Reply to DC Chosen Best Place to Raise a Family

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm the first poster who brought up the issue of schools. We actually looked to buy in Capitol Hill, but felt we were priced out. Instead, we live in Alexandria City (Del Ray), in a place that was probably $100-$200k cheaper for the same size space (1600 sf). We love our 'hood, and our schools are probably no better or no worse than the schools in Capitol Hill (I don't really know), and I certainly don't think we're abusing our son by sending him them to our neighborhood elementary school with the okay-ish test scores. Like many parents who live in the city, the issue gets trickier as our sons gets older. Do we send him to the high school with the so-so rep? Do we want to be living in such close quarters with a teenaged son? I don't have the answers. More than likely, we will end up moving to a more "affordable" city so that we can live in a small house within city limits (and either go private or public, depending on the place). Of course, the term affordable is subjective, but I don't think you can argue that DC has one of the highest costs of living in the country.[/quote]

This is one of those things that everyone knows to be true, but which is only true in a limited sense:  DC's cost of living is roughly on par with Boston.  So it has one of the "highest costs of living in the country" in the sense that all top-tier cities with high salaries and viable economies have high costs of living.

http://activerain.com/blogsview/311916/washington-d-c-area-cost-of-living-high-but-not-the-highest

A pretty good summary of the issues here:

[quote]And that’s where Greater Washington DC really stands out. It is a big diverse metro – the nation’s eighth largest. It is a human capital magnet, home to four of the five counties nationwide with the highest concentrations of college educated adults and the third largest creative class concentration in the nation. With an unemployment rate of just 5.4 percent, the second lowest of any metro with more than one million people, its economy has proven to be among the nation’s most resilient. Still, its housing prices and overall cost of living allow it to remain relatively affordable, providing great value for its residents. And it’s the only large metro in the country to see its housing values appreciate over the past year (more here).  While most commentators and economic developers remain fixated on trying to build the next Silicon Valley, replicating aspects of  LA’s film industry, or trying to generate New York-style entertainment clusters, it’s worth paying a good deal more attention to what’s behind greater Washington’s capacity to strike such a nice  balance between clustering, and affordability, allowing its residents’ paychecks to stretch much further than most.[/quote]

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