Photo by Rich Renomeron

According to an article in Sunday’s issue of the The New York Times Magazine, we’re rich! The D.C. area, Annie Lowrey writes, can largely thank a decade-long expansion of federal spending for its recent growth and acquisitions of superlatives like that of the wealthiest, highest-employed metropolitan region in the United States—positions it continues to cement even as the nation continues through an age of relative austerity.

But it’s not strictly the federal workforce that is driving this expansion. Rather, it is the legions of contractors and other auxiliary professionals who are responsible for new lifestyle effects like condos above coffeeshops, Tesla dealerships and artisanal beverages.

Lowrey uses Jim Abdo, the residential developer, as her lens into D.C.’s boomtime. Abdo’s eponymous company is responsible for gleaming, high-end condominiums and apartment buildings throughout the area, from Gaslight Square—an Arlington complex where the article begins—to new projects in Brookland. As Abdo has it, his ideal buyer fits an increasingly familiar profile:

And many of these young professionals, as Abdo hoped, worked 14-hour days and wanted to live near work, friends, coffee shops and yoga studios. This infusion of human capital, combined with proximity to the Federal tap, proved attractive to a huge number of other businesses looking to hire.

Those young professionals Lowrey refers to aren’t necessarily coming to town to work for Uncle Sam directly, but for much of the first decade of the 21st century, there was no shortage of lucrative government contracts being offered in fields like defense, security, biotechnology and scientific research, and many of those are filled with the relatively young people who want urban amenities like new restaurants and other recreational venues.

But Lowrey’s article is troubled by a couple of elements. First is a bit of geographic ambiguity—it’s easy to fixate on the growth of D.C. as a city, but these trends apply far more toward the region at large than they do solely to the District. Our region is a company town, and the company is never going to go out of business—in fact, it’s the kind of company that began spending more to fill in the gaps left by economic collapses in other markets. How much of that trend, though, applies to the District specifically and not the entire area?

The article starts with Arlington and continually references the contract-heavy defense and scientific agencies that ring the Capital Beltway, but that’s not the only thing fueling the growth. The city of Washington, where unemployment and income inequality remain far higher than in the suburbs, is also going through the same economic expansion that is benefitting many other big cities.

Since 2007, cities—particularly those with competitive rental markets—have flourished, and D.C.’s population trends are a perfect example of why. After 50 years of a shrinking population, as Matthew Yglesias points out, after 2000, more people started moving to D.C. and staying. And with the city’s dominant industry constantly attracting newly transplanted young professionals while others cycle out, D.C.’s non-governmental industries are taking root, and not just in the form of hot restaurants and expensive furniture.

But D.C. isn’t the only place where neighborhoods are being overhauled in to hip, new dwellings surrounded by cool coffeeshops and high-end independent merchants. Sure, it seems that of late Washington can’t seem to open enough small-plates restaurants, single-pour cafés and bars that serve fernet on tap, but the same could be said for various parts of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Charlotte or any number of cities. With an added layer of young people with money to spend, there’s an expectation of a certain class of services that developers are rushing in to provide. Perhaps that’s why the most prescient quote in Lowrey’s story comes not from a guy like Jim Abdo, but from the novelist George Pelecanos, who nods to D.C.’s continuous gentrification:

“People will tell you it’s not about race, but it is,” said George Pelecanos, a Washington native, novelist and screenwriter who worked on “The Wire.” “It’s no longer a black city, and a lot is going to be lost because of that. But the flip side of that is, I try not to get too nostalgic about what Washington was.”

The District government, of which Lowrey makes only a passing mention, has staked much of the city’s economic future on a burgeoning technology sector. It’s a bit unfortunate that the most visible example of that is a $32.5 million tax incentive deal with LivingSocial, which after a few years of propulsive growth recently laid off more than 10 percent of its D.C. employees. But D.C. has also staked itself on catching bigger whales like Microsoft, which is opening an “innovation center” at St. Elizabeths, and smaller startups, like the technology development firm Fortify.vc. The combination of the newer companies and high-tech defense contractors like Northrop Grumman might be why a Forbes ranked the Washington metropolitan area as its No. 1 “New Hot Tech Spot.” Then again, in a tech market that produces both teeth-cleaning coupons and predator drones, it’s not hard to figure which one is the larger breadwinner.

Side note: The photographs in the Times Magazine article were taken by Michael Horsely, who recreated a set of photos of various spots around D.C. he took in the 1980s. Today, obviously, those locations look much different. DCist published some of Horsely’s archival photos in 2010.