Washington, District of Columbia

The corner kept its name

In 2019, a luxury apartment building called The Shay filed a noise complaint against a MetroPCS store on the corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW. The store had been playing go-go music through outdoor speakers since 1995. The corner is literally named Chuck Brown Way, after the man who invented the genre. The speakers went silent.

Eighty thousand people signed a petition. T-Mobile’s CEO reversed the decision. The city made go-go its official music. A mural went up on the side of the building that filed the complaint. Natalie Hopkinson, the Howard University professor who wrote Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, stood at the unveiling: “This is such a happy day. We are one step closer to having everybody remember why this corner is a sacred place.”

The music won. The corner kept its name. But the neighborhood kept changing. Only three Black-owned businesses remain on the U Street corridor out of more than 300 at the corridor’s peak. Ben’s Chili Bowl. Lee’s Flowers. Industrial Bank. The rest is apartments named after the culture they replaced. The Ellington. The Langston. Buildings that take the name and lose the people.

Go-go only works live. The call-and-response requires bodies in the room. Hopkinson’s book title says it: the musical life and death of a Chocolate City. The displacement of the people who play the music, not the music itself.

That dynamic — the seat keeps its name, the people rotate through — is the District of Columbia.

One jurisdiction, two cities averaged

DC scores 53.5 on the County Distress Index. Elevated zone. If you stopped there, you’d note the distress and move on. But the composite is doing something unusual here. It’s averaging the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country with some of the most distressed, and the result still reads Elevated.

Every one of the twelve counties I’ve written before this one was defined by distance from power. Appalachian counties an eight-hour drive from the state capital. Farm counties where the closest federal office is a post office. Small towns where the decision-makers are always somewhere else. DC inverts that entirely. The agencies that measure poverty, track unemployment, and insure mortgages are all headquartered here. The distance is zero. The protection is not.

Housing Cost Burden scores 78.8 out of 100 — Serious territory. Legal Distress scores 26.0, among the lowest in the country. Those two numbers sit 53 points apart inside the same jurisdiction. The person earning $123,000 a year with employer health insurance and the person paying half their income in rent while their FHA mortgage goes delinquent — the composite doesn’t know they’re different people. It averages them into Elevated.

Median household income is $104,643 — the 97th percentile nationally. Poverty rate is 15.2% — above the national median. Both numbers are real. They describe different residents of the same jurisdiction. DC ties with New York for the highest income inequality in the nation.

FHA delinquency in the city where HUD lives

The number that changes the story is FHA serious delinquency. 8.34%. The highest rate among all 654 large-volume FHA counties in the country. 767 originations, 64 seriously delinquent loans, zero claims filed yet. The loans are going bad but haven’t reached the claim stage. Early distress.

FHA is the federal government’s own mortgage program. 3.5% down. Credit scores just above the cutoff. The borrowers with the thinnest margins. And the place where those margins are failing most visibly is the city where HUD is headquartered.

The next-closest large-volume counties include Charles County, Maryland, at 7.64%, East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at 7.54%, and Baltimore City at 7.15%. DC leads them all.

The auto loan delinquency rate tells a related story. 9.61%, the 90th percentile nationally. In a city with a functional Metro system, the residents carrying car loans are disproportionately east of the Anacostia — where the map gets thinner and the commutes get longer. Auto loans in DC are a class signal.

The line the Anacostia draws

The Anacostia River runs through the District like a line drawn on a spreadsheet. West of the river: less than 25% Black, average household income around $140,000, roughly 50% homeownership. East of the river: 92% Black, average household income around $48,000, homeownership below 25%.

Ward 3 median family income: over $250,000. Ward 8: $47,108. Child poverty in Ward 3: 4%. In Ward 8: 41%.

LaMonika Jones, the director of D.C. Hunger Solutions: “They don’t really realize that when you’re looking at Ward 7 and 8, east of the Anacostia, that the median income is about $50,000 but when you look at other areas in the District, their median income is upward of about $120,000.”

Between June 2025 and February 2026, Ward 8 accounted for 30% of DC’s eviction filings despite comprising 16% of the renter population. The median back rent at filing: $4,851. About three months behind. Monthly evictions climbed from roughly 124 pre-pandemic to 164 in FY2025. The RENTAL Act, passed in September 2025, reduced the required notice period before filing an eviction from 30 days to 15.

Amanda Korber, managing attorney at DC Legal Aid’s Housing Unit: “I think it’s gonna get ugly, and I think it’s gonna get ugly fast.”

From the other direction: DOGE layoffs flooded the market with inventory. DC-area housing inventory nearly doubled. Across the broader metro area, more than 13,500 homes were for sale by May 2025. Federal workers leaving. FHA borrowers falling behind. Two housing crises running in opposite directions inside the same city.

Taxation without representation, still printed on the plate

DC residents pay the highest federal taxes per capita of any jurisdiction in the country. Nearly $37,642 per person in net federal collections. They have no voting representation in Congress. In February 2026, Congress passed a disapproval resolution removing roughly $658 million over five years of local tax dollars from DC’s budget. License plates in the District have read “Taxation Without Representation” since the late 1990s. The argument is printed on every car in the city, and nothing has changed.

Parliament called it Chocolate City in 1975, when the Black population exceeded 70%. It’s now roughly 45%. Barry Farm — established in 1867 by the Freedman’s Bureau as one of the first Black homeownership communities in DC — began demolition in 2018. The families who lived there scattered across the District and beyond.

Gregory Adams, a longtime U Street resident: “People who lived along the U Street corridor… I’ve seen them go. It wasn’t that they were dying off. They couldn’t afford to stay.”

The uninsured rate is 3.4% — less than half the national median. Medical debt affects 0.95% of the population, compared to 3.68% nationally. Medicaid expansion works. The safety net functions. But even with those counterforces, the composite still reads Elevated. The safety net measures a different city than the one east of the river.

The seat stays. Who remains in it.

DC’s neighbors tell the familiar version of the gap story. Arlington scores 23.5, Healthy. Fairfax scores 30.0, Healthy. Then the gradient steepens. Montgomery County scores 40.3, Normal. Alexandria scores 43.9, Normal. Then Prince George’s County — the only majority-Black jurisdiction among the six — scores 73.5, Serious. Fifty points separate Arlington from Prince George’s. DC sits at the hinge.

I don’t know whether the FHA delinquency rate is a leading indicator or a steady-state feature of a city this unequal. The loans haven’t reached the claims stage yet. That gap between delinquency and loss — between falling behind and losing the house — is where the next chapter sits. The city’s overall homeownership rate is 41.1%, the 0.5th percentile nationally. The people who managed to buy are the ones going delinquent at the highest rate in the country, using the government’s own program, eleven miles from the agency that runs it. The indicators to watch are FHA delinquency, auto loan delinquency, and Housing Cost Burden — which at 78.8 is already 25 points above the composite. The seat stays. The question is who remains in it.