Could you give an example of how this power dynamic might work in a non-House-Of-Cards setting, you know, in a non-political setting?
Certainly everything in D.C. need not revolve around Capitol Hill/K-Street, right?
Certainly everything in D.C. need not revolve around Capitol Hill/K-Street, right?
But yes, everything in D.C., even for 30 or 40 miles outside of the city, is absolutely consumed by the Federal government.
The downtown of D.C. proper, outside of the tourist areas, is almost entirely composed of foundations and think tanks and non-government organizations who's mission in life is to try and influence executive or legislative policy decisions. There's almost no other real industry by comparison. The tech scene in D.C. is dominated by fed contracting megacorps and small tech businesses that exist only to partner with those companies in order to get the small business set asides. The non-Fed tech sector in D.C. is abysmally small. It exists, and there are hacker meetups and proper commercial companies here, but the ecosystem for those companies is pretty sparse. Most of the non-fed commercial tech companies you find are IT services companies that help build internal infrastructure for non-tech companies.
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life. It's slowly changing, but nearly everybody who works in the city in the Fed space, lives outside of the city. It means commuting here and traffic is easily as bad as L.A. It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland. If you want to bang into a Senator or a cabinet secretary while grocery shopping, go shopping in McLean or Great Falls.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
But I think it's also that the atmosphere in the city is so stifling, the constant ladder climbing and political backstabbery so intense, that people just want to get away from it.
Take a look at the large West Coast tech companies with offices in and near D.C. and you'll see that, down to the position, they all open up their offices to cater to the Fed space. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, etc. all have offices near D.C. and if you check out the job listings all require clearances and/or experience doing business with the Federal government.
Practically, nobody cares about how much money you make, or your investment abilities in D.C. It's your positional authority, and what that means, earned through the tripod of power, that people care about.
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life.
In the past 10 years, there has been an absolute transformation in housing and retail from Gallery Place/Chinatown, to 14th St and all the way up to Columbia Heights. I challenge one to stand on the corner of 7th & H St and say that the city dies after working hours and on weekends.
It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
Unless you work for GSA, I wouldn't make assumptions like this. It is impossible for the federal government to open up a new 500,000 sq ft facility in downtown DC because there simply isn't any available space at a reasonable cost. Sprawling complexes are cheap and easy to build in the exurbs and the employees don't have any choice but to follow their agency to its new location. It has nothing to do with finding talent, especially in the hills of Virginia where fewer people choose to live.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland.
Suburban Maryland (esp. North of DC). Southern Maryland is Waldorf, St Charles and La Plata, which I would argue are not places where Senators reside. Though, I think you will find that more of the recent politicians are residing in DC. For example, Obama, while a Senator, resided in an apartment building in downtown DC.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
Again, you might benefit from taking a walk anywhere in DC. H St NE, areas around Union Station and even New York Ave & Florida are nice.
DC is changing, but very slowly. The last couple mayoral administrations have done a pretty good job of gentrifying (I don't think that's necessarily a bad term) parts of the city and encouraging new residential construction.
There still isn't much of a nightlife in the city though. Sure there's been little pockets of it at least as far back as the early 90s when I was old enough to look for that kind of thing. But I think the loss of Chinatown in favor of the Verizon Center and a few trendy bars is one of the great tragedies of the city.
But still, most new transplants I run into looking for a hip place to move to end up in Arlingon or Silver Spring and to some extent parts of Alexandria. Many of my gay friends do find homes and community in D.C. around DuPont and a couple other spots, but even with a scene in the city, about half of the folks I know live in Arlington/Alexandria.
In general, a constant theme I could apply to people I know (anecdotal I know), they try to make it work in the city, then quickly move out as soon as their lease is up. There just isn't the kind of benefit of city life that you get in more regular cities.
It doesn't help that, while having lots of little parks, they're virtually unusable due to deep rooted homeless problems in the city that haven't materially improved since as long back as I can remember (the 80s). Getting panhandled virtually every block in some areas gets old very fast.
As for the historic housing, lots of people have visions of this https://farm1.static.flickr.com/118/263237392_a4aacdd50f_m.j...
only to find endless listings for places like this http://sweetpaperdoll.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/100_0259.j...
which means on top of the already inflated price, they'll have to put in endless expensive refurbishments to have a livable home.
It's kind of a shame since the public transport network in D.C. is one of the few functionally useful ones in the U.S. I think the metro is the 2nd most used subway in the U.S.?
The good news, like I said, is that it is slowly changing. The population is increasing for the first time since the 1950s (the city back then was over 3/4 of a million people, it hit 600k in 2010 an apocalyptic population drop. Estimates say almost 50k people have moved in in the last 4 years).