Stronger job growth and a healthier housing market in the region account for much of the mobility, said Lisa Sturtevant of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis.

"While [the D.C.-area housing market] is still slow, it's possible to sell your home and move to a bigger one," Sturtevant said. "We're not anywhere close to being back to normal, but compared to other places, we don't have as many people underwater."

But what if the original, 100-square-mile federal district had never been split up in the first place? Today’s Washington would feature splendid suburban shopping at the Pentagon City mall in Southwest. It’d already have a Walmart—also in Southwest. Based on the city’s current political divisions, it’d likely elect D.C. councilmembers from 12 wards. Those pols could rake in money by levying real estate taxes on the skyscrapers of Lynne Street NW, in the Rosslyn neighborhood. The undivided city would have a population of nearly one million, almost enough for two Congressional districts.

Would representatives from those constituencies get to vote? That, alas, we’ll never know.

Some stats on the original D.C.:

Illustrations by Jandos Rothstein

Mount Pleasant, April 24

Bias Attack: Wielding a pipe, a man allegedly went after two transgender individuals on March 13. Via MPD listserv, Sergeant Carlos Mejia says the two victims were in the area of 14th and Shepherd Streets NW when a suspect decided to club them with metal. He says cops discovered the suspect attacked the victims because of their gender identity. One of the victims sustained injuries from the attack and received medical treatment, he says. The suspect was arrested on the scene.

Though a Fourth District arrest report confirms that a suspect, referred to as D. Melgar, was arrested at the time and place Mejia indicates in his post, the report doesn't say Melgar was slapped with an assault charge. Instead, it reads that Melgar is being charged with "THREATS (FELONY)." MPD has not yet responded to multiple requests to clarify what charges the alleged assaulter will face.

From D.C.?:The body of Tannessa Victoria Taylor, 19, was found in Patuxent River State Park in Maryland on March 6, and Montgomery County detectives are investigating her death as a homicide.  A turkey hunter who was roaming the park discovered the body around 12:30 p.m., buried in a shallow grave. NBC Washington says Taylor had been involved in prostitution and that she was known as Tasty Cake. Speaking to the Maryland Gazette, Capt. Paul Starks said "police could not confirm Taylor's address, but a state online court database lists Taylor, who was 19, with an address in Southeast Washington, D.C., in January 2009."

The Hard Way: A masked man robbing a business in the 2000 block of G Street NW didn't futz around with a gun. An employee of the establishment told cops the man came in on March 13 around 7:30 p.m., snatched the cash register, and ran out the door. Pursuing him, the employee was able to wrench the register away from the thief, but not before he filched $48. "The suspect is known and a warrant is being applied for their [sic] arrest."

Yes! We're Robbing You: Two men (see below) robbed a health food store around 3 p.m. on March 15. Police say the duo produced a handgun and took an unspecified amount of cash from the Yes! Organic Market at 3809 12th St. NE.

A Nice Afternoon: Evidently, even in a rapidly changing District, some city traditions are alive and well—like shooting craps. An MPD listserv poster writes: "Just wanted to bring to your attention some activities taking place in the NE around 1:30 pm today. I was going past Hong Kong Carry Out on East Capitol (near the Car Barn) when I noticed some unusual activity. A group of men were outside the Hong Kong Carry Out playing dice on the sidewalk and exchanging money as they won or lost. One of these men seemed to be smoking marijuana. I would have called 911, but I didn't have my cell phone."

An employee who answered the phone at the take-out place declined to give his name but confirms that some customers who frequent the establishment like to shoot dice and gamble outside. He also says the restaurant only gets upset with them when there's alcohol involved. As for the tobacco and marijuana he suspects they sometimes toke: "We ask them not to smoke inside," he says.

Actually, I Live Here: Last week, an MPD listserv poster complained that an ominous group of loiterers and alleged drug dealers were holding him hostage at his home in the 300 block of W Street NE, making it impossible for him to, say, have a dinner party—his would-be guests refused to leave their cars after they pulled up. Fifth District Commander Lamar D. Greene tells the Blotter via email that the "loiterers" are just neighborhood kids hanging out and being loud: "The juveniles and young adults that congregate within the 300 block of W street NE are primarily residents and friends of residents who reside on or near W street. Occasionally these individuals will congregate until late hours in the evening conversing loudly and disturbing the block." Like we said to the complainer last week: Good luck with that.

Source: MPD District listservs, public releases

Photos courtesy of MPD

Cappuccino photo by Jazzbobrown, Creative Commons Attribution License

I was just loafing when this popped into my inbox: The District Department of Transportation is doing away with one of the city's sweetest freebies: Saturday parking. Starting soon, drivers will have to feed the meters on Saturdays, just like they do Monday through Friday. The rate for primo spots in parking-challenged neighborhoods is also going up to $2 an hour. So forget about budget loafing at Mid City Caffe or  Sova unless you can get there – lugging your laptop – without a car.

Not quite yet, though. The new rules were supposed to begin Saturday. Since the Washington Post's Dr. Gridlock reported the news this morning, however, District Transportation officials have apparently pushed back the start day from Jan. 2 to sometime in mid January, according to this story by NBC's Washington station.

Either way, Monica G. pretty much summed things up when she forwarded the news to the Petworth listserv with the following comments: "This completely sucks! This is horrible!"

In a posh hotel in downtown D.C., Dixie, a beagle mix, is sniffing out bed bugs. She can find them in walls, under carpets, and mixed up with cockroaches inside a spinning training device. Mattresses, the most common hiding place for these seed-size suckers of human blood, pose little challenge.

“She only gets fed if she finds a bed bug,” says her trainer and handler, Blaine Lessard, as he reaches into his belted pouch for a piece of kibble.

She seems kinda skinny, I say, and wonder if this incentive-based feeding is providing all of Dixie’s nutritional needs. “Well, these kinds of dogs do run lean,” he counters. And, in truth, Dixie’s perfectly energetic and beagle-like as she follows Lessard’s command—Seek!—to sniff the room’s perimeter.

The hotel room is clean. The bug Dixie keeps hitting on is inside the big wheel sitting on the floor. It spans about four feet in diameter with spokes that end in plastic containers, each of which holds either a bed bug or some other scent-giving item designed to throw Dixie off.

Since she’s trained exclusively on bed bugs her entire life—about nine months—she is rarely, if ever, thrown off. “I have complete confidence in her,” says Lessard, who once witnessed Dixie pointing him to a hotel closet, even though he could find no evidence of a bug. She did the same thing in the room directly above and in another room directly above that one. A technician finally found a relatively small infestation inside the wall.

Dixie’s training began at the Florida Canine Academy before she moved in with Lessard and his family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Both Lessard and his beagle-mix are in the employ of Western Pest Services, an extermination outfit with 24 offices, mostly in the eastern U.S. The dog is part of Western’s preventive market: If she finds a bug or two, the company’s pitch is that you can nip that problem before it becomes a full-on infestation. If she doesn’t find anything, well, go ahead and go to sleep without waking up with that creepy feeling you’ve got bugs in your sheets.

Her territory covers D.C. and Baltimore, but she’ll go as far as Virginia Beach and Philadelphia. She does need to get fed, after all. Prices start at $300 and go up from there depending on the type of building, how many rooms it has, and how long it takes Dixie’s nose to cover the premises. According to Lessard, she can cover 120 hotel rooms in one day of work.

He says he knows of "maybe one" other bug-sniffing dog in the D.C. region; an Internet search only pulled up Western's dog service. In NYC NY BedBug Dogs says it's been in business for 40 years.

According to Western Pest Services, the customer base here, which also includes hospitals, nursing homes, college dorms, apartment houses, and single-family homes, is starting to pick up. The other uptick comes from the bed bugs themselves. There are simply more of them.

The National Pest Management Association says that since 2000, bed-bug complaint calls have increased 71 percent. Every state and the District has had an outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control, although the CDC doesn’t have an accurate accounting; every municipality handles the problem differently.

In D.C., anecdotal evidence—including the creepy-crawly cover story we ran about bed bugs in Logan Circle and elsewhere—suggests the problem’s getting more serious. In March, the local Dept. of Health organized its first bed bug summit. There's also a Web site to register local infestations.

So what’s happened? Why does this pest now need specially-trained dogs and DOH summits? It’s actually a fairly recent problem. After World War II, the bed bug in the United States was pretty much a nonentity. DDT eradicated it. But DDT isn’t an acceptable pesticide for reasons illuminated by Rachel Carson, among others. As more people traveled the world, bringing back these notorious little hangers-on, colonies grew and they also grew resistant to common treatments.

Nowadays, says Lessard, “if you’ve one or two bugs in a room, you’re done.” And finding one or many? It has nothing to do with cleanliness. Five-star hotels fall victim. OCD clean freaks get them. Once your home's infested, two of the more common ways exterminators will treat your home is with freezing chemicals or heat; a friend in D.C. recently vacated her home so that technicians could blast the place with space heaters. It appears to have taken care of the problem.

One solution not to try? Diesel fuel around the bed. For more about that, read our cover story. Got a solution or a bed bug story of your own? Let us know in comments.

Photographs by City Paper Staff Photographer Darrow Montgomery

We're Top 5 for marijuana and binge-drinking, which should surprise no one who's bought a jumbo slice on a weekend night, but check out these numbers:

Vermont tops the nation in marijuana use (2.5 percent of people 12 and over get high there), North Dakota flattens all comers in binge drinking (58.1 percent of 18-25-year-olds and 28.7 of folks 26 and up). Cocaine use in D.C. though, is at 5.1 percent, which means there's a reasonable chance someone in your office is going to think s/he is really, really smart and good-looking later this evening.

Photo of someone pretending to snort Chex mix with a Slim Jim (which is more what you'd expect of D.C., drug-use wise) by Flickr user decaf

As Loose Lips roamed the stone platform that is Freedom Plaza, he spied various D.C. politics stars of yesteryear. There was Kevin Chavous, the dashing former Ward 7 councilmember. And over there was Sandy Allen, the folksy former rep from Ward 8. And unmistakable in his Nats cap and bow tie was Anthony A. Williams. It was all enough to make this columnist expect a showing by John Walker Lindh and a debate on the use of force in Iraq—all so 2002!

The blast from seven years ago congregated at Freedom Plaza to boost a rally in favor of renewing the endangered D.C. school voucher program. Williams, who served as mayor of the District from 1999 to 2007, threw the whole weight of his formermayordom behind the voucher cause: "Really, the long-term prospects of our city are a solid education for our kids," said Williams. "We can't fix our schools overnight and I think parents ought to have an option."

As things currently stand, federal funding for the D.C. voucher program, which helps fund private educational options for about 1,700 D.C. kids, appears ready to expire in 2010, unless the feds change course. That's what Williams and Chavous and Allen were pushing for. When asked if he thought local funding should replace the federal commitment—as has been persuasively suggested by Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King—Williams said this: "I would personally think so, but we ought to get to that road when we get to it. Right now we don't have that choice because the federal government is deciding [whether] to fund the program."

Since leaving office nearly two-and-a-half years ago, Williams has maintained the lowest of profiles, agreeing to be interviewed about his first home purchase in the District, and about his job as something of an investment banker, but otherwise steering clear of the municipal issues that wore him down over eight years. A post-rally scrum with reporters was the first time that Williams had stood before reporters and addressed those issues.

When asked about his successor, Adrian M. Fenty, Williams responded, "I've made a religious effort to stay out of his way. It's easy because 99.66 of what he's doing, I agree with." That remaining .33 appears to cover vouchers, a topic on which the current mayor has been almost officially lukewarm.

From there, Williams repeated the sort of claptrap that came to define his weekly Wednesday press conferences. On his ability to work the levers of government, Williams waxed nostalgic about his relationship with former D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp. "I felt like I got into a roll with the council, actually. When I went to things with them, there was a lot of friction but a lot got done," said the former mayor. "Linda and I worked at our relationship. Obviously there was a lot of commotion and animostiy at times. When you're mayor of the city...you're the crab on top of the bucket and everyone wants to pull you down. So i understand the friction, the competition. But, you know, you can make it work."

The ever-cautious Williams, however, did stray from the script once, when asked directly about mayoral-council tensions. He went off on a tangent and answered one of the central criticisms of his mayoralty: "If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken less trips. I would have trimmed back a lot of stuff," he said.

On a more contemporary note, Williams said that his work as an investment banker for cities with Primum Public Realty Trust is in "transition" thanks to the economic crisis. "My little pizza stand got hit by the hurricane," he said.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

From an Onion memo:

We love our print publications. They are the foundation of the Onion and, in the majority of our markets, they make us money. We have no plans at this time to cease publication in any of our other markets.

Note: This post was amended and corrected at 3:34 pm to reflect the fact that this case is not officially classified as a D.C. case.

The Washington Business Journal is reporting that the ubiquitous coffee chain is shuttering more of its local coffee outlets. Starbucks is pulling out of Northwest! OK, parts of northwest–Cleveland Park and Georgetown are losing an outlet each:

"In D.C., Starbucks will close the 3301 M St. NW location, which has been boarded up for months. Also being closed is the Cleveland Park store at 3420 Connecticut Ave. NW.

Starbucks said 6,000 of the job cuts announced in January would come from the store closures. The company also announced plans to cut an additional 700 non-store jobs, including about 350 at its Seattle headquarters."

But why stop there? Why not kill off at least one in Dupont Circle?

(Via DCist)

More on the beer garden proposed near National's Stadium in D.C.

Andrew J. Kline, representing Robert "Bo" Blair, said at a March 25 meeting of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board that his client wants to create a "festival site with amenities" near National's Stadium, but that "beer garden is not our term, I don't know where that came from."

Blair, who is on four licenses in the city, according to Kline, plans to hire private security staff, and there will be one main entrance to the festival site. There will be no cover for admittance, and there will be a separate tent where alcohol is served where staff will check IDs. Their preliminary proposal indicates a trailer will be used to lock up liquor when there's no game.

ABRA Commissioner Nick Alberti suggested the venue also be used for family oriented events and perhaps even farmer's markets on non-game days.

The proposal will be discussed at the April 13 ANC 6D meeting, according to JDLand.

Commissioner Donald C. Brooks said he hopes the owners, "no pun intended, knock it out of the park."

"The initial vote was 12-0. The unanimous vote sets the stage for future debate on legalizing same-sex marriage in the District and a clash with Congress, which approves the city's laws under Home Rule. The council is expected to take a final vote on the legislation next month.

Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who is gay, called the amendment a matter of 'basic fairness.'

The city's laws on same-sex unions have been murky, he explained. Couples ask, he said, 'Is my marriage valid in D.C.? For years now, it has not been clear.'"

WTOP files its own story on the vote:

"Just minutes after the Vermont State Legislature voted to overturn a veto by the state's governor to allow same-sex marriages, the D.C. Council gave preliminary approval to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.

Lawmakers say Tuesday's 12-0 vote moves the city a step closer to eventually allowing same-sex marriages to be performed in the District.

'This is a right that should be enjoyed by all of our citizens,' Councilmember Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) says. 'Today is another major step toward the ultimate goal of all of us living in a city and a country where everyone is treated equally.'

As LL recently reported, more same-sex legislation is in the works. In a similar vote today, the Washington City Paper staff informally decided that same-sex marriages should be legal in D.C. One staffer went so far as to say that only same-sex marriages should be legal here.

It has trouble, too, with population–a mere 585,000 people live here.

And who wants a guy like Paul Strauss to move from Shadow Senator to Senator-In-The-Full-Light-Of-Day?

But there's a group of D.C.ers—very good high-school football players–who are making the case for the District to become the 51st. According to Sports Illustrated, the District produced 27 recruits for Bowl Championship Series college football programs between 2004 and 2008.

Although that number would appear to pale when placed alongside a monster football mill like Florida–with 981 recruits–it's a remarkable number when you look at per-capita production of football stars. By that measure, the District is close to Florida: It produced one fabulous BCS recruit for every 21,919 residents, and Florida's per-capita rate was one phenom for every 18,683 residents. On the per-capita front, D.C. blows out states like Texas (24,976), California (44,499), Ohio (31,729) and so on.

And even in absolute terms–not adjusted by population, that is–the District's great football recruits run up the score on several states with Senators and Representatives, including Nevada, West Virginia, Idaho, and others.