March 18, 2024

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What happened to America’s capital?

Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown.

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Bowser has drafted these desperate measures in a belated response to the desperate times. As the forty-two-page report concedes early on, “once a bustling employment center, Downtown DC has faced an outflow of office workers in response to remote and telework trends.” Doubtless the pandemic and resulting rise of remote work have played a role in the deterioration. Government employees have been particularly reluctant to return to the office five days a week — and given that they’d have to spend eight hours a day with other government employees, it’s hard to blame them. The knock-on effect is that the consultants and lobbyists hoping to influence or cajole the government don’t feel the need to return to the office either. Countless business meetings and happy hours have been reduced to Zoom calls and emails.

But there’s a more significant reason why DC workers don’t want to go downtown — and the word merits just a single mention in Bowser’s report: crime. Violent crime was up 39 percent last year in the city, with the murder rate rising to heights not seen since the mid-1990s. Why would you drive in to the office when your car could be hijacked in broad daylight by a perpetrator who won’t face consequences? Safer to stay in Virginia or Maryland.

It is deeply unfashionable in the left wing of the Democratic Party to acknowledge that urban crime has become a problem in the last four years — “public safety” is Bowser’s preferred phrase, and she’s ringfenced $31.5 million for it over the next five years. But if any of that money is intended for actually hiring more police officers, her report does not indicate it.

Life is rough for the few cops who still work for the Metropolitan Police Department — they have left the force by the hundreds, putting the department headcount at a half-century low.

Unexpectedly:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll