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Washington, DC · DC · 20 neighborhood clusters
Compare official Washington, DC neighborhood clusters on ACS rent, walk, safety, schools, and commute. Rankings stay inside this city.
Data period. ACS 2024 5-year (2020-2024) · MPD Sep 2025 – Aug 2026 · OSM Oct 2026. ACS and MPD retrieved 2026-10-01; OSM retrieved 2026-10-01. Editorial copy last revised Sep 2026.
Published walkable weights — same order as the table below. Fit is an in-house score, not a resident review.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 8 is Downtown, Chinatown, Penn Quarters, Mount Vernon Square, and North Capitol Street. The GIS spelling is Penn Quarters. Property rate is the highest in this set, 75.4 per 1,000, and the park count of 140 includes the Mall and people who do not sleep here. That is visitors and civic land, not a score for every side street.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 18 is Brightwood Park, Crestwood, and Petworth. More house than bar, and the ACS rent median is $1,730 — below the northwest clusters. Georgia Avenue is the spine. Columbia Heights is south.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 5 is West End, Foggy Bottom, and GWU. The campus pulls the median age to 28.8, the youngest in this set. Property rate is the lowest here, 14.0 per 1,000. Georgetown is the hill west. Downtown is the Mall side — a different cluster.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 6 is Dupont Circle and Connecticut Avenue/K Street. The circle is the lawn and the night. OSM counted 245 restaurants in or near the cluster — visitors write the property rate, 62.6 per 1,000. Logan Circle is east. Adams Morgan is north.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 7 is Shaw and Logan Circle. Search Shaw or U Street and you land here, not on the Howard cluster to the north. 14th Street is the strip; the side blocks are houses. Property rate is 21.4 per 1,000, quieter than Dupont’s visitor count. Dupont is west.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 2 is Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, Pleasant Plains, and Park View — one polygon, not four. It is the largest population in this set, 51,000. Search Mt. Pleasant and you still land here. Petworth is north.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 26 is Capitol Hill and Lincoln Park. Row houses, the park, and a violent rate of 1.6 per 1,000. Eastern Market is the errand people mean. Navy Yard is the new buildings south, its own cluster. The corridor north of here is Stanton Park.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 25 is Union Station, Stanton Park, and Kingman Park. Search H Street and you land here, not in Trinidad. The station and the corridor pull visitors; property rate is 38.2 per 1,000. Capitol Hill is the row houses south.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 9 is Southwest Employment Area, Southwest/Waterfront, Fort McNair, and Buzzard Point. Search the Wharf and you land here. Waterfront apartments and a federal edge. The park count of 110 includes the Mall within 800 meters, not a hundred local parks. Navy Yard is the newer towers east, its own cluster.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 21 is Edgewood, Bloomingdale, Truxton Circle, and Eckington. Search Bloomingdale or Truxton and you land here, not on a second polygon. Houses and a Metro spine. Trinidad is east. The 14th Street strip is Logan Circle, south.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 14 is Cathedral Heights, McLean Gardens, and Glover Park. Wisconsin Avenue is the errand. Violent rate is 0.9 per 1,000. Georgetown is south; Tenleytown is north. It is not Georgetown.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 1 is Kalorama Heights, Adams Morgan, and Lanier Heights. Search AdMo and you land here. 18th Street is the night; the ACS rent median is $2,350. Columbia Heights is the larger cluster north.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 15 is Cleveland Park, Woodley Park, Massachusetts Avenue Heights, and Woodland-Normanstone Terrace. Search Woodley Park and you land here. Violent rate is the lowest in this set, 0.6 per 1,000. ACS home value is $1,270,906. Adams Morgan is the night south of here.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 11 is Friendship Heights, American University Park, and Tenleytown. Search Friendship Heights or AU Park and you land here. Median age is 47, the oldest in this set, and ACS income is $239,075. About 28% of households rent. Cleveland Park is south.
$3K ACS median rent
Cluster 27 is Near Southeast and Navy Yard. Capitol Riverfront is the search that means this row. ACS rent is $2,760 and 87.6% of households rent — the most renter-heavy cluster in this set. The waterfront west of the channel is Southwest, its own cluster.
$1K ACS median rent
Cluster 39 is Congress Heights, Bellevue, and Washington Highlands. Search Bellevue or Washington Highlands and you land here. ACS rent is the lowest in this set, $1,045. Violent rate is the highest here, 9.1 per 1,000. That is a count for the cluster, not a personality for every block. Anacostia is the smaller historic row north.
$3K ACS median rent
Cluster 3 is Howard University, LeDroit Park, and Cardozo. The name on this row is LeDroit. The 14th Street strip belongs on Logan Circle, Cluster 7 — not this polygon. ACS rent is $2,752. The property rate is 57.8 per 1,000 because that edge is busy.
$3K ACS median rent
Cluster 4 is Georgetown and Burleith/Hillandale. Search Burleith and you land here. ACS home value is $1,357,427, the highest in this set. Violent rate is 0.8 per 1,000. The shops pull the property count to 36.7. Foggy Bottom is east.
$2K ACS median rent
Cluster 23 is Ivy City, Arboretum, Trinidad, and Carver Langston. Search Ivy City or Carver Langston and you land here. The corridor north of Capitol Hill is Stanton Park, Cluster 25 — not this row. ACS rent is $1,754. The violent rate is 6.1 per 1,000.
$1K ACS median rent
Cluster 28 is Historic Anacostia, a small official polygon of 5,219 people — not all of Southeast. ACS rent is $1,424. Violent rate is 8.2 per 1,000. Congress Heights is the larger cluster south. The river is the west edge.
Schematic cluster map — the Potomac on the west, the Anacostia on the southeast. Click a block to open it. Distances on this drawing are not street geography. Adjacent blocks are not a claim that two neighborhood clusters share a border.
ACS 5-year median gross rent for Washington city. Up 50% since 2014.
Overlapping 5-year ACS windows (B25064), not asking rent. Figures are for the city place, household-weighted across all occupied rental units.
Washington ranks Office of Planning neighborhood clusters — the city’s official named geography — and this site shows a relocator subset of 20, not all 46 mapped clusters. Parks, the Mall, and military bases are left off. The Potomac sits on the west of the sketch; the Anacostia is on the southeast.
AdMo, Shaw, U Street, the Wharf, and H Street are search names inside those clusters. Shaw and U Street land on Logan Circle. H Street lands on Stanton Park, not Trinidad. School ratings are not in this Washington snapshot, so that axis does not separate the list. The map is schematic.
Not a best-of list. Four cuts of the same 20 official neighborhood clusters.
School-heavy
Nearby rating + calmer map
Lower ACS rent
Survey median, not a listing
Lower DC Code rate
Fewer reports per 1,000 in this city set
Published fit uses default walkable weights and a $2,500 ACS rent budget. Same order for every reader. Fit is a number inside Washington, DC only.
| # | Neighborhood | Published fit | ACS median rent | Walk index | Safety index |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Downtown | 80 | $2,469 | 100 | 0 |
| 2 | Petworth | 68 | $1,730 | 70 | 63 |
| 3 | Foggy Bottom | 64 | $2,479 | 40 | 100 |
| 4 | Dupont Circle | 64 | $2,255 | 67 | 5 |
| 5 | Logan Circle | 60 | $2,390 | 39 | 89 |
| 6 | Columbia Heights | 59 | $2,013 | 55 | 47 |
| 7 | Capitol Hill | 59 | $2,341 | 38 | 84 |
| 8 | Stanton Park | 58 | $2,490 | 60 | 16 |
| 9 | Southwest | 57 | $2,213 | 39 | 58 |
| 10 | Eckington | 50 | $2,208 | 41 | 37 |
| 11 | Glover Park | 47 | $2,200 | 16 | 95 |
| 12 | Adams Morgan | 46 | $2,350 | 21 | 53 |
| 13 | Cleveland Park | 45 | $2,260 | 14 | 79 |
| 14 | Tenleytown | 43 | $2,413 | 12 | 74 |
| 15 | Navy Yard | 43 | $2,760 | 10 | 68 |
| 16 | Congress Heights | 43 | $1,045 | 32 | 32 |
| 17 | LeDroit Park | 41 | $2,752 | 28 | 11 |
| 18 | Georgetown | 39 | $2,779 | 20 | 26 |
| 19 | Trinidad | 35 | $1,754 | 13 | 21 |
| 20 | Anacostia | 31 | $1,424 | 0 | 42 |
ACS median gross rent mixes every occupied rental. Walk is an in-house OSM count, not Walk Score. Safety ranks DC Code rates inside Washington, DC only.
Rent figures are ACS 5-year median gross rent (2020-2024, ACS 2024 5-year) mixed across unit sizes in the District of Columbia. Congress Heights is the lowest median in this set at $1,045. That is a survey median, not this week’s asking rent for a one-bedroom.
Walk is an in-house index from OpenStreetMap groceries, cafes, parks, and transit stops inside the official polygon or within 800 meters of its centroid. It is not a Walk Score® license.
Safety ranks MPD DC Code rates (Sep 2025 – Aug 2026) inside this Washington, DC set only. A lower index means fewer DC Code reports per 1,000 ACS residents relative to the other neighborhood clusters here — not a guarantee that a block is safe, and not a measurement of noise. DC Code here is homicide, sex abuse, robbery, and assault with a dangerous weapon as violent; burglary, theft, theft from auto, motor vehicle theft, and arson as property. Not FBI Part I.
A nearby school rating is not an assigned campus. Missing ratings sit at the middle of the scale.
Commute minutes are typical weekday estimates to named job centers, not live traffic.
Boundaries are DC Office of Planning neighborhood clusters (DC GIS Administrative Other Boundaries / Neighborhood Clusters). Crime counts are MPD crime incidents (DC Code: homicide, sex abuse, robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon, burglary, theft, theft from auto, motor vehicle theft, arson), assigned to the neighborhood cluster on the incident.
ACS and MPD were retrieved 2026-10-01. OSM was retrieved 2026-10-01. Editorial pages on this site were last revised Sep 2026.
Sources: U.S. Census American Community Survey, OpenStreetMap, and this city’s police open data via the method page. NabeWise is published by NabeWise Media.
How the Washington, DC number is built — not a grade of the place.
Washington ranks Office of Planning neighborhood clusters — the city’s official named geography — and this site shows a relocator subset of 20, not all 46 mapped clusters. Parks, the Mall, and military bases are left off. The Potomac sits on the west of the sketch; the Anacostia is on the southeast.
Congress Heights has the lowest ACS 5-year median gross rent in this set at $1,045 (2020-2024 survey). A median mixes every occupied rental. It is not this week’s one-bedroom.
Mapped groceries, cafes, parks, and transit stops inside the official neighborhood cluster or within 800 meters of its centroid. Downtown currently leads the default walkable ranking. It is not a Walk Score® license.
Official neighborhood clusters only — 20 on this map. AdMo, Shaw, U Street, the Wharf, and H Street are aliases on official neighborhood clusters, not extra polygons. The schematic map is for clicking, not for measuring a shared border.
Housing is ACS 2024 5-year (2020-2024). Crime is MPD DC Code for Sep 2025 – Aug 2026. OSM amenities were snapshotted 2026-10-01. Editorial copy on these pages was last revised Sep 2026.
No. A number here is a rank inside these 20 official neighborhood clusters, not a grade you can carry to another city.
Six axes — safety, schools, walk, cost, vibe, and optional commute — scaled only inside Washington, DC, then weighted. With default walkable weights and a $2,500 ACS rent budget, Downtown is the current top match (80 published fit). Rankings never jump a city line. The formula is on the method page.
Full formula on the method page.