Josh Barro, Columnist

The Real Reason Washington Is Boring

September 26, 2012 at 5:31 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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The Atlantic has yet another one of those pieces trying to unravel the deep mystery of why Washington, D.C., isn’t “hip.” Rebecca Greenfield offers several explanations, many of them dubious.

For one thing, she says Washington is too expensive to be hip. That will come as news to residents of New York's Williamsburg neighborhood, where the average apartment rent has reached $3,364.