4. Washington, D.C.
Designed as America’s Rome and now, after 200 years, beginning to act the part • It’s becoming less a bureaucrats’ town and more of a blossoming cultural center • The region is beginning to challenge Boston as the East Coast’s leading technology center • Brutal traffic in outer Virginia and Maryland suburbs is driving some folks back to close-in neighborhoods • Excellent subway • Crime is dropping • Substantial African American middle class • Museum heaven. • Many beautiful streetscapes—some leafy and genteel, others urban and hip • The Shaw, Mount Pleasant, and Howard University areas are at the forefront of a growing neighborhood renaissance • Capitol Hill and Logan Circle, once considered edgy, are now well established as comeback neighborhoods • Recalls a Southern graciousness, but balanced by a Yankee work ethic • Bouncing back from the Marion Barry era, although still hampered by a democracy deficit: ruled by Congress, pays taxes but has no voting representation on Capitol Hill.

5. Pittsburgh

The affordable San Francisco: great neighborhoods lining valleys and perched atop hills—and unlike San Francisco, it’s not losing all its working-class character • Steel, once its lifeblood, is down to just a few thousand jobs, but the town has hung on and diversified • Downtown survived the ’60s and ’70s better than most, and still sports four major department stores (although a new plan to level some older buildings there warrants close scrutiny) • Hilly topography fosters strong neighborhood identity and cohesion • The city wisely kept its streetcars, upgrading them to light rail and adding bus-only lanes to improve transit • It passed on building a perimeter beltway and constructed fewer freeways than other cities • The Andy Warhol Museum helped to spark revitalization • A North Shore development replaces the outmoded Three Rivers stadium with a new football stadium, ballpark, housing, and office buildings • A New Urbanist community, now under construction, will extend the popular Squirrel Hill neighborhood across a mountain of industrial slag; it’s the ultimate brownfield reclamation project • Chatham Village, a visionary workers’ housing project built in the early 1900s, today ranks among Pittsburgh’s most prestigious addresses • The stock of old buildings throughout the city is outstanding • A unique tax system, inspired by 19th-century economic theorist Henry George, assesses land at a higher rate than buildings, thus encouraging historic preservation, discouraging downtown parking lots, and reducing sprawl.