Gentrifying Washington, D.C. by Jerry Weinberger - City Journal

Much of the African-American demographic decline can be traced to the way lower- and middle-income blacks are moving to the suburbs, just as whites did after World War II. As a result, Maryland’s Prince George’s County is now the wealthiest majority-black county in the United States. (The gangsters from Yards Park also moved there, which accounts for most of the county’s crime.) But it’s just not true that D.C.’s racial divide is getting worse. Despite the African-American exodus—amounting to 100,000 people since 1990, according to a CBS Baltimore article on the 2010 census—the D.C. population grew by 30,000 residents over the same period. Many of the newcomers are well-off whites, while others are Hispanic, African, Asian, and multiracial. Immigrants now account for over 20 percent of D.C.’s metro-area population, according to a 2011 Brookings report, The Geography of Immigrant Skills. A recent article in the Washington Post, “A Region Remade,” reports that in 2010, just one in three neighborhoods in D.C. was highly segregated, with more than 85 percent of the residents of the same race or ethnicity. D.C. is becoming more diverse and undivided, not less.