What we hope to do on housing

Greater Greater Washington will be growing thanks to a generous gift and foundation grant, and increasing our focus on housing. Here’s what we have in mind for housing.

Rising housing prices in DC and many in-demand parts of the region is one of the biggest challenges our region faces. With rising prices comes displacement of longtime residents, while people who want to move to walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods find themselves priced out and shut out.

We’ve talked about these issues on Greater Greater Washington since the site began, but we hope to do much more, including discussions about more neighborhoods and featuring voices of more residents (and potential residents).

We also hope to bring the discussion offline. Greater Greater Washington has been able to bring together a community of people who want to discuss the shape of the neighborhoods in the Washington region and how they are changing, but not everyone sits in front of a computer all day at work with the freedom to click over to non-work websites every so often (which, face it, is the way most of you read the site).

Finding solutions to housing problems that are truly inclusive requires having a conversation beyond just the website itself. We want to foster more conversations in person, so that more people can participate and so that members of our current community engage more with neighbors with different backgrounds and life experiences.

At the same time, we’re still a media site and our biggest strength is sharing information with a wide range of people. Therefore, as we convene offline discussions, we’ll look for ways — maybe text, maybe video, or who knows — to let those who can’t attend an event still hear from the people who could.

Let’s make sure there is enough housing for all

Our region must build enough housing for the people who want to come here without displacing those who are already here. That includes enough housing at the top of the market, lower-priced but unsubsidized housing in cheaper areas, and guaranteed “affordable housing” as well.

The San Francisco Bay Area is in the middle of a major housing crisis — far, far worse than here — because it didn’t build nearly enough new housing. We can’t let that happen in DC.

Building enough housing is going to require every neighborhood to do its part. It’s simply not fair for some neighborhoods, especially wealthy and powerful ones, to tell other neighborhoods that the brunt of all new housing construction must fall there.

That doesn’t mean residents should have no say in how their neighborhoods grow. Maybe some places in a neighborhood aren’t the right ones for new housing, but other spots are. We’d like to spark conversations, both online and offline, about the best and most sustainable ways for neighborhoods to grow. We want all residents (and prospective residents) to be able to participate in those conversations, no matter their backgrounds.

We don’t expect to come in with all of the answers for each neighborhood. The answers aren’t one-size-fits-all. What can span across neighborhoods are some basic values. We’d start with “growing, inclusively.” We should seek to welcome all people, not shut them out, and welcome greater diversity of background and income level.

We might have a good home in a neighborhood we love, but not all do. We might have good access to our jobs, but many do not. What we value in a place, we should wish to make available to others as well. When I started Greater Greater Washington, I wrote, “As the region grows, we must preserve what already works and expand what is possible, to ensure that there are enough great neighborhoods for everyone who wants to live, work, shop or play in one.”

As it happens, “growing an inclusive city” is the tagline for the 2007 DC Comprehensive Plan. The District will soon begin the process of revising the “Comp Plan,” which could be one excellent forum for this conversation and an opportunity to ask the District to clearly envision the growing, inclusive city of coming decades. This is also an issue that affects the entire region, and every jurisdiction needs to play a part as well.

If you would like to be part of this conversation, add your name here. You can help organize discussions, write articles about housing in your community, or just join the discussion online and offline. And if you would like to organize it as your job, check back tomorrow when we post our open positions.