Former editor-in-chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.

Here’s an interesting question to consider: is the District of Columbia becoming less diverse? With whites once again moving into the city, the question of the sustainability of the District’s multicultural heritage has been raised, but what do recent demographic shifts actually suggest about the future of a diverse D.C.? Over the past decade, the city as a whole has become less black, though blacks still make up over half of the city’s population. This might not be the case for long; within ten years, and possibly by the 2010 Census, the District may not have a majority race group.

It isn’t difficult to see why. Since 2000, the number of non-Hispanic whites in the city has grown from 28 to 31 percent. The population of Asians has increased from 3 to 3.5 percent. And the share of Hispanics of any race in the city has grown from 7.9 percent to 8.2 percent.

Within the city, diversity trends have been more difficult to pin down. In Ward 3, long the city’s whitest, the share of blacks and Asians in the population has increased in recent years, while the white population share has declined slightly (to 80 percent). In Ward 8, on the other hand, the population actually became more black between 1990 and 2000, when the share of African-Americans residing there rose from 91 to 93 percent, though there is a good chance that trend has reversed itself amid the shifts and growth of the past few years.

Of course, racial and ethnic classifications aren’t the only way to measure diversity. Tolerance of various lifestyles is another—one on which the city, despite recent headlines, has a good track record. Diversity of income is yet another, and on that score the District has struggled, along with the rest of the nation. Increasingly, a fairly even distribution of income across the city and within neighborhoods has given way to polarization.

Photo by Pianoman75