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Downtown looks great, but the school system is a nightmare. The business community has volunteered to pay for a new baseball stadium, but the city's only hospital for the poor was allowed to close. Wealthy, largely white Tenleytown west of Rock Creek Park is home to a new Best Buy selling high-end electronics, but largely poor and black Ward 8 east of the Anacostia River is still waiting for its first grocery store. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute recently found that the chasm between rich and poor is as great in the District as in any major U.S. city and that the gap has grown wider as the District has prospered. In June, a poll conducted for the Service Employees International Union found that a plurality, 44 percent, of likely Democratic voters think things in the city are on the wrong track, with young people, blacks and the poor expressing the highest levels of dissatisfaction. Thirty-six percent of those polled said the city is "headed in the right direction." [more

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