The Rise of Ward 6 Residential Segregation by Income

On Wednesday, the Post reported on a Pew Research Center report on rising residential segregation by income in the United States. Basically, it said that those with higher incomes were living more with those with higher incomes, and those with lower incomes are living more with those with lower incomes. However, the majority of people still live in middle-income or mixed-income areas. The take away is that income inequality has continued to increase since about 1967 and people are living in ever more economically homogeneous areas.

One issue that is not explored in the report is that DC and Ward 6 have areas with extremely high incomes, extremely high incomes on a national scale. The DC median household income is $58,526, which means that half of the population makes above this amount and half of the population makes below this amount. The US median household income is $51,914. Census tract 9.01 in NW (between Nebraska, MacArthur, Massachusetts Avenues) has the highest median household income in DC and likely one of the highest in the US -- $213,000 -- which means that 50% of the households in that census tract make more than $213,000. In DC, there are 8 census tracts with a median household income over $130,000. In Ward 6, we have two census tracts with among the highest median incomes in the city, more than those in many Georgetown census tracts. Census tract 67 and Census tract 81 are two of these eight very wealthy census tracts (see map below). Census tract 67 has a median household income of $141,000, while next-door census tract 81's is $132,000.



Of course, a $213,000 household income would be quite easy to obtain with two primary care physicians in the household. Yet, such a household income is very high in DC and in the nation. When living in such super-rich census tracts, residents do not in fact feel as rich as they are and do not necessarily understand how little many others are paid for full-time work in the same city. (A NY Times blog very interestingly discussed this situation in its post "Why so many rich people don't feel very rich.") In 2010, you were the top 5% of household incomes nationwide if your household made $180,810 or more (Census report). A household income of $100,065 put you in the top 20%. Living in a census tract, like census tract 67 in Ward 6, with 50% of the residents making over $144,000 is rather unusual in the United States and means that people are really very wealthy.

In this table, we can see that, in census tract 67, the average family income increased every decade, while the residents in the poorest census tract in DC had dramatic declines in their average family income:


As Columbia University sociology professor Saskia Sassen argues, these expanding income inequalities are not the result of some natural trend in cities. Before 1968 or so, income inequality in the United States had been declining for decades (see chart below). People make these income inequalities. How does living in a very wealthy census tract and among very wealthy neighbors and friends make these inequalities less visible or seem rather natural?



P.S. Another topic for discussion from the report: "residential isolation by race is more prevalent than residential isolation by income" (p. 14).

Why does Jane Jacobs matter?

Probably most people don't know much about Jane Jacobs (on left in photo), but she is very important for New Urbanists, an influential group in DC and elsewhere. For example, the Greater Greater Washington blog seems to follow New Urbanism and a certain interpretation of Jane Jacobs' work.

Like many groups, New Urbanists reject the urban renewal represented by Robert Moses (on right in photo). After the Second World War, Robert Moses came to represent the archetypical powerful urban planner, who bulldozed the past and recreated the city (and the suburb) for the car by building new bridges, public housing projects, and highways. By the 1950s, communities resisted this "urban renewal" through demolition. In 1955, the Capitol Hill Restoration Society began its fight against plans to destroy row houses to make way for highways, large government office buildings, etc. Jane Jacobs represented this kind of resistance and the desire to create real, authentic community in opposition to faceless development. The New Urbanists have rejected Robert Moses' corporate/government city and have embraced Jane Jacobs' urban village.

However, in her Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Brooklyn College sociologist Sharon Zukin has shown that the dichotomy of Moses vs. Jacobs no longer applies. Now, developers and government officials fuse Moses' corporate/government city with Jacob's urban village. Development is now a new kind of urban renewal with a human face.

An example of this fusion is the HOPE-VI-funded transformation of Arthur Capper public housing into Capitol Quarter (see my previous post). As with the old urban renewal, HOPE VI removed the buildings and the people and sought to create a completely new community on an assumed blank slate. However, in contrast to the old urban renewal, under the influence of Jane Jacobs, a more varied architecture was introduced (row houses, apartment buildings, office buildings, etc) and more varied incomes were introduced. A firm was even brought in as "architects of community," to socially engineer community.

While Jacobs supported diverse and dense neighborhoods, she would have rejected such eradication of existing communities, introduction of buildings built all at the same time, planned communities, and the potential for, in her words, the "Great Blight of Dullness." She might have been relieved by the street life some blocks away. Capper Carrollsburg had lively street life, which Jane Jacobs would have likely suggested that planners build on, rather than destroy. So, New Urbanists may have made Jacobs the new planning orthodoxy, but I don't think that Jacobs would have wanted to be part of that orthodoxy and would have seen it as window dressing on the urban renewal she rejected. Jane Jacobs matters because urban planners and especially New Urbanists have used certain interpretations of her ideas.