black population trends mirror white ones on about a twenty year lag, it’s easy to imagine that the process of middle-class suburbanization just hasn’t quite finished yet.
But these things all mask more serious dysfunction. In particular, I can’t help but shake my head in stunned wonder when I see that in 1990, 95 percent of Ward 3 was white, while 97 percent of Ward 7 was black. None of the other wards were as monochromatic, but it's astonishing that those two areas, just a few miles apart, were as thoroughly and effectively segregated as if walls with guards had been erected. To me that’s the story in District demographics. It isn’t the gray places that are tinting one way or another, it’s the institutional factors that make it possible and normal for such sharp lines to be drawn. And that, we should be sure to remember, is not a Washington problem, it’s a national problem.
Photo by furcafe.
By 2000, Ward 3 had increased its black population to just over 6 percent. We’re unable to tell whether that trend has continued in one of the city’s priciest wards, where the median home price last year stood at nearly $1 million; we have to wait for the 2010 Census to get a full idea of how the boom in the Washington economy and real estate market have changed the face of the District. It's worth remembering that amid the larger demographic changes, young, well-educated blacks are moving into the city’s hip neighborhoods along with their white, Asian, and Latino counterparts. But black newcomers are outnumbered.
And the city is largely powerless to change these circumstances, because so much of the demographic story is also an economic story. I write often about how our local governments can improve the status of lower income individuals and families—by building more and denser housing with low income set-asides, by improving regional transportation networks, by improving school quality and accessibility, by working with local businesses rather than recruiting national chains, by maintaining high quality public services, and so on—but these are fingers in a breaking dam.
Our demographic portrait is becoming more like that of the nation as a whole, and so is our economic one. Across the nation, economic inequality has begun to attract more attention as a serious and destabilizing national affliction. Where once race split cities down their very middles, economic differences now squeeze low-income families out to the far edges of metropolitan areas or to poorer cities and towns altogether.
Many of those in the black community with economic potential to look after have picked up from Wards 7 and 8 and moved. Others have remained, participating in the city's economy, making a life for themselves in the eastern half of the city, and working to improve the neighborhoods they call home. But a significant number of the people left behind face as dismal an economic picture as any in the metropolitan area. Largely disconnected from the greater Washington boom, many residents sit suffering through double-digit unemployment, waiting for the momentum across the river to push them aside. These individuals mirror populations of all groups around the United States who have been unable to benefit much from economic growth. The question for all of us is how do we pick such people up? How do we give them the tools they need to participate in the economy, and how do we make such participation worth their while, rather than a doomed spiral of stagnant earnings amid rising costs? Because in the end, it doesn't much matter what our cities look like or who lives there; if we watch as millions fall so far behind that they can't catch up, we've failed as a society.
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The tendency is always to inject explanations for these kinds of statistics. But I focus on the point that rising housing costs account for a relatively small percentage of housing turnover, as gentrification is mainly focused in a few neighborhoods. Change is simply a part of the urban landscape. Instead of questioning the "decline" of blacks, we could just as easily praise the rise in diversity. Unfortunately a vocal contingent has decided to ignore the 'white' contingency in the diversity equation and look out only for those like them.
Change has always occurred in American cities, and some neighborhoods in some cities have histories of going through 3, 4, 5 or more majority ethnic groups.
I would posit that as America quits subsidizing the poor to live in cities, America's cities will increasingly look like cities in Europe or Latin America or elsewhere. Those with money will be in the inner core, and those without will be flung to the fields. Picture what happens if America taxes gas the way its taxed everywhere else (much less driving). Picture what happens as America becomes increasingly stabilized, and birth rates continute to drop, and other aspects of other wealthy nations start creeping into our lifestyles.
No need to look at this so much as a racial issue anymore. Its much more an economic and sociological issue that crosses racial lines.
It's no longer NECESSARY to live in a city for the common man like it was in the Industrial Revolution. Cities are no facsimilies of "city living." People are willing to pay dearly for that program.
"Cities are (now) facsimilies of 'city living'."
How absurd to cite housing purchase prices when it is renters who have left the wards east of the Anacostia. The garden apartments built in the 1940s-1960s were subjected to "demolition by neglect" and residents, the working poor, were displaced to the high-rise rentals just across the Prince Georges County line.
I hope things go back to the way they were. All the real Washingtonians please leave PG and move back in the city. It's getting UGLY!!
I agree with JP that in this day and age, it's much more a socioeconomic issue than an issue of race. Unfortunately, this reality will not keep certain morally and politically corrupt individuals from playing the race card over and over again.
Ryan-
According to the link that you provided 84% of Ward 3 was white not 95%.
Unless you consider anyone thats not black to be white.
Sorry, 91% white, 95% white and Asian.
Ryan-
According to the link that you provided 84% of Ward 3 was white not 95%.
Unless you consider anyone thats not black to be white.