Reply to 80’s/90’s DC vs 2020’s DC-Biggest Similarities, Biggest Differences?

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Reply to "80’s/90’s DC vs 2020’s DC-Biggest Similarities, Biggest Differences?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In the 1990s you did not go east of 13th Street in the CBD.  The area around what is now the Verizon Center was a pedestrian mall (F Street was closed) that was filled with addicts, dealers and the homeless.  On the Hill, no one went north of E Street on the NE side or south of G on the SE side or east of Lincoln Park.  What is now Union Market was the Eckington warehouses where you could go get wholesale flowers.  8th Street SE had a lesbian bar called the Phase and a decent Salvadoran restaurant and the street was really rough to walk down.  The city government was exclusively Chocolate City and Marion Barry controlled.  City services were abysmal.   Tony Williams did a LOT to improve the DC bureaucracy by getting rid of all the people who had gotten patronage jobs and did no work.  The school system was so, so much worse.  The schools did not start on time in the fall because DCPS was incapable of getting books out of warehouses and delivered to the schools.   There were no crazy white progressive politicians on the Council like there are now.

Even though there was a lot of petty crime, and shootings among drug crews, [b]carjackings were not a thing[/b] and violent juveniles were locked up more frequently. So there was not the overarching sense that juveniles could commit crime with total impunity like there is now.  Also, while there were homeless people you did not have the tent culture that proliferates now.  [/quote]

Most of what you write is spot-on, but carjackings were definitely a thing in the 1980s and '90s. It got so bad that the DC Council passed emergency legislation in 1992 that installed manadatory minimums on carjacking:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1992/10/07/dc-council-passes-carjacking-laws/6079515d-5007-43a5-a7de-7c1924f562c4/[/quote]

That’s crazy [/quote]

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