Alex Massie Alex Massie

A local post for local people

Ezra Klein looks at lifestyle amenities of the sort that bright young white folks like to have in their city and observes that Portland and Seattle score better on this than Washington DC. So far so good. Then he adds:

DC, by contrast, has a lot of white people working in it, but is actually only 39% white, and has a city government that does not derive primary political support from transient white voters. So the character of the city actually does more to represent its inhabitants. Which seems rational. Moreover, the white people there 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.

This is a little odd (though I should add that Ezra himself has an update acknowledging that he may be mistaken on this one). As Ryan Avent notes there are plenty of folk in DC who think the city government is more interested in the Kennedy Center set than the people who live on the “wrong” side of the Anacostia. You can make a pretty good case, for instance, that the $650m or so the city is spending on the new Washington Nationals ballpark is a boondoggle for the affluent white middle classes (and the team’s mega-rich owners of course) that will have no obvious economic benefit to the city.

Still, Ezra’s idea that there’s “little need” for the city government “to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents” is rather odd since that’s exactly what the city has been trying to do for the past ten years. Indeed Mayor Anthony Williams’ biggest challenges were to a) restore fiscal sanity to the city and b) attract new residents to slow or reverse the city’s population drain.

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