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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

> Loudoun County, Va.; Fairfax County, Va.; Howard County, Md.; Falls Church City, Va.; and Arlington County, Va., were among the highest counties by median household income.

Are these counties where lobbyists live?

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Lots and lots and lots of dual-income lawyers and consultants. This is one of the areas where, on average, women have their first child at a very late age[1]. Lobbying across a wide array of industries but also defense contractors and such. I was actually just looking at median home sizes/prices[2] in that area for June of this year. I live in Arlington, bought a house earlier this year and discovered $425k is pretty much the bottom of the non-condo market, we only saw about 1 go up per month and everything closed immediately. Feels nuts here.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...

[2] https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697

$425K seems delightful here in Silicon Valley, where the bottom of the non-condo market is about $1.3M and the bottom of the condo market is roughly $900K.

Should have known I couldn't mention housing prices without comparisons to the literally-the-most-extreme outlier bay area. The DC area isn't geographically constrained the same way, doesn't have the same concentration of hyper wealth, has immediately-adjacent jurisdictions with regulatory setups more amenable to development to California, and a much better/more extensive transit system. Salaries for your typical fed or consultant here don't come close to the engineering compensation in the bay for lower level employees.

Also, it's not $425k for a single family home. It's $425k for a 60-70 year old brick or cinderblock townhome/duplex between 800-1000 sqft that was constructed as WW2-boom housing.

The $1.3M homes in Mountain View are also 60-70 year old post-war construction of roughly 800-1000 sq ft. A duplex will run you about $1.9M here. New townhomes are roughly $1.6-1.7M. The sort of house that would be considered a modest suburban middle-class dwelling in most other places go for about $2.2-2.4M; a "nice house" (like the one my sister paid $550K for in the Houston metropolitan area) goes for around $6M and can only be had in the wealthy towns like Los Altos Hills or Atherton.

Yes, this is basically an extreme outlier for the U.S. I was surprised to find that it's actually pretty reasonable compared to many urban areas in the world, though - cities like Sydney, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai are rapidly climbing past Silicon Valley in housing unaffordability.

$425k for a non-condo is downright cheap even by thirdl world Indian standards

Not just lobbyists. A lot of professionals working for the government, military and all the companies that provide service for the government. Being close to DC, the area is flush with government money which is also funding a healthy software development and IT environment. Money may be corrupting politics in DC and ruining the nation but everyone in the vicinity is getting some of that DC gold dust. Record taxes and increased government borrowing should keep that gravy train going for a while longer.

> Are these counties where lobbyists live?

Lobbyists, senior executive officials, senior Congressional staffers, executives and highly-paid employees of government contractors,...

DC and its VA suburbs also have a good tech talent pool as well. Probably doesn't pay as well as lobbyists, but it would still push the median up.

The top end of teacher scale in APS in Arlington County is $157,029 [0].

Not saying they don't deserve it, far from it, just saying there are plenty of high paying jobs (tech or otherwise) in the DC area.

[0]: Page 19: https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Pay-Plan-18-...

Teat of the federal government.

Defense Contractors & Federal Government

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