Perspective
It's Not Cool to Argue About Whether D.C. Is Cool
Can increasingly unaffordable urban places have too many trendy restaurants and hipsters? Maybe that’s not the right question.
The tropes frequently leveled at D.C.—square, swamp, “Northern charm and Southern efficiency”—are well known. But until recently, you rarely found the descriptor “cool” among them (despite the efforts of the city’s visitor’s bureau).
That started to change in the Obama era, when the local economy boomed, Millennials arrived, and D.C. turned up atop “cool cities” lists. And last week, George Washington University law professor David Fontana confirmed, in a much-discussed story for the Washington Post, that the city had formally joined the company of the nation’s other redoubts of hip.