Hunger Games USA: Rich Zips Cluster Around Washington DC

A feature article in this morning's Washington Post, about the large number of wealthy communities that have grown up around the Washington D.C. tit.  The online version even has a nice tool for checking out how your own zip code stacks up to the "superzips" surrounding DC.

Washington: A world apart

...Clarksville sits in one of the nation’s “Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees.

Although these areas would be considered rare in much of the country, they’re fairly ordinary by Washington standards.

A Washington Post analysis of the latest census data shows that more than a third of Zip codes in the D.C. metro area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for income and education. But what makes the region truly unusual is that so many of the high-end Zip codes are contiguous. They form a vast land mass that bounds across 717 square miles. It stretches 60 miles from its northern tip in Woodstock, Md., to the southern end in Fairfax Station, and runs 30 miles wide from Haymarket in Prince William County to the heart of the District up to Rock Creek Parkway.

One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered...

The clustering of wealth around the United States Capital city is a natural consequence of both the governments propensity to "spill" money close to home (even bureaucrats have more sympathy for people they know than for people they don't), and for those businesses that benefit from government expenditures to relocate all or much of their businesses to the DC region, to be closer to the tap.

I'm starting to come around to my Dad's idea that the US capitol city should be relocated, preferably to Fargo, North Dakota, or some similar venue, to move it close to the geographic center of the country (yes, it would help if we conquered Canada, too), and to have it in a climate that's just barely tolerable for human existence, to discourage too many people from cluster.

My own zip code, 20685, comes in with a median household income of $103k, and a ranking of 79th percentile, good, but by no means "super."  We are, of course, in the shadow of the DC region, but far enough that the wealth flowing from the district is attenuated somewhat by the commute required.