<p>DC is a fantastic just out of college town. My daughter and her friends love it. It’s big enough to have a lot of stuff going on for young people, but small enough to get around easily. Expensive, but not like NYC where Manhattan is prohibitively expensive.</p>
<p>The ideal situation for a new graduate is to put the feelers out for alums from his/her college and try to get hooked up into a “group house”. DC is all townhouses. Three or four kids rent a townhouse.</p>
<p>The post-college kids follow the frontiers of gentrification, so the group house neighborhoods move over time. For a good long while, it was Adams Morgan which is centered at 18th Street and Columbia Road. This area is full of “hipster” bars, happy hours, etc.</p>
<p>The U-Street corridor runs east-west from there over to Howard University. This was the commercial corridor for black Washington and, historically, is much like 125th St. in Harlem. The 1968 riots were centered at U Street and 14th and wiped out much of this area. This was a devastatingly bad area in the 70s and 80s, but has now seen intense gentrification and is quite happening.</p>
<p>14th Street runs north-south up to Columbia Heights – a once ritzy neighborhood, transformed to African American in the 1950s, destroyed in the riots, became heavily Latino in the 90s, and is now one of the hottest urban renewal areas in the country. Extremely multicultural with white gentrification, heavy Latino, and the traditional middle-class African American populations.</p>
<p>At 14th and Park is a massive new urban shopping center, anchored by a Target and served by the Columbia Heights subway station at 14th and Irving. The subway stop south on U Street and the one north at Georgia and New Hampshire have opened up all these neighborhoods for semi affordable group houses – figure $600 to $900 a person for a townhouse with 3 or 4 kids. New restaurants and bars open weekly. One of the popular spots is Wonderland at 11th and Kenyon – now a mecca of post-college hipsters in a building that was once Washington’s most popular African American gay nightclub.</p>
<p>These neighborhoods vary wildly from block to block. There are some blocks on 14th south of Harvard with public housing developments that are seriously bad news (although most of the violent crime appears to be drug dealer territorial battles). A few blocks north is really nice with renovated $500,000 luxury townhouses.</p>
<p>If you can get in with an existing group that knows the territory, great. Craigslist is also a popular option for matching up roommates with houses. My daughter and her friends have lived in two different Columbia Heights houses. They have not had crime issues, although they are smart about it. They don’t wander around late at night solo. They routinely walk home from Adams Morgan after a happy hour and dinner, no problem. These are bustling city streets with a lot people out and about. But, different people have different perpectives and different experience levels in city neighborhoods. They moved three blocks after the first year and upgraded their situation (safety and convenience) exponentially.</p>
<p>You really don’t want a car living in the district. Parking is expensive. Public transportation (both subway and bus) is good. You can rent a Zip car once a month as needed for much less than the price of a parking space, let alone insurance and upkeep.</p>