Why is McLean so prestigious?
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Anonymous
| I am surprised to look at its Wikipedia page. I grew up in McLean and went to Langley. It was a quiet boring town with not very friendly neighbors. As for the wealth...most of the places in Fairfax county have wealth and there is no shortage of multimillion dollar homes in the area. Also most of its residents are elderly or empty nesters. I recall us being one of the few families with kids our age in our neighborhood. |
Anonymous
| Redlining |
Anonymous
| Because there are huge showy houses there. JFK started it. |
Anonymous
This. |
Anonymous
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I think of McLean as old and boring money. Is that prestigious?
I also think of it as a wealthy Republican area. |
Anonymous
That would be RFK. Jackie’s dad had a house there but JFK never did. |
Anonymous
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There seem to be a never-ending series of threads started about McLean as a pretext to bash it. I don't really get it, since I don't see people in McLean pushing it on posters with the same frequency as posters from Arlington, Falls Church City, or Vienna.
There's no mystery about why people move to McLean: (1) it's centrally located between DC and Tysons; (2) houses there are among the largest and nicest of any DC-area suburb; (3) the public schools are top-rated and it's also easier to get to DC/MD privates than it is from other parts of NoVa given the proximity to Chain Bridge and 495; and (4) it's safe and quiet. There's also no mystery about why other people avoid McLean: (1) the population trends older than in many other areas; (2) there's no nightlife and the retail area is underwhelming; (3) it's mostly White and Asian, so some URMs may feel unwelcome; and (4) Republicans live there as well as Democrats. But is it "old money"? Overall, no (nor is there really a lot of "old money" anywhere in this region). It's higher-income people, many professionals and/or first or second-generation Americans, with work ties to DC or Tysons. Are most of its residents retired and old? No, again (McLean HS, for example, has been among the fastest-growing high schools in FCPS in recent years). Is it mostly Republican? No, yet again (it has been mostly Democratic for years, but Republicans aren't as outnumbered as they are in Arlington or Bethesda). |
Anonymous
I think of it as foreign born wealth. |
Anonymous
JFK bought Hickory Hill from a Supreme Court justice and later sold it to RFK, whose family lived there much longer. |
Anonymous
JFK bought Hickory Hill in 1955. In 1956 he sold it to his brother. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_Hill_(McLean,_Virginia) |
Anonymous
And it was Jackie's stepfather, not her father, who owned a different property in McLean when she was growing up. |
Anonymous
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Is anywhere in the DC area actually prestigious? I really can't think of anywhere that is in the global sense. McLean is an expensive area with SFHs. That's all I think about it.
Maybe Kalorama and some of the neighborhoods immediately to the west? |
Anonymous
Kalorama has more old, distinguished houses, but then it also had Ivanka and Jared to trash its reputation. And it's also got plenty of third-world kleptocrats (the DC equivalent of the Saudi princes of McLean) and Big Law partners who grew up in places like Brooklyn (before Brooklyn was a thing) and Paramus and think spending $5M on a house in Kalorama will buy them respectability. |
Anonymous
I meant old people. Not old money. Old people who bought expensive houses in the 90s. Didn't you just confirm what was said? More likely to be a white, old, Republicans than other areas nearby. Not that it's everybody or even most people. |
Anonymous
| I don't get it either, OP. Parts of it feel very ramshackle and overgrown. |