Today in the Wall Street Journal I read an article about some bad news for Washington, D.C. (but good news for the rest of us?) : the pandemic crushed their local economy and housing market. As the article says, “The Pandemic Hit Cities Hard, but Especially Washington, D.C.” And who could be surprised by that? D.C. is not a city made for social distancing, but for social interaction. All sorts of tourists and interns who require housing in the District no longer needed it, and government workers are being allowed to work remotely.
During my years just out of college, a very large number of people I knew moved to D.C. to work on K-street: the lobbyists and think tank set. Consider how many pharma lobbying jobs were created after the passage of Obamacare in order to keep it in place, and how the big tech companies sent people to DC in order to protect their patronage. But this too has limits. The article offers a portrait of a young man working in a think tank in DC until the pandemic. When his organization announced it would become a "think tank without walls," he put his stuff in storage and headed to Florida. That strikes me as a very typical story. Another 35 year old woman, just married, decided to move out because of “social unrest in D.C., the cost of living, becoming a mom.”
Hopefully this is not symbolic of changes to our larger country. I don’t know what to make of the D.C. situation yet. Other than to note that like many oil towns in Texas, Washington DC is becoming a boom- and bust- town. Cue the Toby Keith song…
…actually, it would probably be more accurate to cue this one, since we’re talking about DC lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians:
Let's see what happens to gov't. For now, it's likelier, it seems to me, that a minority of elites segregate themselves further to avoid crime, than that DC will lose even 5% of its population...