“It’s like they started to see the money coming in and D.C. rising in its desirability or whatever, and it felt to me like the city leaders were very drunk on that … And they remain greedy for more.”
One of the biggest disruptions has been the exodus of the Black middle class. D.C. was once an enclave for Black professionals and middle-class Black families, filled with all-Black neighborhoods with elegant row houses in some neighborhoods, rolling lawns and colonials in another, and, in upper Northwest D.C — the Gold Coast — stately mansions. But crack hit the city hard in the ’80s and ’90s. Downtown became a ghost town. In recent decades, many of those families have moved to nearby suburbs in pursuit of bigger homes, better schools or less crime.
“I was born in the ’70s,” Bowser said. “So [my family] experienced the D.C. where the schools weren’t good and the neighborhoods weren’t safe. So we saw a lot of people who had good jobs — government jobs, some D.C. government, Post Office, Metro — who were D.C. residents born and raised here, pick up sticks and move to the suburbs.”
As a result, D.C.’s Black middle class “doesn’t exist in the same way” today, said Sharon Pratt, who served as mayor from 1991 to 1995, before Barry took office again in 1995. While more affluent families once flocked to neighborhoods like the Gold Coast, their children did not. “They moved to Maryland where they could get more home for less money and where they were more welcome,” Pratt said. Prince George’s Black population was soaring — rising from 50.7 percent to 62.7 percent from 1990 to 2000 — while D.C.’s was plummeting, part of a national trend of increasingly diversifying suburbs. Today, Prince George’s County is one of the wealthiest majority-Black counties in the country.
Meanwhile, as the Black middle class was hollowed out in the city, the Black-white divide became increasingly an economic split as well. In 2012, to address the city’s declining Black population, the city formed the Commission on African American Affairs. In 2017, the commission released a report outlining staggering gaps between Black and white residents in education, employment and wealth — with trend lines indicating the Black/white wealth gap was growing wider.
That report proved prophetic: In 2019, census data showed the median income for white households was about $150,000 compared with $49,000 for Black households.
Black households left behind as D.C. incomes increased
The report concluded with 13 policy recommendations to expand affordable housing and increase employment opportunities, warning city officials that “growing inequalities are endangering the African American community in D.C.”
The report was intended to be a deeply researched call to action. But the city didn’t allocate the resources needed to turn those recommendations into policy, said Maurice Jackson, the commission’s inaugural chair and an associate professor at Georgetown University.
“They were promoting this notion of Chocolate City as, ‘Looking good, everything is fine, people,’” Jackson said. “But I knew the numbers were just the opposite.”
Each of the forces at work in D.C. is understandable. And those forces aren’t unique to D.C.: a city trying to get back on its feet; a white professional influx driven by fancy condos and trendy urban living; Black middle-class families, looking, like every other generation of Americans, for more room and better schools in the ’burbs.
