Only one Reston neighborhood makes the top 1,000 wealthiest in the US...and that's a good thing!

Yes, folks, we have a winner:  Brandermill-Hunters End. The neighborhood is located northwest of the intersection of Wiehle and Baron Cameron avenues out to Rt. 7. 

Brandermill-Hunters End ranks #665 among the top 1,000 wealthiest neighborhoods in the country and #15 among the 28 qualifying wealthiest neighborhoods in the Washington, DC's Virginia suburbs according to The 2010 Higley 1000. (The metro WDC area has a total of 68 wealthy neighborhoods on the list.)

Brandermill-Hunters End Neighborhood, Reston, VA

While it is unclear why one would put together such a compilation (despite its value to those who are marketing condos in Boca or Bentleys in Bethesda), the methodology for making these rankings is impeccably thorough:  

My data is derived from the American Community Survey 2006-2010. My methodology consisted of aggregating contiguous block groups with a mean income over $200,000. Block groups are subdivisions of Census tracts. The whole country is covered by these geographical tracts. A typical Census tract will have 5,000 residents and be made up of 5 block groups of 1,000 residents each. Theoretically, the boundaries should be drawn to group people of similar socio-economic status. The boundaries are meant to stay the same from Census to Census to be able to study the change in neighborhood characteristics over time. A small change in boundaries, particularly if apartments, condominiums are included, can cause a neighborhoods income to plummet.

. . . and we wouldn't want any of those pesky apartments, condos, or even townhomes to sully such a ranking.  Still, one needs only to look at the million dollar-plus condos being planned and built in Tysons and Reston Town Center to see that, yes, you can be wealthy and live in a condo.  

On a broader basis, Dr. Stephen Higley, Professor Emeritus of Urban Geography, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama, analyzes the ethnic and racial composition of these neighborhoods nationally and by neighborhood.  The results are about what you'd expect:  The wealthiest neighborhoods are far more Non-Hispanic White than the nation generally. This is reflected in the chart below which shows the percentage of minorities in different categories (although the title is misleading).

FWIW, the Brandermill-Hunters End neighborhood has a mean household income of $212,304 (which isn't really too "mean" at all!) and was 1.6% Black, 6.8% Asian, 3.5% Hispanic and 88.1% Non-Hispanic White in this 2010 review.  

Being an emeritus professor, Dr. Higley has chosen to move from Alabama to Arizona--and he doesn't mince words about his reasons. 

After a 17 year run, I recently retired and moved to Tucson, Arizona. I am now a happy homeowner in the Dorado Country Club in East Tucson. Free at Last!, Free at Last! I managed to get out of Alabama before I died, lol!

Montevallo was so atypical of Alabama: intellectual and liberal in it’s heart as a result of the University’s presence. I miss my good friends from Alabama but I am so happy to leave behind a state that at it’s heart is still a racist, heartless hotbed of anti-intellectual hypocrites. What a dump.

There you go.  BTW, the Dorado Country Club is NOT on Dr. Higley's list. Maybe he should have moved to Reston!  

All kidding aside, the fact that there is one--and only one--of the nation's wealthiest neighborhoods in Reston speaks, in part, to the great value this community places on one its original planning principles:  Providing housing for all incomes and all ages.  The diversity of Reston--wealth, race, ethnicity, religious, age, and more--is one of its greatest assets.  

The villains... are the developers and city officials who smilingly insist that "change is good."

This review of the movie, "My Brooklyn," filmed by Kelly Anderson, documents the disruption of the Brooklyn community in the name of progress.  The following paragraphs from this review written by Sarah Goodyear describe the results:

. . . as Anderson documents, the transition has been marked by pain, loss, and alienation for the small business owners who had kept the Fulton Mall thriving for all those years. In some of the film’s most powerful sequences, Anderson interviews the people being displaced by the rent increases and demolitions resulting from the "improvements," and their stories are wrenching. The barber who took such pride in giving Isaac Hayes a shape-up; the wig store owner who wonders how she will pay her children’s college tuition; the man who ran the diner for 26 years and watches helplessly as his business is taken out from under him. It’s hard not to feel that H&M and the Gap are a poor replacement for these locally owned enterprises. The character and cohesion they bring to the street will surely vanish with them.

Anderson doesn’t pretend to present a balanced picture here. The villains of her story are the developers and city officials who smilingly insist that "change is good," and the residents at a nearby farmer’s market who dismiss, with oblivious racism, the place where generations of black Brooklynites came of age and created a culture that the rest of America is still busily consuming. She creates an ugly portrait of a city where disregard for the needs of the less privileged is as stark as it ever was in the much-maligned days of Robert Moses.

This is not an organic sea change, argues one scholar interviewed for the film, but rather a deliberate strategy on the part of city government. "It’s actually about tearing down neighborhoods and building different neighborhoods," he says. And this: "This is not the only way a city gets governed. This is not the only way that development happens."

In the past 10 years, Brooklyn has become a kind of Rorschach test onto which urban observers can project their ideas about the future of cities. Is gentrification a scourge or a boon? Are white, yuppie newcomers a positive part of the borough’s revitalization or the harbingers of its fatal homogenization? My Brooklyn is a powerful, deeply researched telling of the borough's story from one woman’s point of view, a lament for the human price paid by many to ensure great profit for a few.

Movie Trailer:

 Will this happen in Reston and Tysons?

Affordable Housing Developer Problems, Washington CityPaper, March 15, 2012

Posted by Lydia DePillis on Mar. 15, 2012 at 12:48 pm

For my column this week on Arlington's efforts to court yuppies, I wanted to know: Why is it that all the new buildings going up these days seem aimed at a higher-income demographic, when there's clearly demand on the lower end of the spectrum?

The basic answer for that, developers tell me, is fairly simple: Land is expensive along transit corridors like Wilson Boulevard, so they build whatever will command the highest rents per square foot, and so far the market hasn't given them a reason to believe they won't lease.

Because for-profit developers aren't building for the majority of the population, non-profits have stepped into the breach. According to Nina Janopaul, director of the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, non-profits now own 14 percent of the county's rental housing stock. I asked her to explain why the market wasn't delivering the kind of housing that the folks she serves in Arlington really need. The answer is the same as it might be for a private developer: Regulations. . . .

For the rest of this article, click here.  

If we want balanced and diversified housing in Reston's TOD areas, we need to begin to work now to prevent this kind of problem.