Speaking of the new Nationals stadium, Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch, a recent transplant to DC from the wrong coast, thinks the lengths the city went to build it were deplorable. He links that to more mundane problems the city faces, such as its vermin problem. No, not that kind. The four-legged variety:

On my very first trip to the supermarket as a bona fide Beltway resident, a little black rat darted between the feet of everyone in the checkout line. While the customers eeked, the Safeway employees just laughed and laughed. At my new rowhouse, I noticed packs of the critters clattering through the neighborhood’s front yards, including my own. There were scores of gaping rat-holes in the dirt, and the trees were full of day-rats (otherwise known as squirrels) during sunlight hours. Some time soon after the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Rat, my pregnant wife walked downstairs and reached for her bag on the couch, and out jumped a plump young rodent.

I began making inquiries to exterminators, colleagues, and panicky urban websites, and what came back was a Stephen King hellscape. “We can trap what’s inside right now and plug up some holes and establish a perimeter outside,” the first rat-assessor told us. “But there’s no way to keep them out of your house in this neighborhood—they just come right up through the sewers.”

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Vermin complaints to the city government were up 8 percent in 2007. In October of that year, self-described “rodent experts” Dale Kaukeinen and Bruce Colvin released a nationwide study naming Washington the fifth-most- vulnerable city to a major spike in rat population, a prediction that seems more likely than ever after yet another mild winter. The National Zoo has such a bad infestation that two adult pandas were killed by rat poison a few years back. “Mayor Anthony A. Williams declared war on the rats in the late 1990s,” Washington Times columnist Tom Knott wrote in February, “and the rats won.”

The problem, he argues, is that the city’s priorities are screwed up. It is a problem that is by no means unique to the District. But DC still finds a way to stand out:

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a $611 million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team. Actually, that figure is much too low: Eminent domain settlements with in-the-way property owners added $43 million to the cost, and a handful of outstanding cases could tack on $24 million more. There were also $32 million in municipal infrastructure improvements. So how much is $710 million in the scheme of D.C.? More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget. (It receives an additional $4 billion or so from the federal government.) It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools. Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall: postponing a tax cut on commercial property, doubling the cost of a business license, increasing ambulance fees, charging an extra 23 cents for every phone line that can call 911.

All true, sadly enough. On the other hand, I went there Monday to watch the Nationals-Brewers game. It was my first trip ever to the new stadium and I gotta say, that place is sweet.

Matt, I suggest that you do what I do and what a majority of the people who work in DC do: move to the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland and commute in. It’s a small city so it is easy to do. Isn’t that the Libertarian thing away? To vote with your feet, I mean?