Reply to Why do you live in the DC area?

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[quote=Anonymous]Moved here for grad school, stayed for job opportunities. Have lived here for 20 years and am married with two kids. Have lived in DC itself the whole time (though spouse used to live in suburbs).

What I like and dislike changes with time. These are the major factors of satisfaction/dissatisfaction:

-- Stuff to Do. I have always felt DC punches above its weight in this department and still do. Smaller city but amazing museums, tons of festivals, great bands come through here. Food scene was pretty bad when I moved her but now really good, though as I've gotten older I go out to eat way less so this is much less important to me (same with bars).

-- Affordability. Used to be amazing, obviously much less so. Spouse and I are in fields where we'll never make a ton of money even at the director level, and we've been slowly (or maybe not so slowly) priced out of a lifestyle we once thought we could afford. We're probably going to cash out and move in a few years and this is the main reason why -- our jobs will be less tied to DC in the next few years and our money will go so much further elsewhere. It feels like we get poorer every year even though our incomes have steadily risen. Part of that is cost of kids, but most of it is general cost of living around here.

- Culture. Super uneven. We've never been part of the political/media complex in DC so I have limited interaction with that. I work in the arts and DH works in academia. I do think DC culture can be too Type A and competitive at times. I find this especially jarring in the art world where of course there is competition but there's a joylessness to it in DC that doesn't exist in other art communities I'm a part of. DH has a similar experience in academia -- it's a different vibe than you'd find in either a bigger city (where academics are considered middle class and fairly irrelevant) or a college town (where they are top of the heap). In DC, academics are close enough to policy-making that there is an aura of power, but they make no money in their actual jobs and don't have real power. So there's this weird focus on media presence, mainstream publishing, and consulting, that I think really wears down pure academics. Most people do not go into academia because they love the hustle. But we do like that people in DC tend to be, on average, well-educated and interested in the world. That's not always the case.

All in all, I have no regrets about the time we've spent in DC, but I feel it no longer really suits us. We could move into adjacent industries, boost our income, and "keep up" with costs here, but that would require us to become slightly different people with slightly different values, and it's just not what we envisioned for ourselves. It's time for us to move on. [/quote]

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