Anonymous wrote:OP, I'm from the Bay Area, used to live on the Peninsula. I moved to the DC area about 10 yrs ago.
Here's what I noticed when we were looking here:
1. sidewalks -- I lived in CA most of my life, and I am used to sidewalks. Here in the DC area, a lot of areas don't have sidewalks.
People mentioned Potomac on here. We looked in Potomac. No sidewalks. So, just be aware.
2. kids playing outside -- that does not happen in a lot of the UMC neighborhoods here. The kids are all in activities, classes, etc.. The moms (mostly) organize a lot of the playdates.
3. In the summer, families socialize at the private pool clubs. This is not a thing for me, but we joined the neighborhood pool club so our kids had someone to play with in the summer. A lot of the pools here also have swim teams, and it seems like a lot of the kids join the swim team for social reasons. My kids didn't want to do it, and I didn't want to force them. But, it did mean that they were not part of the social circle.
4. Also, I'm sure you know that a lot of people around here vacation in August. We did not realize this when we moved here.
5. Public schools -- your kids are young, so you probably didn't experience public schools in CA. Mine did, and I did, too, since I grew up there.
The public schools around here are vastly superior to the public schools in the Bay Area. FCPS and MCPS have magnet programs starting in mid ES all the way up to HS. They can do this because both school districts are large, and there are a ton of really smart people around here, which equates to a lot of smart kids. While the Bay Area also has a lot of smart people, most of the school districts are small -- town based -- and so they don't have the economies of scale to provide real magnet programs. When I looked into gifted programs in the Bay Area, it was just basically pull outs a few times a year to work on "projects". The budget cuts in CA also meant that some of the "gifted programs" were cut, and so the parents were basically propping those programs up.
Even if your kids don't go to the magnets, a lot of the schools are really good, and offer an array of challenging programs.
The downside of such a large district is that it is unwieldy, and some of the schools are really really large. So, your kid can get "lost" in the crowd. Some parents will put their kids in private due to their kids getting lost in the large schools. I don't blame them. If your kid needs smaller class sizes, I would look at private school. There are a ton of them around here. As expected, you will find that a lot of kids in neighborhoods that are very wealthy do go to private school.
But, if you want a tight knit neighborhood with kids playing outside, I would not pick an area where a lot of the kids go to private school.
To be honest, I regret picking a wealthy-ish area. I think I was overly impressed with how big of a house I could get with Bay Area money. If I had to do it over again, I'd pick an area that is on the lower end of UMC where the kids aren't as overly scheduled as UMC/wealthy kids. But, that's probably also because I'm not really into the UMC lululemon wearing, private pool club lifestyle.
Good luck picking a place.
PP I'm interested in this comment. Where is a place that's lower UMC with great public schools? We ended up in FCC and everyone here is very scheduled. So isolating.
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