How the Capital Has Crumbled

For some time, life here has been a study in contrasts: the impressive monuments and edifices of the nation’s capital shadowed by some of the country’s most oppressive poverty and crime.

But now Washington has taken on the trappings of a Third World city. Broke, neglected and mismanaged, it seems incapable of providing basic services, paying its bills, repairing its firetrucks or supplying its children with books and pencils.

“Every day here,” says an Egyptian diplomat, “reminds me more and more of Cairo.”

How bad is it?

The post office at 14th and Irving Streets S.W. was closed because rats were eating the mail. The city-run nursing home for indigents--where 300 District of Columbia workers are on the payroll to care for 28 residents--is shutting down, too, after seven patients had to have limbs amputated when their bedsores became infected.

At the cockroach-infested city morgue, which needs $800,000 in urgent repairs, corpses are stretched out on rusted gurneys and on the floor, sometimes in bags that have split open, revealing their faces.

Mayor Marion Barry, who is in a 12-step recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse, has been in a state of denial. In April 1995, less than a year after he referred to himself as a “financial genius,” Washington faced a $722-million budget deficit. Congress responded by usurping much of the mayor’s power by placing the city under the authority of an independent control board. Barry initially fought the move and now frequently challenges the board’s authority.

On any given day, 30% of Washington’s police vehicles are in the shop for repairs. “We’ve been holding this stuff together with paper clips,” says Chief Larry Soulsby. One-quarter of the school buses are inoperable and so many firetrucks are laid up because of a shortage of spare parts that the city can respond to no more than two two-alarm blazes at once.

Uncollected trash mounts up on the potholed streets in summer, and unplowed snow in winter. Entire city departments and agencies--including public housing, foster care and the receiving home for juveniles--have been seized by the courts because of malfeasance and financial irresponsibility.

At Springarn High School, Assistant Principal Charles Harden fumbles with the lock to the gym. “Look at this,” he says, opening the door. The gym--where Elgin Baylor, Dave Bing and Sherman Douglas played before going on to the NBA--looks like something out of Beirut. A tarp catches water leaking through the ceiling. The wooden floor has buckled into foot-high ripples. The lights don’t work. Soot coats the walls and the plastic championship banners have melted, the result of an electrical fire that started in the shorted-out scoreboard.

“It all began with the leak,” Harden says. “The city came out and did some patchwork on the floor but we couldn’t get anyone to fix the roof. Eventually the leak spread. The water destroyed the floor and we had to close the gym. The basketball team played all its games on the road this year and the students have to take P.E. in their classrooms. The kids have been really understanding, though. They know we aren’t the only school suffering.”

Coach Keino Wilson shelled out $1,500 of his own to buy basketballs and uniforms. Wilson, who played with the Los Angeles Clippers in 1990, is contacting Baylor--his uncle--and other former NBA stars to see if they will help fix and renovate the gym.

Troubling Story

Although anecdotal evidence of decay abounds in every U.S. metropolis, stark numbers tell a troubling story in this 68-square-mile enclave where the middle class--black and white--is fleeing the heftiest combined federal and local taxes in the nation, one of the highest crime rates, and city services that often seem on a par with those in Kinshasa, Zaire.

* Since the mid-1960s, Washington’s population has shrunk from 800,000 to about 600,000. Of the nation’s 200 largest cities, only St. Louis and Hartford and New Haven in Connecticut lost a larger share of their population from 1990 to 1994.

* District residents with jobs fell from 320,000 in 1985 to 250,000 in 1993. Last year alone, 17,000 jobs vanished. Today, the majority of Washington’s voters are on welfare or Medicare or work for the city. Seventy percent of people who work here do not live here, giving the district the highest rate of nonresidential workers in the country.

* School enrollment has declined from 146,000 in 1970 to 80,000. Teachers are being laid off, class sizes increased, expenditures slashed. Only 52% of high school students graduate. When the board of education voted in May to close seven schools, board president Karen Shook said, “They are all in terrible condition. Teachers have to rush around with buckets when rain comes. We cannot afford to keep all the schools open.”

* Of the 66,000 hotel rooms in the Washington metropolitan area (which includes suburban Maryland and Virginia), 25,000 are in the district, indicating business people and tourists stay elsewhere.

* Dozens of trade associations have left, as have most major businesses, except MCI. But of MCI’s 4,100 local employees, only 900 are based in the Washington headquarters; the others work in the suburbs.

Soaring Prices

In the wake of the middle- and upper-class flight, real estate prices have tumbled and taxes have soared, along with the number of poor dependents.

“I don’t think for a minute anyone exaggerates how bad things have gotten,” says civic activist Marilyn Groves. “One just wonders--have we already crossed the line of no return? Are we dead and just haven’t fallen over yet? Let’s go over to the 3rd District police headquarters. I’ll show you what I mean.”

Walking up tree-lined 19th Street from Dupont Circle is a pleasant experience, past century-old stone homes and two small parks that residents have reclaimed from drug dealers and maintain themselves in the absence of city support. At the station, Sgt. K.R. Robinson is happy to show her visitors the remnants of a once-fine facility.

“The smell in the bathroom isn’t bad today,” she says. “It’s cool. But on a hot day it’ll knock you over.” Dead electrical wires dangle from the ceiling like cobwebs. The motor for the ventilation system is broken. Gaping holes mar the walls. In the detectives’ room, officers fill out reports on old typewriters (and often pay for gas and repairs themselves to keep their official vehicles in service). Small cement chunks falling from the roof in the garage bounce off cars in a pitter-patter of soft echoes. The carpet in the commander’s office is stained and frayed. Asked what’s on her wish list as she walks down a dim corridor, Robinson says, “Light bulbs.”

How did Washington get this way? The city started with an economic advantage: A huge base of government salaries that resulted in a median family income of $30,727 in 1994, higher than that of any state. Yet it has become a city that arrests more black men each year than it graduates from high school. It is a city that recently had the nation’s highest murder rate, highest percentage of one-parent families and unwed mothers, highest infant mortality rate and the highest percentage of adults in prison and adults receiving public assistance. It is a city where eighth-graders lead the nation in time spent watching TV--and have the nation’s lowest scores in math proficiency.

Unique Structure

“When you talk about Washington there always has to be an asterisk, and that asterisk is Congress, hovering over the district,” says Bernard Ross, chairman of American University’s department of public administration. “Though the district government today has been truncated [by the control board], Washington on the whole did quite well for a while [in the first years of home rule].”

The problem in part, Ross says, stems from the city’s unique political structure. Carved out of Virginia and Maryland to be the nation’s capital after the Revolutionary War, the federally run District of Columbia gained home rule in 1975. But even with a mayor and city council, it remained a ward of Congress. It depended on Congress for one-quarter of its revenues, had no umbilical cord tied to a state or county government and to this day cannot send a voting representative to Congress.

Congress controls the federal enclave that stretches along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, meddles in city affairs even in flush times and exercises influence through monetary subsidies. For its part, Washington cannot tax the federal buildings, museums and universities that abound here and cannot institute new taxes, such as a commuter tax, without congressional approval. The city also must operate a prison, a university and a motor vehicle registry department--responsibilities traditionally held by states.

In 1978, Washington, with the support of the largely white business community, elected Barry, then 42, the son of a Tennessee sharecropper and a veteran of the civil rights movement, to his first term as mayor. He could stir a crowd. He was intelligent, charismatic, irrepressible, a skilled politician who knew the value of rewarding supporters with jobs and contracts. The city payroll grew and grew until today 1 in 7 households has a city employee. Some of the workers getting paychecks, a recent investigation showed, are dead.

Early on, Barry scored some stunning successes. He redeveloped downtown along the K Street corridor, oversaw the completion of an extensive commuter rail system, put in place one of the nation’s best summer youth programs. But increasingly, as drugs, alcohol and fast living took their toll on Barry, Washington became a city running on autopilot. Private contractors working for the city got paid late or not at all. City funds hemorrhaged. Some city workers “retired in place,” collecting paychecks but seldom showing up for work.

With no accountability, municipal services ground to a near halt. Through it all, Barry remained a master politician, tying his fate to the welfare of the district in the minds of the disenfranchised. When he got out of prison after six months on a drug charge, Ward 8--the city’s poorest--elected him to the City Council. In 1994, he stunned everyone by recapturing the mayor’s seat. By then, though, Washington was broke and reeling out of control. Congress voted in April 1995 to put the district under the authority of a five-member control board and Barry gradually was transformed into a figurehead.

As mayor for 13 of the last 17 years, Barry is the usual target of public wrath when people bemoan the city’s condition. The City Council, which approved the policies and appropriations that led to the deterioration, strangely has escaped unscathed. So has the city’s guardian--Congress.

“Whose fault is it?” control board member Constance Berry Newman said of the crisis at a conference in April. “The list is pretty long over the years: Congress, elected officials, federal agencies, business, labor unions . . . the region and the surrounding states. Blame does not get us very far. What matters is talking about solutions.”

Dorothy Brizill came to Washington 15 years ago from New York to work at the Brookings Institute, a think tank. Her husband, a writer, was mugged three times last year. Her own life was placed in peril when drug dealers put out a hit: $3,500 for anyone who burned down her house with her in it. “When I heard, I was surprised it was that much. About $500 is the going rate for getting someone killed here,” she says.

Brizill is a community activist who, with police help, chased drug dealers off her block in Columbia Heights. She turns north on 16th Street N.W. in her mother-in-law’s battered car. Elegant, abandoned Victorian homes, their windows cinder-blocked, their yards barricaded by chain-link fences, stand on each block. Now city-owned and vacant for years, most bear a sign that reads:”Reclaiming The City, Investing in People. Mayor Marion Barry.”

She pulls to the curb, careful to avoid a group of idle young men in baggy pants. “When we go into the park across the street, I want you to close your eyes and imagine how beautiful it was,” she says. “The park won a national competition for design when it was built. Now just imagine . . . “

The graceful fountain was intended to create a wading pool in summer and a skating rink in winter, but the water was never turned on. The flowers are dead, the cement chess tables crumbling. Garbage, syringes and wine bottles are everywhere. Two men sleep under the skeleton of a tree. As far as Brizill knows, no child has set foot in the park in seven years. When she called the city to complain, officials could find no listing of the 25-year-old park. It wasn’t on their inventory.

Residents Organize

As Washington more and more resembles an urban frontier, Brizill and others in the city’s battered middle class have in effect formed mini-neighborhood governments. They have organized scores of civic and watchdog associations and are providing services the district no longer can:

* In Dupont Circle, Marilyn Groves and her group raised $8,000 and found pro bono labor to patch up the police headquarters. They plant and trim trees on city streets and run their own “rat patrol,” reporting commercial violations of sanitation codes. “We are what’s left of the middle class,” she says.

* In Georgetown, real estate agent Rod Johnston helped to organize Wells Fargo guards to patrol residential streets. Each subscribing household pays $180 a year. Since the program started, robberies and burglaries have dropped more than 80%. “We were stunned,” he says. “We would have been happy with 10% at first.”

* In Mount Pleasant, Margaret Goodman, a Peace Corp executive, went door to door in January’s blizzard to collect contributions to hire a contractor to clear the street of waist-high snow. “This wasn’t really new,” she says. “Only once in the 12 years I’ve lived here has the city plowed the street.”

* At the Mann Elementary School, PTA President Jane Joyce and other parents underwrote the cost of first-semester supplies, from textbooks to pencils. Joyce asks electricians, landscapers, contractors if they’ll do school repairs free.

Still, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the district, believes Washington eventually can be put back on course. “The assets the city has are tremendous,” he says, noting that, like other troubled cities, the challenge is to end the flight of business and the middle class, make the streets safer, improve schools and reduce the tax burden.

The control board--which approves contracts and the payment of bills and has the power to subpoena and fire--already has had a stifling effect on incompetence and corruption in the bureaucracy, Davis says. Last month, the board demanded the ouster of Washington’s human services chief, a 25-year city employee, for dismal job performance.

Whether Barry will sign on to help reform the government in the last two years of his term is uncertain, although he recently did admit with uncharacteristic candor: “The chickens have come to roost.”

Meanwhile, some residents in Georgetown are advocating that their enclave revert to the independent city status it enjoyed until 1891. Others talk about returning the district to Maryland, which doesn’t want it. As to whether Washington would become the 51st state, a plank in the 1992 Democratic Party platform, “That’s pie in the sky now,” says Davis.

The bottom line is this, says Charles Wesley Harris, a professor of political science at Howard University: “There are going to have to be major changes or the federal government will have to take the district over again. Washington can’t go on like this.”

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District of Columbia

* Founded: 1790. First local officials elected in 1974.

* Land area: 61 square miles.

* Est. 1994 Population: 606,900.

* Median age: 33.5 years.

* Median household income: $30,727.

* Racial makeup: 65.8% Black, 29.0% White, 5.4% Latino origin, 1.8% Asian, 2.4% other.

* Education: 21% high school graduates, 52% with some college courses or degrees.

* Violent crimes per 100,000: 2,663, more than three times the national average.

Source: The Almanac of American Politics, Congressional Districts in the 90’s and Claritas Inc.