Quote:
Originally Posted by jmecklenborg
To whoever remarked on the departure of black residents from the District of Columbia...Wikipedia still lists the district as 40% black in 2020:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Washington,_D.C.
I remember driving around the rough parts of DC on a trip in 1999 and not seeing a single open business for mile after mile. There were a fair number of vacant buildings, but not the tear-downs on the scale of Baltimore or Detroit.
Also per Wikipedia, 2000 was the nadir of DC's population, at 572k. It is now just under 700k, so a huge increase. |
DC was 60% Black in the 2000 census, so dropping to 40% by 2020 was a pretty dramatic change in just two decades.
DC and Detroit had similar racial compositions throughout most of the postwar era, and they were on similar trajectories until the 1990s due to
white flight suburbanization. DC actually had worse losses of white population in the first several decades after WW2, but Detroit caught up in the 1990s. DC also started to see substantial declines of its Black population in the 1980s, while Detroit's Black population did not begin to decline substantially until the 2000s. However, DC's white population grew substantially in the 2000s. Without that growth in white population since 2000, DC's total postwar population loss would still look similar to Detroit's.
People might point to DC being the seat of the federal government was a unique stopgap that Detroit didn't have to stabilize the population. But an even better reason for the divergence is the DC Metro. Detroit had the exact same opportunity to build a system like the DC Metro but was not able to pull it off due to political dysfunction. DC was able to do it and was fundamentally transformed by it.
Threaded Mode