DCentric

D.C. isn’t hip, and our expensive housing market may be to blame. That’s according to Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, who writes the District attracts politicos and high-end services. “But by the same token,” he writes, “if you’re a semi-employed artist or guitar player [D.C.] is much more expensive than Philadelphia or Baltimore and still smaller and less interesting than New York City, which has less than one-third our murder rate.”

Some District artists are finding themselves priced out of living and working in D.C. Go-go, D.C.’s homegrown music genre, is increasingly being relegated to the suburbs. Nonprofit and government-subsidized housing and grants present one solution to keeping artists within the District’s borders, but it may not be enough to keep it cost-effective for all D.C. artists to remain.

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• Source: Slate

If DC ever becomes as safe as NYC and our schoolkids score as well on tests as New York kids, then I suspect Washington’s housing costs will rocket past New York’s already very high ones. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the city was probably more culturally influential during its mid-eighties quality of life nadir than it is today as a richer-but-prohibitively expensive city.

Read more at: www.slate.com

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