Eckington in DC by David licensed under Creative Commons.

It has been four years since many of Eckington’s residents and its Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners came together to craft a vision for how we want growth to happen in our neighborhood in the next 10 years. But despite countless hours spent over these four years to define and advocate for an affordable future for Eckington through amendments we wrote to the 2006 Comprehensive Plan, DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is pushing to override our neighborhood’s wishes in one stroke of his pen.

Eckington is not a NIMBY community. When we began drafting amendments to the Comprehensive Plan in 2017, we saw the writing on the wall that development was coming to our neighborhood. But instead of fighting it, as is often the story, we embraced it, recognizing that one of the best ways to ensure that our family-friendly community can avoid skyrocketing housing costs is by building more housing in the city where no housing currently exists. And what better place to build more housing than near the two Metro stops in our neighborhood’s Northeast and Southeast corners, and along the Metropolitan Branch Trail, which serves as Eckington’s Eastern border?

The Eckington Civic Association, where Conor is president and Shelley served as chair of the development committee, led the effort to draft the Comprehensive Plan amendments. We initially submitted comments in 2017, asking for the Office of Planning to “plan for growth in a way that maintains Eckington’s relative affordability, diversity, and family-friendly appeal, while incentivizing retail and commercial development in key areas, and encouraging higher-density development close to Metro stations and along the Metropolitan Branch Trail.”

When DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson released his amendments to the Office of Planning’s submittal for the April 20 markup, he removed our recommendations, and doubled down on an illogical position that the city needs industrial land more than it needs new housing. But just looking at housing prices in Eckington in the time it has taken to get the amendments to their first vote shows how misguided that belief is—the average single family home that cost $643,000 in 2017 now costs $801,000.

And as we wrote in our letter to the Chairman, his unilateral decision to continue concentrating production, distribution, and repair zones in Ward 5, and in Wards 7 and 8, is a racial equity and environmental justice issue:

Simply put, the Chair’s decision to drop the Eckington Amendments at this late stage, despite the support of the Eckington Civic Association, ANC 5E, Office of Planning, and Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (and the absence of any on-record opposition) is an example of the “exclusionary and inaccessible” process that the Council Office on Racial Equity found objectionable in its Racial Equity Impact Assessment of the Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2020.

Eckington’s Metro- and trail-adjacent properties are precisely where DC must add more housing if the city is going to achieve its affordability, equity, and environmental goals. Furthermore, the continued concentration of Production, Distribution, and Repair (PDR)-designated land in Wards 5 and 7 poses racial equity issues, as the Chair has acknowledged in discussions about this Comprehensive Plan. But by dropping these amendments, the Council will perpetuate those issues until the next planning cycle.

As of 2019, residents of the census tract containing Eckington’s PDR-zoned land were 49% Black, 34% White 10% Hispanic, and 5% Asian. Twenty five percent of families speak a language other than English at home. These residents live adjacent to the Fort Myer asphalt plant and breathe in the air pollution it spews every day. These amendments will not close this plant, but they do make it possible to transform this land into housing if Fort Myer decides to move or sell in the future. It is simply unacceptable that the plant’s long-term presence in our neighborhood is more important than the health and desires of the people who live here.

On April 28, 2021, we wrote to both Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Chairman Phil Mendelson, urging them to reinstate the “Eckington amendments,” or, 2419.2 and 2419.3 on the Future Land Use Map, which would permit residential and commercial uses in addition to production, distribution.

The chairman’s subsequent amendments to the committee print were passed on May 4 by the DC Council during the first reading of the Comprehensive Plan. Language such as, “Any strategies to expand PDR land designations or accommodate future PDR uses shall prioritize areas that do not currently have a disproportionate amount of PDR-designation land” (page 4) is step towards addressing the inequitable distribution of PDR-land in the future, but it fails to seize the opportunity that we have right now.

Studying this issue further and weighing in on a future planning cycle—a process that could take another eight years to complete ——is not a compromise. It effectively stymies any future redevelopment of PDR parcels into mixed uses, and puts us in the unfortunate position of having exceedingly little say in whatever development does come to our neighborhood in the coming years, despite overwhelming community support for the amendments we put forward.

When we wrote our amendments in 2017, we could not predict the future. But the expectations of increased housing demand and associated skyrocketing costs in our neighborhood have borne out, and we have an urgent need to address this pressure by adding more housing, especially affordable housing. Chairman Mendelson’s position will not only further the inequity of concentrated industrial land use in Ward 5 (and an asphalt plant in our neighborhood specifically), it will also undemocratically overrule years of community engagement that got us to this point. Neither of these outcomes should be acceptable for our city’s leaders.

We have one more chance to restore Eckington’s Amendments before the Council’s second reading of the Comprehensive Plan Act of 2021. Now is the time for our elected leaders to stand up for Eckington. The full text of our letter to Mendelson is here.

Alex Baca is the DC Policy Director at GGWash. Previously the engagement director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the general manager of Cuyahoga County's bikesharing system, she has also worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in DC, San Francisco, and Cleveland. She has written about all of the above for CityLab, Slate, Vox, Washington City Paper, and other publications.

Shelley Vinyard lives in Eckington and is a member of the Eckington Civic Association. During her day job, she works to save the forests of Canada for an environmental advocacy group, but at night she fights for things closer to home, including more affordable housing, better bike infrastructure, and fixing Dave Thomas Circle. She has an unbearably cute daughter and a bike that she loves almost as much (but not quite).

Conor Shaw is an attorney at a nonpartisan ethics watchdog. Conor grew up on Capitol Hill and now lives in Eckington, where he is president of the Eckington Civic Association. Conor wants our streets to be safer for all—and especially cyclists and pedestrians; our local businesses to thrive; and our housing policies to promote affordability, diversity and yes—density.