The worst city government in America.

• Author: DeParle, Jason
• Position: Washington, D.C.

When it comes to screwing the poor and feathering their nests, the District of Columbia's bureaucrats take the prize.

Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly Katherine Boo and Michael Weeks provided research assistance for this article.

If you came anywhere close to Washington, D.C. last year, chances are you heard about the ambulance crews. Poor fellas, they were just a bit disoriented. They kept racing out of the fire stations and losing their way, while their patients choked and bled to death. After driving to the wrong address twice, a rescue unit never did catch up with Victim Number Nine. He lay hemorrhaging for 40 minutes until his family quit waiting for help and whisked him to the hospital, where he died. As reports of the lost ambulances increased, the fire chief got serious: he rushed out and bought his crews some $8.95 maps. And the department didn't exactly score a public relations coup when a 911 dispatcher told a distraught caller to "grow up."

Everyone knows that big-city governments are bad. But the real story is this: they're worse than you think. And they're worst of all for the poor, for whom city services such as public housing and public health care are supposed to offer a last defense against pure misery. In D.C., misery has won. The government's mismanagement is so complete that the passive sins of its inept bureaucracy surely rival any active ones of business exploitation as an oppressor of the poor.

In D.C., as in most big cities, the usual case against the government focuses on old-style sin and scandal: rumors of the mayor's drug use and mistresses, or the parole prospects of his former aides. But plain corruption, of which there's been plenty, is finally just a footnote compared to the quiet cruelty of the District's everyday bureaucratic incompetence.

A small sampler from recent months:

> A murder victim died with 22 pieces of identification in his wallet. The city classified him as "unidentified" and sent his body off to be cremated. His family found out six months later.

> An 88-year-old boarding home resident collapsed and died while covered with maggots and lice. Three different city agencies knew about the condition of the home but did nothing about it.

> A drug dealer suspected of murder walked out of the courthouse after two clerical errors combined to set him free. When the police caught up a month later, he was wanted for four more killings.

The District may be pushing incompetence to its limits, but other big-city governments aren't far behind (see page 37); remember the 61 Philadelphia rowhouses destroyed during the city's standoff with MOVE? The befuddlements of big-city government are not only tragicbut ironic, given the zest for local government across the political spectrum. The right, seeking to get the feds "off the people's back," nurtures a vision of bolstered local powers. Mainstream Democrats, attacking the Reagan-era cutbacks, have presented big-city mayors as a more compassionate example of executive leadership. And for some liberal intellectuals, city government serves as the repository of hope for those activists who wanted to "empower" the people through "Community development." But whatever the doctrinal allures, bureaucratic inanities block the empowerment of anyone besides the bureaucrats.

And money isn't the issue. Unlike the people it purports to serve, one thing the D.C. government can't cry is "poor." Attempts to say just how wellfunded it is get complicated, since the District has responsibilities that elsewhere get divided between cities, counties, and states. But even studies that adjust for the District's unique status find plenty of money heading towards the till. Only oil-rich Alaska collects more tax revenue per capita. In crucial areas like public housing, the District has even been caught returning federal money it failed to spend. "We have enough money," says John Wilson, chairman of the city council's finance and revenue committee. "I think [the government's] just inefficient and incompetent."

As for what the city does with the $4 billion in taxes and federal grants it manages to retain, there are clues. They don't, shall we say, make us wonder how city managers can make ends meet. Anecdotally, there are stories like the one about the city paying $2.5 million to rent a building it couldn't occupy because it failed to give the builder the plans to finish the interior. Or Car GT897, a city vehicle parked downtown and forgotten for nine months, while transients slept inside it. (Who says the city doesn't care about the homeless?)

Any number of hypotheses arise to account for the lost car and empty building, but a lack of clerical and administrative staff is not among them, The District has the only child support collection agency in the country that consistently has spent more than it has collected. The city historically has spent about twice the national average to deliver a welfare check. Only one state hires more administrators per teacher. And the rival governments aren't exactly portraits of efficiency. To waste more money than the competition takes work.

If bad local government were simply a matter of waste, we could just rub our sore wallets and hold a legitimate grudge. Sure, the bureaucracy functions first as a jobs program for its employees and only secondarily as a government. Sure, civil service rules keep incompetent workers in, and strict residency requirements have kept lots of talented people out. But the point isn't that city workers get more than they deserve; it's that city residents get less, particularly those most in need.

There's no small amount of irony in this since the the leaders of most big-city governments sell themselves as friends of the poor.

"The ones everybody's saying all along they're doing for-they're the ones suffering the worst," says Wilson, who, like a certain Washington, D.C. mayor, has civil rights roots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. "The elderly The poor."

Pesky budget officials

Somewhere inside Washington's public housing authority, she's #247-56-2910. But her real number is eight. That's how many years have passed since 59-year-old Lilian Wade first applied for a place in public housing.

Back then Wade held occasional jobs as a maid or nurse's aide; now, after a heart attack, she gets by on a $359 monthly disability check. This, as you might gather, does not make her a major player in the Washington real estate market. Wade has fashioned a solution: she splits a $427, two-bedroom apartment three ways, with two other disabled women. Wade sleeps on a fold-out cot in the dining room. But even with this variation of breakfast in bed, she spends more than half her income on utilities and We go to churches and get some canned goods," she said. "We get pork and beans. We don't beg."

But not far from Wade's home there's a familiar Washington sight: empty public housing, and lots of it. In some cases, entire courtyards of shuttered, silent brick. Some of the city's vacant apartments are scattered throughout occupied projects; others are part of whole buildings emptied for "modernization" projects and often forgotten for years. Together they account for 19 percent of the city's public housing-more than 2,400 empty, waiting homes. And it's not as though the District lacks the money to fix them up: In the past three years, the city has allocated about $100 million to modernize the apartments-so much that the housing authority can't figure out how to spend it all. A few years ago, the federal government got so tired of the District's decade-long failure to spend modernization funds, it finally stopped forwarding the money. At least Wade has shelter. Others aren't so lucky. As the District's inventory of empty public apartments has grown, so have the numbers of homeless families lining up at shelters.

The District's mismanagement of public housing has a long and proud history. In 1971 auditors from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development voiced their dismay over the "apathy" of the D.C. housing employees and th"despair" of the tenants. Those were the good old days. By 1987 the mayor's blue-ribbon commission on public housing argued that "the picture had changed . . . but not for the better." And those are the mayor's own emissaries speaking.

It's no easy feat to keep so many apartments vacant and vandalized when pesky budget officials start shoveling $100 million your way. A lesser agency surely would have fixed something, even if by mistake, It took teamwork-bad maintenance, bad inventory control, bad security, bad rent collection. One feeds on another, but the lion's share of the credit goes to maintenance officials and their staffs. Not only have they taken up to eight years to fix vacated apartments but auditors have found they ignore more than half the maintenance...