Reston, VA has has best salaries relative to COL? LOL.
Fairfax County, VA, is literally the 2nd richest county in the US; the #1 richest county is right next door. Traffic is heavy, and housing costs keep goin up. Salaries are decent, esp. in the cleared government sector, though civilian gigs are pretty lucrative too.
Don't get me wrong, you'll probably have a decent lifestyle there -- I think about moving back occasionally -- but it's nothing like Omaha or Columbus.
Source: am from there, ran data centers in Reston, Herndon, and Ashburn.
It's a DC suburb. The usual DC set plus the Dulles tech corridor set. Also, northern VA suburbs are really aggressive about keeping out lower-income people (poor social services, poor transportation), which keeps the average high. The suburbs here don't have really rich people the way you see around other major cities, just very homogenous upper middle class ones.
Of the Top 10 Richest Counties in the US, five (5) of them are DC suburbs (far flung burbs in the case of Stafford Co, VA. Median household income in Fairfax and Loudoun is north of $110k. Source: from Fairfax, work in Loudoun.
I wholeheartedly disagree with that. Alexandria, maybe. But Fairfax County is pretty large: it encompasses Annandale, Springfield, and Centreville. Springfield has a heavy latino population, and Centreville and Annandale have like a 25% Asian population. Annandale even has a section called "Little Korea" for pete's sake.
To be fair, though, Alexandria is not fair from Arlington, and about the only people who can afford to live in either of them these days are trust fund babies.
Not surprised about Virginia, which is where I live. 3 of the top 5 richest counties in the US are in Virginia. If you count Maryland, then 4 of the top 5 are in the DC metro area.
I don't know what you're reading, but Thomas Jefferson High School is not in Fairfax. It's here in Alexandria. Fairfax would be half an hour drive for me and I live on the extreme, western edge of Alexandria. There's a whole, other city in between (Annandale). It'd be like saying something was in Brooklyn when it's actually in Queens.
Virginia is a weird state. Fairfax and Alexandria are classified as "independent cities", which exist in parallel to and outside of counties. There are only 41 independent cities in the US: Baltimore, MD; St. Louis, MO; Carson City, NV, and then 38 more in Virginia.
The signficance is that independent cities can't levy income tax, but have to pay for their own schools and roads. We make revenue through property taxes (not just land/houses, but also cars! That's a whole other story) and business licenses. The state then calculates how much it will contribute to our school funding based on our supposed "ability to pay".
Between property values and transit issues here, there are a likely more "property owners" in Fairfax than here in Alexandria. Alexandria is much more of a bedroom community for DC, whereas people in Fairfax spread more across NoVA for work. The state sees the higher property values in Alexandria, and our higher population, and thinks "oh, they are loaded, they don't need so much". But we're not. We're a town of renters. All the property is owned by DC and NYC property developers, which got sweetheart tax break incentives to build here.
You can readily see it when visiting. Fairfax's roads are nicer. Their public buildings are newer and larger. They have several, gorgeous, gigantic public parks with stuff like kiddie train rides around the perimeter. Fairfax is apparently rolling in cash. And Alexandria can't even fix a foot bridge across a 20-foot wide creek bed.
So we just don't have the money to fund our schools anymore. Hell, my own kid's school is one of the better ones in town and they can't even afford to have enough bus drivers and substitute teachers for the year. It's garden variety bad administration over the last 15 years, not anti-Asian sentiment.
I grew up in the county. The reason it's so well off is the proximity to dc and large tech/defense corridor. The county attracts the rich because you can buy a McMansion with land, and still get to work. It's built up heavily in the last thirty years (I passed cow pastures and corn fields on the way to school), but they're mostly gone now.
The fact that counties around Northern Virginia are the wealthiest counties in the whole country (and 3rd wealthiest one is in Maryland, also close to DC) supports that statement:
Northern Virginia is pretty much all a disaster. There is zero urban planning. The streets are built randomly, not in a quaint way, which makes getting around impossible. The commercial areas are built as far as possible from residential ones, which makes running to the store for milk or going out to lunch a huge time sink. The traffic is horrible as a result, even though the area isn't really that densely populated.
Compare: Westchester County to Fairfax County, roughly similarly sized suburbs. Westchester has all these cute little downtowns with grid streets (ish) built around Metro North stations. Traffic is kept under control because a large fraction of people commute to the city by rail. Fairfax County sucks in comparison. No transit to speak of, awful traffic, etc. Its the result of urban planning that basically consists of (mark of a subdivision and let the developers do whatever they want).
Arlington is tolerable, but only because development sprung up around Metro lines. Ditto Alexandria, which at least has a centrally planned downtown core.
My husband grew up in Pulaski, Virginia which out in the depths of nowhere to most people in Virginia, but got Comcast internet (poorly), Verizon (barely), and 251 acres of land for less than $200,000 dollars.
His family moved out there to satisfy his father's dream of being a gentleman farmer. He moved away after university because neither he nor his father are actually very good farmers.
I get a bit wistful about it, since it is beautiful countryside and I'd like to live there but the lack of amenities keep me away. Virginia as a whole has lots of empty land, so simply sitting 1.5 hours (during rush hour) outside of DC is enough plop one down in farmland.
Amen... but with Washington DC. Northern VA has literally the richest counties per capita in the US. Then I look at Eastern WA or Idaho and lose my shit. Montana, too, though the culture is terrible.
If only I could get a job there that didn't pay poor salaries...
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