The District is one of the most expensive places to live in the country. That could be why Columbus is trying to woo DC residents.
The city of 800,000 in central Ohio, anchored by Ohio State University, has placed ads in Metro tunnels recently. Many of them seem to target millennials. One ad, below, specifically points out Columbus’s affordability.
In most parts of the District, people who wish to buy a home face an expensive housing market. The costs become even higher if you want to buy within the boundaries of a high performing public school so your children have the right to attend that school.
With Uber and other ridesharing services becoming a common transit option for some DC residents, we wanted to get a sense of when someone might substitute an Uber trip for a Metrorail trip. To do this, we plotted data on travel time and cost, creating a visualization that shows whether Uber or Metro is faster, and at what cost, for 114 different trips between Metro stations. By adding in the time it takes to wait for a Metro train or Uber, walk to the Metro, or sit on a delayed train, we can see how a person’s decision might change depending on their circumstances.
In hypothetical comparisons, tax burdens on the District’s families are lower than those in surrounding jurisdictions in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. This is according to a recent study we released, Tax Rates and Tax Burdens 2014: Washington Metropolitan Area, that compares tax burdens across four main taxes: income, property, sales, and auto.
On July 1, 2020, the minimum wage in the District of Columbia will be $15 per hour.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on US national, state, and local economies. One of the difficulties in assessing the extent of the economic impact is the lack of timely data. While measures to control the pandemic rapidly destroyed jobs in the retail and hospitality and leisure sectors, official US Bureau of Labor Statistics figures on jobs at the national level were not available until a week after the end of the month when the jobs were lost. And at the state and local level, the jobs numbers are available two are more weeks after the end of the month.
When the CARES Act passed in March, self-employed persons were granted eligibility to apply for and receive unemployment benefits for the first time in history through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. The self-employed have always been a part of the economy, but the CARES Act marked a turning point for this business type with formal acknowledgement by legislators to the importance of supporting them. But who are the “self-employed”? The identity of the self-employed has long been a mystery.
Tackling climate change and advancing environmental sustainability is a challenge that is emerging as a key urban policy issue by an increasing number of US cities, and the District of Columbia is a national leader on this front. The District of Columbia was the first city in the nation to pass major environmental sustainability legislation.