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Get to know Southwest Waterfront

The Southwest Waterfront is a neighborhood that looks and feels completely new but is actually one of the city’s oldest. Like many other revitalized urban waterfronts across the country, Southwest Waterfront benefited from a concerted partnership between local government and developers to transform an isolated area into a gleaming and alluring destination. The Wharf, a multi-billion-dollar mixed-used development that opened in 2022, now dominates the Southwest Waterfront, boasting restaurants, shops, residences, hotels, and businesses all along a mile-long stretch of the Potomac River, along with the revitalized Maine Avenue Fish Market, the country’s oldest open-air seafood market. Condos are the main housing option here, ranging in vintage from mid-century to brand-new. Southwest Waterfront is also home to a couple of unusual communities: two architecturally notable mid-century-modern townhouse developments and a collection of houseboat owners known as the Gangplank Slipholders Association, the largest liveaboard community on the East Coast.

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Living in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., is a beautiful city with gorgeous architecture and a vibrant cultural life that also just happens to be the nation’s capital. Of course, Washington, D.C., is a company town — the company being the American government — but only a quarter of Washington, D.C., residents are federal employees, with the biggest employers being the major hospitals and universities. Washington, D.C., is an exemplar of urban planning, thanks to the vision of military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant. L’Enfant’s plan symbolically put the people in charge by placing Congress, and not the White House, at the pinnacle of the city, with D.C.’s wide boulevards radiating out from the “People’s House” on Capitol Hill. L’Enfant also laid out the National Mall, which stretches for more than two miles from Capitol Hill to the Potomac River, creating a public space for marches, monuments, and museums.