Muito do que é dito sobre Washington, pode ser aplicado igualmente a Brasília: essas cidades aproveitam sua condição de capitais de um regime federal para se imunizarem contra acidentes econômicos que atingem outras cidades e estados. Ou seja, independente do estado da economia, os burocratas continuam a ganhar bem, a gastar, a consumir. E o resto da população paga por isso.
Washington também já teve como Brasilia, os piores políticos que se possa imaginar: corruptos, bandidos, ignorantes. Algo se pode consertar, como foi feito em Washington, mas nem sempre.
Pelo menos no que se refere a Brasília, a decadência continua (mas isso a capital partilha com todo o país: estamos num processo acelerado de decadência institucional, de erosão moral, de subdesenvolvimento político e de involução mental).
Aproveitem para conhecer um pouco mais a história da capital imperial.
Aaron M. Renn
The federal government’s relentless expansion has made Washington, D.C., America’s real Second City.
The Washington,
D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the
remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad.
Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country
remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity
is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning
economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and
former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are
battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their
match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic
power and national importance.
Illustrations by Arnold Roth
In fact, we’re witnessing the start of Washington’s emergence as
America’s new Second City. Whether that’s a good thing for America is
another question.
Washington is an artificial capital, a city
conjured into existence shortly after the Revolutionary War. Its
location was the result of political horse-trading. Virginia congressmen
agreed to let the federal government assume the states’ war debts, even
though Virginia itself was already paid up; in exchange, the new
capital would be located in the South.
The city’s early boosters hoped that its location on the Potomac
River would help it grow into a commercial as well as a political
capital, but that didn’t happen. While other cities got state backing
for their business endeavors—a good example is the Erie Canal, built by
New York State, which benefited New York City enormously—Washington was
run by a Congress more interested in national affairs than in local
ones. The city stagnated at first. Its growth finally picked up during
the Civil War, but it wasn’t until the Great Depression and World War
II, with their expansion of the role of the government in American life,
that Washington grew prosperous. During the war, average family income
there was higher than in New York or Los Angeles.
It was also a heavily black city—by 1957, the country’s first major
city with a black majority. But back in the 1870s, Congress, motivated
by racist fears of black votes, had replaced the city’s elected mayors
with a board of commissioners appointed by the U.S. president. That
change, coming just a few years after black males had won the right to
vote in Washington local elections, hobbled the city’s ambitions and set
the stage for its troubled legacy in race relations. It wasn’t until
1973, when the civil rights movement had made the disenfranchisement of
the city’s blacks untenable, that D.C. regained local control.
Unfortunately, a number of factors—including the 1968 riots after Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and a series of disastrous urban
policies enacted by the federal government—set the stage for the
emergence of political opportunists, including the infamous Mayor Marion
Barry. During his tenure in the 1980s, unchecked corruption, ineptly
delivered city services, soaring crime, horrendous public schools,
financial chaos, and racial tensions made the city a byword for
dysfunction nationally. So did the 1990 video that caught Barry smoking
crack in a hotel room.
Nevertheless, the metropolitan area surrounding Washington continued
to grow and thrive. And when the 2000s arrived, the expansion of the
federal government not only catapulted the region into a new league of
success but also transformed the troubled city at its center.
During the first decade of the twenty-first
century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of
measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten
largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which
federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the
Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in
population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt
boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth
Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous
metropolitan area in America.
The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front.
Since 2001, Washington has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate of its
peer group. Over the course of the entire decade, it ranked second in
job growth, trailing only Houston. That wasn’t just because of the
federal agencies and gigantic contractors of Washington stereotype. The
region has also been a hotbed of entrepreneurship—much of it, to be
sure, dependent on federal dollars. During the 2000s, it had 385 firms
named to the
Inc. 500 lists of fastest-growing companies in
America, according to Kauffman Foundation research—by far the most of
any metro area. From 2000 through 2011, according to rankings developed
by Praxis Strategy Group, Washington’s low-profile but powerful tech
sector had the country’s second-highest job growth, after Seattle’s. The
region is also one of America’s top life-sciences centers.
Then there’s economic output. During the 2000s, per-capita GDP grew
faster in Washington than in any of its peer regions except the Bay
Area. Today, Washington’s per-capita GDP is the country’s
second-highest—again, after the Bay Area. Unlike Washington, however,
the Bay Area hemorrhaged jobs over the course of the decade. Related to
Washington’s impressive output is its astonishing median household
income, the highest of any metro area with more than 1 million people. A
remarkable seven of the ten highest-income counties in America are in
metro Washington. And during the 2000s, per-capita income rose in
Washington faster than in any of its peer metros.
Finally, Washington’s population is the best-educated in America.
Almost half of all adults in the Washington region have college degrees,
the highest proportion of any metro area with more than 1 million
people. The same is true of graduate degrees: almost 23 percent of
Washingtonians hold them.
The region’s success relates to two larger points. The first involves
the fact that prosperous urban regions in America are increasingly
divided into two kinds. Some, like the Bay Area, embrace a “vertical”
model of success, generating increases in economic output and per-capita
income with stagnant or declining population and jobs. Others, like
Dallas, are “horizontal,” featuring growth in population and jobs but
stagnant or declining output and income. But Washington is an exception:
it is the only metropolitan area with a population of at least 1
million that achieves the best of both worlds, combining Dallas-style
population and job growth with the fabulous output and wealth of a San
Francisco. In that respect, it is a city without peer in America.
The second point to emphasize is the sheer scale of Washington’s
performance. If you consider the claim that it’s becoming America’s new
Second City an exaggeration, note that its huge recent growth has
brought its economic size much closer to Chicago’s—not just in
per-capita terms but in absolute ones, too. Back in 2001, Chicago’s
economy was 52 percent bigger than Washington’s; by the end of the
decade, the gap had shrunk to 24 percent. Similarly, in 2000, total
personal income was 62 percent greater in Chicago than in Washington—a
difference that had dwindled to 31 percent by the end of 2010. Chicago
has just 16 percent more people with college degrees than Washington
does. And Washington has
more people with graduate degrees than Chicago does and is closing in on Los Angeles.
None of these measurements, by the way, includes nearby Baltimore.
The combined Washington-Baltimore area is now the fourth-largest in the
country, with about a million fewer people than Chicago. In roughly 15
years, if current growth rates hold, Washington-Baltimore will pass the
10-million-person threshold necessary to be counted as a megacity.
It isn’t just the Washington metropolitan
region that’s thriving. The current boom is accomplishing something that
previous ones didn’t: transforming the city itself, the District of
Columbia. The District’s population grew during the 2000s for the first
time since 1950. It suffers less from the problems that once tarnished
its image: strained race relations, high crime, ineptly delivered public
services, local financial crises. Many city services, such as planning
and transportation, have been heavily professionalized and are even
touted nationally as innovative models.
True, corruption, especially in real-estate deals, remains alive and
well. A parade of local politicians, including current mayor Vincent
Gray, is under a cloud, and even Marion Barry is still around as a city
council member. But with a torrent of investment, new residents, and
prosperity flooding in, it hardly seems to matter. The District grew by
more than 1,000 new residents per month between 2010 and 2011. It ended
the 2011 fiscal year with a budget surplus of $240 million and the 2012
fiscal year with a surplus of $140 million. In the past, people put up
with a dysfunctional city government so that they could be near the
federal one. Today, by contrast, the District is a desirable place to
live in its own right, much like Manhattan or San Francisco.
This trend is affecting every aspect of urban life. Real estate has
been thriving, of course. Washington has the nation’s lowest
office-vacancy rate, along with some of its highest commercial rents.
Last January, the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate put
Washington in third place on its list of top global cities for foreign
investment, behind only New York and London.
Residential real estate is also booming. “People seem to have a
hidden assumption that every house in the District will eventually be
crowding $1 million,” wrote Megan McArdle in the
Daily Beast in
September (adding, however, that “this doesn’t seem possible to me”).
Rents are high, with lower-cost apartments disappearing rapidly as
investors pay current residents as much as $10,000 to move out so that
their apartments can be rented to others at higher rates. In 2011,
buoyed by robust demand, builders broke ground on more than 15,000 new
apartment units throughout the Washington region. “Much of the building
is taking place in the District,” noted the
Washington Post,
adding that “the vast majority are ‘Class A’ units aimed at young
professionals eager to live in walkable communities near shopping and
public transportation.”
As that statement implies, the apartment boom is driven by a surge in
younger residents, especially in the region’s core. The District owes
almost all its population growth to people in their twenties and
thirties; 48 percent of its households are single-person, a nationwide
high. What’s attracting these upscale young? At warp speed, Washington
has become a New York–style urban playground and employment market. As
Time recently reported,
every week brings fresh evidence of continuing prosperity: a
new restaurant, a new nightclub, another restored 19th century
townhouse in a previously dodgy neighborhood selling for $1 million or
more. Start-ups are hiring through Craigslist, and just opened lobbying
firms have no trouble collaring clients. Storefronts that stood
abandoned five years ago fill with pricey gourmet-food shops.
Similarly, Ross Douthat observed in the
New York Times that
over the [last] decade. . . . the changes to Washington have
been staggering to watch. High-rises have leaped up, office buildings
have risen, neighborhoods have been transformed. Streets once deserted
after dusk are now crowded with restaurants and bars. A luxurious
waterfront area is taking shape around the stadium that the
playoff-bound Nationals call home. Million-dollar listings abound in
neighborhoods that 10 years ago were transitional at best.
But Washington isn’t Portland, a youth mecca where, the quip goes,
“young people go to retire.” Geographer Jim Russell notes that
“Washington’s young talent is super-ambitious. They are driven to
succeed in a very competitive talent market.” Jobs on Capitol Hill or in
high-profile nonprofits are highly coveted and hard to land. Like New
York, Washington is one of the world’s toughest arenas, a place where
the best and brightest come to prove themselves.
They aren’t just white hipsters, either. The
Washington metro area is 26.4 percent black, Number Eight in the
country among metros with more than a million people. Stereotypes of the
city dwell on its black underclass and its history of electing black
nationalist politicians like Barry. But the area has a large black
middle class as well—above all, in Prince George’s County, just across
the Maryland state line. That county is over 65 percent black, and its
median household income is $70,700, making it the highest-income
majority-black county in the United States.
Immigrants, too, have been flourishing in Washington. By the end of
2010, nearly 22 percent of the metropolitan area’s population was
foreign-born, up from 17.3 percent in 2000—the biggest increase among
the ten largest American metro areas. A lot of these immigrants are
Latino, as in many American cities. But Washington’s immigrant base is
highly diverse. For example, tens of thousands of Indian immigrants,
many of them tech entrepreneurs, live near Dulles International Airport,
in an area that the
Atlantic has labeled the “Silicon Valley of
the East.” The region also attracts immigrants from East Asian and
African countries, such as Korea, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. Many are highly
educated. “We have a lot of really highly skilled, really highly
educated immigrants in technical fields,” George Mason University’s Lisa
Sturtevant told the
Washington Examiner last year. And, Russell
adds, “D.C. is a global talent market increasingly on par with New York
and London. It is drawing the cream of the crop from around the world,
and they are paid top dollar.”
The international origins of both talent and investment in Washington
signal something new: it’s becoming an important global city. “In a
globalizing world, capitals count for less than global business
centers,” journalist Richard Longworth wrote in 2009, adding that
“Washington, a one-dimensional company town if there ever was one,”
never made anyone’s list of global cities. That view of Washington is
increasingly dated. Yes, it’s still a government town, but it’s the town
of the most important government there is, and that distinction
matters. Washington is home to a massive number of embassies and
international institutions, of course. Almost 1,500 foreign
correspondents from 113 countries are based there, giving Washington a
global news-media reach on par with New York’s. Even domestically, the
news media industry has consolidated into Washington, along with New
York, writes Matthew Yglesias in
Slate. A recent meta-analysis of
various surveys by economist Richard Florida ranked Washington the
Number Three global city in America, behind only New York and Chicago.
But what solidifies Washington’s emerging
status as America’s new Second City isn’t its economic performance or
its emerging global-city profile. Both of those are secondary effects of
the real change in Washington: the increasingly intrusive control of
the federal government over American life.
Traditionally, Washington thrived through a “leaky bucket” model,
redirecting some of the gigantic money flow through the federal pipeline
to itself. The 2000s were an especially good time for the region, as
two wars, plus 9/11-related defense and homeland-security procurement,
fueled the boom. These days, about a third of the Washington-area
economy depends on the federal government. But with $16 trillion in
national debt and large deficits projected as far as the eye can see,
the gravy train may be coming to a halt. Some, like Steven Cochrane of
Moody’s Analytics, think that fiscal retrenchment would spell the end of
D.C.’s new prosperity. “The days of Washington being the leader in
terms of job growth and economic strength are really over,” Cochrane
told the
Washington Post in early 2011. “I think there’s no way
that [the pace of job growth] could be kept up any longer, particularly
now that the federal government is undergoing pretty strict [budget]
scrutiny.”
The leaky-bucket model may indeed be nearing its limits. But
Washington has discovered a new way to extract value from the federal
government, based not just on spending but on an ever-expanding
regulatory state. An array of programs—the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank
acts governing finance; the government’s auto-industry takeover; the
EPA’s declaration that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—takes regulation to
new levels of detail and intrusiveness, even extending to the
micromanagement of particular companies. The trend began long before
President Obama took office, but its quintessence is Obamacare, an
annexation by the federal government of one-sixth of the American
economy via 2,000 pages of byzantine legislation, not counting the
thousands of pages of implementing regulations still to come.
All this intrusion emanates from the legislative and especially the
regulatory machinery in Washington. The city has become, in effect, the
Brussels of America. So a wider and wider variety of businesses and
organizations must be located there to lobby the government that decides
their fate. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, total
spending on lobbying rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to $3.3 billion in
2011.) These firms pay local taxes. So do their workers, who also buy
houses, patronize stores, pay tuition at private schools, employ local
doctors and lawyers, and so on. The regulatory superstate is
turbocharging Washington’s local economy.
This new basis for prosperity could pay huge dividends to the region.
The model here might be the defense industry, which has already
centralized many operations in the area. Northrop Grumman, for example,
recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Washington. Boeing
shifted its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago to be closer to defense
operations and customers in Washington. Other industries, such as
health insurance, may follow suit. Even if they don’t relocate to D.C.
entirely, they’ll need to be represented there.
City Journal
contributing editor Joel Kotkin has speculated that “when everything
from zoning [to] the location of industrial plants and healthcare is
under Washington’s control, the capital could conceivably even emerge as
a challenger to New York’s two century reign as the country’s most
important city.” The mere fact that such heresy can be uttered
illustrates Washington’s new power.
So Washington can boast demographic and
economic growth, a highly educated workforce, an emerging
elite-global-city profile, and regulatory hegemony that ensures that
America will continue to pay it tribute, even if the federal government
manages to restrain its spending. This looks like a winning recipe
locally, and it gives the region a legitimate claim to be America’s new
Second City.
But it’s a loser for America. Even more than the old leaky-bucket
system did, the regulatory superstate depends on inflicting pain on the
rest of the country, pain that only Washington itself can relieve—if you
pay up and have the right connections, that is. Washington’s fortunes
and America’s are increasingly at odds. The region is prospering because
it’s becoming something that would have horrified the Founders: an
imperial capital on the Potomac.
Aaron M. Renn is an urban analyst, consultant, and publisher of the urban policy website The Urbanophile.
