Posts by David Alpert — Founder

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.

  • Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building

    “From the street, [Brooklyn’s Municipal Building] looks like ‘dead space,’” writes the Brooklyn Paper. “‘People have just accepted that government buildings are only for government,’” says Joe Chan of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. Downtown DC is even worse, with back to back Federal buildings each of which…  Keep reading…

  • Hope for DC’s waterfront

    DC’s Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is a classic example of failed urban renewal - old row houses and tenements (some nice, some less so) were razed, replaced with a freeway and 1960s/70s-era buildings where cars enjoy more square footage than people. The dinner cruise on the Potomac Stefanie and I took for our six-month anniversary departed from a pier in Southwest, and…  Keep reading…

  • Drive-through apartments

    In Robert Heinlein’s (fairly bad) book I Will Fear No Evil, cities have become so dangerous that residents drive their cars directly into their buildings, up car-sized elevators, and right to the doors of their apartments. Early in the book a significant figure is murdered because she tries to use the pedestrian entrance. Now, via Streetsblog, such a building is under construction…  Keep reading…

  • The federally tilted playing field on transportation

    The Washington Post recently ran an article exploring the impact of the Federal Transit Administration on transit projects. Fierce competition for the FTA’s limited transit funding and strict criteria mean that states are forced to make many changes, wise or unwise, to their projects to qualify. Virginia had to drop plans to put the Tyson’s Corner segment of the planned…  Keep reading…

  • “We Are Smart Growth”

    You know Smart Growth—the philosophy of building “compact, transit-  Keep reading…

  • Charleston

    Last month, I visited Charleston for the Democratic debate. Here are my thoughts on the debate itself. The next day, I got to walk around historic Charleston. It has some beautiful old Southern houses, and some great commercial streets with historic brightly colored townhouses. For a small city, it has some pedestrian activity in the evenings, though the jobs aren’t downtown…  Keep reading…

  • Calculating walkability

    The walkability of a neighborhood is an intangible quality that doesn’t appear on real estate listings like the number of bathrooms or the square footage. But living in a place where you can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, hair salons, and other amenities makes life in certain places enormously different (and, I believe, better) than those where driving…  Keep reading…

  • Island Plan for new villages?

    Martha’s Vineyard’s regional land use agency, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, is conducting a broad participatory planning proccess, Island Plan, to solicit input and devise a long-term plan for the future of the island over the next 50 years. Still in its early stages, it covers topics such as housing affordability, year-round employment opportunities,…  Keep reading…

  • Washington’s good streets and bad streets

    Washington, DC is a city with some of the most magnificent public spaces and some of the worst at the same time. The Mall is mixed; it’s a huge tourist attraction with great, free museums and monuments, but many of the buildings present blank stone walls to the streets and there are too many cars, rendering it more of an empty grassy space between attractions than a destination in…  Keep reading…

  • Yglesias on urbanism

    Matt Yglesias wades into the debate about cities versus suburbs, and which is the future of America.  Keep reading…

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