Washington's odd racial geography
The city's layout keeps white and minority neighborhoods separate
One of the strange things I’ve noticed in DC is the level of racial segregation by neighborhood. Maybe this isn’t strange; maybe I have simply not spent enough time in American cities. Certainly I’ve noticed racial or ethnic segregation in other cities: I lived in between Finsbury Park and Highbury in London. The former contains numerous immigrants while the latter does not. But the strange thing about Washington is how segregation is intimately connected to the city’s geographic layout, and how clear the dividing lines are.
Here's a map to help you get a general idea of what I mean. Red dots are white, blue dots are black, orange dots are Hispanic. I live just past the upper-right border, in Maryland, in a majority-Hispanic area (for another week, anyway). Georgetown is on the left-hand side, just above the beginning of the red area, where the Potomac curves away to the left.
DC streets are laid out in a grid system. Avenues radiate from the center. As you can see, they proceed diagonally. If you want to travel quickly from one part of the city to another, you use these avenues. For example, I travel along “Michigan Avenue” into the center of the city before cutting across to Georgetown.
If you compare these two maps, you’ll notice something odd: the avenues connect both black and white neighborhoods to the city center. But they don’t connect black and white neighborhoods to each other. If you want to go from the upper-left (white) to the upper-right (black), you can’t take an avenue: you need to take a maze of smaller streets, at times dangerously cutting across the avenues. The effect is even more notable if you live in Maryland. The fancy white neighborhoods, like Bethesda or Chevy Chase, radiate out from the northwest, and it’s hard to get from that area to the poorer northeast black areas, like Brentwood. (Silver Spring is interesting, and also better-integrated, because it straddles the border of these two sections.)
The rich white areas (and they are rich—we’ll get there in a minute) also don’t have subway access, which makes them even harder to reach. Here’s a subway map.
Notice anything? The whitest area, where my blue dot is, doesn’t have any metro stations at all. Nor do any metro lines travel east to west in the District’s northern section, where the racial differences are obvious. (The red line technically connects Bethesda and Brentwood, but only by means of a long detour through the city center.) Neither London nor Vienna has this weird layout. That said, it’s not due to racism, or not primarily: the geology of Georgetown, at least, is unsuited to metro expansion, and most of the people going to work in the city don’t live in the the northwest. It’s not some nefarious plot to further segregate the city—but in practice, it probably has this effect. Here’s a good summary from NPR.
The difference from one neighborhood to another is astonishing. I see it every time I drive to Georgetown, especially if I take the difficult, circuitous, east-to-west northern route. In fact, you can pinpoint the spot where the racial composition switches, partly by looking at people on the sidewalk, but mostly by looking at the houses. Frankly, half the city is really pretty, and the other half is really ugly. And it switches within a block or two. Half a mile to the west of the Smithsonian Zoo, median household income is about $140,000. Half a mile to the east of the zoo, it’s about $80,000.
I don’t mention any of this because I have a solution. Maybe there is no solution, or maybe gentrification will gradually solve the problem on its own by improving low-income, minority neighborhoods—my own seems to be getting nicer. But I’m not convinced, since DC has apparently grown more segregated over the past thirty years, despite an overall increase in prosperity.