Washington, DC, avoided the worst price rises that have plagued American cities
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What I've seen is that Arlington and the surrounding counties only seem to draw people in if they HAVE to be there. Everyone else I know left to literally anywhere else since it really doesn't bring much to the table.
Every city has gotten more expensive, but DC gotten more expensive much slower than NYC or SF. High rises and strip malls are tolerable if you live on a metro line with easy access to downtown neighborhoods. And building high rises is much preferable to a city where working- or middle-class people can never own a home.
It's a dense suburb with high rises along the corridor. It's metro accessible between Rosslyn, Courthouse, Clarendon and Ballston, but only along the strip. The metro is also so deep in areas and so slow to arrive, that going down and waiting usually takes longer than biking or walking or driving. Anything interesting in the area also requires a car. The corridor itself is barely human scale in terms of distance. Stores are very spaced apart. You can walk minutes and barely leave the alcove of your particular high rise. To me it's the worst of all worlds. Annoying to drive in, but too car centric to be truly walkable and not dense enough to make the metro really make sense. As soon as you leave the main corridor it also becomes single family homes with nothing going on. I will say, biking is a true pleasure though.
While DC as a whole might be less walkable than that corridor, it definitely has a city feel that I think is hard to put into words. I think it has a much more even density of housing, stores, and restaurants that you don't find in newer developments that tend to segregate zoning. It's a much more interesting place to exist in for the average human. It's why I don't think they two areas are interchangeable at all.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/G8SXAuMAZVypHyuKA?g_st=ic
It’s, like, in the middle of a bunch of parking lots? A big part of the catchment area is a highway interchange? How do you walk to this station?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocess...
I bike everywhere and advocate for less car centric infrastructure. But in an intellectually honest way, The Automobile has been very effective at slowing the rise of housing costs, for decades, almost everywhere.
Fully disagree. I lived in a very nice 2bd/1ba apt with a friend just two years ago and paid $1200/mo in rent.
> If you're going to live in Arlington it begs the question of "why even live there unless you have to".You could probably live anywhere else since the character-less high rise apartments and strip malls are copy and pasted for every other new development style in the country. I was just in Bellevue in Seattle and for all I knew it could have been Arlington.
Wow. I disagree so hard here. As someone who grew up in Arlington, sure I'm biased, but also educated on what Arlington is like - there are incredible diasporas from Korea, Mongolia, East Africa, and Central America. Really excellent food, a lot of culture spread throughout. Public school system is amazing, and you're 1.5-2hrs away from some amazing national parks. Sure - it's still a suburb. The Rosslyn/Clarendon strip has some spots that fit the description you're talking about, but also some spots that totally don't. It brings a lot more to the table than most other suburbs I've been to.
In the actual city?
Look, Arlington is fine. It's a fantastic suburb if looking at it stats wise. It's educated, the foods weirdly good, and the schools are good. That said, it's pretty interchangeable with a lot of new build suburbs across the country but expensive with pretty awful traffic. You could put me in most places in Arlington and I couldn't tell you what state I was in. To me that's just not a place that has the type of character I'm looking for. I'd rather a shittier place that has some soul, than Arlington. It's why I loved Richmond much more than anywhere I lived in Arlington.
Obviously this is all personal opinion. But I've definitely noticed that certain types of people struggle to be in the NOVA area, so they leave. The people left are people I struggle to relate to. Doesn't mean they're bad people, they're just not my people
I left Arlington in 2017. I spent the previous 19 years there without a car and had no problem getting around by walking, biking, or public transportation (subway, Metrobus, and ART -- Arlington's local bus system). I did not live in the Blue/Yellow or Orange/Silver subway corridors. The closest I ever lived to the subway was more than one mile. Focusing development along the subway lines was a good idea. There's a lot about Arlington I'd criticize; but, getting around is not one of them.
With some of the worst crime.
All the suburbs building the same sort of multi-story mixed-development to replace what used to be strip malls or warehouses or whatever also have single family housing and existing residential - it's just worlds easier if you don't have to deal with as many property owners or with people who don't really want to move.
Upzoning provides a windfall for the current landowners, increases tax revenue, provides more places for people to live, and reduces price pressure on people being pushed out of the neighborhood. The author pointed out that apartment dwellers pay more in taxes than they consume from city services, and that a group of homeowners who were interested in selling were able to get their land upzoned and sell to a developer for a 3x return.
- this is the whole DC area, not DC itself, which is quite expensive (think SF vs Bay Area). “DC” here is actually a collection of cities surrounding DC.
- the Metro is largely a commuter rail, not a day-to-day transit option. If you live outside DC proper, you need a car.
- DC is remarkably economically stable because of the government. Imagine if Tech in SF reliably paid exactly 75k-150k for every role, with 99% job security, regardless of economic conditions. That’s the DC economy.
- this article ignores the fact that municipal fragmentation keeps costs low too. If Alexandria doesn’t build, Tysons and Arlington will.
All that to say, transit isn’t the only answer. DC is v unique in the US.
Going to disagree on this statement. MARC and VRE are commuter rail. Metro is higher frequency than any commuter rail system and has high frequency in all directions even outside of rush hour.
DC is unique in how far into the suburbs they have high frequency transit. The orange line and blue lines already reached pretty far from the city before the silver line was built, which goes ridiculously far out from the city.
Looks like every 3/4 minutes, which would be very unusually frequent for a commuter line.
Also, er, commuter rail _is_ a day-to-day option; that's why it's called commuter rail. It is, literally, what it is for.
Arlington avoided price rises because it and the surrounding NoVA area was still being built out, so profits for landowners and management companies could be maximized by planning for growth, and providing the amenities that would bring in more middle-class renters. Washington, DC was built out ages ago; there is nowhere for prices to go but up.
DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there.
edit: thank you all for your travel suggestions, but this was a tongue-in-cheek way of trying to point out the absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world".
I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
Comparatively, the other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. produce some product/service that is competitive in the common market: tech things (SF-Bay Area), financial services (NY), entertainment (LA), more tech things (Seattle), etc. [0] Another way I think about it is that these other metro areas have to produce something that people would want to exchange dollars for because they provide more value to them than their dollars.
The thing that separates D.C. from these other metros (and for lack of a better term, "the real world") is that the value-determination mechanism of exchanging dollars for goods/services is completely different than the other cities (and I would argue much worse). Government has little incentive to spend less and consequently seek goods/services that provide the best value. In fact, the U.S. federal government has quite the opposite motivation. Every department is incentivized to spend as much as possible within their allotted budget (which hardly ever decreases year-over-year), lest they demonstrate that they could actually perform their functions with less money than has been allotted to them (gasp!). This phenomenon can be observed in the frenzy to spend all the budgeted money by the end of the fiscal year. [2]
The end result is a city that continuously spends more money for goods/services that are almost orthogonal to providing value (since that is not their point). There's something perverse in the fact that of the ten highest median income counties in the U.S., 50% of them are in this area that produces goods/services of dubious to no value. [1]
[0] Apologies to anyone if I caused offense at these gross oversimplifications of their cities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
[2] Anecdote: I literally worked on a project for a three-letter agency to develop an ML model that would identify which budgeted funds were "in danger" of going unspent by the end of the fiscal year. Leadership loved it. What was a manual process involving countless person-hours that usually began in late spring to comb through the budget, could be supplemented by a model-based prediction in February.
DC is absurd, it consists almost entirely of people who live off the rest of the nation's tax dollars and yet look down upon the people who subsidize their lives. OP was pointing out the fact that the rest of the nation was suffering during the recession but DC was untouched because their jobs and lifestyle are ensured by government funds
What government spending?
They do, they just ignore it. 40% of the city population is poor to working class black people. It was once 70%.
There are areas where you can have a bustling set of offices with high paid workers, and you walk 4-5 blocks down, and you're in a poor neighborhood. And the two don't interact.
This reminded me of what my Russian -American friend told me about present-day Moscow. The family members they have there are living very happily in the city, with great transportation and healthcare options, completely isolated from the rest of the world and the Ukraine war. I can see how it would be easy to believe Putin's version of reality if that's all you ever were exposed to.