Reply to Relocating to DC...what's life like?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've been following this thread with interest.

Not one poster so far has recommended that you move into the heart of the city and put your elementary school aged children in one of the downtown schools and give you and them any exposure to real city living and diversity.  For $1.8 million you could buy a very nice rowhome in Logan Circle or Shaw or Dupont.  You could walk to absolutely everything.  You could stoop on your front porch and meet your neighbors.  You could put your kids in schools where there's real socioeconomic and racial diversity.  In short, you could have a real DC experience.

The NW neighborhoods that other posters are recommending are for all practical purposes suburbs -- and rich ones at that.  There was a firestorm on this website a few months ago after a couple of researchers at Brookings studied DCUM postings and concluded that it perpetuated segregation in the DC public school system by steering parents towards the richest and whitest schools in the city.  What I'm seeing here is Exhibit A.

Take a chance, OP.  You're smart, educated, and being a SAHM have time to watch over things and get involved.  Your kids would thrive in a more diverse environment than what these folks have been pushing on you and be so much better off for it.  Don't move to DC just to wall your kids off into the vanilla experience that DCUM is pushing on you.    [/quote]

Yes, living in a $1.8 million Logan Circle townhouse is the “real DC experience.” [/quote]

I did have to chuckle a bit. The "real" DC experience is a modest townhouse in the suburbs because that's what most people's lives are like. Patting yourself on the back because your kid knows a few token minorities in his class while the rest of his friends are rich kids. Don't kid yourself into thinking there's serious socio-economic diversity in people's lives outside the superficial. It's starting to reminds me of New York or even London, with multi-million dollar terraces right around the corner of grimy council estates. You really think the kids in the fancy houses are going to be good friends with the kids in the subsidized housing? Maybe in a politically correct version of a Hallmark movie.

OP is affluent. She knows her tribe. The move to DC is really to be part of her tribe, affluent urban people. And that is totally fine. Just be honest when talking about wanting diversity and all that. Dupont, Kalorama, Georgetown all tick the boxes. She won't get that much for 1.8M but she'll get something. But I do wonder - if they don't *have* to be in DC, why not just go straight to New York? Brooklyn, Park Slope, Cobble Hill?

[/quote]

OP here - Thank you for your post and yes, you've given me something to think about. Yes, technically we can live anywhere, however, DH frequently travels to DC and I'm the "single mom" for most of the week. The idea is that if we lived in DC, DH could see his kids more often, attend school functions, etc. I've always loved the buzz of cities/urban environments, however, I'm very far from a Real Housewives-type person. The pressure cooker/mean girls clubs are not something I'm looking for. It seems those situations/personalities absolutely do exist, but there are alternatives as well. We participated in the DC School Lottery last year and we were awarded Langley Elementary, which seemed to be an interesting school that we would have investigated further, but we ended up not moving. Our housing budget is high because I feel it has to be high due to the market. For us, it's a large amount of money and we could get a McMansion in Wisconsin for that price tag, but we enjoy getting outside of our house and "unplugging" the kids and DH so we can make memories and traditions. My concern is that in Wisco, the long winters allow for excessive amounts of YouTube watching and Nintendo Switch playing haha. [/quote]

OP, you're not moving here.  You're just bored.[/quote]

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