Agreen sign with a horse-drawn carriage marks the turn in the road: Townes at Covington, it reads, a nod to the management company running properties in this quiet cul-de-sac 30 minutes outside Washington DC.
Of course, there aren’t any horse-drawn carriages here. There aren’t even really any pedestrians. I drive up to a cheerful cream-colored house with blue shutters. I park.
It’s high summer in the Washington metro area – the Fourth of July – and neither I nor the couple I’ve come to interview seem to mind meeting on the holiday. There is, after all, a reason they left the District and bought a big airy townhouse in Bowie, Maryland, last year. The last place any of us want to be in the 90F (32C) heat is barbequing on a concrete city roof.
Charla Freeland, 27, and Brian Freeland, 32, are graduates of Howard University in Washington, and both still work in the city for the radio station Sirius XM. But they came here to escape DC’s soaring real estate prices and the stresses of city life. As Brian puts it when we’re seated in the living room: “I like my space.”
Here there’s plenty of space: parking for their two cars, a deck overlooking a leafy park, a reservoir with birds nearby, and a room upstairs where, Charla says, “we keep our shoes”.
All that for less than the price of a one-bedroom condo in Washington. That’s not lost on Brian, whose view of the homeownership is, like other members of the millennial generation, still shaped by the 2008 housing crash and ensuing Great Recession.
At its sale price of $289,000, their three-storey townhouse cost around a quarter of what it would in their old stomping grounds of Shaw – a historically black neighborhood where median home prices have more than quintupled since 1995, making it one of DC’s fastest-appreciating real estate markets in recent years.
They haven’t made new friends yet and Charla misses her old ones in the city, whom she now drives half an hour just to meet for brunch. She doesn’t expect to be doing it long.
Most of her friends are still single and they give her no grief for leaving. “I was lucky,” she says of meeting Brian as an undergrad. “When they find someone, they’ll be out in the suburbs too.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
