Barack Obama moves his family to a luxury hotel in Washington this weekend to begin a life very different from the crime-ridden neighbourhoods and Aids-infested housing projects a stone's throw from the White House.

As they settle into a suite at the historic Hay-Adams Hotel, a temporary home before they move across the road and into the White House on January 20, the Obamas are also arriving in a city where local activists hope that the President-elect will focus more than his predecessors on the chronic urban ills and glaring racial and class divide in Washington.

Despite being the capital city of America and home to many of its most famous monuments and buildings, Washington is divided starkly by race and income. In the predominantly white northwest sector live some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the US. Swaths of the mostly black eastern suburbs, however, are blighted by gun killings, an Aids epidemic and some of the worst schools in the country.

It is an underreported scandal of life in Washington that in the shadow of the US Capitol - where the city has no voting rights - are areas of appalling urban deprivation that have persisted for decades. Because it is not in any federal state Washington DC has no vote in Congress.

Mr Obama has pledged to do more than previous presidents to alleviate these glaring disparities of colour and class, but it is only one problem among many huge ones that he is inheriting.

There have already been some mutterings among education reform groups in Washington that the Obamas did not visit a single state school when they decided where to send their daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7. The girls start at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School on Monday - alma mater of Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore Jr - where fees are $29,000 (£20,000) per student a year.

While there are some good state schools in Washington, the overall education system is abysmal. It is one of the heaviest funded in the country, but with some of the worst results. Teaching standards and dropout rates are shocking.

From his suite in the Hay-Adams - it is not clear which one he is occupying but the two biggest in the hotel go for between $5,000 and $6,000 a night - Mr Obama will be able to gaze across to southeast Washington where, as he noted in a speech in July 2007, every second child lives below the poverty line. In northeast Washington, in the suburb of Trinidad, police were forced to set up road checkpoints recently that made the area look like a war zone, which is not far from what it is. Gun crime among young black men had reached such levels that cars were checked and people were asked why they wanted to enter the area.

In 2007 Washington, a city of about 500,000 people, two thirds of whom are black, recorded 181 murders. Nearly four out of five victims were killed by gunfire and 80 per cent of those were black men. It is a marked improvement from the 1990s, when a crack problem turned the city into the murder capital of the US: there were 479 murders in 1991. Even today, however, the murder rate in Washington is the third highest in the country after Detroit and Philadelphia.

It also has the highest Aids rate in the US. A report from district health officials in November 2007, which compiled the first statistics of HIV/Aids prevalence in Washington, described it as a modern epidemic. The study said that there were 3,269 cases between 2001 and 2006 - and more than 80 per cent of those infected were African-Americans. Among women who tested positive, nine out of ten were black. The rate is nearly twice that of New York and more than four times of Detroit.

All this is happening a short drive from the Hay-Adams Hotel - with its goose-down pillows and microfibre bathrobes.

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