Renter's Guide: Check Out These Six Hot D.C. 'Hoods

PICKING A PLACE TO LIVE is hard! Sure, you could think about property value and crime statistics, but wouldn't you rather focus on revolving restaurants and other important things like that when you're thinking about what to look for in your new neighborhood?

1. COLLEGE PARK, MD.
Relive your misspent youth, and your WWII days, just off the Green Line.

You may have gone drinking at the college bars — like the cavernous Town Hall, the dive bar with pinball machines and a colorful, cheap-beer-enjoying clientele — of College Park. The neighborhood combines suburbia with cozy bungalow houses, bikes parked on the porches, all screaming of academia.

You can rent a one-bedroom place starting around $1,050, take the Green Line anywhere you want to go, take in a physics lecture at the University of Maryland, and then play pinball all day and night while swilling affordable suds. Yes, yes, yes — but you can also do something far more exciting in College Park: You can eat at 94th Aero Squadron, a World War II-theme restaurant that sits next to College Park Airport, the country's oldest continuously operated airport. There is weekly hand dancing at the 94th Squadron, too. That's D.C.'s answer to the jitterbug, in case you didn't know.
» 1 br: $1,050-$1,100
» 2 br: $1,300-$1,500

2. DEL RAY, VA.
Serenity off the Yellow and Blue lines

Del Ray is either the calmest or most stressful place on Earth, depending on what you make of the more than of six "relaxation" or "stress-relieving" shops on its small, quaint and entirely charming main street. Massage shops, day spas, a place advertising "authentic" pilates — if you need stress relief, this is your place.

But also, if you need custard, the Dairy Godmother is there to fill that need. Buy cheeses from Cheesetique, local meats (Let's Meat on the Avenue) or hats (try Tops of Old Town). Del Ray also has a number of gift shops, a gallery featuring monthly rotating exhibits of local artists, an upholsterer, a handful of tasty restaurants including the famous St. Elmo's Café and the less famous Al's Steak House ("no cell phones permitted"), a dog bakery and other amenities that make this charming neighborhood a way to live in a great small town right next to a Metro stop.

It also lets you buy comics and exotic plants from one of the greatest shops ever: the Exotic Planterium and Card & Comic Collectorama, a dusty, treasure-filled store whose owner, Dennis E. Webb, grows many of the plants from seed, and collects everything from Sweet Valley High dolls in their original packaging to old Spiderman comics. Webb has operated the shop right on the main drag for 34 years. So, go buy a plant from him. Plants are relaxing, too.
» 1 br: $1,050- $1,350
» 2 BR: $1,500-$2,200

3. ANACOSTIA
Be the newest bard of Anacostia, off the Green Line.

Anacostia is moving on up. But it's still cheap (for D.C.) now, with even luxury rentals at $1,300 or so. With them, you get to live in an interesting neighborhood that offers riverside activities, an excellent pizza joint, an excellent soul food restaurant, a local art gallery, a big chair (19 feet tall!), friendly neighbors, access to the Anacostia Community Museum — a branch of the Smithsonian — and a view of Frederick Douglass' house, perched on a hill above the rest of the neighborhood. (Douglass lived in Anacostia from 1877 until his death in 1895; the politician, activist, vice presidential candidate and writer was known as the Bard of Anacostia.)

But the area is quiet; there isn't any nightlife yet, there are few places to grab a meal, and the main streets — with their pretty, crumbling buildings — do smack of disarray.

There is talk — lots of talk — about developing Anacostia, building complexes with a soccer stadium, retail space, restaurants, bars, condos and recreation areas. There are proposals out there and lots of hope from community activists that these plans will come to fruition. It's a gamble: Get in for cheap now and enjoy Anacostia's present charms as well as its all-too-well-known detriments, or wait and spend a whole lot more in the future. You have a 19.5-foot-tall mahogany chair on the main street to enjoy in the meantime.
» 1 BR: $775-$1,300
» 2 br: $1,000-$1,500

4. CRYSTAL CITY, VA.
Evolve, revolve, off the Yellow and Blue lines.

You know Crystal City as the land of hotels, offices and the military. It has a network of underground tunnels connecting shops to restaurants to offices to apartment buildings, which means that, conceivably, a person who lives and works in Crystal City could actually spend his or her whole life in Crystal City without going outside.

Whether that is good or bad we leave for you to decide — but if you do go outside, you will find yourself in a place that feels like an office park gone berserk. Chain restaurants, big hotels, even a jazz-playing water park — it's all clean and corporate. Arena Stage is in Crystal City now, too, and there's a weekly outdoor James Bond movie screening, so there's culture. It's going to be more residential soon, too — since 10,000-plus federal workers are leaving Crystal City, there's the hope that the neighborhood will change from being dead after 6 p.m. to being the sort of place people would want to live.

Across Eads Street it's something of another world: small brick houses, apartment buildings, non-chain restaurants. 23rd Street between South Eads and South Fern streets has a strip of restaurants — Ethiopian, Thai, even Freddie's Beach Bar, featuring a weekly drag brunch.
Drag brunch in Crystal City: It's something to contemplate. Something to contemplate over a $5 beer and free snack mix at one place that seems to bridge these two worlds — the 35-year-old revolving bar/restaurant at the Doubletree Hotel, which has a panoramic view of the Pentagon, the Capitol, the Potomac and a two-story place that seems like it belongs somewhere else; the Crystal City Motel, delightfully incongruous there in the midst of corporateville.
» 1 br: $1,450 - $1,800
» 2 br: $2,080 -$2,350

5. SILVER SPRING, MD.
Arrrgh, it's the Red Line.

You already know if you like Silver Spring, with its mallish development featuring an Irish bar and clothes shops galore, its affordable-ish high-rises and its movie theater and the AFI — which manages on three screens to show more and better movies than theaters eight times bigger. Silver Spring has a walkable main street — OK, so it's Georgia Avenue, which is not exactly Main Street U.S.A., but it is walkable, and it does have a lot of different restaurants on it. And there are the neighborhood block parties — "Celebrating Community" — which suggest that Georgia Avenue can be Main Street after all.

Lollygag in the controversial fake-grass park while contemplating the confluence of low-rise and high-rise living. Then repair to the best basement dive bar in D.C., the Quarry House Tavern, for beer and local bands, girding yourself for the best reason of all to move to Silver Spring: Piratz Tavern, a pirate-theme bar and restaurant where you can not only drink strong grog, but where you can also be regaled with pirate shanties and tales of pirate woes.
» 1 br: $1,150-$1,450
» 2 br: $1,300-$1,800

6. COLUMBIA HEIGHTS
Pinups for big malls, off the Green and Yellow lines.

The houses are expensive now — don't try finding a bargain townhouse anywhere near 14th Street — but there are newly built luxury apartments with openings. And nearby you'll find lots of suburban-style amenities: a huge Giant supermarket (where you can buy tiny shrimp), Ruby Tuesday's, Target, Best Buy, Payless ShoeSource, even Staples, for pete's sake.

But just around the corner from all these things is a whole street of small Vietnamese restaurants with homemade signs and cheap pho. And pupuserias where two cheese pupusas cost $1.50. And a community garden, and lots of religion supply shops, and a dive with a Ms. Pac Man console. And across the street from the huge Giant is a vegan café called Sticky Fingers. It's small and gives free refills on coffee. It closes at 7 p.m. but makes up for the early closing with a fundraising calendar its owners put out: Pinups for Pitbulls, which seeks to raise awareness about how great pit bulls are (and they are) by putting out pics of punky girls in lingerie posing with their sweet dogs.
» 1 BR: $1,400-$1,950
» 2 br: $1,800-$3,000

Photo by Bill O'Leary/TWP, Milie Sommer for TWP, Lucian Perkins/TWP
Written by Arin Greenwood