The OP lives in my original stomping ground. I grew up in a subdivision called “Potomac Woods.” Later, a new abutting subdivision was named Potomac Springs. And I noticed how the word Potomac was being attached to a lot of new development like Potomac Hills, Potomac Crest, Lake Potomac, Park Potomac, etc…It was during the early 80’s when the outer suburbs were intensifying and becoming the middle suburbs. In 85, we moved out along Route 28 and “North Potomac” was not heard yet. Hell, Quince Orchard was not yet built and I still went to Wootton.
I did some history research for Crooksville, Ohio as I prepared my book on Watt Pottery. A local park was named “Coney Island” and a booklet about the town’s history mentioned it was named after the famous Coney Island in Cincinnati. Hah! Sounds like they never heard of the original in New York. Ohio small towns - third string at best*
- I mentioned that because many towns in northern Ohio are named after the town in Connecticut from which the settlers migrated. In turn the Connecticut towns were named after the town in England.
A good rule of thumb nationwide is that if there’s a desirable {Someplace}, there will probably be a {North / East / West / South Someplace} that was once a middle-class poseur but is now a dump. Ditto for {Someplace Heights / Glades / Bluffs / Valley / Estates}.
The L train station in the photo is near the Bushwick branch of Brooklyn Public Library. I lived in East Williamsburgh in the nineties, at the corner of Metropolitan and Bushwick. I’m not sure what I would consider the western border, but Flushing/Newtown Creek/Meeker sounds about right to me. I thought Bushwick was considered hip nowadays, though, although I realized it extends to Brownsville/Ocean Hill. My daughter and her friends were looking at an Air BnB that said it was in Bushwick, but I could tell from the map it was near Broadway Junction.
My city is so bad in the past 10 years the northern half is trying to rename itself into something completely different despite the fact nobody I know who even lives in that part of town call it that. You would only know it because of street signs that say NOW ENTERING but then when I look up my city on the internet the city (and most of the internet) still officially refers to that part of town under the old name.
I don’t think anyone’s sure of how New Albany got its name, but Beverwyck, NY was renamed for the Duke of York and Albany, later James II of England, so the practice of giving locations classier names goes about as far back as there were colonies.
Estate agents have always done this over here, especially in London, where perceived neighbourhoods can have very elastic non-boundaries, according to fashion/gentrification. “X-adjacent” or “Y-borders” are one technique, adding North/South/East/West to somewhere more upmarket is another, and so is inventing a completely new name. My favourite was an area of south-west London that was “adjacent” to several other (in those days before the most insane property bubble) OK but ordinary/workaday areas, which happened to have large areas of open green space or “Commons” - the agents started calling it " 'Twixt the Commons".
And then there’s the whole question of the hierarchy of Street/Road/Place/Close/Square/Avenue/Boulevard, etc.
Oh yes. When I moved to NJ I lived in Princeton (Township, not Borough, but definitely Princeton) and I soon found that developments way far from Princeton took the name. Princeton Meadows, Princeton View (you’d need a tower 100 feet high to see Princeton from there) etc., etc.
It was really quite funny.
And the Western Electric Research Center where I worked was supposedly located in Princeton (we had a PO Box) but really in Hopewell. In its defense it started in the Princeton Shopping Center which really is in Princeton.
In Toronto, there is the famous nineteenth-century streetcar suburb known as The Beaches. It takes in the old resort areas between Queen Street East and the actual beaches on Lake Ontario. Queen Street has streetcars, tony boutiques, the beautiful park of Kew Gardens, a really nice library, and further east the legendary Goof restaurant. North of Queen Street are well-off houses on leafy ravine roads going up the hill towards Kingston Road.
Kingston Road has another streetcar line, and it angles northeastward from Queen Street further west, going uphill as it heads east out of town. It’s much more working class, as befits the original road to the east.
North of Kingston Road are assorted working-class suburbs until you get to the old railway yards near Danforth train station. In times past, the yard was bigger, and they kept extra locomotives here to help trains up the grade to the east. Industries too were here. The area in no way is rich or tony.
But real-estate agents keep calling the area north of Kingston Road… the Upper Beaches.
Nope. Sorry. That’s never going to take.
That’s not the worst I’ve heard though. One condo going up on The Queensway, a suburban arterial road about 10 km west of the centre of the city, beyond Queen Street West, beyond West Queen Street West, beyond High Park, beyond Grenadier Pond, beyond Swansea and the Humber River and the sewage treatment plant and the industrial zones along the freeway… this condo was advertised as being in “Downtown West”.
In the Boston suburbs is a town with a reputation for excellence of its schools, and I suppose the obsession of its residents with education.
There is a “Sharon Chinese School” and a “Russian School of Mathematics - Sharon” neither of which are in Sharon but in adjacent towns with less glittering reputations for academic focus. Perhaps the Chinese school was once located in Sharon, but the math school never was.
I guess in this case they are marketing themselves to the education-obsessed folks in the town of Sharon.
I don’t know what’s particularly affluent-sounding about “Clinton”, but some residents of that Manhattan area and real estate agents apparently prefer it to the previous accepted name, Hell’s Kitchen.
When I lived in that area, I joked that everything between the Brunswicks and Trenton was called Princeton.
West Windsor is adjacent to Princeton. It’s technically and legally named West Windsor, but businesses routinely use “Princeton” as their address. The mail gets there. 
I could forgive that if these developments were close to the Potomac river, but I know that they are not; actual Potomac basically has a monopoly on all of the residential riverfront property.
Here in Dallas, there’s a “Hollywood Heights - Santa Monica” neigborhood, that was built sometime prior to WWII. It was almost certainly named after the California towns.
I would bet that anything with the name “Park” in it around here is more than likely named to leech off the Park Cities’ (a tiny enclave of two small cities totally within Dallas) extreme affluence.
Curiously, there are both a “Hollywood” and “Bel Air” in Maryland, but both cities predate their Los Angeles counterparts by a large margin, over a hundred years in the latter case.
I’m also from the DC area, but mostly oh the Virginia side. Most “Alexandria” addresses are actually in Fairfax County and not the City of Alexandria. (Fox Mulder, circa Season 6, had an “Alexandria” address, but when I looked up the street on Google Maps, it turned out to be a lot closer to Lorton and Dale City.) And a lot of developments out Routes 7 and 50 from the last half century, in the direction of horse country, have names reeking of Englishness and old money (like Centerville’s London Towne), but actually feature little of one and none of the other.
Always amusing to watch that show and be painfully aware the writers were clearly just taking placenames off of a map and had no clue how far apart these places really are. There are often scenes where they’re downtown at the FBI building, and Mulder has to “stop at home for something first, I’ll meet you in Germantown in 20 minutes.” LOL
My guess is that it harkens back to DeWitt Clinton, the governor who built the Erie Canal and was a huge deal in his era. New York has a Clinton County, two towns, and a village, and every city upstate has a major street named for him. Old class.
Always amusing to watch that show and be painfully aware the writers were clearly just taking placenames off of a map and had no clue how far apart these places really are. There are often scenes where they’re downtown at the FBI building, and Mulder has to “stop at home for something first, I’ll meet you in Germantown in 20 minutes.” LOL
A couple of times, the action would take place near somewhere I used to live and I could narrow it down to a specific block. The only building in Takoma Park that could accommodate the Lone Gunmen’s headquarters that week was just inside the DC line (but also called Takoma Park), a building that also housed the army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper. An underpass in Reston had to be where Hunter’s Mill Road goes under the Dulles Access Road. Still scratching my head about Skinner’s apartment in Crystal City, but it’s not exactly impossible.