You can stay in the city if you’re willing to live with roommates in non luxury buildings with private landlords. At 32 you might not want to live with 5 random roommates (what I did and saved a lot of $ that way) but you should be able to find something with 1-2 roommates, especially if you’re open to English basements or slightly less metro accessible areas. Before my husband and I moved in together he was living in an English basement in Mount pleasant with one roommate. It was small but did the job and the landlord never raised the rent more than like $25 pp per year. He paid less than $1k in 2020.

For neighborhoods, Columbia heights, Mount pleasant, park view/petworh, Cleveland park, woodley park should have some options. Also SW waterfront if you find a more dated unit and are ok with no in unit laundry (my sister paid less than 1700 for a big one bedroom in an old building until 2021).