Posts tagged Housing Shortage
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DC wants more affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods, per its newly-released targets
On Tuesday, DC released targets for affordable housing production by neighborhood planning area, which are similar to wards but don’t change with population shifts. Mayor Muriel Bowser committed to building 36,000 new units by 2025 in her inauguration speech, and these targets show where a third of this total, the affordable units, will go. Keep reading…
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Restrictive zoning is impeding DC’s goal to build more housing, research shows
Mayor Muriel Bowser kicked off her second term as Washington, D.C.’s mayor last January by setting an ambitious goal for the District: building 36,000 new homes by 2025. To reduce the likelihood that new construction will displace lower-income and minority communities, the mayor challenged “every ward and every neighborhood” to pitch in toward the city-wide goal. Keep reading…
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We asked Ward 2 council candidates about housing issues. Here’s what they said.
The GGWash elections committee is currently in the process of endorsing a candidate for the Ward 2 council seat in advance of the June 2020 election. As part of this process, we sent a questionnaire to each candidate who has filed to run. Our questionnaire contained three sections, covering the broad issues that we routinely cover on the blog and around which we regularly advocate: housing, transportation, and land use. Keep reading…
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There should be more subsidized housing in wealthy parts of DC, survey takers say
Residents think there needs to be more affordable housing west of Rock Creek Park and in other wealthy areas, a new DC survey shows. The Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) and the Office of Planning (OP) released the results of the survey it conducted over the summer to the public at Ron Brown High School this past Saturday, September 21. Keep reading…
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The region urgently needs more homes. Why not adopt housing targets—with teeth?
The region needs to build 374,000 housing units by 2030. Most of them—preferably, three-quarters of them—need to be affordable. Otherwise, housing costs will ascend from merely expensive to stratospheric, tons of households (about 220,000) will be displaced, and the economy might slow down to a sludge. Keep reading…
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The NoMa BID wrote an open letter about homeless encampments. What do you think of it?
On Wednesday, August 21 the NoMa Business Improvement District (BID) released an open letter expressing frustration about underpass encampments in the area. People walking or otherwise traveling from east to west sides of the neighborhood have to go under these underpasses. They’re a common spot for people experiencing homelessness to sleep and camp. Keep reading…
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Gentrification is beneficial on average, studies say. That doesn’t mean it’s not painful for some.
Newly-released research found that gentrification produces mostly positive effects for original lower-income residents, but that doesn’t mean there are no losers. Rather, neighborhood change is far more complex than the typical narratives let on, and there are a lot of ways to decipher and judge its effects on individuals. Keep reading…
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Why vacant homes won’t solve our housing shortage
One frequently-heard retort to any call to allow more housing construction is a single statistic: There are 17 million vacant houses, more than 30 for every American experiencing homelessness during the 2018 Point-In-Time survey. While those vacant houses do exist, they exist for complicated reasons. Keep reading…
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What Montgomery County can learn from DC’s accessory apartment policy
Montgomery County is debating a change to its zoning rules that would make it easier to build accessory apartments, also known as Accessory Dwelling Units or ADUs. What impact would such a change have on the area? Thankfully, we can look at our neighbors in DC for clues, since the city passed a similar rule change in 2016. Keep reading…
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Events: Find a home for affordable housing in the Green New Deal
Learn about how the “Green New Deal’ and housing intersect, DDOT has updates on the Connecticut Avenue Streetscape project, and you can learn about tenant co-ops this week. Keep reading…