It’s rare that any of the well-read political blogs based here in Washington take on issues that fit within DCist’s mandate to stick mainly to local issues, but when they do, boy howdy, they can really make a mess of things for themselves. The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein has already issued a mea culpa for a post he put up late last night on his personal blog, which wondered why there aren’t more amenities for wealthy young white people in D.C. like there are in cities such as Portland and Seattle — but not before receiving harsh rebukes from his peers for basically not knowing what he was talking about.

The whole thing starts off with Klein linking to a new study debunking a Cato Institute study that claimed Portland’s efforts at applying New Urbanism in its city planning were ruining the town. Klein then goes on to assert that D.C. is less attractive to educated, young, white people than Portland or Seattle in terms of density of coffee shops, book stores and the like, and to surmise that the reason is that the city government has fewer incentives to attract those sorts of people because of their status as a minority in black-majority Washington.

Moreover, the white people [in D.C.] basically have to be there. You don’t move to DC because it’s awesome, you move because it’s where your work is. So there’s little need to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents.

Photo by IntangibleArts