Not surprisingly the Michelin Guide started handing out stars for D.C. restaurants in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_starred_resta..... For decades, it ranked (in the US) only restaurants in SF, NYC, and Chicago.
My general cut of it would be Frederick - Leesburg - (follow US 15 south) - Gainsville - Quantico - La Plata - Waldorf - Bowie - Laurel - back to Frederick, although I'm not high confidence of the cuts on the MD side of the line.
Maryland also did a better job of spreading out its employers. A lot of those Virginia exurbs still commute into DC, or at least Northern Virginia, making traffic a nightmare, at least during rush hour.
Another thing that slightly confuses that map: Virginia has much better arteries into DC. You get into DC from the south on I-395 and I-66, and they take you all the way downtown. Maryland has only surface streets. (It was supposed to have I-95 connecting straight through the city to join up with I-395, and I-595 where New York Avenue is, but that would have destroyed a lot of neighborhoods in exactly the way they were destroyed in building 66 and 395.)
That means that there's a fair bit of Virginia that is technically 45 minutes away from the center of the city, but not during rush hour. The 45 minute line in Maryland is pretty close in, but the 1 hour line turns out to be quite broad, because you can reach it on Maryland's interstates that flow pretty freely (parts of it, even during rush hour).
Of course you really should be taking public transport, except during a pandemic. The driving and parking are both horrible.
An additional factor to consider in the DC area is that the DC central business district is relatively weak compared to other major jobs centers: Arlington, VA (just across the river) has hefty job concentration, as does the Dulles-Tysons corridor; on the MD side, there's an additional jobs concentration on Rockville-Bethesda.
The final factor is of course the Baltimore-Washington divide. As you head northwest in MD, more people start commuting to Baltimore instead of Washington. So instead of there being a relatively clean sprawl/rural divide you can point to as a boundary, there is instead a more or less continuous sprawl that transitions from DC suburbs to Baltimore suburbs, and the mixing zone (particularly the Laurel-Columbia belt) is more accurately a suburb of both rather than one or the other.
DC - Maryland - Virginia
aka "The greater Washington, DC metro area"
Nearly 100% of Michigan is 150 miles or less from an international border that is in navigable waters. Is it a coastal state?
Navigable Waters of the United States has a specific legal definition [1] and it has nothing to do with whether it's salt water or fresh water. So the question of whether a particular state is "coastal" based on proximity to salt water a valid question!
The people of Bangor Maine and Buffalo NY have a hell of a lot more in common with the people of Cincinnati Ohio than they do with the people of Portland Maine and NYC.
On the west coast the "wealthy urban and suburban areas on the coast" vs "literally everywhere else" difference is even more stark. And I'm not talking about just the urban vs rural divide. The people of secondary cities resent being ruled by the interests of the major metropolitan areas as much as the rural folks do.
Cities/MSAs are the drivers of cultural identification in America, much less so than states.
Counties have a variety of shapes and sizes, so that doesn't really tell you proximity to the coast, but a majority of the population lives within 50 miles of the coasts.
[1] Let's say a day's drive is around 400 miles, since if you go north traffic is rough.
If you relocate a government agency HQ to an area that doesn't have any competitive jobs, you're making it more difficult for that agency to attract and retain tallent.
Just by moving the office in the first place you'll hemorrhage experienced personnel who don't want to move their lives across the country.
To proponents - that's a feature not a bug. Less effective regulation (and eventually deregulation) being the goal.
But... that's also much closer to the people they are actually regulating. And if you think Kansas City isn't a "real city" able to attract competent bureaucrats, you are way too deep in the swamp.
If my wife's job got moved to a more affordable place, I'd love to leave.
The increase is probably driven largely by these people, who 20 years ago would have been in Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery or Howard Counties.
And the area has always done fairly well. An uncle by marriage had planned to move back to Long Island after finishing up at Georgetown Law. Then he read that Arlington County topped the list of US counties ranked by average income for lawyers. He moved across the river and didn't look back. That would have been about 1950.
How much has the federal spend increased in that same time period? A lot.
A fair portion of the upper middle class, mostly "west of the park" (Rock Creek Park) uses the public schools: Eaton, Deal, Wilson is a common progression. And some those who can use the public magnets, Banneker, School Without Walls, Ellington. I am not talking here about the really rich, whom I do not know, but about the prosperous.
Yes, lobbyists, but there have always been lobbyist. Yes, contractors, but the DOD contractors tend to be in Virginia. Again, I don't think that there prosperity of the region as a whole has changed that much, rather the share of the region's prosperous who live in the District.
Does it matter? Coastal cities have been rich for a long time. DC pulling away from the median dates to 2006.
There's plenty super-rich here, but they're not particularly tipping the scales out of 700,000 people. The rise of DC's wealth has largely been a huge influx of young professionals in the past 20 years. Most of whom are probably government-adjacent, but we're talking people making 120k/year, not 10MM. It's the same pattern as a dozen other big US cities over the past 10 years.
DC public schools enrollment is up 10% in the past 5 years, and DC Charter school enrollment is up nearly 30%.
https://dcps.dc.gov/release/dc-public-schools-enrollment-sur.... https://dcpcsb.org/student-enrollment
Sorry I know i'm taking the bait, the lazy stereotypes of DC as a non-city with a few zillionaire lobbyists just irk me.
Not that places have to remain static, but these are neighborhoods with a long and interesting history. DC isn't just a government seat. It's a real city, sandwiched between the Confederate capital and a slaveowning but non-seceding state. That gave rise to a unique culture -- including having one of the nation's most prominent Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
That culture persists and evolved, and it's worthwhile to consider that rather than simply replacing it. Exactly how to do that, though, is an ongoing challenge.
Isn't this just another way of saying D.C. is defined to be a highly urbanized area?
This certainly made it much more expensive as it was the middle of nowhere and there wasn't any infrastructure there.
Looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22812/cairo/population, that’s a slight slowdown from the 30 years it took them to go from 5 to 10 million or from 10 to 20 million, and looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EGY/egypt/population-g..., it may slow down further, but they need to build a lot of houses fast to accommodate that.
I, probably naively, took this as more of an efficiency move rather than political.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2020.0000...
They keep growing the city larger and larger. Leave for 20 years and come back, and you don't recognize the scenery anymore.
Actually that's true in the old city as well - there is a huge commercial sector and it's very dynamic and alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_purpose-built_national...
Constantinople lasted over 1100 years.... and Washington seems to be the capital of a reasonably prosperous and stable country?
Both the Canadian and American cases are not a relocation that made it too far from the original place
Brasilia was hundreds of Km from the original capital, this move is 45Km away.
It will probably produce some stratification but also relieve pressure from Cairo.
* relieve pressure for the elites in Cairo
Anyhow, lowering Cairo’s pop by six million should make it more livable traffic and smog wise.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22812/cairo/population
It will take longer than 12 years for this new city to reach 6 million people. So what will happen is the population growth will slow some in Cairo; there will be NO population decline there.