HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
STATE SPOTLIGHT
AMID GENTRIFICATION, A ‘NEW D.C.’ EMERGES
BY OCTAVIO NUIRY, MANAGING EDITOR
Today, Washington, D.C. ranks among the nation’s most thriving and vibrant cities.
highest-income counties in the United States are located in suburban D.C., and six of the 10 wealthiest counties are in the D.C. metro area, according to the U.S. Census Bureau . Indeed, life is splendid in the Washington region. Falls Church, Virginia, led the nation with a median household income at $121,250 a year. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the median income is $118,934. And in Northwest Washington, where much of the city’s elites live, the median household income is $109,909. By comparison, the national median household income was $56,516 in 2015 — half of what the median District worker earns annually, the Census reports .
Not only are household incomes high in the nation’s capital, but the D.C. metro housing market is thriving too, fueled by high prices, expanding transit options, new developments and an influx of upwardly mobile millennials, both inside and outside the Beltway, experts claim. While home prices in the District of Columbia haven’t hit Manhattan and San Francisco levels, it is among the nation’s most expensive, outpacing cities in California like Los Angeles and San Diego. Silvana Dias, a broker at Long & Foster in Spring Valley, in Northwest Washington, D.C., said D.C.’s prosperity and growth
While the rest of the nation got hammered by the Great Recession of 2008 and struggled to recover eight years later, a remarkable inversion occurred in Washington, D.C.: as the rest of the country’s real estate markets receded, the District of Columbia blossomed. Flush with trillions of taxpayer dollars, largely the result of two foreign wars and a massive government stimulus, the D.C. economy flourished. By some measure, the nation’s capital has become the richest region in the country. Three of the
ATTOM Data Solutions • P13
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