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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My point is different. Not questioning anyone’s choice which is based on many things, $/sqft, commute, tolerance for and desire for certain things.

Based on my experience, if one magically took out people from these neighborhoods and plopped them into Cleveland Park or Woodley Park or Massachusetts Heights (not Bethesda, please no), they would see their living environment differently afterwards. It would be hard to normalize the myriad daily inconveniences, challenges and stresses. That’s it.[/quote]

Yes please magically plop me in a $1.5 mil house! I’ll take it.

Cleveland Park has less crime in great part because it is less dense, and in turn the housing is more expensive. The Hill is more affordable and dense. [/quote]

This, plus it's just even really clear that Cleveland Park would get rid of the stress associated with urban crime and other issues.

I live near H Street and recently spent the afternoon in Cleveland Park, and I had a nice time. The library is gorgeous and feels brand new, there are lots of little shops there, I had a great lunch at Vace, stopped in at Streets to pick up a few items, and swung by the Target to grab a few other things. The metro is right there. I absolutely had a moment of "wow I could totally live here, I like the scale of this neighborhood a lot and the things I needed today were all closer together than they would be on H Street." Seems like a really nice place to live.

But:

(1) a house in Cleveland Park would easily cost twice what my house off H cost. Maybe if I wanted to live in a condo it would make sense -- the condo buildings in CP are older and a little less expensive, though they also seem to have higher fees. But if I wanted to live in a house, we're talking about a difference of like 1.5 million to get the same size house. Not negligible.

(2) The commercial area is compact and convenient and has a metro, which is great. But H Street has a lot more stuff. It has multiple proper grocery stores, plus the Trader Joes on Florida's is walking distance as well. The streetcar offers more hyper-local transportation (and is free) than the buses on Connecticut Ave.

(3) I actually saw more homelessness and experienced more panhandling in CP over a few hours than I usually do on H Street on a weekday afternoon. There were multiple people camped out under the marquis at the old Uptown theater (plus how sad that theater is now closed!), there was panhandling in and around the metro, I saw people sleeping on benches near the Target, etc. Not judging -- I live in the city and I'm used to this sort of thing. But the idea that my extra 1.5 million in housing price in CP would buy me a magically upscale environment without some of the issues that are endemic to city life? I'm sorry, but no. You see this throughout the city, sadly.

I will give you that schools in CP are probably more consistently better than on H Street, but I'd argue that is a direct result of the cost of housing -- those schools have a broad base of wealthy families and fewer FARMS kids overall, which enables them to more easily raise money and then channel it towards extras that are appealing to a UMC person like myself. The schools near H Street have higher rates of FARMS kids and actually do a pretty great job with them despite the fact that they need a lot more from the school than your average CP resident. This is a permanent feature of education in the US -- the more money you have, the easier your access to high quality education, full stop. It's true in the burbs, too. The suburbs we could afford have schools that are not considered to be as good as the schools in parts of MoCo or NoVa that people rave about, but buying inbound for those schools costs a premium. This is not rocket science.[/quote]

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