The low-income and extremely low-income households in DC are made up almost entirely of people of color, so the affordable housing crisis perpetuates and exacerbates existing injustice and inequity in the District.
The poverty rate within the African-American population in DC is 25.8%. It is 15% for Asian-Americans, 13.1% for Latinos, and just 6.6% for the White population. And, though African Americans make up 47% of DC’s population, they account for 85% of the homeless population of the District.
Source: Talk Poverty
There are many complex reasons for these disparities. In DC (like most communities across the country), there is a long history of explicit racism in housing policy, including racial covenants in neighborhood charters and land leases, segregationist and exclusionary policies like redlining, and other mechanisms that prohibited people of color from accessing housing and other assets. Continued disinvestment in neighborhoods with high populations of color has continued to exacerbate gaps in wealth accumulation and access to opportunity.
Similarly, continuing pressures of housing development have displaced low-income communities and communities of color in changing neighborhoods. Sometimes this happens prior to development, where public housing or other buildings with low-income residents are razed in favor of market rate development, as was the case during the “urban renewal” redevelopment of Southwest DC in the 1950s. And this practice continues in many forms today. Development, and demand for development, places upward pressure on housing prices, so low-income residents, which are more often than not residents of color, are unable to continue living where they have been for generations.
There are of course a lot of complicated factors involved in these dynamics, and we haven’t come close to doing the issue justice here, but the critical point is that the affordable housing crisis is more acutely felt and more overtly damaging to people of color, especially in DC.
For more on this history of segregation in DC’s housing, we encourage you to explore the resources at Mapping Segregation DC.
