Pity poor Washington.
No good restaurants. Worse summers. The few event spaces are always under construction. And there’s a massive gopher problem at the local golf course.
Now I hear we can’t even maintain our main community pool.
At least a couple weeks a year there’s some nice cherry trees, but even their ailing patriarch Stumpy was deported from the Tidal Basin a couple years ago (Biden’s America, amirite?)
Which must explain why people filed out of the city in 2020 and 2021, losing over five percent of the population. Although population grew in 2022 (and 2023 and 2024 and 2025).
Believe me, everyone here is hyperaware—a failure for which residents can only apologize.
Like on a recent “Washington podcast,” which if you’re not familiar, is a media curio wherein journalists - current or former Washington residents - talk about politics, journalism, and what a wasteland Washington is. (ed. Did you know it’s a swamp? Because it’s a swamp).
Look, I get it. Condemned to decades in Washington, I can’t tell you how awful it is. Like, build a high-rise every once in a while at least! Boring, homogenous, self-important, and the weather thing again.
So a tip for others suffering through Washington, or otherwise fated to move here. Here’s how I muscle through: spend as much time as you can in the nearby town of DC.
I recommend it. It’s pretty great.
If you’re not familiar, the basics on DC: it’ what’s called a “majority-minority” city and four years younger than the rest of the country. With a street layout I could explain but it’d be embarrassing for both of us.
Washington has major sports teams, but DC has a powerful arts scene. Not like in the way Washingtonians think, but consisting of beautiful, historic, DIY, and everything in-between venues and co-ops and collectives (well, one fewer these days).
Musically there’s a crazy thing where Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, the proprietary funk of go-go, the hardcore eruption of Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fugazi, to Wale and Ari Lennox and Oddisee…somehow they all continually radiate sub-audibly throughout the scene into creative interference. Like an inter-generational sympathetic vibration.
Oh, and the food! Unlike Washington, yes, where the restaurants are mostly theatrical industry plants with “prime steak & stone crab” in the name, DC is pound-for-pound the best food city in the country. The best Palestinian restaurant in the country - straight up among the best of all restaurants in the country - is here. So is the most creative Peruvian spot. The largest Ethiopian population in the world save Addis Ababa is here which you can imagine pretty tightly regulates the quality of injera.
Washingtonians knowingly refer to Washington as “this town” and fête high-status authors who write knowing books about Washington with titles like This Town. You’ll clock this particular literary genre — “an insider’s take on Washington” — from the backgrounds of cable news talking heads, occupying an entire two shelves of unread meet-the-author giveaways.
Want an insider look at DC? Try The Sweet Forever (George Pelecanos), about a 1986 localized outbreak of institutional corruption and NBA first-round pick Len Bias. A whole postwar survey of loss, class invisibility, and school transfers resides in Lost in the City (Edward P. Jones).
If you still insist on peeking into the lives of the neighboring political class, try historical page-turners like Advise and Consent (Allen Drury, 1959) or Democracy: An American Novel (Henry Adams, 1880)
Should you get turned around, you’ll know you’re in Washington by the conditioned small talk… “such a transient city; nobody’s from here” and “no lived history, just 70s era government buildings.” Totally fair. Lucky us in DC, my particular neighborhood dates back to 1880 (when it got a trolley line). Our immediate neighbors consist of multigenerational family residencies.
Newly arrived in Washington you may become overwhelmed by the diversity of lived-experience. Graduates of private and selective state colleges? Unashamed self-expressive fashion: Patagonia, J. Crew, Vineyard Vines, Tory Burch, too many to clock. And from every geography of the city’s industrial firmament: Congress, think tanks, foundations. I think I once met a law clerk and even a political operative in training!
Speaking of which, the city has a roughly quadrennial ritual involving frenzied overdetermination and really weak parties (excuse me, “balls”). More often than not though on those days in DC there’s little knowing shakes of the head followed by a lot of going about our lives: driving buses, teaching kids, working in kitchens, and for some of us playing music.
If in spite of all of the shortcomings, should you still consider moving to Washington know that it is expensive. Unfortunately, DC isn’t any better.
The author is a writer and musician who lives in the Eckington neighborhood of DC.