With its “vibrant mix of residential, retail, commercial and green space,” Arlington County, Virginia is exactly where a lot of Millennials in the Washington DC area would like to live–at least according to one such Millennial named Harrison Godfrey. However, many can’t, as the median home price is $550,000, which is far more than two professionals who each earn $50,000 a year can afford.
Godfrey has apparently never taken an economics class. At just 26 square miles (compared with an average of 450 miles for the rest of Virginia’s 94 counties), Arlington County is in reality a small city. According to the 2010 census, it is 100 percent urbanized with a population density of 8,000 people per square mile.
By comparison, the urbanized portion of Montgomery County, Maryland is just 3,500 people per square mile. In other words, there really isn’t any more room to build in Arlington County, at least not without displacing a lot of people who live there now–which would probably mean some of the ethnic minorities that help make the county “vibrant.”
