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Comment by cglan | Hacker News Reader

Washington DC != Arlington and the surrounding regions. They're not interchangeable. Saying DC avoided the price increases (it didn't) is disingenuous. DC is horrifically expensive for a small city. Outside of DC is barely "DC". It's not very walkable and not very metro accessible except along the silver line corridor. 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. The development style was literally the same

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.

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Rosslyn, Courthouse, Clarendon, and Ballston are more walkable and metro accessible than substantial chunks of DC and are where a huge number of Arlington's residents live. It's all shinier and has less character than DC but otherwise I think your characterization of Arlington is very off.

Concur. I've lived in Rosslyn, Courthouse and Clarendon in that order and I've enjoyed it. Georgetown is a quick walk or bike across the river. DC is a quick metro ride away and you don't have to deal with having a car downtown. On the weekends your that much closer to the outdoors and don't have to deal with traffic leaving and entering DC.

Still though, a metro stop in Georgetown woulda been nice.

I lived in Courthouse for years. Obviously this is an opinion, but I don't view that corridor as a city.

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.

I live in NYC and haven’t been to DC in ages, but what is the deal with this station?

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?

I don't live there, but I'm familiar with Tysons corner (it's an enormous mall serving most of nova). that station probably functions more as a park-and-ride than something you would actually walk to.

I remember being in Tysons on business a few years back and could see across the road to the mall. But I couldn’t just walk there to find dinner because there was literally no way to walk across the road.

I don't disagree with your critiques and I certainly have my own of the area, but I see a lot of that as an argument for why the Arlington corridor is part of DC conceptually. It is highly connected to DC (transit times into DC as low or lower than many intra-DC trips), high density (the entire county is only a bit less population dense than DC itself), and essentials are walkable if a bit inconvenient at times. Arlington would be a bad city if it were isolated, but Arlington is the way it is because it isn't isolated.

The argument of the piece is that the silver line corridor is tightly integrated with the city of DC. I lived in Clarendon and tons of people lived there and commuted into the city. People live there because DC is a great city with filled with interesting work that doesn't exist anywhere outside of the capital.

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.

> DC is horrifically expensive for a small city.

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.

> I lived in a very nice 2bd/1ba apt with a friend just two years ago and paid $1200/mo in rent.

In the actual city?

You're definitely not finding a 2bd/1ba apt in a safe area in DC for that cost, and I've looked. Not anymore.

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’m not sure I agree with this. I currently live in Arlington, and used to live in DC a few years ago. I moved here because it is safer than DC but still 10 minutes away from DC, has fantastic public schools, and even more fantastic public parks, much cleaner than most areas of DC, cheaper, tones of restaurants, bars, etc.

Arlington is to DC as Oakland is to SF: they're not interchangeable, but they've become substitutable for many in the region.

> It's not very walkable and not very metro accessible except along the silver line corridor.

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.

Arlington is DC enough. Geographically it is just as close to downtown as Tenleytown. DC proper is expensive, but they didn't see crazy appreciation like the rest of the country. Prices stayed flat.

It actually WAS DC at one time, then Virginia reclaimed its territory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocess...

> It's not very walkable and not very metro accessible except along the silver line corridor.

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.

Has it? It's also increased the cost of housing fairly directly in the form of mandatory parking, which is very expensive especially in urban areas. (And indirectly in the form of the opportunity cost of that space not being used for more housing.)

> DC is horrifically expensive for a small city

With some of the worst crime.

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