Take into consideration, dear worst-reader, before you read the link below, that I am from Washington DC. I went to dumb-down school just south of the nations capital and my US address (when I’m in the US) is just east of it. I also lived in Virginia for a short stint of this/my useless-eating life. Boy, do I have a lot of memories of DC and its surroundings that date back to the 1970s. Of course, besides the contradictory feelings I have for it, recent years have proven to me that there is something to be said for outgrowing one’s home. Yet it still leaves me with regrets. For example, I was never able to actually live in DC. Although, even today, as an American Expat, so far away, I still dream about having a small apartment in Georgetown (where I worked), or living in a bigger place on Mass Avenue (where I had many extended stays with an old, dear friend.) Then there were the various bars and nightlife that twirled my world when I was young (I worked my first restaurant job in DC when I was 19). Of course, with every visit home from Eurowasteland, I always enjoyed a night out in DC. And let’s not forget the theatre scene on 14th street that I tried so desperately to be part of in the early 90s–but was profoundly rejected. Oh well. With all that nonsense in mind, DC is a pretty cool place. Yet the last few years that I’ve visited, one thing has stood out: the lie that is American’t development, particularly real-estate development. Two years ago on a visit I stood in awe in some areas of DC watching the construction of (what looked like) thousand unit condos. They were being built in huge lots in the middle of town or on the shores of waterways that surround the city’s south where old and dilapidated military facilities were dormant for years. Last year most of the construction was completed–and my jaw didn’t drop when I looked up real-estate prices. But I suppose for most not familiar with DC, the term ‘wow’ is an understatement when it comes to measuring the cost of life there. Luckily one of my friends got into the DC real-estate market twenty years ago. He’s now given up on DC and moved to some exotic asian place where he lives cheaply off rental income from his DC property. And when he says to me on one of our regular Skype connections that he doesn’t miss DC in the least, I’m not surprised. DC has changed, indeed. It has not changed for the better. That is of course an understatement but it also of no surprise. I don’t have a hard time believing my old friend. He needed a break from the town he grew up in. It had changed beyond him. It had become a kind of nemesis home. Indeed, dear worst-reader, it’s hard to face the reality of what’s become of what used to be an interesting town whose residents were always struggling to be part of an American metropolitan place and not just a homestead for military adherents and automaton bureaucrats. But none of that is worth giving much worst-thought. The thing to keep in mind when reading that a place like Washington DC leads the worlds greatest fail-upward nation in real-estate costs, is that no matter how expensive it becomes, no matter how much value the owners of capital get out of it, it will still be just a town built on a swamp in the middle of a nation divided by ignorance and reactionary (political) forces. DC will never be San Francisco or New York or any other ‘real’ metropolitan place. It will never give the world culture or creativity. It will always remain the shit-hole of world politics that has ruined life for generations to come. It will also be the centre of the cesspool that is both Maryland and Virginia, places that provide it all the inept minions that keep the cogs of the DC machine going. But I’m not bitter about it. Really. Rant on.
Washington D.C. is Now the Most Expensive Place to Live in the USA | Liberty Blitzkrieg.
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