residents

The city of Mount Rainier, population 8,498 is located 4 miles from downtown Washington D.C. and is the historic Route 1 gateway community from Prince George's County to D.C. at the District's northeastern boundary. Mount Rainier is primarily a residential community with 1,100 single family homes and three large apartment developments constructed in the 1940s. Renter occupied housing is 68% of total housing.

Still lacking a fancy restaurant or a movie theater, this largely working-class city isn't quite Berkeley-on-the-Potomac -- or even another Takoma Park. But it is fast becoming something close: a model village for artists, environmentalists, pacifists, multiculturalists and other liberals, who are drawn as much by the chance to build their ideal community as by Mount Rainier's sprawling back yards and housing prices in the low $200,000s.