Washington is Beautiful but Expensive

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I teach a course in political geography at the University of Prince Edward Island, where in one segment we look at the history, geography, and demographics of some of the world’s major cities.

One of them is Washington, DC, and I sometimes ask students if they’ve ever been to the American capital. Very few have.

That’s a shame, because it is a beautiful, planned city, worthy of a superpower like the United States.

I worked as a journalist in Washington in the 1980s, but was last here in 1993. I’ve now come back for a conference.

For the politicians, lobbyists, and journalists who work here, life here can be hectic, as befits a world centre. We used to call it “Powertown.”

Prior to leaving, I was told by two colleagues who visited the city last year that I would see many changes. They were right.

Most Canadians are familiar, if only in pictures and on television, with the National Mall. With its magnificent museums, monuments and statues, the U.S. Capitol at one end, the Lincoln Memorial at the other, and the White House a little further north and in between, it really is a breathtaking sight.

But they might not have seen the city’s wonderful neighbourhoods, such as Adams-Morgan, Chevy Chase, Cleveland Park, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, and Kalorama. The city is also home to many universities.

There’s a fly in this ointment, however. The city has become so expensive many people can no longer afford to live in it.

The old 14th Street corridor, for example, has been transformed dramatically, as have other gentrified areas. Where there were once shabby streets with pawn ships, cheque-cashing places, and cheap liquor stores, they have been replaced by great restaurants, trendy bars and endless rows of glass condos.

It’s partly the result of the exponential growth of the federal bureaucracy. 

In response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush directed enormous sums of money toward national security efforts that required a highly sophisticated workforce.

The Sarbanes-Oxley law, passed in 2002, led to complex financial regulatory efforts that demanded staffing to match. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 generated a stimulus bill, the Dodd-Frank law and the Affordable Care Act, each of which was a regulatory undertaking of the first order.

Government contracting dollars spent in the Washington area more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, reaching $80 billion, and the amount spent on lobbying more than doubled between 2000 and 2011, reaching $3.3 billion.

By one estimate, there are at least 20,000 registered lobbyists in the city, mainly located along K Street. For every one member of Congress, the influence industry produces about $12.5 million in lobbying.

So, while some three million jobs were lost nationwide in the great recession after 2008, the Washington region, which includes suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, suffered far less.

Essentially, Washington has been the beneficiary of a ­decades-long, taxpayer-funded stimulus package.

There are some 120,000 more people in Washington now than in 2000, bringing the population to almost 700,000. Many are young; the median age is nearly 34, four years below the national average.

And as tens of thousands of the nation’s best-educated workers arrived and during that period, the region added 21,000 households in the nation’s top one per cent.

Not surprisingly, between 1991 and 2016, the average single-family house price in Washington increased 317 per cent, approximately 50 per cent more than the increase nationwide.

In the Shaw neighbourhood, a small area located in the Northwest quadrant which includes the U Street corridor and “Little Ethiopia,” housing prices increased 145 per cent in one decade.

Welcome to the imperial city. You may visit anytime, but you likely can’t afford to live here.