Anonymous wrote:Upper NW is overrated. Grew up in upper NW, it was fine. Inherited houses there and sold them all. Moved to Alexandria and absolutely love it.

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Anonymous wrote:Who is able to afford these houses? What’s driving up prices? If salaries aren’t keeping pace with home prices, why do prices keep going up? Investors?

I live in OP's target neighborhood (CCDC). A real estate friend of mine says that it is not uncommon for parents to pay down payments or even purchase houses outright for their adult children. On my block there are at least 5 families with infants living in $1.5 to $2 million homes. I don't know how they've swung it but I know I couldn't have afforded current CCDC housing prices on the salary I was earning when my kids were born.

I’ve been going to open houses and I would say fully half of the groups there include an elderly parent. Including for buyers in their 30s and 40s!

Also for buyers who look just out of college…which my parents had bought me a half million dollar+ condo or house when I was just out of school…

I know at least two couples with 300k HHI that have bought 1.5M house. I am sure that their family helped at least with down payment.

Anonymous wrote:Don’t understand why this thread is getting so much play. It’s not difficult to find a 3B place for $1.5 million or less in NW or close-in Bethesda. Now $1 million is getting difficult in those areas, but $1.5 is a generous budget

Anonymous wrote:OP, do you *have* to live in DC?

It's kind of a superstition, but sometimes I think paths are blocked to protect us. The life you are describing is, by your own description, crazy. Your schedule is exhausting, you cant take vacation, housing choices are depressing, and on and on. For $1.5M you can have a great life elsewhere. I left the DC area, and on that budget, I am still pinching myself regularly to make sure I'm not living in a dream.

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Anonymous wrote:Save $2M.

By the time I do that, I'll need 2.5.

So true.

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Anonymous wrote:Save $2M.

By the time I do that, I'll need 2.5.

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Anonymous wrote: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.

I think OP is saying in part that she's tired of crime in Petworth and wants to moved to a safer part of the city. So in that sense, a new neighborhood could be very different.

Anonymous wrote: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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Anonymous wrote:If it helps, we're in Petworth and everyone we know that's left has gone to MoCo. Mostly Takoma Park/Silver Spring, some to Bethesda. You'd be in good company if you ended up there!

Also in Petworth, my kids lucked into a J-R feeder and we are also probably suburb bound because the schools just aren't good enough to justify the cost of moving in bounds.

Why move in-bounds if you lotteried into a feeder? Isn't that the entire point of the lottery? And I'm not saying J-R is perfect, but it's certainly not any worse than Takoma Park and Silver Spring schools. Sounds like OP isn't considering Bethesda or McLean, so apples to apples, her "upper NW" and MCPS options (Blair, Einstein) are going to be very similar.

Because the commute is extremely disruptive for marginal educational benefit (in our case).

Where are you looking to move though? I'm assuming not Takoma Park if you're looking for more than a marginal benefit in the move...

OP here, not the person you're replying to. But my main motivation to move is safety. I don't feel safe and my kids are not getting the freedom I want them to have as a result. I don't need it to be like a gated community, but DC has been awful with shootings lately, increasingly during the daytime. TP is surely an improvement?