Nation: Boomtown on the Potomac

If you are poor, you have no business in Washington.” So said snippy Journalist Anne Royall in the early 19th century. Her observation is hardly less true today. Only now it must be added that anyone with business in Washington faces little risk of poverty. The great company town on the Potomac is booming. Humorist Russell Baker may garnish the truth when he writes of suburban lawns “green with money.” And admittedly not everybody rushed to get at the $13,000 Chinese vases when the new Neiman-Marcus store opened last November. But by the most telling measure—family income—Washington has fattened into the most affluent metropolis in the country.

Gloats the slick monthly Washingtonian in a promotional brochure: “In most major cities, you see street vendors selling hot dogs, peanuts or ice cream. In Washington there is a pushcart vendor selling quiche Lorraine, páté, hummus and fine cheeses. But that’s the way it is in Washington—expensive tastes and the money to afford them.”

Most Americans in the outcountry cannot be expected to join in all the glee. For one thing, good news in Washington is usually bad news for taxpayers elsewhere. For another, Washington’s prosperity, by its very nature, is likely to remove the capital even further than ever from the realities of the country. Too much new money along with all that old power have already lent the city a noticeable ambience all its own. The Chicago Daily News recently called it “the most puffed-up, self-important city in the world.” And last month New York’s Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan charged that the well-paid bureaucrats have “grown pleasingly plump with their own self-regard.”

If so, it is scarcely surprising. For since the 1960s, greater Washington has evolved into a privileged ghetto, home of a pampered class all but immune to the disheartening tantrums of the economic weather. A few areas may look better off in certain statistics, but none can boast of an affluence quite like Washington’s. It is effortless, persisting, secure. True, in the 71% black District of Columbia, poverty persists, along with the core city’s reputation for street crime. Even so, black unemployment in D.C. is a third less than the U.S. average.

Uniquely, greater Washington’s economy improves in both good times and bad. Not by magic. Public problems are to Washington what oil and gas are to Texas. In Washington the fuel crisis that is but a specter everywhere else takes the shape of a new Department of Energy. Somehow the city does not need to fear the economic cycles that batter the rest of a country. Why not? Well, as the New Republic put it, “Washingtonians live outside of the law of supply and demand.”

Neiman-Marcus, with its proved disdain for small change, is by no means the only luxury store to move into the Washington market. Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor, all have opened one or more outlets in or near the capital; all have done well enough to tempt established stores such as Hecht’s and Woodward & Lothrop to retreat from their old bargain-counter ways. Mercedes-Benz thinks well enough of the area to service it with five agencies.

All in all, the city is one of the hottest markets in the U.S. By the latest official Census Bureau statistics the Washington metropolitan area’s 3.1 million inhabitants had a mean family income of $21,441 in 1976, which put them well ahead of the Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago areas. The metropolis contains a larger than average proportion of the college-educated, white-collar types that the mercantile world considers the ideal customers. Their financial well-being is not harmed by the fact that they enjoy generally lower property taxes and pay less than the nation as a whole for medical care, public transportation, cigarettes—and liquor, which moves at a higher rate per capita than anywhere else.

Abundant money plus a fast-growing population have created a housing market so inflamed that it is a legend. House hunters today have to think rich if they expect to buy even an average middle-class dwelling. Says Senator Edward Zorinsky of Nebraska: “In Omaha we condemn houses that cost $100,000 here.”

Filling the city’s new offices are ever fresh droves of the lobbyists, lawyers, consultants and experts who embody the outside world’s hopes of coping with the Feds. Some 2,200 trade and professional associations now maintain offices in Washington, and more are trailing in every day. The city is overrun with lawyers —13,000 now, up from 7,000 in 1972. Granted, not all of them mint money like old Presidential Adviser Clark Clifford (who reputedly earns well over $1 million a year), but a great many wind up with six-figure incomes. Few Washington lawyers would disagree with the partner in the famous firm of Covington & Burling (most of whose 80 partners have incomes over $100,000) who privately admitted: “Every time the Federal Government sneezes you can hear coins rattle in our cash register.”

Ultimately, it is not Washington’s prosperity as such that merits concern. But the effect of an affluence that is invulnerable could well haunt the country sooner or later. It was never easy, even back in the days when they were truly underpaid, to awaken those whom Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls “the feudal barons of the permanent Government” to the social realities around the country. Job security alone filled them with the sass of power. Now that they are both fat and sassy, some observers are convinced that the rulers in Washington have difficulty in understanding conditions in the rest of the U.S. One such observer, Albert E. Sindlinger, of the marketing research firm Sindlinger & Co., believes that Washington is emotionally alienated from what he calls “the real United States.” Sindlinger bases his conclusion on extensive surveys of the Washington population. Sampling in six Washington suburban counties, Sindlinger found that 81% of those interviewed had had recent income hikes (v. 29.5% nationally) and 69.3% expected increases in the near future (compared with 32.1% nationally).

It might well be that Senator Moynihan, in his collision with the bureaucracy, was encountering a symptom of the same disconnection. The New Yorker was raising hell specifically because the bureaucrats of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare had refused to produce some information he had requested. They were guilty, he said, of the old Navy crime known as “dumb insolence.”

One Senator’s exasperation hardly amounts to a groundswell of national sentiment. Still it might be taken as a testy hint of the wind that, granted the direction of things in smug Washington, could freshen into a compelling issue in some future election. Government’s mere bigness helped waft Jimmy Carter into the White House.