The sister cities of Maryland and Northern Virginia

Maryland and Virginia may only be separated by a river, but if you live and spend most of your time on one side, you may not know much about the other.

To bridge this divide, I made a list of places in Maryland and their Northern Virginia equivalents:

I grew up in Montgomery County, but my partner and one of my best friends lived in Fairfax County, so I got to know the area really well over the past 10 years. While both sides of the river have their quirks, they have a shared history and development pattern. If you’re looking for a thing in Maryland, you’ll probably find a thing like it in Virginia: crunchy neighborhoods with old Victorian houses (Takoma Park, Del Ray), conglomerations of Ethiopian food (Silver Spring, Bailey’s Crossroads), an area with office parks and shopping centers that’s slowly turning into an urban center (White Flint, Tysons), and so on.

This isn’t a complete list. I’m just comparing Montgomery County on the Maryland side with Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Alexandria on the Virginia side—combined, they’re about the same size. Both areas developed around the same time period, both have some of the region’s largest job centers, and Fairfax and Montgomery are the region’s first and second largest jurisdictions, with populations of 1.15 million and 1.05 million, respectively.

Montgomery and Fairfax counties in particular have long been in friendly competition with one another, in part because they’re so similar. Both counties vie for the same employers to relocate there, like Amazon’s second headquarters (which is going to Arlington). Ten years ago, the Montgomery County Council even commissioned a study comparing it to Fairfax County on everything from demographics to tax rates to public health.

That said, when I posted this on Twitter, commenters had lots of suggestions for additional Maryland and Virginia analogues. What do you see in this list? What are your Maryland or Virginia equivalents?