District of Columbia housed homeless in upscale apartments. It hasn't gone as planned.

WASHINGTON - The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell - it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in northwest Washington.

But the Art Deco complex, which overlooks Rock Creek Park and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is today the troubled locus of a debate on housing policy in a city struggling with the twin crises of homelessness and gentrification.

But the situation at Sedgwick Gardens is different: Many of the new tenants are homeless men and women who came directly from shelters or the streets, some still struggling with severe behavioral problems.

The result has been a kind of high-stakes social experiment that so far has left few of its subjects happy. Police visits to the building have nearly quadrupled since 2016. Some tenants have fled. In February, responding to complaints, the city began staffing the building with social workers at night to deal with problems that arise.

The article references a study that says DC has the most intense gentrification of any U.S. city. I know we have gentrification on steroids, and it's generally a good thing. Viewed broadly, DC still has an excessively high percentage of the region's low-income population. If we've learned anything over the past 50 years, it is that big concentrations of welfare populations breed trouble. That was one of the core mistakes of the Great Society wave of housing projects, which created Petri dishes for disfunction. We are still dismantling that mistake.

This depends on the culture. Unintended pregnancy and maternal mortality rates are significantly higher in Washington, DC than in the rest of the US. According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2014, maternal mortality rates in DC are nearly twice the US average, at 41 deaths per 100,000 births. And that is from https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-metropolitan-washington-dc/blog/access-to-abortion-and-dc-statehood-are-the-same-fight

DC Has Highest Percentage of Food Stamp Recipients - https://www.newsmax.com/us/washington-dc-highest-food-stamp/2015/01/17/id/619202/

DC Has a Bigger Welfare State than Any European Country besides Denmark - https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/dc-has-bigger-welfare-state-any-european-country-besides-denmark

In fiscal 2015, the District of Columbia sent the fewest people into the military, - https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/lifestyle/where-do-military-recruits-come-from-not-the-district/2229/

If the goal is to assist the welfare population in moving out of disastrous neighborhoods, fine … but don't move them and then reconcentrate them in what becomes essentially a new project, albeit one in a swankier neighborhood. That won't work.

Liberals are at war with God and His word, and thus reject that man is sinful by nature, and go about indoctrinating a culture with their victim-entitlement mentality, which excludes mercy and grace towards true victims, with its incentive of gratitude toward betterment, and instead it makes welfare a "right," as a form of justice with liberals being the self-proclaimed saviors of those oppressed by those to earned benefits by obedience to God's principles.

Thus these liberals think that changing things like housing will not change those within the culture that they have fostered, and sinful man often chooses.

I know we have gentrification on steroids, and it's generally a good thing.

Economically gentrification can offer improvement, but socially it does not in my experience in a populous section of Central Americans (mostly: I am one of the few who are not). You have a friendly humble people, who are receptive to the gospel of Christ, and who love children and get along very well overall as a social (but not social warrior) community, and you lure in a culture of young people (who used to be called "Yuppies") that overall do not even try to interact with the rest of neighbor, and have dogs instead of kids, and often will display indifference or animosity toward the gospel message (this tells a lot about a culture), and tend to be overall far more intolerant and conceited. But if the friendly "live and let live" Central Americans were raised as the Yuppies were in their culture than they would be like them. And actually can become like them as they become established (this is MA, not MI).

All DC statistics are skewed by the very small size of the District proper. The Combined Metropolitan Statistical Area (the Washington & Baltimore MSA's combined) has nearly 10 million people. DC proper has been growing in recent years and is now just under 700,000 people (47 percent black; 45 percent white), so DC itself constitutes only about seven percent of the metro area. Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties are all bigger than DC. This is due to the fact that the size of the District is fixed by the Constitution. DC cannot grow and therefore has never annexed heavily urbanized, close-in suburbs that, anywhere else, would have long since been incorporated into the city.

If you look at the metro area as a whole, DC's social statistics look much more normal, aside from being ridiculously affluent; seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the U.S. are DC bedroom communities. If you look at the District in isolation, however, things get a big squirrely. DC has a bipolar income distribution, heavily skewed at both ends. We still have an excessively large share of the region's low income population. Gentrification is shrinking that, but we've still got a long way to go.

And Washington, D.C., Is Most Liberal Place In USA - CNS News: The percentage of people living in Washington, D.C., who call themselves liberals is far greater than the national ... - https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/gallup-washington-dc-most-liberal-place-usa

Thus i wonder why the name "Columbia" is even tolerated by the liberal SJW in the federal district since Columbia is feminine form of "Columbus."

seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the U.S. are DC bedroom communities. . If you look at the District in isolation, however, things get a big squirrely. DC has a bipolar income distribution, heavily skewed at both ends.

So what happened to the "share the wealth" demand when its in their backyard?

So what happened to the "share the wealth" demand when its in their backyard?

Liberalism is about sharing other people’s wealth, not your own. I thought you knew that.

Exactly, as meaning a presumed elite morally superior class taking - not encouraging volitional giving - what other's merited and rightfully owned (but not their own wealth) and giving it (in order for the liberals to obtain power) to those who did not and often would not, or at least did not take the risks and engage in the patient effort to attain the benefits which the liberals see are manifestations of unjust inequality.

And usually not even under the pretense of mercy, but as a right, as a form of social justice, as if the providers were oppressors who must be forced to increasingly divest of what they earned - regardless of how much lawful labor was involved - in order to serve justice in the eyes of the liberal mind.

Which burdens the producers and eventually if successful, works toward all having a share in poverty and are subservient to the liberal elites.

Thus my question addressed the duplicity of liberal D. C., for if they really were faithful to the "share the wealth" demand that they want to impose on others, then D.C. would not have a heavily skewed bipolar income distribution.

But going back to what I said about sharing other people’s wealth and not your own, this and the victim-entitlement mentality is from Hell, having begun with the devil as seen in his presuming to occupy God's throne, (Is. 14:14) and essentially telling Eve God needed to share the wealth. (Gn. 3)

Yet we are to volitionally share what we have in our judgment as to where it will benefit, and serve the Lord according to the grace given, for "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required" in the sense that we are to obey ( Luke 12:48)

There is a very practical limit to share the wealth leftism in DC. That is the fact that, no matter where you live in the District, the DC line is within spitting distance. Voting with your feet is probably easier here than in any other big city in America. The surrounding suburban counties are very affluent. They are not low tax havens by any means. But they do impose a limit to the natural tendency of the looters in local government.

DC also bottomed out hard. We passed through the Marion Barry years and bankruptcy. All but the very stupidest Democrats understand that the District needs to be tax competitive for businesses and upper middle class taxpayers.

Affordable housing is a legitimate issue. I am a great believer in mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. The ideal would be a city in which people could at least have the option of ditching their car and living within walking, biking or easy public transportation range of their jobs. This goes for people doing humble jobs as well as upscale yuppies on expensive bikes; the mechanic or supermarket clerk shouldn't have to deal with a two hour commute to a low wage job. I would not dream for an instant of standing in the way of the suburban cowboys who want to live in Urbana or Haymarket or Woodbridge and spend four to six hours a day in their cars. Each to his own. But I would not smash livable neighborhoods in the core to build new expressways for the expat commuters.

To recap: DC proper has only about seven percent of the CMSA's total population. We still have far more than our fair share of the region's poor. This is due to decades of public policy that favored suburban commuters and used the city as the dumping ground for the region's problem cases. No more. I am in favor of stopping MS 13 at the Mexican border, but as long as we are doing catch and release, they'll be here -- and in this area, it's only fair that 93 percent of them land in the suburbs. The gentrifying city doesn't have room for them, and maybe they can help educate liberal suburban voters about the need to secure our borders.

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