Opinion by
Megan McArdle
Columnist
August 14, 2021 at 1:49 p.m. EDT
For more than 50 years, Washington, D.C., was “Chocolate City” — the nation’s first major majority-Black city, a center for Black arts and culture and a hub of Black political power. But that title has officially been erased, new 2020 Census data reveals.
The latest figures show that D.C. residents who identify as White, alone or in combination, now outnumber those who identify at least partly as Black. While every other ethnic group increased in number between 2010 and 2020, the Black population actually fell by almost 10,000.
This is obviously a story about gentrification and the structural economic disadvantages that left many Black families unable to compete with Whiter and more affluent newcomers for a limited supply of housing in the urban core. But the numbers also tell a more complicated story — one that might have had a happier ending if we made different policy choices.
D.C. became majority-Black in 1957, part of a larger national phenomenon that Alan Ehrenhalt has dubbed “the Great Inversion.” Historically, Ehrenhalt notes, the affluent tended to live in urban cores, where everything was conveniently close, pushing less affluent workers to the urban fringe. But American cities abruptly reversed that pattern mid-century.
This “White flight” was partly driven by court-ordered desegregation of housing and schools. But there were other, non-racist reasons that people left for the suburbs. First was a decades-long crime wave. People also liked single-family homes with yards, and cars made it possible to have one while working in the city.
White people, who didn’t face labor market discrimination or the legacy of slavery, got there first. But plenty of Black people wanted houses with yards and disliked crime, too. As the Civil Rights Act increased economic opportunity, D.C.’s Black population peaked in 1970 at 537,712, then began declining. Decades before any significant increase in the city’s White population, nearby Prince George’s County became the wealthiest Black-majority county in the nation.
Some of the departing residents were replaced by Hispanics, owing to an immigration wave in the 1990s. Meanwhile, America’s Great Inversion began to revert as crime fell and young people stayed single longer. Since 2000, Washington’s population increased by more than 20 percent and diversified so that no racial group had a majority.
Diversity is good; the problem is that economic recovery came at the cost of displacement. And while some of that was probably inevitable, a lot was because of policy choices.
Because housing is an unusually long-lived asset, declining demand can drive rents extremely low for decades. During the Great Inversion, that meant Black families with modest incomes were able to afford sizable homes in urban cores. During the Great Reversion, however, they were disproportionately the ones being displaced. That wouldn’t be good no matter who it happened to, but the stark racial aspect makes it particularly intolerable.
Ideally we’d fix it by ending structural racism. Unfortunately, no one seems to know how to do that. We do have a pretty good idea of how to fit more people into the same space, which is less a matter of social engineering than simple geometry.
Unfortunately, our housing affordability debates tend to focus on replicating what’s been lost: the ultralow rents that occur when a city’s population falls dramatically. It would be extraordinarily difficult to replicate that glut by building since developers won’t want to build more houses than there is demand for. Meanwhile, government attempts to mimic the effects of such a surplus are constrained by the same rising real estate costs as private development.
Buying expensive central real estate for affordable housing means fewer such units will be built overall. Force the cost onto the private sector through inclusionary zoning or rent control, and you may actually make the affordability crisis worse.
That’s not to say that we’re powerless to prevent displacement. We could certainly alter tight zoning, building height restrictions, parking mandates and various NIMBY-enabling legal chokepoints that drive up the price of multifamily housing. We could also make it easier to use the housing we have more efficiently.
In 1950, D.C. accommodated more than 800,000 citizens — 110,000 more than the city currently holds. How? By putting more people in each house. Looking at the census reports from my own neighborhood during the early 20th century, I’m struck by how many families had one or more people rooming with them.
As in so many other places, D.C. policy discourages people from operating rooming houses or turning their basements or attics into apartments. Stringent construction codes, inspection requirements and eviction protections, while well-intentioned, make it more expensive and riskier to rent out part of a dwelling. The result is a city full of very nice, not-very-crowded housing increasingly occupied by the well-off.
Different policy choices wouldn’t have saved the Chocolate City as it was. But it would have let us keep all the chocolate while still adding a rainbow’s worth of other flavors
Megan McArdle
Columnist
August 14, 2021 at 1:49 p.m. EDT
For more than 50 years, Washington, D.C., was “Chocolate City” — the nation’s first major majority-Black city, a center for Black arts and culture and a hub of Black political power. But that title has officially been erased, new 2020 Census data reveals.
The latest figures show that D.C. residents who identify as White, alone or in combination, now outnumber those who identify at least partly as Black. While every other ethnic group increased in number between 2010 and 2020, the Black population actually fell by almost 10,000.
This is obviously a story about gentrification and the structural economic disadvantages that left many Black families unable to compete with Whiter and more affluent newcomers for a limited supply of housing in the urban core. But the numbers also tell a more complicated story — one that might have had a happier ending if we made different policy choices.
D.C. became majority-Black in 1957, part of a larger national phenomenon that Alan Ehrenhalt has dubbed “the Great Inversion.” Historically, Ehrenhalt notes, the affluent tended to live in urban cores, where everything was conveniently close, pushing less affluent workers to the urban fringe. But American cities abruptly reversed that pattern mid-century.
This “White flight” was partly driven by court-ordered desegregation of housing and schools. But there were other, non-racist reasons that people left for the suburbs. First was a decades-long crime wave. People also liked single-family homes with yards, and cars made it possible to have one while working in the city.
White people, who didn’t face labor market discrimination or the legacy of slavery, got there first. But plenty of Black people wanted houses with yards and disliked crime, too. As the Civil Rights Act increased economic opportunity, D.C.’s Black population peaked in 1970 at 537,712, then began declining. Decades before any significant increase in the city’s White population, nearby Prince George’s County became the wealthiest Black-majority county in the nation.
Some of the departing residents were replaced by Hispanics, owing to an immigration wave in the 1990s. Meanwhile, America’s Great Inversion began to revert as crime fell and young people stayed single longer. Since 2000, Washington’s population increased by more than 20 percent and diversified so that no racial group had a majority.
Diversity is good; the problem is that economic recovery came at the cost of displacement. And while some of that was probably inevitable, a lot was because of policy choices.
Because housing is an unusually long-lived asset, declining demand can drive rents extremely low for decades. During the Great Inversion, that meant Black families with modest incomes were able to afford sizable homes in urban cores. During the Great Reversion, however, they were disproportionately the ones being displaced. That wouldn’t be good no matter who it happened to, but the stark racial aspect makes it particularly intolerable.
Ideally we’d fix it by ending structural racism. Unfortunately, no one seems to know how to do that. We do have a pretty good idea of how to fit more people into the same space, which is less a matter of social engineering than simple geometry.
Unfortunately, our housing affordability debates tend to focus on replicating what’s been lost: the ultralow rents that occur when a city’s population falls dramatically. It would be extraordinarily difficult to replicate that glut by building since developers won’t want to build more houses than there is demand for. Meanwhile, government attempts to mimic the effects of such a surplus are constrained by the same rising real estate costs as private development.
Buying expensive central real estate for affordable housing means fewer such units will be built overall. Force the cost onto the private sector through inclusionary zoning or rent control, and you may actually make the affordability crisis worse.
That’s not to say that we’re powerless to prevent displacement. We could certainly alter tight zoning, building height restrictions, parking mandates and various NIMBY-enabling legal chokepoints that drive up the price of multifamily housing. We could also make it easier to use the housing we have more efficiently.
In 1950, D.C. accommodated more than 800,000 citizens — 110,000 more than the city currently holds. How? By putting more people in each house. Looking at the census reports from my own neighborhood during the early 20th century, I’m struck by how many families had one or more people rooming with them.
As in so many other places, D.C. policy discourages people from operating rooming houses or turning their basements or attics into apartments. Stringent construction codes, inspection requirements and eviction protections, while well-intentioned, make it more expensive and riskier to rent out part of a dwelling. The result is a city full of very nice, not-very-crowded housing increasingly occupied by the well-off.
Different policy choices wouldn’t have saved the Chocolate City as it was. But it would have let us keep all the chocolate while still adding a rainbow’s worth of other flavors
