A reader writes:

Annie Lowrey's ending to that DC piece dripped with just as much condescension as the beginning: 

On the final spot on our tour, Abdo took me to his newest, biggest project. We drove north on North Capitol Street, as if we were driving out of the District, to a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood called Brookland. It is a mostly older, mostly lower-middle-class neighborhood, underserved by grocery stores and restaurants and overlooked by many of the young professionals farther south in Bloomingdale or Shaw or Capitol Hill.

Really? Brookland may not be Bloomingdale (where Lowrey lives), but to describe it "as though we were driving out of the District" is ludicrous. You've lived here for five years and you think Catholic University is out of the District? It's less than two miles from her own neighborhood and just three from the Capitol, closer than Georgetown, Woodley Park, or Cleveland Park. And "mostly lower-middle-class" sounded off to me as well. A quick search of Census data: the neighborhood's median household income is $72k and 38 percent of the households make more than $100k. Those numbers may be low for the area but it's still a neighborhood full of great old houses that regularly sell for more than $500,000.

Another:

It was such a lazy, wrong-headed piece, I don't even know where to start.  How about the fact that her basic premise (exploding federal workforce leads to an economic boom in DC) is completely backwards: DC the city has boomed precisely while the federal workforce stagnated or fell through the '90s and 2000s (see chart here).