As you read this article in the Washington Post by David Fontana on how Washington, DC has become cool, keep in mind that a half million people commute from Virginia and Maryland into Washington every day and that 1.6 million commute into Manhattan daily, many spending more than an hour each way to do so:
For a long time, Washington was more like Atlanta or Buffalo or Kansas City. It had theater and restaurant scenes just like these cities did, but D.C. theater and restaurants couldn’t be compared to those in Los Angeles, New York or San Francisco. Today, that’s no longer true. And notice how many of Washington’s political elite now move between not just Congress, the White House and K Street, but between Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Favreau, for instance, decamped to Los Angeles after his Obama years. Kass moved to Brooklyn and works on business ventures with San Francisco firms. The exchange of people and businesses goes both ways. Philz Coffee — which started in California and has locations across the state — can now be found in exactly one other place in the country: Washington.
As with the other coolest cities, the rest of America might deep-down admire what Washington is becoming, but it has a hard time relating to it. We want our entertainment and financial and technological capitals to be better than us. We will buy what they sell so that we can be better than we are, even if just for a moment. But we want political leaders to share our values, not be somehow superior to them.
It seems inevitable that cool Washington will struggle to connect with the rest of America so long as it stays on this path. Superstar metropolitan areas are hard for people from middle America to move to and stay in. Some of that is cultural: Moving to Washington used to involve leaving one’s home but not entirely abandoning the ethos of that home; to move here was to relocate but not to defect. But much of the problem is economic: Washington was once a city that a middle-class family from Georgia or Rhode Island could send their child to for a summer in college or for a job after college — and that child could afford to stay here when he or she wanted to buy a home and start a family.
Between 1991 to 2016, though, the average single-family house price in Washington increased 317 percent, approximately 50 percent more than the increase nationwide. In the Shaw neighborhood, which has been at the core of cool Washington, housing prices increased 145 percent in one decade. (Real-estate prices nationwide increased just 50 percent during the same stretch.) One telling indicator of how the city has changed: In 1900, 3 percent of D.C. residents came from New York state. Today, that number is 5 percent. That may seem like a small change, but it came over a period when New York state’s population as a percentage of the entire country shrunk from 10 percent to 6 percent.
The fear is not just that cool Washington will increasingly struggle to relate to America, but also that America will struggle to relate to it. Can people who live in Atlanta or Buffalo or Kansas City fully connect with a metropolitan area where the median home value is half a million dollars? In Kansas City, when the Royals won the World Series in 2015, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to celebrate. Washington has always struggled to keep a baseball team, and now that it has one — and the team is good — it still sometimes has difficulty attracting enough fans to compete with the fans of visiting teams.
I guess there’s more than one way of looking at that, a yin and a yang as it were. On the one hand maybe all of those people spending so much of their lives commuting into the city center just can’t afford the ultra-urban lifestyle they really want. On the other maybe suburban living is what more people really want and they only commute because the government departments, in the case of Washington, DC, are clinging bitterly to an 18th century model of doing business. Just as a comparison on a daily basis I meet with people in six different timezones. I go into the office because my employer insists on it rather than because it’s effective, efficient, or necessary.
Here’s a gauge: the people moving into the most urbanized areas tend to be foreign-born while those moving away from them tend to be native-born. In Washington, DC people with incomes over $200,000 per year tend to be white; people with incomes under $30,000 tend to be black. Cool, eh?
Here’s my opinion. We should stop worrying about an enemy bombing Washington, DC and do it ourselves. The functions of government shouldn’t be centralized; they should be dispersed throughout the country. It’s more resilient, fairer, and more conducive to good government. What makes Washington rich and cool is nostalgia.
