Transcript
ALICE RIVLIN: The last few years have seen a lot of progress in Washington: a fiscal turnaround, new housing and retail, and revitalization of neighborhoods reaching into many long-neglected places. But those of us who look closely at the city know that we still have a very long way to go. We are still a city of extremes of income and racial division. We have a high poverty rate, we have much affluence, but we have a week middle class. We lost population over several decades. Primarily we lost middle-income families with children, black and white. The population has now stabilized and begun to grow again, but the legacy of those years of decline is still with us, the extremes of income, the weak middle, and the visible divide between the blacker, less-affluent part of the city on the East, and the whiter, more comfortable part of the city on the West. And although development has occurred on the Eastern side of the city and many plans have been discussed, the revitalization has moved far more rapidly and more visibly in the city's Western half.
Low-income residents often feel left out, left behind, and even perhaps more important, disadvantaged by the progress itself, by the rising rents, by the rising prices. Development has not been good for everybody, and it has not generated yet enough employment, enough training opportunities, for the current low-income, less-skilled resident.
The focus of the study that we want to talk to you about today is very simple. It is how Washington can grow its middle class from within. Several years ago a colleague and I wrote a paper about the benefits to the city of growing the population by 100,000 people which many of you may remember, and subsequently a Brookings team worked with the city's Office of Planning to show how revitalizing neighborhoods all over the city and creating new mixed-income communities along the Anacostia and at McMillan Reservoir and all those other places could accommodate a larger population and grow the middle class and draw the city together. That 100,000 number was picked up by Mayor Tony Williams and became an official goal, but unfortunately it was widely misinterpreted. Many people heard the phrase "grow the population by 100,000" as though it meant attract 100,000 new people from outside the city who do not live here now. That was a misinterpretation, but it does not matter.
The result was that several groups in the city got together and said what we need to do is help the low-income people who live here now move into the middle class. Irene Lee of the Casey Foundation challenged us to do serious work on that question, what could Washington actually do to reduce the low-income population quite quickly by opening up realistic opportunities for people to get better jobs and move into the middle class? And that is what we are talking about today.
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