Posts about Jobs

Ultimately, Gray's mayoralty will leave a lasting effect on the budget and city services, and residents, whether they voted for and endorsed Adrian Fenty (as I did) or Gray, should care a great deal about what the capable people in the administration, unconnected to the campaign or any campaign finance, are doing.

We've also yet to find out whether the mayor himself was part of any illegal activity or knew about it. Based on what we know thus far, it appears that Gray made some very poor choices about whom to trust early on. Since then, he's replaced most of these poor hires with better staff, who are better at sharing the administration's positive accomplishments, such as:

One City One Hire

The administration's program to help unemployed residents find jobs has now suc­cee­ded in getting employers to hire 3,000 unemployed District residents in the past year.

There are numerous obstacles to getting people into jobs, but employers' lack of trust in DC's jobless has been among the most intractable. One City One Hire officials work to restore this trust by personally vetting resumes of unemployed DC residents and asking employers to consider a couple of handpicked resumes for each opening.

Some feel that this is what the Department of Employment Services (DOES) was supposed to be doing all along. This is technically true. It's also true that DC Public Schools are supposed to be properly educating our children. We shouldn't withhold credit where credit is due when DCPS or DOES fulfills its mission.

Sector-specific economic development

Under previous administrations, the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development was concerned almost exclusively with real estate deals. Although targeted real estate deals are important, only Mayor Gray has really invested in developing other sectors that are strategically important to the city.

The Mayor's broader focus has produced new positions critical to the city's economy, even if the officers filling those positions often operate behind the scenes. For example, newly hired DMPED officials regularly meet with leaders of the technology, government contractor, and health care communities to align identify ways DC can support these strategically important sectors.

A newly reconstituted Workforce Investment Council, whose executive director Alison Gerber was recruited from the Aspen Institute, has made it clear that workforce development dollars must be targeted to high demand sectors. As a result, for the first time, workforce development in DC is no longer scattershot, with the Gray Administration targeting key sectors.

DOES has cut off funding to several training providers whose training wasn't aligned with these sectors. A new Workforce Intermediary will ensure that the needs of hospitality and construction employers are addressed by training providers.

Continued capital investments without raiding city's reserves

DC residents were aware of the many capital improvements made under former Mayor Fenty, but fewer were aware that Fenty drew down the "rainy day" fund of $700 million to pay for some of these improvements.

Mayor Gray has continued the pace of capital improvements, with renovations of Takoma Education Campus and Woodson, Cardozo and Anacostia High Schools. While maintaining the pace of the previous Administration, Mayor Gray has managed to replenish our reserve fund, bringing it up to $1.1 billion.

Sustainability plan

If you haven't seen the objectives Mayor Gray set for 2032 in his Sustainable DC plan, then you should take a look. These objectives should provide the basis for numerous DC government initiatives over the next two decades covering issues as diverse as our food supply and obesity, along with transportation, tree canopy, and waste.

For some these strategic plans and objectives may seem mere feel-good talk, but these objectives matter. Historically, DC government has looked to such comprehensive plans and small area plans in designing legislation and framing countless policy debates in subsequent years.

Cameras and parking

Study after study proves that traffic cameras save lives. Mayor Gray significantly expanded traffic cameras in this year's budget, a politically courageous move that will continue DC's trend of lower and lower traffic fatalities.

While the DC Council created visionary pilots in performance parking, the previous administration never made it much of a priority to adjust meter rates to manage curbside space effectively. The Gray administration has expanded performance parking and made it clear this is a priority.

Continued momentum in education reform, streetcars and bike lanes

Some predicted that education reform, the streetcar and bike lanes would stop under Mayor Gray. Let's be clear: that hasn't happened. Mayor Gray has increased the investment in streetcars, pledging $100 million in capital funds starting last year.

The pace of bike lane construction slowed a bit at first, but DDOT is now putting in bike lanes on many streets throughout the city, and is on track to build the L Street track this summer and M street soon after. He even vociferously defended Capital Bikeshare over Twitter to skeptical New York reporters.

Finally, Mayor Gray has continued the process of education reform, despite the fears of many DC residents. Teachers are still being evaluated and sometimes fired based on performance, not on seniority.

The Gray administration's education reforms have included important initiatives which haven't received the same attention and publicity accorded the teacher firings. The administration has already made strides toward improving our special education system and opened multiple Early Stages centers aimed at early identification of kids with special needs. These investments have reduced by 20% the number of children bused, at DC's expense, to non-public special education, saving significant money.

I'm not nominating Mayor Gray for sainthood, but residents need to reexamine the fairly widespread belief that the administration is not getting anything done. While Adrian Fenty was very good at getting press attention for his actions, this administration is acting more quietly.

We should condemn any illegal behavior from the campaign, but we must also give the mayor and his staff credit for the ways the administration is making DC greater for the long term.

Just for comparison, $32.5 million is about the cost of modernizing an elementary school like Stuart-Hobson ($33.6 million). It's also roughly equivalent to the cuts Mayor Gray is proposing to the Housing Production Trust Fund, our best vehicle for promoting affordable housing ($38 million).

Before supporting the tax break, DC residents deserve to know specific benefits that these LivingSocial tax breaks will yield, and that they are more important than modernizing an elementary school or increasing the supply of affordable housing.

The proposed tax breaks reduce LivingSocial's property and income tax from 2015-2020 on a sliding scale based on number of DC residents employed. At least half of their employees must be DC residents for the tax breaks to kick in at all.

The vast majority of LivingSocial's employees are not engineers. Half of them work in sales and many work in transitional jobs writing copy for the deals.

These are good jobs, but they're not tech jobs, and don't contribute to a tech hub. The people who fill these jobs wouldn't necessarily work in technology firms after LivingSocial.

There are two unique things that LivingSocial or another tech company can bring to the District, and these essential elements are part of all successful tech hubs.

1. Smart money: The executives are good at innovation, and will start investing in other innovative companies if their company goes public or is acquired.
   
2. Smart engineers: The companies recruit and train very capable software engineers.

A deal that will benefit DC residents must be structured to retain smart money and smart engineers in DC.

Smart money, i.e. venture capital, is regional and is not confined to a particular county. So keeping LivingSocial execs who cash out and become venture capitalists in DC instead of Arlington doesn't seem worth paying $32.5 million for.

Smart engineers are another story. Most of LivingSocial's engineering openings are not in DC. Why not structure the tax breaks to target software engineers? Their presence in DC contributes to a larger tech cluster when they leave to work for other innovative tech companies.

The competition for smart engineers is intense in all tech hubs around the country. Even if LivingSocial, which currently loses hundreds of millions of dollars per year, doesn't find an exit strategy, DC would still benefit by the presence of hundreds of smart engineers looking to join innovative startups.

Apparently LivingSocial executives have told Deputy Mayor Hoskins and his staff that Virginia officials are courting them and that they are considering options such as Arlington. That shouldn't be a surprise. All corporate executives try to negotiate subsidies for jurisdictions where they have offices.

At the Tysons Corner software company I co-founded, we are frequently telling local officials where we have branch offices (Norman, OK and Charleston, SC) that we might move. We have received over $100,000 in subsidies over the past 3 years as a result.

But these cities only allow us to spend the subsidies we received on training for local employees in new positions that we add. That makes a lot of sense, because if we do leave, we will leave behind smart engineers who will go looking for jobs with similar companies.

Those jurisdictions are selling their locales based on value, not based on price. Such targeted incentives are what help build a cluster of related firms.

Reducing the corporate tax payments of a company that primarily hires salespersons and copywriters, on the other hand, doesn't appear targeted to yield any specific return. By comparison, spending that $32.5 million to modernize an elementary school or increase the supply of affordable housing feels like a more responsible choice.

DC councilmembers, who will consider the proposed LivingSocial tax breaks, should ensure that the tax incentives will actually help make DC a tech hub. Corporate subsidies and tax credits can benefit the District as long as the subsidies are vetted in a transparent, rigorous process that demonstrates specific benefits to DC residents. A tax break for LivingSocial could do that, but as it's structured right now, it wouldn't.

This job migration is almost certain to continue given Georgetown neighbors' recent success in blocking GU's plans to expand the main campus. Mayor Vincent Gray seems very aware of the problem this creates for the District, given that the Education and Health Care job sector is the District's, and the nation's, fastest-growing.

That's why he voiced concerns at a Jobs Summit about the limitations sometimes placed on employees and students to address town-gown conflicts. "I need to understand more about what these [university] jobs would be and reasons for those caps," Gray said. "Historically, there have been tensions between the universities and the neighborhoods in which they reside."

Some growth advocates criticize neighbors for opposing growth on campus without equivalent on-campus housing, and will undoubtedly do so in the comments to this article. The reality is that town-gown disputes are not new and are not going away, so we must learn how to address the concerns of neighbors without losing education jobs. Mayor Gray and other city leaders can and must do just that.

Earlier this year, in response to community opposition to its Campus Plan, GU committed to relocate "1,000 School of Continuing Students students to an off-campus location by Dec. 31, 2013." While one would assume that those SCS students will also go to the Clarendon campus, GU says it is "exploring potential transit-oriented locations elsewhere in the District." What can the District do to compete for those jobs?

To entice GU to build a satellite campus in DC, the District should offer to extend the H Street/Benning Road streetcar line onto GU's campus by a certain date. Specifically, the line would proceed without overhead wires on dedicated transit lanes along Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, past Wisconsin Avenue and the Car Barn, joining mixed traffic at the Key Bridge intersection where it would reconnect to overhead wires and enter campus on the Canal Road entrance. The route would terminate in the parking lot outside McDonough Arena at the current Georgetown University Transportation Shuttle (GUTS) bus stops.

The streetcar line was initially anticipated to run along K Street in Georgetown. Recently departed DDOT Deputy Director Scott Kubly told the Georgetown BID, however, that he would prefer M Street in order to increase ridership. The M Street route, terminating on campus, would be a real win-win-win for every part of the city.

Improving DC residents' access to District jobs: 72% of DC jobs go to non-DC residents, and given the location of GU and GUH (DC's 6th largest employer) near the Key Bridge the percentage on campus is likely that or higher. A Streetcar onto campus would economically integrate the city, connecting residents around the city and particularly in Northeast with nearly 10,000 jobs on GU and GUH's campus. The much-expected future site of the GU Hospital on North Kehoe field would be a brief walk to a streetcar station in the McDonough Arena parking lot.

Creating GU jobs in DC: A streetcar terminating on GU's campus would provide door-to-door service to and from any satellite campus on the eastern half of the route. This will stem the flow of jobs from DC's top employer to Virginia. Furthermore, GU would face fewer constraints in the growth of its main campus because the congestion created by employees of and visitors to GU and GUH would be addressed. This route would eliminate the need for the controversial GUTS Shuttle to Dupont Circle, as it would include stops at Metro stations on several lines including Farragut North.

Improving Georgetown retail: Georgetown business leaders have experienced much angst lately about losing status to retail districts on 14th Street, U Street and H Street. Bringing streetcars along M Street on dedicated lanes would be a bold move to raise the strip's profile and cachet.

Historic preservation of Georgetown: Streetcars historically ran along M Street to the Car Barn. Any argument that a wireless streetcar on M Street somehow detracts from Georgetown's historic character would clearly be impossible to make. Furthermore, there would be no need for overhead wires as long as there are dedicated lanes.

Kubly explained to the Georgetown BID that the limits of current wireless technology are not in terms of distance, but in terms of time. Thus, a dedicated streetcar lane, meaning that streetcars won't waste valuable time (and thus electricity) sitting in traffic, significantly adds to the distance that a wireless streetcar can travel.

Reducing traffic and parking congestion in Georgetown: A couple years ago DDOT paid for a consultant to do a Transportation Study in Georgetown. One of the interesting findings was that congestion on M Street is at the intersections, and not in between them. Traffic analysis showed that the outside lanes were not used to capacity during rush hour, so the creation of transit only lanes should be able to shift traffic over one lane with minimal increase in congestion.

Even assuming no mode shift as a result of streetcars, then, dedicated transit lanes on M Street would likely result in little to no increase in congestion. Of course, there would be an expected mode shift not only to streetcars, but also to the bus lines that traverse M Street (which are the most-used Metrobus lines in the entire region).

The current fiscal environment makes it difficult to justify an investment in streetcar technology if it is merely viewed as a toy for the new, wealthier urbanites. But design it instead to improve access to jobs for DC residents, and sell it as such, and the project makes sense in just about any budget environment. In fact, few investments would result in as reliable and measurable an increase in jobs for DC residents as dramatically improving access to the largest employer in the city in return for that employer's expansion within the city.

Does the political will exist to do what makes so much sense?

On Wednesday, the Post reported the latest jobless numbers from July: 5.9% of the region-wide workforce lacks a job, a rate that is "well below the national rate of 9.1 percent". This represented an increase, according to the article, from the June rate of 5.8% due to a "steep decline" in the public sector which is "facing turmoil."

A similar report appeared about June unemployment. Joblessness in Ward 8 continued its increased from 16.9% in June 2008 to 28.2% in June 2011.

And the turmoil doesn't end there. Black teenage unemployment nationally is 40% according to the Labor Department, and is no doubt that or higher in the District, whose overall teen jobless rate is the highest in the nation at a whopping 50.1%. The jobless spike along with the housing crisis has destroyed black wealth, which has fallen from 1/7 that of whites in 1995 to 1/11 in 2004 and 1/19 in 2009 according to the Pew Research Center.

Unfortunately, the Post article on these statistics gave little attention to the issue of black unemployment. The only articles discussing the issue in the Post have mentioned it in the context of how it may affect President Obama's chances at re-election.

A Post blogger on media issues, Erik Wemple, who previously covered the District at TBD.com and the City Paper, posted recently on "How to measure the coverage of black issues." Wemple concludes:

Who's right? Has the coverage dipped or increased? Alas, even with Internet search engines and news archiving services, ascertaining volume trends over such a large coverage area is an undertaking fraught with practical and methodological problems.

Mayor Gray and President Obama will both announce new measures today to address unemployment. Leaders and journalists should ask the questions: What are the causes of the spike in crisis-level unemployment in DC? Do the proposals of the Mayor and the President to reduce joblessness address those causes? Why has the Council passed over 300 pieces of legislation this year and nothing on unemployment?

Do jobless citizens east of the Anacostia River need to riot, like in London, for us to see them? Or will the rest of the city finally notice the tragedy happening in slow motion before us and start debating its causes and solutions?

Though the majority of the 7.5 million carless households in the nation's largest metropolitan are well-served by transit, 700,000 households cannot access mass public transit. Access to transit, the study argues, impacts connectivity to employment opportunities. An inability to access transit further disadvantages these metropolitan communities.

In the Washington DC metropolitan statistical area, spanning as far as Baltimore and West Virginia, there are 193,558 zero-vehicle households, accounting for 9.5% of all metro area households. In the city, 100% of household with or without a car have access to a transit stop. In the metro area, 96% of car-less households have access to transit, and 92% of similar households in the suburbs. Approximately, 82% of metro households without a car are near a transit stop while 78% of suburban households without a car are near a transit stop.

"For most households in the DC region, you can efficiently take a bus, subway, or commuter rail to your job, shopping, and sports," says Senior Research Analyst Adie Tomer, who led the project. "We have received a solid return on our transit investment, and that helps thousands of households live without a vehicle."

A total of 7.5 million households in the United States do not have access to a car but can travel by transit. 61% percent of these households are in cities and 60 percent are low-income. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have the highest number of households without cars. Households without a car in cities have much higher access to transit: 99 percent live near transit. Only 58 percent of households without a car in the suburbs live near transit.

Over 90 percent of zero-vehicle households in large metropolitan areas live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind. This exceeds the 68 percent coverage rate for households with a vehicle, suggesting transit service aligns with households who rely on it most.

The more sprawl in a region, the more obstacles there are to mobility and accessibility. Tomer says older center cities with concentrated cores, such as those along the Eastern seaboard and on the West Coast, have utilized zoning regulations and maximized land use to make it easier to live car-free. Metropolitan areas in the South, like Altanta, Houston, and Dallas, are more car-dependent. "Their recent investments in rapid transit infrastructure can't keep up with their sprawl," Tomer contends.

As suburbs grow to encompass more housing and more jobs, planners, policymakers, and transit agencies will need to address coverage gaps and route changes to reflect that growth. Brookings' report demonstrates that the betterment of public transit can make day-to-day life easier.

When District residents hold DC jobs, only 36.1% of them commute by car. But when non-DC residents hold DC jobs, 61.3% of them commute by car, according to 2009 American Community Survey data.

As a result, a whopping 81% of those commuting by car to DC jobs are non-DC residents.

Are city leaders doing anything to prioritize DC residents' access to DC jobs? No. The Transition Report of the Economic Development Committee for then Mayor-Elect Gray, led by Chamber of Commerce head Barbara Lang and former George Washington University president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, had this recommendation:

Reduce the amount of time people spend driving into and out of the city. The District would stand to retain and attract more businesses that demand ease of access and improvements to quality of life by easing traffic congestion.

Why do we shoot ourselves in the foot like this? It's one thing to complain about taxation without representation, but when we spend our own locally raised tax money primarily to promote employment to those living in the suburbs, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

It's time to end the old, ineffective approaches to fighting unemployment - more roads and more corporate tax holidays. They don't work anymore. A major campaign to economically integrate our city is needed to reverse the decades-long trend that resulted in ever larger roads shuttling a larger percentage of DC's jobholders in and out of the District.

The jobs that could employ a large portion of DC's jobless are there, particularly in the leisure and hospitality sector, which is the second fastest growing sector in DC, adding 10,700 District jobs from 2001 to 2011. Educational and health services, the fastest growing sector, added 26,500 jobs in the same period. The new University of the District of Columbia Community College is furiously training residents for these growing health careers.

Existing job growth is sufficient to provide opportunities for DC's 34,600 unemployed, 8,824 of whom live in Ward 8 where 1 in 4 workers is jobless. Companies that would not locate in the District because the CEO doesn't like driving from Potomac to DC are rarely part of these two sectors, and are thus not needed to address our unemployment crisis.

Furthermore, the surging creative class in the District, whose spending is largely responsible for the growing service sectors, are attracted by public transit and public spaces. That's why their employers, like LivingSocial, are compelled to stay in the District.

We clearly don't need to spend locally-raised tax money to buy more jobs, particularly when 72% of the jobs will go to suburban residents and the jobs city residents need are here and growing. We must make it easier for DC residents than non-DC residents to access jobs in the city, while providing targeted training when needed for expanding job areas in DC.

And the local policies that promote employment for suburban residents over those who live in DC don't end there. DC has an 18% tax on parking garages, but with a loophole so large you could drive an SUV with Virginia plates through it. Garages that provide free parking to employees rather than contracting through a commercial garage are somehow exempt from this DC tax.

This self-defeating deference to suburban commuters is found in the design of streets across the city. My residential street (33rd Street in Georgetown) is primarily used by Virginians crossing the Key Bridge to get to jobs in Upper Northwest. Two of the most iconic streets in our city, M and Wisconsin in Georgetown, have become car sewers for suburban commuters during rush hour. Unsurprisingly, most jobs in Georgetown, including the large percentage of leisure and hospitality positions, are held by Virginians.

Why do we allow this? Let's replace a lane on each side of M and Wisconsin with a dedicated transit lane or widened sidewalks, and push to get streetcar service into Georgetown to help DC residents access Georgetown jobs. Let's cut off my Georgetown residential street and others to through traffic.

If DC is to leverage the disrespect we get in Congress for real unity and action, we must start caring about and investing in our own residents first. Let's start by vastly improving public transportation and bicycling infrastructure to economically integrate our city.

These jobs, primarily in leisure, hospitality and personal care, are rapidly growing as a share of the total jobs. The growing creative class of knowledge workers have higher incomes and demand more and better services.

Hence the growth of education and health care services, at the high end, and leisure, hospitality and personal care services, at the low end. Both types of services are producing jobs faster than any other sector in the District. The latter, lower-end services are performed by what Florida calls service class workers.

Despite this, no one thinks of them as a solution to unemployment because they are usually crappy jobs - low-wage, dead-end jobs with few benefits.

But factory jobs were also crappy jobs a century ago, argues Florida. As millions of workers left the farms people wondered who would employ them, and the only solution were low-wage, dead-end manufacturing jobs.

By the end of WWII, these crappy jobs were the pathway to the middle class. Thanks to unions and to the professionalization of management, factory jobs became higher value jobs that were more highly compensated.

As evidence that service class jobs are being upgraded in the same way, Florida points to the 20 firms employing primarily service workers on the Fortune list of 100 best companies to work for. In the top 10 are Wegmans, Zappos.com and REI.

There are three steps that Mayor Gray should take to help DC's jobless get and retain good service class jobs.

Expand transit links across the Anacostia to leverage the city's natural advantages
Unlike lots of jobs that have been outsourced, service class jobs are primarily done in person with end customers. That means service class workers have to commute to the neighborhoods where their customers live.

Factory jobs are usually located away from residential areas. While manufacturing has never been a large part of Washington's economy, much of America's present sprawl and auto-dependency is attributable to the zoning of neighborhoods by single use (residential, commercial, industrial) in response to the rise of factories.

Because service jobs are usually done in person, cities have a natural advantage in employing their service class residents. In fact, service class workers before the rise of manufacturing often lived in alleys directly behind the homes of wealthier residents.

The District should be leveraging this natural advantage by improving transit links across the Anacostia River to economically integrate the city. Metro, like other transit systems that arose in the 70s in Atlanta and San Francisco, exists primarily to shuttle suburban workers in and out of the city. Mayor Gray and DDOT Director Bellamy should increase their investment in the Circulator and Streetcar routes that shuttle District workers to District jobs.

Look for soft skills training models that work
Mayor Gray often points to the new Community College of DC as an example of his investment in training. While the training provided by CCDC is helpful for jobs in the growing health care field such as nursing assistants, the District's service class needs primarily soft skills training. Instead of focusing exclusively on technical intelligence for particular careers, we need to also focus on social intelligence for service class workers.

Lack of these soft skills is the barrier that keeps less educated workers from getting and keeping leisure, hospitality and personal care jobs. The Department of Employment Services (DOES) and the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development should find models for soft skills training that work.

Perhaps DOES could pay for soft skills case workers to connect clients with service class jobs and then meet regularly with the worker and their manager on-site to discuss their performance. This would effectively provide free training and personnel management for employers, and would target the specific skills mismatch that keeps service class workers jobless.

Target firms with good service class jobs for attracting to the District
Service class jobs will become better jobs the same way factory jobs became better jobs - re-engineering of workers' jobs to address demand for better quality from customers and better pay from workers.

DC's rapidly growing, well-paid class of knowledge workers increasingly demand more and better quality services in food, personal care and home care, and leisure. We need to build up a class of service sector managers who are skilled at re-engineering service processes and positions in order to meet these demands.

Ultimately it's these managers who will circulate between service sector firms in DC and make the District a center of excellence in services. Targeting those service providers in the 100 best companies to work for to attract to DC will build up this cadre of managers in the city who then make other service sector firms in DC great places to work.

It's a source of shame that 30% of our workers are out-of-work and 30% of our children live in poverty. Until this third of our city is lifted up, we cannot speak of progress in any other area.

While many talk about unemployment, few provide specific solutions. Whether one agrees with Florida or not, let's join him in offering specific solutions to the challenge rather than reiterating common platitudes.

Why have companies like MCI, Nextel, Corporate Executive Board, and the Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group left the District? According to Ein, the culprits are corporate tax rates and the high cost of real estate.

By that logic, Omaha and Tulsa should be the nation's high-tech hotspots.

I co-founded a tech company in the District in 2000 that now has 60 employees and is headquartered in Tysons Corner. We moved there despite very high rents for two reasons. First, my partners who live in northern Virginia would have far longer commutes into the District than I would have to Tysons. Second, Tysons Corner is where the potential software partners and vendors are—it's where the action is.

Slashing the corporate tax rates in the District would benefit owners of DC businesses like Ein. It would do little to attract outside businesses and even less to help the unemployed, who are already threatened by cuts in social services by the cash-strapped city government.

Technology hubs form where there is a large source of very talented developers, capital and a large number of similar technology companies that serve as rivals or partners. According to Michael Porter, who wrote the definitive text on industry hubs or clusters, these are factors that contribute to clusters in any industry.

Tax rates, according to Porter, are not relevant to the rise of tech hubs. If they were, the largest enterprise software firm on the planet (SAP) probably wouldn't be in Germany, and the largest tech hub in the world (Silicon Valley) wouldn't be in the state that has the second-highest business tax rates in the US.

Ein claims that Washington has "been a place for people to start companies that want to tap into the deep population of one of the most well-educated, computer-savvy young workforces anywhere in the nation". But Northern Virginia's tech cluster didn't just happen; firms located there to take advantage of federal government contracts.

Non-government software firms have been only a knock-on effect, or consequence, of the government contracting hub. My company, which sells software to phone companies, is such a knock-on effect, benefiting as we do from the local telecom sector hub that arose when telecom was heavily regulated by the government.

Washington is quite unlike Silicon Valley, Austin, or New York City with their legions of talented software developers. There is no leading computer science department in a Washington-area university, and there is no rivalry amongst local firms for the best developers as exists between Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The number of tech companies founded in DC, to which Ein points as evidence of our lost potential, is actually not high for a city our size. One of the largest software companies in the world, Compuware, is based in Detroit, and no one is looking to the Motor City as the next Silicon Valley.

DC's unemployed also aren't jobless due to a lack of jobs. They simply lack the skills that even the bulk of existing jobs demand. More than 40% of jobs in DC require a college degree, while nationally only 20-22% of jobs require a college degree. Yet 36% of DC residents are functionally illiterate.

DC lacks a manufacturing base and is a hub for public policy, non-profit and legal sectors that require college or advanced degrees. We need to solve the root problem and not waste our time attracting more employers that require higher education.

Mayor Gray thinks job training will close this skills mismatch. That sounds great, but one wonders what cluster will form in the District that can provide 10,000 jobs for which functionally illiterate residents can train in a year or less. Gray hasn't delved into such details, but it's these details that must be worked out if job training in the District is to avoid being a multimillion dollar boondoggle.

Is there an industry that could employ the 30% of Ward 8 that is unemployed, yet find a home in a knowledge-based economy? The answer is key to the city's ability to wash the moral stain of 30% of its children living in poverty.