After three years, the DC Council passes the Framework element of the Comp Plan

The DC Council voted unanimously today to pass the Framework element of the Comprehensive Plan, a planning document that directs how the city should grow. This brings to a close the nearly three-year saga of updating the Framework, which sets the tone for the rest of the document.

Nearly everything from the draft bill stayed put in the final bill, and the council passed it unanimously. The whole vote took about a half hour. (You can find the full stream of the hearing here.) Housing advocates should be, frankly, thrilled with many of these outcomes.

This update to the 2006 document has been in the works for a long time. Office of Planning, under former director Eric Shaw, first solicited amendments to the full plan in 2017. But changes have only been made to the Framework element, which the council first took up with a public hearing in March 2018. A substantially amended version of that bill is what the council voted to pass today. Here’s some more detail.

What passed exactly?

Very few changes were made to the draft bill, which was released last Wednesday, and the final bill. On October 4, we described some of the changes between what the council voted on at the bill’s first reading and the draft bill that was released on October 2. (You can view a slightly buggy compare copy here.) And in this piece, we explained why Section 224.9 in particular was unpopular with some parties, and why it mattered that it remained in the final bill as written.

The Framework’s language now features more of an emphasis on the need for racial equity in new development, nods to land value recapture, and upweights planned unit developments that prioritize affordability and anti-displacement measures.

It also includes more honest acknowledgments of the city’s current development climate. It grants that the public housing authority needs a great deal more financial assistance, and acknowledges that an increase in residents—not an increase in home construction—triggers high housing prices.

The much-contested Section 227.2 passed with the fixes made to it in the draft bill, and Section 224.9 remained unchanged.

This final edition of the Framework has a lot of good stuff in it that was hard-won, over a very long period of time, by a number of interest groups. Coalitions have fractured and reformed over the year-and-a-half deliberation over this document. This was not easy to organize around, nor was it easy to track. That the bill passed unanimously with little debate reflects a lot of hard work (and, probably, a lot of land-use fatigue).

This is a solid outcome: It explicitly acknowledges the relationship between growth, affordability, and displacement, and the intersection of those issues with core demographic features, like race and income. Those who have spent many, many hours on what the Framework says, what it should say, and how it should say it should be proud of their dedication.

No dais amendments, but a few quibbles

The bill passed unanimously, with no dais amendments. But there was contention over a minor change to the Future Land Use Map definition (the FLUM is supposed to translate the Comp Plan’s land use policy text to map form). Specificially, there was some discontent with the usage of floor area ratio instead of stories or feet to measure buildings.

First, floor area ratio (FAR) describes, via a ratio, how much space a building takes up on a site—so, basically, how dense something is. An apartment building without much grass or parking around it has a high FAR. A single-family home with lots of lawn around it has a low FAR. Strip malls with lots of parking also have low FARs.

FAR might be wonkier, but using feet or stories alone to measure buildings doesn’t fully describe how a building looks, feels, or works with its surroundings. Feet or stories just say how tall something is, but at the last minute, some perceived this switch as a proxy for developer influence over the council.

Similarly, the final bill left the R-1-B zoning designation out of the Future Land Use Map definition of “low-density residential.” R-1-B zoning dictates “areas predominantly developed with detached houses on moderately-sized lots.”

A post circulated the Chevy Chase and HistoricWashington listservs over the past few days contained this missive, claiming that this would allow for untrammeled developer speculation of single-family homes:

In the newest version of the Comprehensive Plan Framework amendments issued by Chair Phil Mendelson today, the residential zoning classification that applies to the majority of single-family homes in Wards 3, 4, 5 and 7 — called R-1-B — is still excluded from the Future Land Use Map (FLUM) definition of “low-density residential” development.

…

If the redevelopment of lots in these neighborhoods as duplexes is accomplished through the method described in the post below, the increased density will not deliver affordable housing. As Jane Jacobs pointed out in Death and Life of the Great American City, new construction is almost always more expensive than existing, old construction, and those costs are passed on to the buyer or renter.

When a developer can replace a detached single-family-residence with two houses, the profits are all the greater. A ca. 1910 house on Morrison Street in Chevy Chase whose fate was the subject of controversy several years ago sold for under a million dollars; the two semi-detached houses that replaced it sold for over $2 million each. Ironically the argument made by the so-called smart growth advocates and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau—who is pushing for the elimination of detached single-family-residence zoning altogether—to justify up-zoning for greater density is that it will bring us affordable housing.

Indeed, GGWash would support such a change, if it came to pass. Single-family homes aren’t particularly affordable, so it’s important to legalize other types of homes (like DC’s iconic rowhomes, or like the apartment building I live in) in places where only detached single-family homes can be built now.

But that’s not exactly what was up for debate today, despite the rhetoric flying around, because—per the Home Rule charter—the council doesn’t have land-use authority. It can merely amend the FLUM definitions, and not including R-1-B is not so generous to pro-development forces that it would result in unmitigated multimillion-dollar duplexes in Chevy Chase.

What’s next?

On October 15, Office of Planning will release both its housing production targets by planning area, and its amendments to the rest of the Comprehensive Plan. There will be a 60-day public review period, and a 90-day comment period for advisory neighborhood commissions.

If you have any thoughts about the Comprehensive Plan, you don’t have to wait for a call to action to voice them to your councilmember, the at-larges, or the council chair—or to thank them for their dedication to this process.