Name: Karen Zens
Occupation: Artist; Retired from the Foreign Service
Hometown: Washington, DC
Tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you lived in DC?
I was born here. My parents were living in the suburbs, but they moved into the city, here on Capitol Hill, when I was ten, so I’ve always considered it my hometown.
I went away to college and after college I worked elsewhere — in New York for a while and in Michigan. Then I joined the Foreign Service, the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. I worked for the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service, part of the Department of Commerce, which is the service that helps find markets overseas for U.S. products and services and supports the U.S. economy. I did that for twenty-five years. My last assignment was here in Washington, and I decided that’s where I wanted to retire. I’ve been retired for almost fifteen years.
Why did you decide to move to DC?
DC, especially when I was in the Foreign Service, was always my home base. My parents still lived here, and I came here frequently for work as well. After they passed away, I felt like I didn’t have a home. When I was deciding where I would want to settle permanently, I realized how much I loved Washington, DC.
It’s a wonderful city, it’s a very green city — our neighborhoods have lots of trees and parks. And it has a vibrant cultural life — it has a great theater life, it has art, it has music, and that’s apart from any of the federal institutions. It’s a very nice place to live, and I think a very nice place as a retired person because it offers a lot of opportunities. The other lovely thing about DC that people notice when you move here is — because we’re a city that has always brought in lots of people from the outside — it’s a very welcoming city. People are happy to meet new people. I’ve lived in other places where people are very friendly, but they’ve lived there forever and they have their own lives there, and people from the outside are viewed a little like outsiders, even though they’re just from another state. That’s not true in Washington, DC — you can quickly find friends and activities to do with them, even if you’re brand new.
What do you love most about living in DC?
It’s hard to pick out one thing! I have a dog and I just love walking around my neighborhood. I live right on Capitol Hill, it’s a very green neighborhood. I run into people I know. I feel like I live in a small town in the middle of a big city, and I have all the cultural advantages of a big city, yet I have this wonderful small town feeling.
Could you talk about your own experience being disenfranchised, or in other words, what it has been like to lose the rights you had when you were living in one of the 50 states?
As I said, when I was in the Foreign Service, I didn’t notice it so much. I represented my country very proudly and I worked for Republicans, as well as Democrats. But I was so busy and it didn’t hit me that although I was paying my taxes the whole time, I didn’t have anyone to represent me. But when I came back to live here, it hit me pretty quickly that I’m paying my federal taxes as I should, and yet, every time there’s a proposal in Congress, and somebody says tell your congressman what you think about it, I have no one to say that to.
It increasingly was annoying, and then, what’s even worse is although we have what is called Home Rule — we have our own mayor and our city council, and we are self-sufficient as far as funding goes — the fact is, Congress can change our laws. Congress can veto local laws. In fact, this year, they took away a billion dollars of our own local money and said we couldn’t spend it. This is outrageous!
As I talk to my friends across the country, they don’t understand this. If someone in Wyoming was told that your local law has just been vetoed by a man in Massachusetts, they would be rightfully up in arms, and yet that happens to us, and legally can happen to us.
Also as I said, the frustration of having no one that I can write to — if you’re a Washingtonian and you try to contact a congressman, the minute they see you live here, you’re not a constituent and they don’t care. The longer I live here, the more infuriating I would say it is. I also realized that most Americans don’t understand that there are 700,000 of their fellow citizens who do not have any representation. I looked it up and we pay more federal taxes than twenty-four states — almost half of the states pay less federal taxes than we do. It makes no sense that we are not a state and that we don’t have representation. I also noticed that we have 450,000 registered voters who can vote for President, but not for anyone in Congress. That just isn’t right.
What does achieving statehood mean for you?
I would feel like a full citizen. As I said, particularly for someone who represented my country — when you’re a diplomat overseas, you’re always explaining your country and representing [it] in a broader sense — and I’ve always been proud of our system. And yet there's this problem, which was never envisioned by our Founding Fathers, who didn’t think there would be permanent residents in the federal district.
I have seen the proposal for statehood and it leaves a Federal District — a small area in the middle of the city, which is just federal buildings and nobody lives there. That fits the original concept of the federal district, and the rest of us should be citizens, and that’s what statehood means for me. It means full citizenship.
What do you think needs to be done to get closer to achieving statehood?
First of all, we’ve never had much luck with a Republican majority because this is a District that votes heavily Democratic, and that’s one reason why people say ‘oh you’ll never get [statehood].’ Well, no one says that Wyoming shouldn’t be a state because they vote heavily Republican. The reality is that we are majority Democrat, probably Democrat plus Independent. It has never been a priority for the Democratic Party, either. I do understand that we don’t need a Constitutional Amendment, we just need both chambers of Congress to support statehood. In a practical viewpoint, we need a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, and then they need to understand that this will also help them. I do believe in a two-party system if both parties are effective and there’s no reason why Republicans can’t try for representation in this city — if they want to propose good legislation, people would listen to them. But in the short term, I think it would take a Democratic majority and their understanding that this helps them, not just us.
In a broader sense for this to happen, more people outside the city need to understand what this issue is all about — that it is an issue of basic fairness to fellow citizens.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
I guess the other thing I want to say to people who don’t understand our situation is that — and it’s understandable, most visitors come and they absolutely do want to see all the federal buildings and the wonderful museums, and they should — but, outside of that federal core is this lovely vibrant city. The majority of people do not work for the federal government — they are artists and educators and taxi drivers and police officers — every kind of profession you can think of. They’re not a bunch of bureaucrats. It’s a very vibrant city with its own culture, it’s not a gray bureaucratic federal city. That would be my other message.
[this interview was conducted in November 2025]