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.