Wow this place sure has changed!
There’s no place on the planet like Washington, DC. Our nation’s capital. The center of democracy. Home to all of our branches of the federal government, home to the supreme court, and home to our sitting president. Our history and our future all have a place here.
We’re gonna drive around parts of Washington DC and look around a little bit. We’ll see some nice areas, some bad parts of town, and discuss problems that exist here, like they do in every other American city.
Right now, we’re in an area of town called the Mall. Here are all of the monuments and important buildings where laws are written and enforced. It’s a very nice part of town. In fact, most of the heart of DC is very pleasant. There are tourists all over and locals come down to frolic on the grounds and or dine.
DC sure has changed a lot. They’ve gentrified parts of town that were ruined by riots 50 years ago. Many neighborhoods like this were in a bad place in the 1980s, and DC’s population plummeted by 25% by 1990 due to crime and a crack epidemic. In 1992, Washington DC was the murder capital of America.
But most places you drive through now have completely recovered, and it’s super expensive to live here again. There’s nothing over a million bucks on this street. There are a bunch of young millennials moving in in neighborhoods like this. How they can afford it, I don’t know. Most cannot.
One of our nation’s capital’s issues is its economic gap. It ranks in the top ten for cities with the biggest gap in income equality. The racial disparity here is also quite evident. All of the upscale toney neighborhoods like this are white, and the ghetto hoods are all black. There’s very little working poor or middle class here.
Now I didn't explore every square inch of this city and I'm sure there are parts of it that resemble the old DC where it's dirty and rundown and where the criminals prey but I didn't see it and I am glad.
The far east side of town across the Anacostia River on the fringes of DC is where it’s the worst. This whole area was the center of the crime and the drugs and was completely ghetto. Today, it too is going through an urban renewal of sorts.
If you left DC 20 years ago and came back, you wouldn’t even recognize the place.
After a big turnaround of two decades of growth, things here seemed to have peaked for now. DC’s population declined by 3 percent in the last year.
And, like every other major city, Washington DC has a huge homeless crisis on its hands. Scattered throughout the city are homeless encampments like these. Some are vacated, others house people who have been here for a long time. Most of the homeless I talked to said they were waiting for affordable housing. For some, it was a many years wait. In the meantime, they go back and forth between cheap motels and shelters, accepting handouts and finding a way to get by.
While in DC I walked around at night. It’s totally clean, and to be honest, pretty dead. This is just blocks from the white house. It’s easy to feel very safe this close to the capital, but you never feel like you’re ALONE. Like there are probably people watching every square inch from the tops of these hotels and office buildings.
I walked past big buildings that looked very important. The columnullur designs were very impressive.
And you’re always reminded about politics no matter where you go in DC.
I also went to the top of the W hotel to get a neat view of the white house and surrounding area. Lots of people were dressed up like they were important. And they played Jason Derulo quite a bit up here, which is weird.
Some would say the worst part of DC isn’t the poverty or the crime or the racial inequality. It’s the politics itself. The politicians themselves. The guts of the place and the reason for its existence. There’s not a lot of faith in the people who run this place anymore. As DC gets more toxic and divided and completely removed from the realities of all Americans, there will be a stain on this town that all the gentrifying can never remove.
#washingtondc #moving
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