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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok I don’t know if this will help.

I grew up in that area. So I know it really well. I’ve also lived there and other places as an adult.

It’s just not that different! It’s truly not. It feels like this important brass ring because it’s so expensive, but it’s only so expensive because it is finite and there is a bigger pool of people who want to live there than can. That’s it! That’s what’s driving up the cost. It’s just demand. It’s not the great things about the neighborhoods, which are great! They’re just not great enough to justify the cost.

There are a LOT of other neighborhoods where your life will be 95% or more the same, that cost a lot less. That have most or all of the great things and other things CCDC doesn’t have, like mudrooms and diversity. You need to identify what you want to walk to, as a priority. Also be open to the idea that your life will change a bit. I used to walk to the corner grocery store like 3x/week and I thought it was important to me to be able to walk to a grocery store. Now I use my car more and consolidate my trips so I don’t care about that and I just want a Whole Foods with easy parking.

If you think you can only be happy in upper Northwest, I have some bad news. You just can’t be happy, or don’t want to. There’s no level of wealth that will help you with that. There are good schools in lots of places and families who have all kinds of problems with Lafayette etc. There’s no guarantee your kids will be happy and successful at Lafayette just because the neighborhood is expensive. If they can be happy and successful at Lafayette, they can almost certainly be happy and successful in Takoma Park or Silver Spring or Rockville or wherever. Your kids are the most important factor. No school is perfect or a cure all.

Here’s the other thing - the reasons CCDC is desirable are the features that were built in to appeal to some of the worst things about our not so distant community history. I’m not saying the people there now are responsible or the factors are all still the same or they don’t exist elsewhere. But it requires and deserves interrogation and conscious decision making. 
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I appreciate this post but I do think you're implying more than what I said. I was lamenting that all our house savings for a specific goal have been wasted. I didn't say I would never be happy. I don't think it's crazy to work toward a goal for 4 years, realize you'll never achieve it, and feel sad about that. [/quote]

I think you’re making my point. People who are resilient and able to be happy would realize that the goal is not a particular patch of soil, it’s a particular lifestyle that they want for their family. And that is easily within your grasp. You’re determined to defeat from the jaws of victory. That’s more about you and your outlook than the real estate market. [b]It suggests that even if you bought a house in CCDC, you’d soon find another thing to be unhappy about. [/quote][/b]

This. I live in CCDC, and I wish I had bought in MD or VA. (No in state tuition or state preference when applying to college and Deal/JR aren't all they are cracked up to be) [/quote]

I grew up in DC (which I love, but could not afford a SFH in) and now live in MoCo. I don't understand living in CCDC if it's an economic stretch. Just cross the line a few blocks or a mile or so and you can live in MoCo and get slightly better public schools and instate tuition. Some people are hell bent on living IN DC but then wind up living in a pretty suburban feeling area with not as good schools and no instate college preference.

OP, 1.1 million could buy a brand new build, nice big house, in Oakland Terrace neighborhood of Silver Spring. 500-600k could buy a 1950s cape cod in Oakland Terrace (in Silver Spring, sort of the eastern part of Kensington, but not Town of Kensington). Nice bilingual elementary school school that is part of the DCC so you have school choice in HS (zoned for Einsten which isnt a W school but has a nice IB program). 1.5 could buy a nice new build a mile or two west of there in Kensington zoned for WJ. 800k could buy a 1950s cape cod type house in that WJ part of Kensington.

If you like cute old housing, check out the historic part of the Town of Kensington. There are several blocks that look like Cleveland Park and those are zoned for either BCC or WJ, I think. You'd probably need well over a million to buy those old houses.

I work remotely. I would not want to make the commute into DC every single day. But people do it. There is a MARC station that goes to Union Station in DC. [/quote]

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