I agree with most of everything you described about power in DC. I do think you're showing a bit of staleness in experience when it comes to life in downtown DC.
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life.
In the past 10 years, there has been an absolute transformation in housing and retail from Gallery Place/Chinatown, to 14th St and all the way up to Columbia Heights. I challenge one to stand on the corner of 7th & H St and say that the city dies after working hours and on weekends.
It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
Unless you work for GSA, I wouldn't make assumptions like this. It is impossible for the federal government to open up a new 500,000 sq ft facility in downtown DC because there simply isn't any available space at a reasonable cost. Sprawling complexes are cheap and easy to build in the exurbs and the employees don't have any choice but to follow their agency to its new location. It has nothing to do with finding talent, especially in the hills of Virginia where fewer people choose to live.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland.
Suburban Maryland (esp. North of DC). Southern Maryland is Waldorf, St Charles and La Plata, which I would argue are not places where Senators reside. Though, I think you will find that more of the recent politicians are residing in DC. For example, Obama, while a Senator, resided in an apartment building in downtown DC.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
Again, you might benefit from taking a walk anywhere in DC. H St NE, areas around Union Station and even New York Ave & Florida are nice.
I largely agree with you except on a couple points.
DC is changing, but very slowly. The last couple mayoral administrations have done a pretty good job of gentrifying (I don't think that's necessarily a bad term) parts of the city and encouraging new residential construction.
There still isn't much of a nightlife in the city though. Sure there's been little pockets of it at least as far back as the early 90s when I was old enough to look for that kind of thing. But I think the loss of Chinatown in favor of the Verizon Center and a few trendy bars is one of the great tragedies of the city.
But still, most new transplants I run into looking for a hip place to move to end up in Arlingon or Silver Spring and to some extent parts of Alexandria. Many of my gay friends do find homes and community in D.C. around DuPont and a couple other spots, but even with a scene in the city, about half of the folks I know live in Arlington/Alexandria.
In general, a constant theme I could apply to people I know (anecdotal I know), they try to make it work in the city, then quickly move out as soon as their lease is up. There just isn't the kind of benefit of city life that you get in more regular cities.
It doesn't help that, while having lots of little parks, they're virtually unusable due to deep rooted homeless problems in the city that haven't materially improved since as long back as I can remember (the 80s). Getting panhandled virtually every block in some areas gets old very fast.
which means on top of the already inflated price, they'll have to put in endless expensive refurbishments to have a livable home.
It's kind of a shame since the public transport network in D.C. is one of the few functionally useful ones in the U.S. I think the metro is the 2nd most used subway in the U.S.?
The good news, like I said, is that it is slowly changing. The population is increasing for the first time since the 1950s (the city back then was over 3/4 of a million people, it hit 600k in 2010 an apocalyptic population drop. Estimates say almost 50k people have moved in in the last 4 years).
D.C., the city, also dies after working hours and on weekends. There's minimal night life.
In the past 10 years, there has been an absolute transformation in housing and retail from Gallery Place/Chinatown, to 14th St and all the way up to Columbia Heights. I challenge one to stand on the corner of 7th & H St and say that the city dies after working hours and on weekends.
It's so bad that many of the Agencies are moving or opening very large satellite offices 20 miles or more from D.C. just so they can find qualified workers.
Unless you work for GSA, I wouldn't make assumptions like this. It is impossible for the federal government to open up a new 500,000 sq ft facility in downtown DC because there simply isn't any available space at a reasonable cost. Sprawling complexes are cheap and easy to build in the exurbs and the employees don't have any choice but to follow their agency to its new location. It has nothing to do with finding talent, especially in the hills of Virginia where fewer people choose to live.
The really powerful people, people sitting on all three legs of the tripod, don't live in D.C. at all. They'll live in Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland.
Suburban Maryland (esp. North of DC). Southern Maryland is Waldorf, St Charles and La Plata, which I would argue are not places where Senators reside. Though, I think you will find that more of the recent politicians are residing in DC. For example, Obama, while a Senator, resided in an apartment building in downtown DC.
It doesn't help that the residential parts of D.C. are rather grim and not very pretty. Even the old historic row houses are rather gritty looking piles of old bricks with broken sidewalks outside and overgrown weeds and grass everywhere.
Again, you might benefit from taking a walk anywhere in DC. H St NE, areas around Union Station and even New York Ave & Florida are nice.