Reply to If you're moving out of the DMV area because of the HCOL

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]1) Where are you going?
2) What is your HHI in the DMV (and what will it be where you are going)?

[b]By HCOL I really mean real estate.[/b] That is truly the only think here that I think is ridiculous here.  Food is honestly the same here as back home in a relatively lower COL area.[/quote]

Childcare is relatively high here too, although lower cost options do exist.  But I think childcare cost here are among the highest in the country.[/quote]

I also think form a quality of life perspective, it's the cost of childcare plus its scarcity. When I speak to friends in other cities, even cities where childcare costs just as much as it does here or more (like NYC, San Francisco, LA, Seattle) they are always surprised by the hoops we have to jump through just to get a spot in a daycare. You see that other places but only with certain, very in demand centers that offer special services like bilingual education or that are attached to prestigious institutions. We sat on waitlists for months just to get a spot at a regular, decent daycare that was reasonably close to one of our offices. That's unusual.

There are a lot of things about the DMV that not only cost more, but are more stressful. Services in this area are weirdly limited in ways that you don't run into in other cities, partly because of how many people abandoned the city for the suburbs in the 80s and 90s. DC never really built up its service infrastructure when people started moving back in. We got lots more bars and restaurants, but not necessarily more daycares, dentists, and auto body shops.[/quote]

Some of those things were better in the 80s/90s.  For instance, I used to take my car to get oil changes on NY Avenue right near mt Vernon square but I’m pretty sure it got priced out after they opened the new convention center. And remember that awesome hardware store that used to be on 17th street?  There’s still a bunch of dentists on 19th street.  Mine is not hard to get into.  
The building of the Verizon and new convention center priced a lot of service type places out in the center of the city.  Everything is so fancy fancy now with cute restaurants and hotels everywhere.[/quote]

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