DC Is Expensive and We're All Just Pretending
I'm going to be honest. I don't know how anyone is making it in DC right now.
Rent for a one bedroom is pushing $2,300–$2,500. A two bedroom runs around $3,000–$3,200. They say you need nearly $100,000 a year just to live here comfortably. Not balling. Comfortably. Using the basic 50/30/20 rule needs, wants and savings a single adult in DC needs $99,424 before anything goes sideways. And that's before you factor in a car. Insurance, gas, parking permit, the random ticket you forgot to pay, the tow you didn't see coming because you missed a street cleaning sign at 6 AM.
Nobody budgets for that. Nobody budgets for DC accurately at all.
Here's the gap that should bother you: the DC median household income is $85,200. You need nearly $100K just to live comfortably. That $15,000 difference is the reason people feel squeezed even when they're making "good money." And in neighborhoods like Ward 8, east of the Anacostia River, the median household income is $31,139. That's not a budgeting problem. That's a structural one.
Then you try to date here.
DC is the second most expensive city in the country for a date night. A dinner and a movie runs $153, according to MoneyGeek's 2024 analysis. Beat only by Miami. Do that twice a week and you're looking at $800 a month on people you might never talk to again. No refund on a bad night at a bar charging $18 a cocktail.
And the dates themselves? Every conversation feels like a LinkedIn exchange. "What do you do?" three times before the appetizer comes. Everyone is ambitious and impressive and also kind of exhausting. WalletHub ranked DC 63rd out of 182 cities for singles in 2025 and honestly nobody was surprised.
And the deck isn't stacked equally for everyone walking into it. Black women consistently receive fewer matches and messages than women of any other group not because of anything about them, but because the algorithms reflect and amplify the biases already in the culture. A Black woman on Hinge went viral in 2024 after changing only her listed race to white and watching her matches increase significantly same photos, same profile, different outcome. Short men deal with a version of the same math. A Bumble product manager noted that most women set their height filter at 6 feet a cutoff that would eliminate 85 percent of male users. The $153 date night costs the same for everyone. The algorithm charges some people more just to get to the table.
You show up making what looks like good money and somehow you're still stressed about your account by the 20th. Salary looks solid until rent takes half, loans take a quarter, and the rest gets split between surviving and pretending you belong here.
Then you go home and don't talk to anyone.
This is the part that gets me. When you're stretched thin financially and drained socially, community is the first thing you drop. You stop introducing yourself. You skip the building meeting. You don't join the group chat. You go to work, come home, close the door, and do it again tomorrow.
The person who parks next to you every single morning? Never spoken to them. Don't know their name. If their window got smashed tonight you wouldn't know how to reach them. And they couldn't reach you either.
It's not just cars. It's the package stolen from your lobby and nobody said anything. The leak from upstairs everyone ignores. The dog that keeps getting out and nobody knows whose it is. Stuff that would take two minutes to solve if people just talked. But we don't anymore.
That's the most expensive part of living here.
DC charges you for everything. But the most expensive thing might be the isolation. Not having someone who texts you when there's a tow truck on the block. Not having a neighbor who grabs your package before someone else does. Not having people around you who just look out.
There's a bunch of tools trying to fix pieces of this. Nextdoor for neighborhood posts. ATME for messaging cars through license plates when you see something. Meetup for finding people who like the same stuff. None of it is perfect. But the fact that we need apps to do what used to happen naturally says a lot about where we are.
You can budget your way out of the money problem. Cheaper apartment. Metro instead of driving. Cook more. But you can't budget your way out of not knowing anyone. That's the cost nobody warns you about when you move here.
Maybe the smartest financial decision you can make in DC isn't a better savings plan. It's just knowing the people around you.
Joe Ogundeyi is the Founder and CEO of ATME. Follow the ATME Blog for more on driving, community, and life in DC.
