D.C. White People Pretty Much Demographic Snowpocalypse
What’s colorless, cold, overwhelming, bound to drive up grocery costs, and comfortingly Midwestern? Hint: if your first response is “a blizzard,” you’re wrong, and you also are probably one of them. White People are everywhere, it turns out, and they are doing more than pruning upright planters and gently nudging property values: they are a ravenous stroller-driving barbarian horde who will not rest until there is a BMW and a wine bar on every street corner in the District of Columbia. At least that’s what WaPo Local’s numbers are telling us:
Via Michael J. Petrilli at the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper education blog comes a list of the 25 U.S. Zip codes which saw the greatest gain in white population share from 2000 to 2010. In the absence of 2010 economic data, which is yet to be released, Petrilli uses the relative change in white population to gauge the impact of gentrification. Three of the top 25 are in D.C. — only Brooklyn, N.Y., with four Zips, is more represented on the list. The particular D.C. Zip codes identified will come as little surprise to city denizens:
No. 10:20001 — Shaw/Bloomingale/LeDroit Park/Truxton Circle/Pleasant Plains — 5.6 percent non-Hispanic white in 2000 to 32.8 percent in 2010.
No. 14:20010 — Mount Pleasant/Columbia Heights/Park View — 22 percent non-Hispanic white in 2000 to 46.7 percent in 2010.
No. 19:20005 — Logan Circle/Downtown — 47.3 percent non-Hispanic white in 2000 to 68.4 percent in 2010.
To be clear: D.C. zipcode 20001 has, in the past decade, seen a nearly six-fold increase in the number of white residents. The last time the District saw this many white people relocating so furiously, there was a gourmet food truck at Pride.