Not that often in the past decade.

As riders face another fare hike, we take a look back.

Homicide statistics have often been bandied about as an easily digestible, if flawed, metric of how well a mayor has battled crime during a given administration. Not surprisingly, the homicide watch in D.C. — a city where, at one point in the late 1980s and early 90s, more than 400 people were being murdered every year — has gotten a lot of attention during outgoing Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term. Police Chief Cathy Lanier stoked additional interest in the number by proclaiming her goal to reduce the city’s homicide total to under 100. Lanier and Fenty didn’t reach that goal during the mayor’s term. But that hasn’t stopped the media from proclaiming Fenty’s excellent performance in tamping down the homicide count during his nearly four years in office.

In yesterday’s Go Home Already, I linked to a story which talked about the results of a report conducted by Wider Opportunities for Women. The report discussed the amount of money that people under certain conditions in different areas around the Washington metro area need to make in order to feel financially “secure.” Of course, there’s serious wiggle room in that phrase, and plenty of commenters argued the validity of the numbers cited — for instance, a single person without children to support in the District was deemed to need a yearly income of $32,000 per year to be “stable.” I finally got a chance to peruse the report, titled “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the Washington, DC Metro Area,” this morning, and thought that I’d share some of the information inside of its pages for you to squabble over.

The poll which revealed that Vince Gray holds a big lead on Mayor Adrian Fenty as we head into the mayoral homestretch was interesting and all. But we found that there were a couple of results in the middle of the poll which were pretty shiny happy things in and of themselves, regardless of whether you’re in the tank for Fenty, Gray, or are planning on writing in your dog on September 14. Based on the raw data, people just seem think that things are going pretty well around this place.