Reviews & Comments
Leesburg, VA
An Affluent Suburban Haven -
3/21/2019Leesburg has grown from a sleepy county seat to a super suburb with terrific parks & rec facilities, an outlet mall, great restaurants (many within the historic old town area), live entertainment venues, and a growing nightlife for young professionals. The mixed-use developments at Wegmans Plaza and One Loudoun are great spots to have a nice meal, do a little shopping, enjoy a spiffy cocktail, relax on outdoor plazas with fountains and play spaces for kids, or to see a movie. Much more relaxed and kid-friendly than the Reston Town Center.
Terrific options for hiking and biking, lots of sports teams for kids, and a huge growth in medical facilities and quality healthcare. Wine lovers will appreciate the local vineyards, as well as many mid-to-upscale restaurants that take their wine service seriously. Summers have lots of free live events, including live music, classic car shows, and a massive home & garden show.
Metro rail is coming to neighboring Ashburn, which is really heating up development. They are almost done replacing the traffic lights along Rt. 7 with overpasses, just in time for this next wave of growth. As where Leesburg was, not so long ago, mostly a semi-rural bedroom community for jobs and activities in/near D.C., today you can live, shop, work, and play all in Leesburg, with a quality of life that reflects the prosperity of the region.
The bad: the inevitable growing pains of new people who’ve changed the character and politics of the region, the higher cost of housing (a side-effect of regional prosperity), local restaurant taxes, the ridiculous water/sewer rates that the Town of Leesburg inflicts on parts of unincorporated Leesburg (as a punishment for rejecting the Town’s efforts to annex them into incorporated Leesburg’s tax base), leaving most of those residents with brown summer lawns and a disincentive to invest too much in landscaping.