Reply to RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]
So again, not seeing the many policies the city pursued to court "affluent people". Seems to me the policies the city did pursue were "not interfering when changing consumer preferences led to a return of the middle-class (and the affluent) to the city." [/quote]

Really, you are asking an involved question that could take many pages to answer properly and doesn't deal with DC schools in any case. But, while this article doesn't answer your question perfectly, it is a good resource. Also, the article deals with a number of issues beyond this immediate one that may be of interest to DCUM readers.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-05-25/opinions/35456628_1_playground-urban-areas-newcomers

"He [Anthony Williams] was working off of a Brookings Institution report that said by attracting 50,000 [b]well-off[/b] single people and couples without school-age children, the District could increase its revenue by $300 million. Williams and his planners laid the groundwork for nearly all the current major real estate projects and for the new condominiums and apartments that continue to rise — faster than anywhere else in the country since the recession began. If you look up and see a crane today, it is probably at work on a project that Williams’s team set in motion."

The bolding of "well-off" is mine. We can argue whether that is affluent or middle class or whatever. But, clearly Williams was planning for people better off than those already there.

Here is the impact of that growth:

"Many longtime District residents and families surely have been pushed out by the incredible rise in housing costs the city has experienced. A recent report found that the number of low-cost rental units fell from 70,600 to 34,500 over the past decade. It’s difficult to buy a house in many D.C. neighborhoods for less than $400,000."

Just to be clear, I am not against growth. To the contrary, I'm very happy with most of the development. But, just as the government is capable of making policies to attract "well-off" new residents, it can surely make plans to address the needs of the existing not-so-well-off residents. I'm not even sure why that idea is controversial. 
[/quote]

I disagree that those two things are linked. Let's say Williams was working off the Brookings report. But the Post piece mischaracterized the Brookings report, which didn't say 50,000 "well-off" residents, but rather:

"Our rough calculations indicate that adding an average single, non-poor adult resident would increase the District’s revenue, net of the cost of additional services for that added resident, by about $4,300. An additional two-earner couple would bring in almost $13,000 net of added costs. If the city’s population of middle- and upper-income singles and childless couples increased by 50,000, the net annual increase in the District’s revenues over operating expenditures would be in the neighborhood of $300 million. It would be possible both to improve public services and reduce tax rates.2"

In other words, 50,000 "non-poor" people.  I agree that "just as the government is capable of making policies to attract [non-poor] new residents, it can surely make plans to address the needs of the existing [poor] residents."

I'm a lifelong DC resident, and I want to see all of our residents taken care of. But I also want to see the city thrive economically. Any I have a problem with the disingenuous way that the case for social services is often made.  Take for example this article on the "income gap" which drives much of the talk about "giving to the rich and leaving some behind".

The income gap exists because almost every middle class person who could, left the city. The only people left were the extremely wealthy, and the extremely poor:

[quote]“The African Americans who stayed in the District were the poorest, who didn’t have opportunities to leave,” said Peter Tatian, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute’s Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities. “The District does provide affordable housing in many neighborhoods, particularly east of the river, so there’s the opportunity to stay if you’re poor. But if you’re middle class, it’s a different story. As housing became more expensive here, those folks moved to the suburbs.”[/quote]

This dynamic had nothing to do with city policies that favored the affluent, but rather city policies that forced middle-class residents to head for the suburbs--it was the near-total elimination of services to the middle-class in the 80s and 90s. To misunderstand that cause is to misunderstand the solution. As an example:

[quote][DCFPI's Ed] Lazere noted that during the city’s financial crisis in the 1990s, vocational training programs were cut that would have helped people who weren’t headed to college.

“We’re reaping the effects of that now,” he said. “We do have a mayor who talks a lot about jobs, but we don’t have a citywide strategy to address the literacy and skills gap.”[/quote]

Stuff like this drives me nuts. Lazere knows as well as anyone that the income gap in DC was not produced by cuts to vocational training programs. It was caused by the elimination of DC's middle-class which was precipitated by a combination of local, regional, and national policies to drive the middle-class out of the cities. Adding vocational training programs will do nothing to close the income gap--at least not without policies that cater to "the affluent" (i.e. non-poor people); it will merely create new middle-class residents who will decamp for the suburbs.

The only way that DC is going to claw its way out of the dysfunction of the last 50 years or so--and so be able to strengthen our commitment to poor residents--is to continue to increase the number of middle-class residents (in the Brooking's words the "non-poor"; or in the Post's words the "well-off").[/quote]

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