The folks at Bankrate have compared U.S. cities based on some pretty broad categories including cost of living, healthcare, culture, and walkability. The cities are then ranked based on their overall score in those categories, with the idea that the higher the score the better the location for retirement.
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Within Arlington, my own neighborhood of Riverwood is ranked #1, and has a population of just 173 out of a population of 209,000 for Arlington.
Within Riverwood, we live in a stone house on the highest hill, at the end of a cul-de-sac, off of another cul-de-sac, but just one stop light to Georgetown.
We have lived in this house for 19 years. It was probably a good buy.
6 comments:
Really? "Culture" Great? I guess it's like being in Rome back when- living near the epicenter of an evil empire does create a veneer of "culture"! Kinda funny though...
Arlington is the epicenter of liberal, with 40 percent minority, lots of education, a public service mentality, and one of the best theatre, music and arts scenes in the world. We have the Smithsinian, the Kennedy Center, and vast tracts of public hunting lands. Nope. It can't be beat. I once asked my father, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live. He blinked. He had been everywhere in the world. Literally. He said, looking at me as if I might be retarded, "I can live anywhere in the world I chose here." His "here" was DuPont circle, about four miles away. Arlington is better.
That's really cool! The Best of Back East for real- I used to kinda think of Ithaca NY but the winters were godawful. Strangely- I feel the same way about where I live in Oakland. It's got some real issues but my little life is fine- perfect weather, beautiful views everywhere but most of all The Wild is right in my back yard- I can walk 1.25 miles and be in the domain of the cougar and coyote- beautiful hidden forests and trails everywhere. Oakland is an incredibly SILLY place politically but it putters on- and ironically it's becoming "cooler" than SF!
The entire "culture" label is subjective in the extreme. Having been those places mentioned once [except all the land, of course], they were cool...but I'm in no hurry to go back. What they do attract is a lot of other people, and that may or may not be desirable to a given person. As far as the 40% minority, I don't believe that should matter at all, one way or another, as a point of pride. People are just people, and the cultural differences they bring being good or bad is again subjective. THAT would no doubt create a massive reaction and a boring lecture about how narrow-minded I am, but the fact is not every needs to use words like "vibrant" and "diverse" in every third sentence to describe how great their life choices are. Personally, I like few people, open spaces, and taciturn, respectful neighbors. Which undoubtedly makes me a boring xenophobe in the greater DC community. Like I'd be anything but amused by that analysis...
Yep. Different strokes for different folks. The matrix selected is only one set of values. I disagree with economists, but they will tell you what people will pay to keep what they have or to get what they want is a decent bottom line metric. Might be true for some. Also, what you want differs quite a bit from age to age. People under age 60 don't think about the distance to a hospital, and people without kids don't pay attention to schools, while most old white people are pretty comfortable in the demographic 1950s. The great thing about Arlington is we are close to everything, from vast tracts of hunting land to salt water fishing, from major stable employers to the levers of social change, from the roots of bluegrass to the opera, from mountains to ocean, and river to lake. The mid-Atlantic area was not an accidental choice for the colonists, and Washington became the Capitol for lreasons that ranged from good weather to good ports, steady water to good soil. The roots of this nation are deepest in the midAtlantic, and are deepest by far on the land I live and hunt. In a few hours you can reach half the population of the country, and in s few minutes you can be hunting on land where you can run you dog all day every day for three weeks and never meet a soul. Then you can drop be 15 minutes and have a Stsrbucks.
I lived in and around Charlottesville, VA many moons ago, with forays up into DC. If I had another lifetime or two, I'd spend some of that time up in your neck of the woods. Beautiful country.
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