President Obama will be moving into DC’s Kalorama neighborhood once his term ends, National Journal reported on Tuesday. Demographics data reveals the president’s neighborhood-of-choice differs from the rest of the city in one significant way: it has almost no poor or black people.
According to Statistical Atlas (which provides demographic information on DC’s neighborhoods using U.S. Census data), the Kalorama neighborhood is just 3.7 percent black — the rest of the city is more than 50 percent black.
While whites make up just 35 percent of the DC population, more than 71 percent of Obama’s neighbors will be white. In Obama’s new neighborhood, whites outnumber blacks 19-1.
Almost 14 percent of DC households — and more than 30 percent in the city’s poorest areas–are on food stamps. In Obama’s entire neighborhood, seven households — 0.5 percent of the neighborhood — qualify for food stamps.
Obama’s new neighborhood is one of DC’s richest. According to Statistical Atlas, Kalorama sits among DC’s wealthiest twelve neighborhoods and has a median household income four times that of the city’s poorer African-American neighborhoods (such as Anacostia).
According to Washingtonian Magazine, a four-bedroom home in Kalorama goes for about $2.8 million.
“It’s hard to imagine the Obama of eight years ago deciding to forgo the potential to move to a revitalizing area, or just a slightly less hoity one, in favor of a zip code where the blood runs royal blue and the servants’ stairs are still used by the help,” the magazine said in a piece that was critical of the president’s neighborhood choice.
“It feels bizarrely out of a character for a man who proclaimed ‘We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed,’ to settle down on a block where a 4-bedroom home averages about $2.8 million.”
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