The People

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July 21, 2011 | 11:28 AM | By

D.C. Population Changes by Block

There’s nothing like a color coded map to help you understand D.C.’s demographic changes. The Washington Post‘s interactive Census map details the density of racial groups by blocks throughout D.C.-metro area. After zooming in on the District, it appears some of the most dramatic changes over the past 30 years occurred in Shaw, Columbia Heights and Petworth.

The blocks just north of the U Street corridor used to be 77 percent black and 5 percent white; now, they’re 15 percent black and 66 percent white. Columbia Heights blocks that once had a black majorities are now mostly Hispanic. Blocks between Georgia and Sherman avenues were majority black in 1990 and still are — although to a much lesser degree.

The maps below show which racial groups constitute the majority in a block area. Bolder colors represent higher percentages of that group:

1990

Screenshot / Washington Post

Population breakdown in Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Shaw and Petworth in 1990. (White = Pink; African Americans = Blue; Hispanics = Purple)

2010

Screenshot / Washington Post

Population breakdown in Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Shaw and Petworth in 2010. (White = Pink; African Americans = Blue; Hispanics = Purple)

FILED UNDER: Around the City, The People, Census, Demographics
July 20, 2011 | 3:59 PM | By

Teen Curfews and Racial Undertones

William Warby / Flickr

A proposed curfew in Montgomery County would prevent teens under 18 from being out past midnight on weekends and 11 p.m. on weekdays.

On Wednesday’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, guests spoke about the merits of instituting a teen curfew in Montgomery County. And parts of the discussion centered around young people in nearby D.C. and Prince George’s County, the majority of whom are black.

Montgomery County’s curfew is intended to curtail crime, particularly gang violence. But guest Daniel Okonkwo, executive director of DC Lawyers for Youth, said after the broadcast that much of the debate is loaded with “coded language.” Some proponents want to keep D.C. and Prince George’s County youth from coming to Montgomery County because they believe they cause trouble.

“We want to keep our kids safe from those kids” is an underlying theme, says Okonkwo, an opponent of the curfew.

D.C.’s curfew, on the books since 1995, prohibits teens under 17 from being out past 11 p.m. during the week and midnight on weekends. There have been other efforts to crack down on teens congregating in neighborhoods like Chinatown — including blasting classical music in favorite hang-out spots and installing other noise repellents.

Business owners say rowdy teens hurt them by driving customers away, particularly when violence erupts. But as Washington Post‘s Courtland Milloy writes, many young black people feel they “are being treated like suspects because of a misbehaving few:”

“My friends and I got locked up two months ago for walking across the sidewalk,” Ke’Shayla Thorne, 17, a student at Spingarn High School in Northeast, told me. “The police said, ‘Come here, you’re under arrest.’ But other people walk like that all the time and they expect black kids to move off the sidewalk and let them pass. Nobody locks them up.”

You can listen to the entire Kojo Nnamdi segment here.

FILED UNDER: Government, The People, Race, Youth
July 19, 2011 | 4:37 PM | By

The Unemployed Cutting Corners in their Diets

pointnshoot / Flickr

Higher calorie foods tend to be cheaper, experts say.

Eating healthy can be a matter of having access to stores, but it’s also about having enough money to buy healthy food and having the time to cook it. And as the economy has worsened, more people are eating unhealthy foods this year than last.

Given those factors comes this article from Huffington Post’s Janell Ross about unhealthy eating and the disproportionately high rate of black unemployment. She writes that since housing costs tend to be fixed, many underemployed and unemployed people save money by eating cheaper and unhealthy foods. She speaks to a Michele Washington, a college-educated single mom originally from Atlanta, who moved into her sister’s Harlem apartment and holds a part-time job. Washington used to cook dinners for her son, Monty. Now, they frequent McDonald’s:

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FILED UNDER: The People, Black Unemployment, Food, Unemployment
July 18, 2011 | 2:52 PM | By

In Your Words: New York Times Tackles D.C.’s Gentrification

Elvert Barnes / Flickr

The Grey Lady published a feature about gentrification around H Street NE and how the city is losing its black majority:

 

The shift is passing without much debate, but it is leaving ripples of resentment in neighborhoods across the city, pitting some of the city’s long-term residents, often African-American, against affluent newcomers, most of whom are white, over issues as mundane as church parking and chicken wings.

The story makes mention of the defeat of Adrian M. Fenty in the 2010 mayoral race and how some focused on used dog parks and bike lanes as symbols for affluent whites “re-arrang[ing] spending priorities to suit themselves.” Adam Serwer of The American Prospect argues the disparity in unemployment rates was the issue in the election; for whites, unemployment increased by 1 percent, while it increased by 5 percent for African Americans and doubled for Latinos:

What happened during Fenty’s term was that black people and Hispanic people lost their jobs while white people largely kept theirs. Blaming this on Fenty is unfair, but given that politicians are always evaluated in part by the jobs they help create (or lose) voting him out was an entirely rational decision. I’m not sure why, in a story about Washington DC’s internal racial divisions, the only mention of this is a throwaway line about unemployment in Ward 8. Alongside the city’s black exodus, the uneven impact of the economic crisis is the story.

The story touched off a Twitter debate among locals about the city’s changing face and how the media and the public talks about gentrification:

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FILED UNDER: Media, The People, Gentrification, H Street NE, In Your Words, New York Times
July 15, 2011 | 10:51 AM | By

Housing Discrimination Against Minorities, the Disabled Persists in Nation’s Capital

Shane Adams / Flickr

It’s been four decades since the first federal fair housing laws came into the books, but a new report finds that D.C. needs to ratchet up its enforcement against discrimination in housing.

The report, issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and posted below, found that builders are constructing apartment buildings that aren’t handicapped-accessible. It also found that some District landlords still practice racial discrimination against African Americans, and that there’s a lack of subsidized housing units west of Rock Creek Park, in a predominately wealthy and white part of the city.

When a person feels they are a victim of housing discrimination, they can file a complaint with the D.C. Office of Human Rights. The office received 397 house discrimination cases from 2002 to 2010. Complaints, which can contain more than one basis for discrimination, were filed based on the following categories:
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FILED UNDER: Around the City, The People, Class, Disabled, Discrimination, Housing, Race
July 14, 2011 | 9:46 AM | By

D.C.’s ‘Gulf’ Between Rich and Poor

Jim Watson / Getty Images

Pedestrians pass by a homeless man as he rests with his belongings on K Street, NW.

How are the poor treated by the media, politicians and society?

Experts on Wednesday’s Kojo Nnamdi show discussed the state of poverty in America and popular perceptions of the poor.

In the District, nearly 1 in 5 individuals live at or below the poverty line — which is about $22,000 for a family of four. Olivia Golden, former director of D.C.’s child and family services agency, told Nnamdi there is a “gulf” between the rich and poor in the District:

One of the reasons that people don’t get distressed by the gulf as we’d think they would is they’re deeply cynical and pessimistic about public investment and public involvement. And so, even if they think,’Well, maybe it shouldn’t be this way,’… they think that anything we could do to fix it might be worse.

An interesting debate then ensued as to whether public assistance programs help the poor, or whether they contribute to the cycle of poverty. The whole segment is well worth a listen.

 

FILED UNDER: Media, The People, Kojo Nnamdi Show, Poverty
July 13, 2011 | 11:41 AM | By

The Pressure to Follow ‘Traditional’ Careers

jasleen_kaur / Flickr

Earlier this week, we noted that the number of Indian Americans pursuing creative jobs has doubled over the previous decade. And a number of South Asian readers joined the conversation, sharing stories about familial expectations and jobs.

Commenter Anupama Pillalamarri writes “there was a lot of pressure on me to pursue a traditionally brown person career until I had a meltdown.” I followed up with Pillalamarri to find out more. She wrote to me:

My interest was in politics and history, but when I mentioned majoring in either of those, my mom told me to pick whatever engineering I liked best and major in that. Another time I told her I was taking a film class and she told me they “weren’t paying blah blah dollars a year for me to watch movies.”

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FILED UNDER: Culture, The People, Jobs
July 11, 2011 | 2:49 PM | By

Five Factors Causing the ‘Decimation’ of the Black Middle Class

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The Rev. Jesse Jackson (L) hold the hands of Angela Walker (R) in Suitland, Md. after a rally against foreclosures in the hard-hit, majority-black county. Walker is recently unemployed and facing foreclosure.

The recession from 2007 to 2009 has hit nearly all sectors and communities in the American economy, but minorities, and particularly African Americans, may have been affected the most. Jesse Washington’s recent Associated Press story about how the recession reversed many of the economic gains that took the black community many years to attain contains some grim statistics: in 2009, the average black household had only 2 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the average white household, and in April 2010, black male unemployment hit its highest point since the government began tracking it in 1972.

“History is going to say that the black middle class was decimated,” Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion, tells Washington. “But we’re not done writing history.”

What has led to such extreme losses? Here are five factors contributing to the “decimation” of the black middle class:
FILED UNDER: History, The People, Black Middle Class, Economy, Housing, Recession, Unemployment
July 11, 2011 | 10:28 AM | By

Indian Americans Increasingly Pursuing Creative Jobs

Indians comprise the largest Asian group in the D.C.-area, and although many are working professional jobs, not all are. But another interesting trend has taken hold in the Indian-American community: the number of Indian Americans who have taken up jobs in the arts, entertainment and food industries has doubled in the past decade from 2.9 percent to 6.1. percent, reports Chicago Business. This video the network produced features Indian Americans who have taken up jobs as chefs and comedians:




This is similar to what I’m witnessing, at least anecdotally, among my fellow Iranian Americans. Members of my parents’ generation have traditionally viewed doctor, dentist or engineer as the predestined careers for their children. It makes sense — they’re relatively stable jobs, and if you’re a new arrival to this country, particularly without a network of friends and family, you may not feel secure enough to go after a “risky” career.

But those of us who were born here may have more stable-footing than our parents did — we have families, institutions and communities here that raised us and that we can rely upon.  We may even have a measure of accumulated family wealth, thanks to the hard work of our parents. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I felt comfortable with pursuing journalism (not the most stable or well-paid of professions), and my brother, who once seriously considered medical school, is now an aspiring film-maker.

I’m curious — are others experiencing something similar, or is the pressure to follow a more traditional career paths still strong?

FILED UNDER: The People, Employment, Immigration
July 6, 2011 | 4:19 PM | By

How to Stretch Grocery Dollars Without a Stove

People on a tight budget have been hit hard this year. Food prices have risen for the first time in two years, and 40 percent of D.C. households with children have reported not having enough money to buy food.

There are ways to stretch a dollar or food assistance even further, and it mostly involves buying smart, in bulk when possible, and investing a lot time in cooking, according to Jodi Balis, Capital Area Food Bank‘s nutrition education director. She spoke on the Kojo Nnamdi Show about strategies to cook low-cost meals and her $16 grocery bag:

But making such meals requires having access to other resources, such as utensils and a stove.

“When we train our partner agencies at the food bank, this has been brought up as well: if somebody is homeless, and they don’t have access to cooking equipment, what can you make?” Balis said on the show. “That really is a challenge.”

Balis said the answer, at least somewhat, may be in no-cook meals. That includes making burritos with vegetables and cheese, and hearty salads with ingredients like romaine lettuce, carrots and sunflower seeds.

The food bank does have a thin no-cook cookbook, she added. But the size of the book shows that perhaps there aren’t many options available to those without a kitchen.

FILED UNDER: The People, Capital Area Food Bank, Hunger