Anonymous
12/13/2025 22:42
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:^i don’t disagree that west laurel/columbia is nice, but it’s not really connected to the DMV. it’s far from the Greenbelt metro. Yea you can drive to Bethesda on the beltway but that’s quite a stressful drive…if your job is near laurel yea it’s a no brained
I and all my neighbors disagree. We all work in DC. Including lawyers, Feds, and other professional services types (tech, engineering, etc).
After doing this for the last 12 years - it’s a 42 min commute to my office in DC. 30 minutes on weekends. I don’t take metro however.
People throw out commute figures like this and never indicate what times they leave. Not all of us have jobs that are compatible with a 6 AM to 2:30 PM schedule.
Anonymous
12/13/2025 20:56
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:What kind of jobs support people buying houses in Odenton/Severna for 1M+? I can understand someone in the DMV area buying a 1M home in Rockville and that being the starter level because of so many law firms, biotech, etc. what’s there around Anne arundel?
We have friends in a million dollar house in Severna Park. She's a doctor and he works remotely in Tech. They are 'boat people'.
We are in the general vicinity and both in STEM and commute to DC. Many neighbors are doctors and some others have DC jobs.
Anonymous
12/11/2025 07:41
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:What kind of jobs support people buying houses in Odenton/Severna for 1M+? I can understand someone in the DMV area buying a 1M home in Rockville and that being the starter level because of so many law firms, biotech, etc. what’s there around Anne arundel?
We have friends in a million dollar house in Severna Park. She's a doctor and he works remotely in Tech. They are 'boat people'.
Anonymous
12/11/2025 05:42
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
If you're willing to drive from Rockville, Gaithersburg or Olney then look at a map and see that West Laurel and surrounding areas are equivalent.
Anonymous
12/11/2025 05:03
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:^i don’t disagree that west laurel/columbia is nice, but it’s not really connected to the DMV. it’s far from the Greenbelt metro. Yea you can drive to Bethesda on the beltway but that’s quite a stressful drive…if your job is near laurel yea it’s a no brained
I and all my neighbors disagree. We all work in DC. Including lawyers, Feds, and other professional services types (tech, engineering, etc).
After doing this for the last 12 years - it’s a 42 min commute to my office in DC. 30 minutes on weekends. I don’t take metro however.
Anonymous
12/10/2025 23:19
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:Can we not have the same sort of prestige complex that the NoVa people have? I was actually pretty glad not to see us MD folks indulge in that silly exercise of showing extreme insecurity.
I guess you haven’t been around long enough to realize that all of those bash McLean threads are not started by other NOVA types but by the envious in DC and MD.???
Anonymous
12/10/2025 23:16
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
^i don’t disagree that west laurel/columbia is nice, but it’s not really connected to the DMV. it’s far from the Greenbelt metro. Yea you can drive to Bethesda on the beltway but that’s quite a stressful drive…if your job is near laurel yea it’s a no brained
Anonymous
12/10/2025 17:15
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:Sounds like we have a contender for the Pimmit Hills of MD!
This genuinely made me laugh out loud.
Some wouldn’t believe it, but in West Laurel and the intersection of the areas bordering Prince Georges, Montgomery and Howard Counties we have homes in the upper $800k to over $2M. This area never shows up on these lists. However this area is the same distance to DC as it is from Rockville to DC. In this area we have access to beautiful outdoor parks and the Patuxent River and also have access to three jurisdictions’ public recreational facilities. We have planned walkable suburbs with Maple Lawn and also the benefits of Columbia and historic areas as well. Also access to best public schools in HoCo and things like The Gardens Ice Rink. Honestly it’s like a little secret because we are close to Bethesda but also can access BWI easily.
I don’t want it on this list because it’s a nice secret- but do want people to know there are great areas in the region and don’t let it deter you from discovering them.
Anonymous
12/10/2025 17:11
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Two Rivers in Odenton is highly affluent for Anne Arundel County standards at least. Two Rivers Elementary almost exclusively serves kids in $1M+ homes and has a lower FARMS rate than every elementary school in Severna Park besides Shipley's Choice Elementary. The only reason they have any kids getting FARMS at all is because the school also serves kids living in apartments within the Waugh Chapel Town Center and has a few kids living in older communities with a few poor rural families just outside the entrance to the community. Yet surprisingly, it is a highly racially diverse school as well. Lots of white, Black, and Asian students enrolled there.
Anonymous
12/10/2025 11:32
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Sounds like we have a contender for the Pimmit Hills of MD!
Anonymous
12/10/2025 10:14
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:What kind of jobs support people buying houses in Odenton/Severna for 1M+? I can understand someone in the DMV area buying a 1M home in Rockville and that being the starter level because of so many law firms, biotech, etc. what’s there around Anne arundel?
Odenton is directly adjacent to Fort Meade (numerous white collar jobs with salaries that support buying homes like that) and is sandwiched right between DC and Baltimore, with transit access to both cities. Some of the people buying the $1M+ homes in Odenton work the same jobs as those buying them in Rockville, others work at Fort Meade and do defense contracting, others are doctors at hospitals in Baltimore and Annapolis.
Anonymous
12/10/2025 09:05
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
What kind of jobs support people buying houses in Odenton/Severna for 1M+? I can understand someone in the DMV area buying a 1M home in Rockville and that being the starter level because of so many law firms, biotech, etc. what’s there around Anne arundel?
Anonymous
12/10/2025 00:32
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:20910 zip code Silver Spring's somewhere around 15-20 percent of single families sold for over a million by my count.
Silver Spring and even Gaithersburg have pockets of extremely expensive homes, nobody is denying that. But overall, Odenton has a much higher share of $1M+ homes than both. Two Rivers in Odenton is a massive community of $1M+ homes. Then there’s others like Chapel Grove, The Preserve, and certain subdivisions in Piney Orchard. People just look down on Odenton because it’s not in MoCo, but in actuality it’s not that different than Rockville.
Anonymous
12/09/2025 22:49
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
20910 zip code Silver Spring's somewhere around 15-20 percent of single families sold for over a million by my count.
Anonymous
12/09/2025 22:43
Subject: Suburban MD Prestige Rankings
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Tier 1:
Bethesda
Potomac
Chevy Chase
Gibson Island
Tier 1.5:
Kensington
Annapolis
Garrett Park
Travilah
Tier 2:
North Bethesda
North Potomac
Rockville (Wootton/WJ/RM school zones)
Clarksville/all of Western Howard County
Ellicott City
Gambrills
Davidsonville
Arnold
Mitchellville
Severna Park
Tier 2.5:
Gaithersburg
Bowie
Crofton
Odenton
Olney
Fort Washington
Takoma Park
Laytonsville
Columbia
Crownsville
Millersville
Upper Marlboro
Urbana
Tier 3:
Cape St Claire
Edgewater
Silver Spring
Germantown
Poolesville
Frederick
Elkridge
Laurel (Howard County portions)
Bowie
Hyattsville
Way too many Anne Arundel County spots on here. Odenton? Gambrills? Come on now.
And what’s wrong with that? Odenton and Gambrills are both upper-middle-class suburbs with good schools. They are absolutely comparable to places in their “tier.” In fact, Odenton/Gambrills have better schools than almost every other town in their “tier” (sorry Blair, even people all the way out here are highly aware that your school is garbage and that magnet kids from Bethesda push up the rankings).
Odenton/Gambrills are Clarksburg/Damascus, be serious
You all are laughing, meanwhile you're sending your kids to an MCPS school that is equivalent to Glen Burnie High School in AACPS. The schools in Odenton and Gambrills don't need a million magnet programs to bring W cluster school kids into their schools to only achieve average rankings. That's the reality of every school in eastern and upper MoCo. If the schools in eastern MoCo had the rankings of Crofton, Odenton, and Gambrills schools, the price gap between homes in Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Potomac and Takoma Park/Silver Spring/non-BCC/WJ Einstein wouldn't be anywhere near as large as it currently is.
This thread is, for better or worse, about prestige. If you think that Great Schools rankings of public schools tell you anything about prestige, you are hilariously out of touch.
So what exactly is so special about Olney, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Gaithersburg, and Fort Washington that Odenton can't be placed in the same tier as them? You literally live in the cheapest, dumpiest parts of Montgomery County bordered by the dumpiest parts of PG County. Nearly everyone in Odenton could afford to live in any of these areas if they wanted to, but they purposely choose to live further out to avoid them. If anything, it does a disservice to Odenton to be lumped in with areas that are one regional program model implementation away from becoming some of the very worst schools in the entire state.
When you rank these towns by percentage of $1M+ homes sold over the last year as a total percentage of all homes, you see Odenton blows the vast majority of these places out of the water too:
Davidsonville: 47% (47 homes)
Kensington: 33.5% (73 homes)
Takoma Park: 24.2% (47 homes)
Severna Park: 20% (70 homes)
North Bethesda: 19.9% (170 homes)
Annapolis: 18.2% (296 homes)
Rockville: 16% (344 homes)
Odenton: 14.3% (91 homes)
Arnold: 12.9% (50 homes)
Gaithersburg: 8% (87 homes)
Olney: 7.16% (19 homes)
Gambrills: 6.9% (12 homes)
Silver Spring: 3.3% (90 homes)
Fort Washington: 0.007% (4 homes)
Crofton: 0.003% (1 home)
So basically Odenton = Rockville and Severna Park = North Bethesda as someone mentioned earlier. I think that makes sense.