New census data helps explain why the District’s black voters felt disenfranchised and turned out en-masse to vote Mayor Adrian Fenty out of office and elect D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray on his promise that he would work to reverse the deepening divide between the city’s white and wealthy residents and its black and poor residents.
Voting data shows that Gray handily won the city’s black and poorer neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River and Fenty found large margins of victory in the white, wealthy neighborhoods in Northwest. In the buildup to the primary, it became clear that many black voters felt they had been disenfranchised by the Fenty administration. They said they believed Fenty had favored white neighborhoods over black as longtime residents were pushed out of the city by climbing
property values from an influx of mostly white, affluent residents.
The census data backs up black voters’ fears that they were losing economic ground to their white neighbors.
“Certain areas added condos as new residents with higher incomes moved in,” said Elissa Silverman of D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The census data “reflects deepening differences within the city.”
Median income in census-defined areas that includes parts of the city’s whiter neighborhoods in Wards 1, 2 and 6 rose from $60,000 in 2007 to $74,000 in 2009, according to an analysis of the census data by D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.
By contrast, median household income east of the Anacostia River, in the city’s majority black neighborhoods, dropped from $32,100 in 2007 to $30,700 in 2009. In those Wards — 7 and 8, Gray’s base — the poverty level rose from 27 percent of residents in 2007 to 34 percent 2009.
