Connor O’Brien of the Economic Innovation Group wrote a solid “just the facts” post about changes in Washington, D.C., in the past few years.
Here are the highlights:
- Washington lost 2.6 percent of its population between 2020 and 2022.
- Since last year:
- Violent crime is up 39 percent.
- Homicide is up 34 percent.
- Carjacking is up 88 percent.
- Robbery is up 68 percent.
- Only 34 percent of K–12 students are proficient in English, and 22 percent are proficient in math. That’s down from 37 percent and 31 percent, respectively, in 2019.
- For the 2022–23 school year, 43 percent of students were chronically absent. That’s up from 27 percent in the 2019-20 school year.
- Metro-system ridership is at around 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels, which is roughly on par with other cities.
There’s one piece of unambiguously good news that O’Brien reports: More housing is being built in the city than at any point in decades. It’s good to see a city permitting new construction, rather than snagging it with endless red tape.
But other than that, yeesh. O’Brien points out that the negative trends on crime this year are abnormal compared with other major cities. It’s not 1990s-level yet, but “on homicide and robbery, the city has ceded 20 years of progress in a very short period,” O’Brien writes.
Washington’s 39 percent spike in violent crime this year was by far the worst of any city. The next largest was 23 percent, in Long Beach. San Antonio saw a 21 percent decrease in violent crime this year. Atlanta’s declined 20 percent. Even cities known for their crime problems, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and St. Louis, saw declines in violent crime this year.
District leadership can’t blame the national environment for its performance. The decline in public safety in the nation’s capital this year is an outlier. Washington had better figure it out, or more people and businesses will leave.