8 ms·

Washington, DC, avoided the worst price rises that have plagued American cities

55 points by jseliger 3y ago

fwungy 3y ago
Surprise surprise. I was going to DC a lot during 2008-2009, when the economy was not in good shape. The place felt untouched. Expensive restaurants everywhere full of people, and everyone bustling about with their little lapel pins that notated the department they worked for, like little aristocrats. DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there.
- visviva 3y ago
  Where would you recommend one visit if they wanted to experience this "real world"? Better yet, what's the realest place one could visit, based on your metrics of restaurants and personal accessories? 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".
  - f-securus 3y ago
    St Louis?
  - throwaway38475 3y ago
    Pittsburgh! Cool working class people and the personal accessories are usually the local sports teams.
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    Queens or the Bronx in NYC. They're big city but full of real, working class people and immigrants. Parts of Brooklyn are good too (but also parts of Brooklyn are just as bad and worse than DC). Definitely not Manhattan, lol--it's DC attitude and costs but everyone works for banks and finance instead of the government.
    - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
      I live in SF at the moment but have family originally from the Bronx. Spending time in NYC neighborhoods is so satisfying, I agree that there's a sense of that you don't get in more expensive areas.
  - fwungy 3y ago
    Take a long ride around Seattle, for one example.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    Chicago. It's interesting that the article doesn't mention Chicago and its metro area at all. The Chicago metro area is still one of the largest in the US, and is relatively affordable. There are also tons of jobs here and its culture and entertainment is only rivaled by a couple cities in the US.
    - euroderf 3y ago
      Chicago has interestingly varied density. In an area that is otherwise low-rise, there will be one extremely tall skyscraper. I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
      - manicennui 3y ago
        Probably the fact that the mayor and aldermen only care about property developers, and it is probably cheaper to buy some old building in an area with no skyscrapers.
  - diveandfight 3y ago
    Wouldn't necessarily agree with the source of OP's metrics, but I would agree with the sentiment I believe they are expressing. 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_counties_in_the_United_States 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.
  - ren_engineer 3y ago
    >absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world". 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
    - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      You're confusing DC with a very small subset of DC which is affluent or government jobs. The vast majority of people who work in DC do not live in DC. Over half of DC's residents are below the poverty line, with terrible schools, barely can get school lunches, child care, or halfway decent jobs. They don't get shit from the nation's tax dollars.
      - fwungy 3y ago
        You can't have an over class without an under class. Rich people need poor people to do the work.
  - steve76 3y ago
    [dead]
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  I lived in Arlington and DC later in the 2010s and it was an incredibly vibrant and diverse city. WASPs are everywhere but so are the younger diverse crowd around U Street, H Street, and Columbia Heights. As well as the huge Ethiopian and Vietnamese populations, with incredible food.
- bink 3y ago
  DC has benefited from continuously increasing government spending, for sure. But it is not immune to downturns. The last was probably in the early to mid 90's when defense spending dropped (at least for certain industries). I've warned friends there who were investing in residential real estate for years that it could happen again, but at this point I sound like Chicken Little.
  - gaws 3y ago
    > DC has benefited from continuously increasing government spending, for sure. What government spending?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there. They do, they just ignore it. 40% of the city population is poor to working class black people. It was once 70%.
  - atonse 3y ago
    I think that sadly it is easy to ignore when the divide is largely geographical. 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.
- 1MachineElf 3y ago
  >DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there. 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.
bink 3y ago
I grew up in the area and don't think it's really fair to compare Arlington, VA to San Francisco. The corridors where all of the residential development has occurred in Arlington in the last 30 years were all basically condemned shopping or office parks. Clarendon/Wilson Blvd, Columbia Pike, Route 1, Rosslyn. All of those areas were relatively cheap land and zoned such that they could build large residential towers and mixed-use shopping centers. They are also almost all on or near metro lines. I've only lived in the Bay Area for a few years but I don't see the same opportunities in SF proper.
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  Within SF there's tons of single family housing neighborhoods along muni lines in the Richmond and Sunset that could be densified. Arlington is a suburb - the analogs are Daly City along BART, South San Francisco, and Milbrae/San Mateo along Caltrain. There's plenty of underutilized land around transit in those suburbs too.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Even if we lived in a world without zoning, occupied residential land is going to take far longer to densify than basically-empty former-commercial/industrial stuff. 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.
    - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
      You may or may not be right but "Building dense housing along transit will take longer here than it did there" is not a good argument against building things in the Bay. 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.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
“The Sahara Desert avoided the worst price rises that have plagued…”
cglan 3y ago
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.
- whats_a_quasar 3y ago
  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.
- humanistbot 3y ago
  Arlington is to DC as Oakland is to SF: they're not interchangeable, but they've become substitutable for many in the region.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  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.
mbbbackus 3y ago
I live in the part of Arlington that this article talks about the most and it's so fascinating to learn about the history of how the area got developed. It really does feel like the county has nailed the the development of Ballston and Clarendon. The only thing I'd complain about is parking. Street parking has costed me over a thousand dollars lol (my car got shot by a bb gun and insurance didn't pay so that's mostly why, but otherwise it feels super safe here)
ihaveajob 3y ago
There's a table that shows the clear inverse correlation between number of added homes and price increases.
curiousllama 3y ago
I’m very familiar with DC, and this article is largely accurate. That said, some context: - 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.
- cowsandmilk 3y ago
  > the Metro is largely a commuter rail, not a day-to-day transit option 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.
  - easton 3y ago
    I just moved here and I see people use Metro to go get groceries in Arlington. Which seems super weird to me because all of the Metro stations in the corridor between Rosslyn and Ballston are really close to grocery stores and then you have to pay $4 (at least) round trip, but I think that proves people use it as rapid transit...
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Government starts lower than 75k but your sentiment stands.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > the Metro is largely a commuter rail, not a day-to-day transit option. 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.
miguelazo 3y ago
From what I have heard, child care in the DC area is among the worst in the country.
- miguelazo 3y ago
  (in terms of how expensive it is)
- gaws 3y ago
  $2,000 to $3,000 a month, and that's if you get accepted into one of the few reputable child care centers.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
lolwut? this says "Washington, DC" but it's actually just Arlington. DC has been gentrifying for decades, despite the protests of very involved activist citizen groups. 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.

55 points by jseliger 3y ago

Surprise surprise. I was going to DC a lot during 2008-2009, when the economy was not in good shape. The place felt untouched. Expensive restaurants everywhere full of people, and everyone bustling about with their little lapel pins that notated the department they worked for, like little aristocrats. DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there.

visviva 3y ago
Where would you recommend one visit if they wanted to experience this "real world"? Better yet, what's the realest place one could visit, based on your metrics of restaurants and personal accessories? 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".
- f-securus 3y ago
  St Louis?
- throwaway38475 3y ago
  Pittsburgh! Cool working class people and the personal accessories are usually the local sports teams.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Queens or the Bronx in NYC. They're big city but full of real, working class people and immigrants. Parts of Brooklyn are good too (but also parts of Brooklyn are just as bad and worse than DC). Definitely not Manhattan, lol--it's DC attitude and costs but everyone works for banks and finance instead of the government.
  - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
    I live in SF at the moment but have family originally from the Bronx. Spending time in NYC neighborhoods is so satisfying, I agree that there's a sense of that you don't get in more expensive areas.
- fwungy 3y ago
  Take a long ride around Seattle, for one example.
- manicennui 3y ago
  Chicago. It's interesting that the article doesn't mention Chicago and its metro area at all. The Chicago metro area is still one of the largest in the US, and is relatively affordable. There are also tons of jobs here and its culture and entertainment is only rivaled by a couple cities in the US.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    Chicago has interestingly varied density. In an area that is otherwise low-rise, there will be one extremely tall skyscraper. I wonder what kind of land use policy creates this phenomenon.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      Probably the fact that the mayor and aldermen only care about property developers, and it is probably cheaper to buy some old building in an area with no skyscrapers.
- diveandfight 3y ago
  Wouldn't necessarily agree with the source of OP's metrics, but I would agree with the sentiment I believe they are expressing. 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_counties_in_the_United_States 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.
- ren_engineer 3y ago
  >absurdity of the OP's comment about DC not being the "real world". 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
  - 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
    You're confusing DC with a very small subset of DC which is affluent or government jobs. The vast majority of people who work in DC do not live in DC. Over half of DC's residents are below the poverty line, with terrible schools, barely can get school lunches, child care, or halfway decent jobs. They don't get shit from the nation's tax dollars.
    - fwungy 3y ago
      You can't have an over class without an under class. Rich people need poor people to do the work.
- steve76 3y ago
  [dead]
whats_a_quasar 3y ago
I lived in Arlington and DC later in the 2010s and it was an incredibly vibrant and diverse city. WASPs are everywhere but so are the younger diverse crowd around U Street, H Street, and Columbia Heights. As well as the huge Ethiopian and Vietnamese populations, with incredible food.
bink 3y ago
DC has benefited from continuously increasing government spending, for sure. But it is not immune to downturns. The last was probably in the early to mid 90's when defense spending dropped (at least for certain industries). I've warned friends there who were investing in residential real estate for years that it could happen again, but at this point I sound like Chicken Little.
- gaws 3y ago
  > DC has benefited from continuously increasing government spending, for sure. What government spending?
pessimizer 3y ago
> DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there. They do, they just ignore it. 40% of the city population is poor to working class black people. It was once 70%.
- atonse 3y ago
  I think that sadly it is easy to ignore when the divide is largely geographical. 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.
1MachineElf 3y ago
>DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there. 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.

bink 3y ago

I grew up in the area and don't think it's really fair to compare Arlington, VA to San Francisco. The corridors where all of the residential development has occurred in Arlington in the last 30 years were all basically condemned shopping or office parks. Clarendon/Wilson Blvd, Columbia Pike, Route 1, Rosslyn. All of those areas were relatively cheap land and zoned such that they could build large residential towers and mixed-use shopping centers. They are also almost all on or near metro lines. I've only lived in the Bay Area for a few years but I don't see the same opportunities in SF proper.

whats_a_quasar 3y ago
Within SF there's tons of single family housing neighborhoods along muni lines in the Richmond and Sunset that could be densified. Arlington is a suburb - the analogs are Daly City along BART, South San Francisco, and Milbrae/San Mateo along Caltrain. There's plenty of underutilized land around transit in those suburbs too.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Even if we lived in a world without zoning, occupied residential land is going to take far longer to densify than basically-empty former-commercial/industrial stuff. 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.
  - whats_a_quasar 3y ago
    You may or may not be right but "Building dense housing along transit will take longer here than it did there" is not a good argument against building things in the Bay. 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.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

“The Sahara Desert avoided the worst price rises that have plagued…”

cglan 3y ago

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.

whats_a_quasar 3y ago
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.
humanistbot 3y ago
Arlington is to DC as Oakland is to SF: they're not interchangeable, but they've become substitutable for many in the region.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
enragedcacti 3y ago
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.

mbbbackus 3y ago

I live in the part of Arlington that this article talks about the most and it's so fascinating to learn about the history of how the area got developed. It really does feel like the county has nailed the the development of Ballston and Clarendon. The only thing I'd complain about is parking. Street parking has costed me over a thousand dollars lol (my car got shot by a bb gun and insurance didn't pay so that's mostly why, but otherwise it feels super safe here)

ihaveajob 3y ago

There's a table that shows the clear inverse correlation between number of added homes and price increases.

curiousllama 3y ago

I’m very familiar with DC, and this article is largely accurate. That said, some context: - 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.

cowsandmilk 3y ago
> the Metro is largely a commuter rail, not a day-to-day transit option 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.
- easton 3y ago
  I just moved here and I see people use Metro to go get groceries in Arlington. Which seems super weird to me because all of the Metro stations in the corridor between Rosslyn and Ballston are really close to grocery stores and then you have to pay $4 (at least) round trip, but I think that proves people use it as rapid transit...
nathancahill 3y ago
Government starts lower than 75k but your sentiment stands.
rsynnott 3y ago
> the Metro is largely a commuter rail, not a day-to-day transit option. 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.

miguelazo 3y ago

From what I have heard, child care in the DC area is among the worst in the country.

miguelazo 3y ago
(in terms of how expensive it is)
gaws 3y ago
$2,000 to $3,000 a month, and that's if you get accepted into one of the few reputable child care centers.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

lolwut? this says "Washington, DC" but it's actually just Arlington. DC has been gentrifying for decades, despite the protests of very involved activist citizen groups. 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.