Big news! We’re growing and doing more on housing

We’re excited to bring you big news for Greater Greater Washington. We’ve just gotten a donation and a grant which will make it possible to improve and expand our content and add a bigger focus on housing, an issue we’ve long hoped to cover in more detail.

Greater Greater Washington started out as a labor of love and a volunteer operation. I started this site in 2008 to write (and learn!) about the forces shaping our communities. It grew as more and more people wanted to read, comment, contribute articles, help edit, and run more of the site.

We will always be a community-driven site, but some things are difficult when your community is all volunteers. We need an editor to help our contributors turn great ideas into effective articles that inform and educate interested residents across our region and beyond.

Our annual reader drives bring in enough money to hire an editor part-time: first Dan Reed, now Jonathan Neeley. The fact is, though, that bringing you four articles every weekday and constantly recruiting new contributors needs to be a full-time job. And that’s not to mention our desire to give our editor a decent living.

Unfortunately, it’s very hard to be a nonprofit with just one staff member. It takes time to manage an organization, and even though we all wish this didn’t have to be the case, it takes time to raise money as well.

In addition, while we’ve always written about housing issues such as the DC zoning update’s efforts to legalize basement and garage apartments, there’s a lot more to discuss about housing affordability. We also really want to expand this conversation to more communities all around DC and the region, including east of the Anacostia River.

Enter the Open Philanthropy Project

We recently spoke with the Open Philanthropy Project, an effort funded primarily by former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna and her husband, tech entrepreneur Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook, Asana).

“Open Phil,” as they call it, is working to give away billions in a wide range of areas, like public health in the developing world, forestalling potential catastrophes that could wipe out the human race, and a number of US policy topics like criminal justice reform and labor mobility (all great causes!) You can learn a lot more about Open Phil from recent feature profiles in the Washington Post and Vox.

One of Open Phil’s priority US policy causes is expanding housing in supply-constrained metro areas. Restrictive zoning and other rules make housing far too scarce and expensive, particularly in the most desirable, highest-wage metro areas. This locks out all but the wealthiest people from the opportunity to live in good neighborhoods with easy access to the best jobs. These metro areas should be adding a lot more housing to meet the demand.

That’s an issue we have worked on since Greater Greater Washington was founded, and when we heard that Open Phil was interested in supporting work on housing supply in the Washington region, we spoke with them. Based on those discussions, Tuna decided to make a personal gift of $75,000 to Greater Greater Washington (which is in the process of registering as a 501(c)(4)) for non-political use, and Open Phil made a two-year, $275,000 grant to our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor, Smart Growth America. These contributions will help us expand our efforts and do much more work on housing issues.

We will be able to support the activities of three full-time staff. Jonathan will be converting to full time and continue editing the site while adding some more responsibilities. We’ll be hiring two additional people, and we’ll talk about that more in an upcoming post.

Open Phil, true to its name, openly posts an analysis of each grant it gives. You can read the summary of its thinking about our grant here.

Some very important things won’t change

We want to emphasize three elements of Greater Greater Washington that will NOT change.

First, we will always continue to be community-driven. Just as, say, Wikipedia has a staff and a foundation and raises funds to keep things going, but its content still comes from its community, the same applies to us (though on a far, far smaller scale).

Our articles will continue to be written by members of our community who want to tell stories about changes in their neighborhoods or policies they’ve learned about. Our volunteer editorial board will continue handling a lot of the site’s day-to-day operation, like looking at emails, moderating comments, and organizing fun events.

Most importantly, the editorial board will continue setting our editorial policies to ensure we stay true to our community.

Second, we’ll still need support from our readers and many others. This isn’t the gravy train that’ll set us up for life. Open Phil is not funding 100% of what we need for this growth, and is only promising support for two years.

That means we need to keep up and grow the reader drives, reach out to foundations, and much more. This makes it even more important to have support from all of you.

Finally, this new housing focus will not detract from our existing content. We’ll still be writing about transit, parks and architecture, education, and many other topics our community members want to discuss.

Stay tuned

Tomorrow, we’ll post more about our ideas and plans around housing, and then we’ll talk about who we want to hire to execute on our exciting new plan.

We’re really looking forward to embarking on this new phase of Greater Greater Washington’s growth with you!