The District’s wealthiest community earns more than three times the household income of the city’s poorest area — a massive income gap that has grown wider over the past five years. D.C.’s wealthiest residents live in the neighborhoods between Georgetown and Friendship Heights, an area rich with million-dollar homes, lived in by some of the city’s top wage-earners. The median income of households there is more than $103,000 annually, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey data.
That’s about $71,000 more than the city’s poorest area across the Anacostia River, an income gap that has increased 45 percent over the past five years.
According to the 2005 American Community Survey, the income gap between the rich and the poor was $49,000, with the wealthiest area earning nearly $79,000 per household. The area across the Anacostia earned nearly $30,000 per household in 2005.
In five years, the median household income for the poorest has inched up by only $3,000 while the richest area’s households have seen their income increase by more than $30,000.
Income in the rest of the city more closely reflects D.C.’s 2009 median household income of about $57,000.
