District Nullius

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

Bad Boundary Stones

In 2012, just before Hurricane Sandy lapped up the New York City littoral, your correspondent was on the first night of a road trip to New Orleans. The first scheduled pit stop was Washington, D.C. It was getting late, after 10 pm or so on a Saturday, so good excuse to pull off for a minute, photograph some monuments, grab a bite, and gas up before the overnight drive to Knoxville. The exit closest to the Mall was serendipitously found, and a parking spot slipped into, suspiciously, with minimal bother. Vincent Price fog hissed up from the dusty green, which the sodium street lights did their best to hold down. No signs, fences, personnel or any other indication of permissible land access. And very dark. Unease in the absence of affirmative. The gravel thoroughfares were shadowed around until the ambiguity became unbearable. Who’s in charge here?

Ben’s Chili bowl is, as far as anyone’s concerned. Up on U Street, next to a bar broadcasting Obama’s second debate with Romney, one’s eyes locked in on the safety lantern glow of diner lights, cumin and sugar redolence beaming. The server keeping the counter heads comfortably in line with gummy bears of wisdom. “It’s never too late to apologize,” was the most memorable. D.C. always offers up enigmatic charisma, Mid-Atlantic cultural exotica. The first exposure to this place a couple years prior left the impression of getting hood-checked by a uniformed Metro employee. “Pardon me, ma’am? Do you happen to know how to get to the White House stop from here?” After an aggressive silence that seemed to imply an incomplete request. “Sorry, this is my first time here, I’m from California.” “Well, this is D.C.!,” she challenged, her uvula boinging like a door stop spring. Gang-banging states as a remit of a public functionaries: that’s interesting.

The bar patrons began filing out, wriggling their coats on. One was asked, “How’d he do?” “Good, he got him,” was the confirmation, matter-of-factly. Indeed, he did get him, as history would bear out. And, alas, the void his august leadership left behind has soured into the stinging atmosphere of the present day’s political culture. In Washington, D.C. there’s a palpable spookiness that exists as a function of its many institutional inputs, American political culture at large being one of them. The District’s singularity as a municipal culture, though, lies in the formidable volume of these inputs, and, as the realization runs, how impossible it is to stage-manage them competently. Good, bad, or indifferent, the intrigue of this place festered, leading to a few more sojourns, and ultimately the present stay--three years in and counting, long enough to begin sinking into its identity. The wincingly eccentric uncivilized Mid-Atlantic brusqueness experienced in D.C. (outshining even Baltimore and Philly) can now be explained.

The District of Columbia, as an object, is what the Romans would refer to as a res nullius (“nobody’s thing”), an item for which ownership is acquired or maintained through seizure. By design, by circumstance, by historical necessity, by autopilot, by the simplest of commons’ tragedy: policy accountability in the District could just as easily be inscribed onto the Potomac effluent as the skies above it. There is a misalignment between stakeholder and custodian in the policy lifecycle that creates a structural, mortal problem. One doesn’t get the notion of outward administrative dereliction, per se, but rather an arena of bad ideas, a dynamic lethargy, where the fight isn’t for effect, but affect. Where actors crowd each other out, instead of a classic tragedy of commons situation where action is yielded on the assumption of the other’s. The kind of situation a Nash Equilibrium is designed to solve. Thus to understand the problems of administering the District of Columbia is to understand the socio-cultural effects of jurisdictional cleavage, and the lack of consistent oversight. The following is an attempt to sketch an institutional cadastral map of the District, working outwardly in. For hitherto an incomplete square of boundary stones is the snafu.

The Graecostasis Community

Foreign missions are the most outwardly-looking institutions that can exist in a municipality (apart from telescopes, of course). These make up a significant portfolio obligation for governance, at all levels, federal and local. To question whether the world has ever seen such a concentration of personnel from embassies in a single city can’t be held as hyperbole. Not least in terms of per capita. At latest count Washington, D.C. hosts some 185 missions from sovereign foreign states. By way of comparison, London hosts 167, Paris 162, Beijing 176 (which is quite noteworthy in and of itself). Missions generally comprise a collection of embassies (‘embassy’ being a general term for facilities supporting diplomatic operations). Along with missions from sovereign states, the District also accommodates missions from international political collectives (e.g., European Union). Factor each mission by the amount of staff required to support their presence, and then add all the foreign employees of countless international organizations operating in the District, and the total population of foreign dignitaries, their retinue, inter alia, occupies a significant amount of municipal space. This constitutes a formidable administrative grey area for local District governance, particularly in its current form.

The Graecostasis (“Greek Station”) was the area of the Roman Forum reserved for foreign plenipotentiaries, so named after the Massalian Greeks who first inhabited it. Reserved front-row seats, essentially, for Roman grand spectacles of the day, whether political or theatrical. The District’s complement of foreign bureaucrats maintains a much more concentrated, consequential presence than its Roman predecessor, arguably. Ancient Rome had a population of a million inhabitants at its height, as the mean of official estimates suggests. The District’s projected 2024 population is approximately 700,000 (though this number swells with office commuters on weekdays). What’s more, the embassies of D.C. are situated, solely, in the Northwest (albeit the largest) quadrant of 28.1 square miles. This isolation has contributed significantly to the antipodal cultural geography of the District. Coupled with the protected status afforded employees of foreign governments and of international organizations, a District government is burdened with penumbran oversight in such an arrangement, meaning, it can only respond to the effect created by this demographic, as it is limited in its exercise of authority over all of its residents. The ultimate responsibility of oversight in D.C. is structurally imbalanced, by design.

The term embassy is a catchall for any physical presence associated with a foreign mission. What the pedestrian regards as an embassy as such, a facility that primarily issues visas, is referred to as a chancery in the relevant parlance. All other spaces supporting ambassadorial functions fall under the rubric of embassy as well: chancery annexes, ambassador residences, and offices for cultural, health, military, and economic attachés. The status and tractability begins to blur at the margins the further one radiates from the official address of the core chancery. Since 2022, the Washington Diplomat, an independent media company, has published an annual “Embassy Directory”, which is, seemingly, the nearest thing to an exhaustive view of D.C.’s foreign diplomatic corps. Though it appears to be more a directory of Ambassadors than Embassies. It lists contact information for the main chancery of each foreign mission, as well as a profile of its ranking diplomat. Were the District to be more effectual, it would maintain a detailed compendium of proximate information concerning the overall presence of foreign missions operating within its borders. This would be an active, general, publicly accessible list of foreign mission properties and staff numbers. The fact that one doesn’t already exist denotes an informational limitation of the goings on in the District (the tax exemption list referenced below would be a good starting point). Therefore a significant aspect of the District’s institutional topography is statistically turbid; one can only govern that which is visible. An attempt at an estimation of the District’s foreign detail is sine quo non for further discussion.

In February of 2008, the Washingtonian reported there were 297 chanceries or chancery annexes and 1,680 residential properties associated with foreign missions in Washington, D.C. Since the number of chanceries has grown to 322, one can estimate the current amount of residential properties to be approximately 1,800. Seems like a pretty big count, but then again, foreign missions are labor intensive operations. The same article cites the foreign mission labor force at 10,000, “…some with full diplomatic status and others, including local hires, in lower-level office jobs, including chefs and chauffeurs”. It goes on to cite a survey conducted by the Greater Washington Board of Trade, which “…found 16 countries with at least 150 employees, led by Saudi Arabia with 780…” These figures won’t come to any surprise to those who have seen such grand compounds in person, or, are privy to some of D.C.’s diplomatic luxuries (the Residence of the Australian Ambassador, for example, maintains a grass tennis court). A significant number of residential properties, then, would be needed to house a significant number of staff. But that’s not all: the diplomatic corps has families of course, dependents. A Los Angeles Times (AP) article from 1992 estimates the Washington diplomatic corps and their dependents (representing 143 countries) to be 22,012. If these numbers are to be honored, then trending to the present with them and the current 185 embassies, the size of the current diplomatic entourage can be estimated to 28,750. So this represents the demographic radius of foreign missions of sovereign states, but there are similar groups to consider.

For a bird’s-eye view, the Secret Service, the agency explicitly charged with the protection of foreign missions in the Capital Region, indicates on their website’s homepage that the Uniformed Division’s officers assigned to the Foreign Missions Branch protect over 500 foreign diplomatic missions in the DMV. The present discussion, of course, lends primary focus on those located within the District. In 2006 the National Planning Commission counted 451 such facilities. There are also 46 missions to the Organization of American States, and one for the African Union, European Union, League of Arab States, and Taiwan (officially, the Taipei Economic & Cultural Representative Office [TECRO]); as well as at least a few others, to be sure. The demographic estimate in the previous paragraph would average to about 155 persons per embassy. Understanding that missions not representing official sovereign states maintain a much lighter presence, the average estimate for each above could be reckoned at 30 persons per mission. Conservatively, then, the human footprint of the diplomatic corps operating within the District of Columbia can be approximated to 30,000, about 10 percent of the Northwest quadrant’s population.

Foreigners working for intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, quasi-governmental organizations and hybrids with varying degrees of permutations of the above, indeed, constitute a more than insignificant portion of D.C.’s working population as well. The World Bank, for example, is estimated to employ 9,000 persons at its Foggy Bottom headquarters, half of which are on contract as “short-term consultants/temporaries”. Across 19th Street is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where over 90 percent of its total staff of 3,100 work similarly. These are just the two of the marquee samples. For the point here is not to conduct an exhaustive headcount, but rather sketch out a notion of the institutional weight and soft exigency such a node bears on the cultural-political matrix of the District.

The issue presented here is one of stakeholder imbalance: a heavy slice of property and persons don’t commensurately share in the District’s common interest. Grand indifference is how this phenomenon manifests, in both the social and architectural landscapes. Local government is, more times than not, left holding the bag. To begin with, there’s the issue of local tax revenue. Foreign missions, and the employees thereof, are exempt from a variety of local sales taxes. The properties of these missions are exempt from real estate taxes as well, as can be the properties purchased to be used as residences for their staff, contingent on bilateral reciprocity. In 2024 D.C.’s Office of Tax and Revenue listed 631 “Foreign Government” properties with exemption status, resulting in $64 million in foregone tax revenue. (Though, some of this foregone revenue gets subsumed by the two Federally-managed diplomatic enclaves located in the District, discussed later.) Then there’s the income tax exemption for foreign workers of international organizations. The World Bank’s non-U.S. citizen employees, for example, are paid a tax-free “net salary” for their work. The IMF has a comparable arrangement. The American Immigration Council estimates the 2018 foreign-born population with a “college degree or more” at about 56,000. A significant number of which commute into the District from suburban DMV, an issue of emphasis in the next section (particularly as it pertains to U.S. Federal employees). A good number of foreign professionals operating in the District of Columbia don’t pay income tax. (It would be a salty irony if the undocumented workers paid more in local taxes [$67 million] than their educated compatriots.) Local taxes of individual income, real property, and general sales are the “principal local revenue producers” for the District, and so take a hit from the exemptions discussed above. Foreign embassies do have an impact on the local economy, of course (in 2008 it was estimated at $400 million), but local government isn’t seeing much of it. The international community executes a non-local existence.

As well, this extraterritorial shadow class contributes to the District’s general tone of incivility, the overall zombification of the real-estate industry, and the inability for local policymakers to arbitrate interests efficiently. The insouciance of this group of people renders the natives churlish in response. For anyone caught in the middle, it’s unbearably gobsmacking. Your correspondent recalls an encounter in the Kalorama neighborhood shortly after moving into town. Early one morning while walking to the N Street tennis courts, a jogging woman who had lost her way solicited directions, avec un fort accent français. She sniffed diplomatically when her request wasn’t met with immediate information, but instead an offer to peek at your correspondent’s smartphone for a quick Google Maps ping. Très bien, Madame, faite-le vous-même, alors, she was left with. And many further examples since, unfortunately. It’s bizarre for a city that hosts a substantial contingent of international professionals to exist in such a way, even, and particularly, in the saturated Northwest. Conspicuously off-putting and old fashioned. Is it the ladder of diplomatic immunity that disposes them to a gruff, corrupt-around-the-edges demeanor? Does a career pole-positioning for network-based appointments sharpen their guile? Packed into the nonchalance of the international desk set is a fraction of yobbishness which stokes an already steamy District reservoir. The flock of seasonal foreign professionals do their part as well. Machine Magazine had one like upstairs neighbor whose attitude towards the custodianship of her unit and the negative externalities produced (water leak) was one of monumental indifference.

The existence of so many bubble lots and bubble folks handicap the local real estate industry. So many ghost acres, and the pratfall of constant unit turnover effectively squeeze out the civilized middle. At the top there are juggernauts of real estate and property management corporations (with attendant lawyers) that cater to kitsch commerce and the sly backroom market for foreign missions and professionals. Real estate magnates have a more significant relationship with foreign dignitaries than local government. At the bottom end is the derelict entrepreneurial-level real-estate class who can rely on the amnesia of a steady stream of short term occupancy to cover their negligence and incompetence. The aspiration for bureaucratic inefficiency binds both groups into the antiquated pretension that only roughnecks and contractors are responsible for the maintenance of their property.

District government oftentimes finds itself in the lurch as a result of a lighthouse indifference found in this Roman Wild West property market. A scenario protracted by sclerotic, despotic administrative structure. There are two principle agencies charged with handling foreign missions in D.C.: the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Foreign Missions, and the Office of International Affairs under the office of Secretary for the District of Columbia. A third agency, the National Capital Planning Commission is tasked with comprehensive planning along with the review and approval of regional projects, such as foreign mission chanceries. Of its 12-member commission, four represent District interests. But once things are built it’s the two aforementioned agencies’ responsibility. When the inevitable conflict arises, the State Department’s authority carries the day. As was the case when Turkey’s plan to demolish and rebuild its chancery was met with local opposition. In 1991 Federal interests won out, and their new chancery was built. Or in the unfortunate case when chancery buildings are left blighted for the neighborhood and the local government to countenance on the account of limited authority, as in the case of properties associated belonging to Iran, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Pakistan and Argentina. A congressional bill would be required to allow the District to act more swiftly in these situations.

The move towards aggregating chanceries onto federally-owned diplomatic enclaves is the right one. The International Chancery Center in the District’s Van Ness neighborhood now hosts 16 foreign missions, reaching its designed capacity. The Foreign Missions Center currently hosts the Embassy of Libya and has the capacity for another 14 available lots. This arrangement is beneficial for local government, as it provides brighter lines of authority and responsibility. It’s a step towards assessing the relationship between the District and Federal governments more clearly.

Federal Triangulation
District at Large
The Fall Line
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