In this week’s Georgetown Current, friend of GM Carol Joynt was quoted in an article about neighbors complaining about the proliferation of long term dumpsters on the street. What she said caused a bit of consternation with some people GM happened to chat with yesterday:
“There’s no reason to have dumpsters in a small scenic village like Georgetown,” resident Carol Joynt said in an interview. “This is a neighborhood with very rich people. They can afford to have dump trucks come in and out on a daily basis.”
The consternation was over the assertion that Georgetowners are rich. This got GM wondering, are all Georgetowners rich?
While it cannot answer this definitively, data from the Census Bureau can shed some light on the topic.
Here is the breakdown of household income in Georgetown (excluding the University). As you can see, the largest single category of incomes for Georgetown is over $200,000 (the highest category the Census Bureau data captures). But it’s still only about 34% of households. An even larger number of households in Georgetown (37%) earn $75,000 or less. So, no not all people in Georgetown are rich.
However, some categories of Georgetown residents are more likely to be wealthy than others. For instance, Georgetown families are much more likely to have high incomes:
Approximately 82% of Georgetown families have a household income over $100,000, and most of those have incomes exceeding $200,000. This is not surprising, if not a bit depressing.
The flipside to this chart is that non-family households (i.e. people living alone or with non-relatives) in Georgetown are much more likely to have more modest incomes:
To be fair to Carol, she didn’t say that all Georgetowners are rich, just the ones doing massive home renovations. (And although the Census Bureau data can’t fact check that assertion, GM feels pretty comfortable giving it zero Pinocchios. Nobody is gutting a Georgetown home while living on anything but superfluous incomes.)
But plenty of people do think that all residents of Georgetown are wealthy. This data shows that that is simply not true.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
If 37% of Georgetown households earn $75K or less, then that means 63% of Georgetown households earn more than $75K. Out of that 63% of households, 34% earn more than $200K. It seems to me that one can infer that Georgetowners are rich.
I find it amusing that this was the part of her quote that caused consternation, as opposed to the far more risible “a small scenic village like Georgetown” bit.
OMGWTFBBQ Georgetown is not “a small scenic village.” It is a neighborhood – a historic, scenic neighborhood, but a neighborhood nonetheless – in the middle of a dense major urban area, in close proximity to the city’s Central Business District. It is directly across the river and within walking distance from many tall buildings and a subway hub. It has numerous multistory apartment and commercial buildings and high volumes of both public transit and private cars.
Nowhere outside of a marketing copywriter’s fevered dream does Georgetown remotely resemble a “village,” small or otherwise. You live in the big city, ma’am. No use pretending otherwise (except as a justification for rampant NIMBYism, but that’s another story).