Many populationexperts predict the District’s official demographic makeup, expected to be released by the Census Bureau this week, will show a marked increase in the city’s white population while blacks continue to decline. But some say that trend, largely driven by the real estate boom in the mid-2000s, may be slowing.
In concert with the shift is the eastward movement of D.C.’s unofficial dividing line that separates the majority-white neighborhoods from the majority-black. That line 10 years ago used to roughly be along 16th Street Northwest, said Peter Tatian, senior research associate for the Urban Institute.
Now it’s inching into Northeast D.C. as development and new housing have created emerging neighborhoods.
“With the housing boom, it got so expensive in Northwest that people began looking elsewhere to where there were more places they could afford,” Tatian said. “But with the housing market [crisis], that’ll certainly slow things down.”
Credit is still tight and new development is only slowly coming back. That’s not to say that gentrification in the District will start reversing, he added. But it could allow for a better balance of development in the future with developers building more housing that is priced for the area median income instead of housing that prices out longtime residents.
Neighborhood Development Co., for example, has targeted Georgia Avenue for several major redevelopment projects, two of which include significant affordable housing allotments.
This week’s release also will likely show the increase in the city’s white population is not as dramatic as commonly perceived.
“People characterize it as a huge influx but it’s really [the] white population increasing somewhat with the black population continuing to decline — plus an increase in Latino and Asian residents in the city,” Tatian said.
Earlier this year, the Census’ official population count revealed that D.C. in the 2000s had registered its first population growth in a half-century, topping 600,000.
White flight from cities began in the 1950s but was offset by an influx of blacks. The 1968 riots triggered a mass exodus of middle-class blacks and whites from D.C., however, and the city’s population fell by more than 150,000 to 572,000 in 2000.
