How I fell out of love with Washington D.C.

Every city draws a certain kind of person—and I used to be that person

In “work mode” in Washington D.C.

In November 2020, my ex and I decided to rent a single-story brick cape in the middle of the suburbs just outside Washington D.C.

I’d been living in the DMV (short for the DC-MD-VA area, i.e., D.C. plus the surrounding suburbs) on and off for going on ten years. I’d lived in apartments and houses, owned and rented, with partners, roommates, and alone, parenting and not.

This house, I vowed, would be the last place I ever lived in the DMV.

We’d chosen the location in the middle of suburban Bethesda for its position almost exactly equidistant from my son’s Waldorf school to the south and her kids’ public high school to the north. The idea was to minimize driving through the soul-sucking Beltway traffic (the region has one of the worst commutes in the country) something we’d each already put up with for far too many years.

It was the first winter of the pandemic. After moving in, I began to walk the streets, first to get outside and get my vitamin D and to keep moving while the climbing gyms were still closed, and later to keep my sanity as school closures dragged on through the Spring.

But I also walked out of a kind of morbid anthropological curiosity about the place.

I think it was the McMansions. Their manicured lawns, built on the remains of torn-down brick capes like ours, the proliferation of cookie-cutter contemporary designs in wholly car-dependent neighborhoods. The foyers big enough to park a Humvee—if they hadn’t already been littered full of daily deliveries from Amazon.

When schools re-opened, I started driving my kid back and forth to his school in Potomac. The daily drive took us through one of the richest parts of one of the richest zip codes in America.

On one of the drives, he started asking about home prices. He asked how much the home we were renting might sell for (ours was one of the smallest in the neighborhood). Having looked at sales in the area, I had a pretty good idea: around $700,000.

Ours was one of the last remaining small, brick one-stories within miles. Modest by almost any U.S. suburban standard. Small footprint, no garage, a partially-finished basement, roughly finished attic, air conditioners in the windows. Three very small bedrooms, or four if you counted the damp, dark room in the basement.

Our landlord received offers to buy it constantly—sometimes developers even came to our door inquiring. Indeed, while we lived there the small cape like ours across the street was bought and demolished, an ode to contemporary large-scale conformity erected in its place.

Homes like that were selling for about $1.6 million, and others, such as the house next door, a Jeep Gladiator with Rubicon trim in the driveway, were going for well over $2 million. (Had the owner of the Rubicon “answered the call of adventure,” as ads for the gigantic jeep promised?—or was she merely carting the two kids back and forth to soccer tournaments?)

My son had no frame of reference for what any of these large sales prices meant, so we compared them to my New Hampshire house. I own a colonial three times the size of that Bethesda rental in a tiny village at the foot of the White Mountains. Perhaps because the village is so small, my house there is within walking distance to a country store, a cafe, a brewery, a swimming hole, and a world-class climbing area.

I’d bought it for $225,000, a number that gave my son pause.

Wait, so why would anyone want to buy a house in Bethesda? he asked as we pulled in front of the brick rental, the Rubicon parked next door.

The value calculation of living here in one of the richest counties in America did not add up in his head.

People move to D.C. for the jobs

It’s not that people think the houses are necessarily a good deal, I told him: it’s that they move to the DMV for work—just as I originally did.

Building your career in D.C. is relatively straightforward if you’re in politics, government, advocacy, or a lawyer. Throw a rock in any direction and you will hit a lawyer.

When I first moved there from my hometown in New Mexico, I got an immediate pay bump. And then another, and another.

My career took off. By the time I was 26, I was leading communications for a small but feisty environmental nonprofit. We were solving (or at least purporting to solve) Big Problems. The people I worked with were ambitious, educated, and attractive. I was handling crisis PR and being quoted in national media publications.

In short, I had begun to taste power and influence, the most characteristic of D.C. drugs. It felt good. My ego was being well satiated.

But the drugs wore off.

After working on a Senate campaign back in New Mexico, I had the opportunity to drink straight from the power and influence firehose itself: Capitol Hill. We’d won the campaign, and it was time to staff up for the actual governing. I could become a staffer for a U.S. Senator.

But even then, I’d seen enough of D.C. to judge that working on the Hill sounded like a petty, all-consuming mud fest. I’d even briefly dated a Hill staffer—her life sounded downright miserable. (“Anyway, all the decisions are made much higher up,” she’d told me one afternoon.)

I didn’t go to work in Congress but still, by 2010, I was leading communications for a renowned D.C. climate think tank. My office had a view over Dupont Circle. I could see the spires of the National Cathedral. I was again helping to solve Big Problems, this time on an international scale.

Yet I had never felt more empty. People sat in their desks from 8 am to 8 pm, and what most of them did all day I’m not sure I could say. Our rock star researcher had stolen 20,000 reporter email addresses from a database and was blasting out constant updates about her one regenerative agriculture project in Africa. She was deemed to be doing extraordinarily good work.

My falling out with D.C.’s job market began at that think tank (I recounted the full, disillusioning story some years ago).

You see, one moves to Washington D.C. hoping to change the world, make a difference, and maybe see some politicians in coffee shops. Then you do a lot of boozy Sunday brunches, and spend 80 percent of working hours in meetings. You watch the gigantic, unfathomable funnel of money being passed around from government to contractors to agencies to lobbyists to politicians and back and around again. You recognize that the important people are the ones who are mostly good at theatrics. You witness the endless ego-stroking. You invent a game at bars to see how long you can go in a conversation before work comes up, and then you realize almost no one wants to play that game. Your idealism gets chipped away. Disappointments compound. None of it is aimed at you—it’s just politics.

And then you become a parent.

Suburbs for the schools

In most parts of the DMV, it’s rare to find parents under 36 or 37 years old.

It’s a city full of whip-smart, educated, ambitious women who at around 38 suddenly wake up realizing they are ready to find the one. Soon after, the happy couple are faced with the prospect of where to live which might have a yard and a good public school where they can escape some of the noise and grind of the city.

So it was for me as well, except that I was eight years early. My son was born when I was 29, in 2010. Within a year, I had switched careers from politics and activism to the private sector. I transitioned from solving Big Problems to simply doing my part for capitalism.

No longer being in politics, or activism, or a lawyer, I was largely free of the D.C. job market. But I was also a father with a custody agreement, and that agreement said my son would go to school somewhere in the DMV.

When I started dating my ex the next year, her kids were attending public schools in Montgomery County, home to the Bethesda suburbs and many others. Like virtually every wealthy parent in the DMV suburbs, my ex had chosen where to live based on the school district.

It’s tempting to say the entire peculiar U.S. system is ridiculously exclusionary and to point to home prices as the reason. If one were trying to score political points, you might point out that there is a $1.1 million average price tag to buy a home to get into one of these very good public schools.

But Bethesda isn’t quite as exclusionary as it might seem—in fact, you can rent a modest townhome in the good school district for roughly the same price as you can rent one in the bad school district a few miles east. Those prices are roughly the same (or even less) than renting an apartment in D.C., a few miles south.

It is surprisingly easy to buy your way into the Montgomery County schools if you are willing to abandon home ownership and just pay rent, and many do. In fact, parts of Montgomery County are among the most diverse (both racially and socioeconomically), in the entire country.

The real problem, in my humble opinion, isn’t the wealth—it’s that the culture of wealth (see aforementioned Jeep Gladiator with the Rubicon trim) is a trap.

Escaping the DMV

The more I observed the kids in their respective schools, the more I realized that the schools had less to do with their upbringing than the larger environment, the culture that is the DMV—and there was no escaping that culture.

There was no amount of lectures I could ever give to my son to explain the wealth and privilege he was surrounded by on a daily basis.

No amount of lectures would make him understand why people purchased $1.6 million homes and sacrificed their financial freedom to $6,000/month mortgage payments for the next 30 years, or why they would continue to sacrifice their best years spending part of every day stuck in Beltway traffic.

Nor could I ever explain quite to his satisfaction why he doesn’t need a PlayStation 5.

There was nothing I could do about the fact that his friends all lived in gigantic homes, their parents driving Teslas, most of them getting $999 iPhones or iPads for their 12th birthdays (which could get replaced in a heartbeat if the kid broke it). I could never quite explain why I was so satisfied with my 2011 Honda Fit, or why I would never buy one of these homes, even with all the wealth in the world.

There was also no escaping the endless string of parentally supervised activity: the string lessons, the sports practices, the games on the weekends, the parents driving their kids from one suburb to the next in their Jeep Gladiators with Rubicon trim.

There was no escaping the conformity of it all, the feeling that this way is the right way. Even if we’d wanted to parent differently, it would’ve been next to impossible.

My ex would give endless lectures to her kids about values, all of which I agreed with. And then the kids would go back to their phones, to their friends, to their memes, to their bubbles of wealth and privilege.

We did try to take them out as much as we could: to see other countries and other ways of living. We took them to rural New Hampshire during the pandemic, where the neighbors were farmers and mechanics, carpenters and shopkeepers, and where no one had torn down any of the old homes. Being stuck there for months on end probably did more for expanding their perspective than all the lectures combined (and bringing my son to Barcelona this past year has been life-changing).

Ultimately, there was no escaping the ideology of the place.

I’m not talking about Democrat or Republican, although it’s a good bet nearly every neighbor will be just the right kind of woke liberal. I’m talking about the ideology that says that all of this conspicuous consumption and driving and traffic and spending 80 percent of one’s working life in meetings to pay off a mortgage of more than a million dollars is a good way to spend one’s time on this Earth.

Careerism as a way of life

After I left activism, my dreams turned to other pursuits: making movies, writing, planting a garden, building a house, climbing a cliff, surfing a wave. I longed to be outdoors more. I longed for friends and neighbors who weren’t quite so work-obsessed.

Perhaps it was Hunter S. Thompson who ultimately gave words to the changes in my heart that drew me away from D.C., in his famous “Ninth Path” letter:

But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

The DMV offers careerism as a way of life. Which was fine as a 20-something.

But as my 30s wore on, I began to see how antithetical the DMV was to the way of life I wanted to pursue.

It is true that much of my dissatisfaction with the DMV came down to a fundamental geographic distance from peaks, cliffs, wind, waves, and the rest of it. In that sense, the DMV can’t help itself. It was born that way.

But I changed. I now belonged in the outdoors, near mountains or ocean, or at the very least, away from so many offices, and so much careerism.

By the time I left, I’d come to understand that living in the DMV was a good way to become a slave to the hustle, the competition for status, the pressure to earn more and more, and the ambition for the next promotion. People get hooked on the power and influence (or as is more often the case, the perception of it), which is very seductive in its way.

Every international city draws a certain kind of person. In Barcelona, I think it’s people who like cities but are mainly interested in pursuing quality of life over everything else. They come for the balance of work, leisure, and rest. For the year-round weather, the access to the beach and the mountains. People who are drawn to those things are usually my kind of people.

D.C. draws those who are interested in their careers, in work, and in influence.

The type writes itself. And, there was a time when I felt right at home, solving Big Problems and living quite happily with all the other young, ambitious, intelligent, attractive denizens of D.C.

But that was a long time ago.