My Recent Notes on DC

Maybe it's the pretentious part of me, or perhaps the older-brother in me, that it means something to me that I do something before it becomes popular. Like with music - whether its listening to Maroon 5 or Matt & Kim - I heard them before you, and for some reason that matters to me. My brother DW - those were my band shirts that were handed down to him, and that was my car that was passed down to him - so there!

Maroon 5... yeah!

So you can just imagine that as the District becomes more and more trendy, I get more and more self-righteous about it. Maybe it's the Obama-factor, or maybe it's all in my head, but it does seem to me that DC is the place to be these days. I moved to DC in August of 2008 for my job, then Obama moved to DC in January of 2009 for his job, and now apparently everyone else is doing the same as well.

Evidence below.

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One of the biggest reasons DC is the place to be is because of jobs:

a) Reputable author and business professor Richard Florida named the District of Columbia the country’s best big city for recent college graduates - based on the job market and cost of living.

b) Another new survey of recent grads by job search company CareerCast.com found D.C. second only to New York City among their most desirable locations, beating out bigger cities like Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

c) Nationally, unemployment for those in their late 20's reached 11% this year - the highest it's been since 1983. For those my age, in their early 20's, unemployment was at about 14%. But DC bests the trends. Overall, nationwide unemployment is about 9 percent; in the D.C. area, it's about 6 percent.

d) The CEO of a major job-placement company said people should go to Washington to look for work. "With all of the work that needs to be done to turn around this economy, and the large number of people in line to retire in D.C. in the next five years, it's not a bad place to look," the CEO said. All this is from the Washington Examiner.

e) Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine recently named DC the third-best city in the country for employment - the DC-metro area boosted by a spendthrift federal government and a consistent 16-million tourists annually.

f) The Washingtonian recently compiled a list of the Top Reasons to Love DC. Number 7 was - you guessed it - JOBS!

People work here!

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Apparently TV people need jobs too, and DC is becoming the place to go for Reality TV:

a) At first it was just Newsweek doing a reality TV spoof called "The District"

b) And then we heard that MTV's Real World would be in DC.

c) And then we heard that BRAVO's Real Housewives series might be coming to DC.