Originally Posted by
paytonc
Even the walkable Metro corridors in Arlington aren't known for their charming historic architecture. The county was largely rural until the New Deal; there are "maybe a dozen" pre-1930 houses in the entire county, per their historic preservation staffer. Still, you'll pay as much per square foot for real estate there as you will in all but the choicest bits of the District.
Here's a study that compared the relative tax burdens of the three states for different theoretical households. DC comes out ahead, although the commenters correctly point out that it assumes that people drive rather nice cars (which even "
ghetto"-dwellers do around here).
If you want to take issue with the aesthetics of Arlington and other inner DC suburbs, that's fine. But do it on the merits of individual buildings and architecture, not their age. To equate "dull" with lack of historic buildings just smacks of a kind of rigid (and largely anti-urban) conservatism. There are plenty of poorly designed, low density, and ugly "historic" structures, plus they are often made with less robust materials, are full of substances now considered toxic, and are far less environmentally friendly.
Those studies are what I referred to earlier. They were made by a DC interest group to promote DC living, so take them with the proper grain of salt - they make subtle changes, including the car ownership assumptions, to tweak the findings in favor of DC.