More to this city than NW
Just a little reminder.There is more to this city than NW. There are these other quadrants, NE, SE & SW. I'm not just talking Capitol Hill, I mean past Capitol Hill, past Brookland, past all those places that cater to the hipster transitional mover-shaker set. And believe it or not..... people live there. People live on the other side of the river. And not all parts of Anacostia, or Ward 8 are horrid. There might not be anything there that would attract a certain demographic, but from reports of some acquaintances, there are pockets where responsible adults live, set out for work, and come back to Wards 7 & 8 unscathed.
I'm writing this because, well I and others can get a little too NW-centric. As if the whole city revolves around what's happening here. I tend to be NW-centric only because this is where I live, and sometimes work, and where I go shopping. Yet, I need to, as we all need to, acknowledge there is the rest of the city.
Some of it is affordable too. For the past couple of years I'd purposely not talk much about NE DC because I really wanted some of my friends to check it out as affordable places to buy. There is a part of NE I would go through often, biking from work in MD. I think it is called Avondale, and I would bike from Avondale, bits of Woodridge, through Brookland and right on into NW. Now I'm going to call affordable anything under $300K, and there are affordable 2-3 bedroom, detached, semi-detached bungalow-type houses with brown lawns and chain link fences. Below $200K there are some SFH and condos and a co-op, but not a lot of amenities, I've noticed.
posted by Mari @ 3.3.06
5 Comments:
Its the amenities that are the key. There is much more to the city than NW but without amenities, why would people go to and, therefore, know about an area?
Amenities also don't have to be shops they can be things such as the ice skating rink at Fort Dupont but more often than not it is shops. As more retail spreads accross non-NW the city will start to seem bigger to many people.
And please don't forget that there are a lot of different neighborhoods across the river - it's not all "Anacostia". That is a common mistake of the NW-centric. (And it's not all Ward 8 either....)
Living in NE and working in NW, I try to act as "laision" of sorts to bridge the gap. Though I'm not sure that Brookland is quite "hipster" - you really have to leave the area (to U Street, Dupont, Adams Morgan, etc.) for a vibrant social scene. As sam said above, the amenities just aren't here yet. There may still be small pockets where you can get a livable semi-detached in NE for under $300K, but they are few and far between in upper NE. It's proabable around Riggs and East of the River, but it's only a matter of time before that's over.
I have been telling my friends that they are not priced out of D.C. - there are lots of places you can still buy at a reasonable price. Sure, they are not in the 'hip' places, but that's life. And now many of these hip areas are filling with luxury condos owned by people who I would not want to be neighbors with anyway!
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