The Washington area in about five years will cross a key threshold, becoming more than 50 percent minority for the first time, thanks mainly to rapid growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations, according to projections by the Global Insight forecasting firm.
The region’s minority groups share many of the same characteristics as the white population, including being well-educated on average and having the highest household incomes in the nation.
Washington is expected to maintain its lead in both areas, which has made it one of the most prosperous and desirable areas to live in the country, the study for the Greater Washington Initiative being released today found.
While whites last year were the majority, with 54.8 percent of the population, slow birthrates and aging will cause their share to shrink to 50.2 percent by 2012, the study projects. Blacks will maintain their 24.3 percent share of the population, but Hispanics will jump from 10.2 percent to 12.8 percent, and Asians will rise from 7.7 percent to 9.2 percent.
Other smaller ethnic groups — among them Middle Eastern immigrants, American Indians and Pacific Islanders — also are projected to increase their share from 3.1 percent to 3.5 percent of Washington’s households, vaulting the total of minorities into majority status in or shortly after 2012.
Washington would join a handful of major cities — the first was Los Angeles — that have moved from a traditional white population of European origin to a multiethnic mix.
“Washington is very diverse” and attracts the “broadest dichotomy” of both native and foreign residents, said Jim Diffley, an economist with Global Insight who conducted the study. While it has attracted some poorer, low-skilled workers like the Hispanic migrants who have flooded into Los Angeles, it also has lured highly educated and skilled Asian workers like the ones who populate the San Francisco region, he said.
“It’s not as strikingly so as Northern California,” but Asian residents with strong science and technology skills have been a secret to Washington’s success, he said. “Without Asian immigration, Silicon Valley would not have existed. That’s the dirty little secret about technology. It was built upon the Asian immigrants to some extent, and that’s true all across the Northeast,” he said.
Affluent black households also are a signature of the Washington region, making Prince George’s County the highest-income majority-black county in the nation. While many black residents hold jobs in government and services, the concentration of wealth and talent has spurred some notable black enterprises that are based in the Washington area.
The study defines the Washington area as the District of Columbia; Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard, Charles, Frederick, Anne Arundel, Calvert and St. Mary’s counties in Maryland; and Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William, Fauquier, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties and the city of Alexandria in Virginia.
Mark Vitner, economist with Wachovia Securities, said Washington’s increasingly diverse population will open more business opportunities for the area in an era of globalization in which having language skills and knowledge of other cultures is a valuable asset.
Washington stands out as one of only a handful of American cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and New York, that have such good connections to the global economy, combined with the expertise in law, international trade and finance needed to conduct business around the world, he said.
“Cities that have multicultural folks from every part of the world are very well-suited to doing business globally,” he said. “These folks can speak the language. … They have the connections to get things done, and they’re all in one place. There aren’t that many places that have that,” he said.
Stephen Fuller, a professor at George Mason University who makes his own projections on Washington-area growth, agreed that the region has been “trending” toward a greater concentration of foreign-born and minority residents, though he said it may take longer for those groups to reach majority status than the study projects.
He said the study’s prediction that Washington will remain a leader in job and economic growth may be too optimistic. He said the area has experienced a “dramatic slowdown” in the last six months after two years of decelerating growth that peaked in 2004, mainly because of a falloff in federal spending on contracts related to homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“That’s the big driver that made us different in the last five years, and it’s done,” he said. Despite the large concentration of foreign-born residents, he said, “We don’t get the stimulus here from global growth or national economic growth that Atlanta or Miami does. We still have a government-based economy.”
Professionals who don’t have to do business with the federal government are starting to leave Washington, he said, because the cost of living has soared in recent years along with the steep rise in housing and energy prices.
The Global Insight study projects that the median price for new homes in Washington will fall by 9 percent by 2009, before recovering and returning close to its current level of $439,180 by 2012. The prices of existing homes, after having doubled or tripled in many parts of Washington since 1998, will barely keep up with the rate of inflation, it projects.
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