It’s sad you think money can buy your kid the best childhood. My kid is thriving in a DCPS school and having a great childhood. Private school doesn’t equal the best childhood. |
There are quite a few kids of law firm partners at our local Hill ES. If you live on the Hill, most big name private schools are not worth the commute in ES and lots of (even wealthy) folks think CHDS isn’t worth the difference for ES, especially if you have multiple kids. Maybe it’s different if Beauvoir is next door? Now I agree that those kids are not heading to SH, and certainly not to EH or Jefferson, but elementary school? They definitely are. |
DCPS is good and kids can do well there. But if I had the option of sending my kids to a school with fewer worksheets, where they read full books and do more writing, I would. The current science curriculum is alarming. Money can't buy parental love or nurturing, but it can buy a lot of other stuff that could benefit a kid. I can't afford that stuff so we make do with the options we have. |
I think there are lots of very wealthy people sending their kids to Mann and Key, but they switch to private for middle and high school. I think the number of ultra high net worth families at JR, for example, is 0. |
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What it seems like is that there is significant race based income disparity with each group having a median in DC about $100,000 at $60,000 and $168,000 and tailing off in each direction - there’s a valley in the middle, it’s not empty, but it’s a gap.
Geographically income and race are probably sorted so that the black households above median black household income are less likely to be Wards 7 and 8. And the white households below median white household income are probably not in the most expensive housing in Ward 3. So if you’re looking for a middle class in DC, you might find it in Wards 1, 4, and 5. 2 and 6 maybe. But these are the middle tails of a distribution, so the middle class isn’t the “nearly-everyone you see in normal life” percentage many Americans believe it to be. |
Spoken like some someone who has never been to Hillcrest (and probably never been to Ward 7 and 8 at all). Median housing price $500,000, which couldn't be more typically middle class. |
There are definitely apartments in zone Mann. You can get a small 2 bedroom for 3K. By no means cheap but accessible to a family of 4, with kids sharing a room, with <<200K HHI. Ask me how I know. Didn't find much for Key. |
| Yes, Hillcrest is a wonderful place. I’ve heard it’s all $7M homes. |
I mean, Vince Gray lived in Ward 7. There are many, many upper middle class Black families there. |
I'm shocked at the families at our elementary who pay 6K in rent or live in 2M houses - that they commited to after having kids - and are concerned about middle school. We plan to rent or by for half that so we can be in bounds for JR or MacArthur feeders (we don't need Arlington or Bethesda). If I had that much to spend, I'd either put the $$ to private school or a house inbound for a good dc or suburban school. |
Yes, the stats are what they are. The anecdotes are what they are. |
And the Black middle class is invisible to lots of white people in DC. |
DC has a relatively small middle class, in general -- regardless of color. |
To be fair, the previous poster said "the black households above median black household income are less likely to be Wards 7 and 8." The most recent data available has the median income for Ward 7 at $45,000 and for Ward 8 at $32,000. There are absolutely middle and upper plus residents in Wards 7 and 8, but it's not the same distribution or concentration as in some other wards. |
The neighborhood cluster that includes Hillcrest is 47% at risk. That's lower than a lot of the Ward 2 and Ward 6 neighborhood clusters: downtown, Chinatown, Mt Vernon Sq, Shaw, Logan Circle, Southwest, Navy Yard. |