Welcome to Opinionist! On Sundays, starting today, DCist will publish opinion pieces about life in D.C. The views expressed below are solely those of the author.

Six months ago, I plunked down what meager savings I had and purchased a few hundred square feet of condo in the Brookland area of Northeast Washington. I had been living in a Columbia Heights rowhouse, surrounded in coffeeshops and bars by the newly rich, made wealthy by timely purchases of neglected townhomes. My morning walk to the Metro was a minefield of construction detritus and orange cones, houses being gutted and rehabbed, and holes being dug and filled in with upscale grocery stores and luxury condos. On weekends I’d walk through the neighborhood, stopping to take in the curious new vistas that changed weekly, fresh iron skeletons and powerwashed brick facades that showed up daily like the morning paper. In such situations, one’s natural feeling is a fear of missing out, and the most casual of friendly get togethers tended to turn to talk of taking the plunge, of investment trusts, and the existence and/or longevity of a housing price bubble. Ultimately, I became seduced, and began a process that quickly developed its own life, pushing me through legalistic hoops until I found myself standing in the dining nook of my condo, holding a bottle of ten dollar champagne and wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Now well settled in, I take the newspaper stories about reduced housing demand with good-natured fatalism, and I’ve come to enjoy the quiet, leafy streets of the neighborhood, where the only crane in sight rises above the Washington Hospital Center, ten blocks to the west. Having learned that I can make my monthly payments, but also that I’m not likely to end up with the grand windfall I was spending in my head over the summer, I’ve gotten a bit philosophical about what it means to have invested in D.C., a city I backed into some four years ago, but now call home in a where-the-heart-is way.

I’d lived in Washington for a year before I’d gotten rid of an active sense of disgust that I wasn’t living in New York City, trying to swim in the big pond, where making it counted. It was another year before my protestations to visiting friends that D.C. was big and exciting lost their artificiality and became sincere. And it was another year, twelve months of life spent living beyond the continuum of work and bars, that made me realize what it is that truly excites me about this town, that justifies my rash grab of a piece of D.C.

James Joyce once said regarding his book The Dubliners, that he couldn’t believe no one had before written about his home town, had given the world Dublin, the second city of the British Empire. In two hundred years of life, Washington has accumulated a rich history, but as a modern city, the world doesn’t know it beyond the corridor of monuments and influence that runs in downtown, nor is it clear that its own residents have a sense of what a story about them might contain. And to me, this is the exciting part. For many, going to New York and succeeding in that world is the most important thing. For me, the idea that modern Washington is largely undefined, that any soul can, with a little effort, earn the attention of the city by his art or artifice, with music or writing or gumption, that’s the really extraordinary thing. Washington is a big town, but a small pond with undefined edges that change all the time. And, most intriguingly, this place feels like a city that’s preparing for its close up. It feels as though all these scrambled parts, the new publications and writers, the new bands and venues, the new theaters and performers, the new galleries and artists, are all about to spill out over the national consciousness, alerting everyone to the collection of talent and energy that’s been gathering behind the veneer of national politics.

How can I, thinking this, be upset about having a piece of the city all to myself, popped bubble or no. There’s no rush to flip this place, after all. I have to stick around and see what happens.