Relocating to Washington DC and Surrounding Areas: Everything You Need to Know Before You Move and After You Get There!

Rating:
Summary: Too General
Review: Although this guide may help the first time mover, it is too overly general to be of any specific help to someone wanting to know about relocating in particular to the Washington D.C. area, such as utilities, taxes, car registration. Its index is insufficient to help pinpoint any necessary item of information. The neighborhood descriptions are brief at best. There are much better guides for your money.

Rating:
Summary: Credibility lost
Review: I am a recent college graduate who is moving to the DC area in a couple of months. As I am unfamiliar with the city, I purchased McFadden's book in hopes of getting better acquainted not only with the city itself, but also with the housing options that exist there. I found McFadden's approximations for apartment rent to be inconsistent with the information supplied to me by realtors and apartment managers. Further, four of the internet sites he lists as good resources do not even exist or have nothing to do with DC housing arrangements. His inconsistency and inaccurate information with regard to some facts makes it hard to trust any advice or suggestions he gives.

Rating:
Summary: Errors mar usefulness.
Review: I had found the San Francisco edition of the "Relocating to..." series extremely useful last year, so I thought this book would be similarly helpful for my move to Washington, DC and reacquainting me with the area after several years elsewhere. Unfortunately, the book is marred by factual errors and typos, misplaced (or absent maps)and questionable organization.

On the plus side, the book provides brief descriptions of various neighborhoods in the DC metro area and related statistics. There's also useful information about the pros and cons of renting or buying in some of the areas introduced earlier as well as information on various recreational and volunteer opportunities. In addition, the book contains useful sections on managing a move, dealing wih movers and other aspects of relocation, although much of this sort of information is freely available on various moving-related websites.

However, the book suffers from numerous mistakes. The author appears to have put effort into creating the book, so whether the mistakes are his or the result of the way the book was handled in the publishing process, I don't know. Off the top of my head, here are just a few examples of the kinds of errors I discoved:

-The book states crime in Georgetown runs 5x the national average, making it--based on comparison with other statistics in the book--more dangerous than Capitol Hill and most other areas described. This mistake made me question all the information provided about the neighborhoods' crime rates.

-The book states Washington, DC consists of only 26 square miles. (It's around 69 square miles.)

-The book says that most landlords require a security deposit of one month's rent in addition to first and last month's rent and then segues into a discussion of living with roommates. The apartment searching I've done over the past several weeks suggests that while some require a month's rent as security deposit, a significant number of landlords --including the large leasing companies--only require deposits of $250-$750, I've seen nothing about having to pay the last month's rent. Do a search on one the rental websites and you can confirm this yourself.

-For decades, the airport across the Potomac from Washington was called National Airport. A few years ago, it was renamed Reagan as Ronald Reagan National Airport, not Ronald Reagan International Airport as named in the book. It is not an international airport because the runways are too short for large jets.

-The book mentions the importance of Route 50 in its discussion of Arlington. However, there is no map of Arlington portraying Route 50 in a map of Arlington. In fact, the map in the Arlington sections highlights Alexandria, not Arlington, and there is no map in the Alexandria section.

-In the various listings of neighborhood stores and restaurants, the quadrant designations (such as NW, NE, SE and SW) are sometimes omitted. Given that identically named, but quite different, streets exist in DC, following standard practice and providing the full street name would lessen the potential confusion of newcomers to DC.

-Why, after discussing the neighborhoods in relation to their Metro access, is the discussion of the various Metro lines saved until far later in the book?

-Also, why not combine the section on the pros and cons of a neighborhood, etc. with the neighborhood descriptions presented earlier (as done in the San Francisco book? It would save a lot of flipping back and forth.

In addition, although this is the result of a hot real estate market and not the fault of the writer or publisher, the rental rates and housing prices described in the book are substantially lower than the actual current going rates. You may want to search the real estate ads on WashingtonPost.com and the rental websites to get a better sense of market conditions.

All in all, if you don't know anything about DC, this book might be worth skimming for some of its information about the neighborhoods. If the author and publisher were to issue a revised, corrected edition, it would boost the usefulness of the book and help justify the purchase price.

Rating:
Summary: Read everything below!
Review: The reviews below are right. This is not a useful book.