DC’s Chevy Chase neighborhood looks to reverse its history of exclusion

In search of how DC’s exclusive Chevy Chase neighborhood might address racial equity, some community members are creating a more inclusive vision for the neighborhood with the launch of the Chevy Chase DC Small Area Plan by the DC Office of Planning. With the help of the ANC and community groups like Ward3Vision, this effort has the potential to write the blueprint for a more inclusive neighborhood while revitalizing its main street. The resulting plan could welcome a range of hundreds of new homes and residents, including low income residents.

Small Area Plans are local plans that supplement the Comprehensive Plan, DC’s 20-year framework that guides future growth and development. In May 2021, the DC Council adopted major amendments to the Comprehensive Plan, including proposed land use changes that would help meet the District’s ambitious housing production goals in an effort to make housing more affordable. The Chevy Chase small area plan is intended to provide more detailed guidance for these land use changes, and align “with citywide priorities of housing production, economic recovery, and equity and racial justice,” according to the Office of Planning.

New homes in Chevy Chase for new residents at a range of incomes would be a welcome departure from a long history of exclusivity and segregation. The study area for the plan, which hasn’t seen new housing in decades and has no dedicated affordable housing, is in an affluent neighborhood with sought-after public schools. The lack of new and affordable housing is the standard for Ward 3, where Chevy Chase is located, which the Comprehensive Plan update found contains only 1% of the District’s affordable housing stock.

Limited housing in the neighborhood drives up the price of existing housing and pushes growth elsewhere. It also maintains longtime patterns of segregation: today, white residents make up 77% of the population, while 6% are Black (in contrast, about half of DC’s residents are Black District-wide).

The small area planning process kicked off in Chevy Chase in the spring of 2020 with a series of community outreach sessions and surveys to establish draft vision and goals for the plan. Now the Office of Planning is conducting a series of community walks in December followed by a charrette (community design brainstorming workshop) in January 2022. A draft plan is anticipated to be ready in March 2022, with a Mayor’s hearing in April and review by the DC Council in the summer.

The plan had its skeptics. The worry was that after all the meetings and engagement, would the plan depart from the status quo? After decades of little new development and no dedicated affordable housing, in an environment historically hostile to any change, could any planning effort succeed?

In 2019, Randy Speck, chair of ANC 3/4G which represents the area, spearheaded a task force to review the proposed amendments to the Comprehensive Plan including changes that would allow modest increases in density along Connecticut Avenue south of Chevy Chase Circle. After months of sometimes contentious discussion, the task force recommended that the ANC support the increase in density on the condition that a Small Area Plan study the impact on the community’s built environment as well as services such as schools.

Then George Floyd’s murder in May of 2020 sparked widespread outrage over racial justice. The Chevy Chase ANC quickly formed a Task Force on Racism. Speck chaired a working group that examined housing issues with the intent to “reverse the exclusionary housing practices of the past by encouraging a variety of housing options that will be attainable for residents with a wider range of incomes and backgrounds.”

The full ANC watered down some of the key recommendations, but the need to plan for a greater diversity of housing options was widely discussed and supported in the virtual meetings and on neighborhood listservs that once only featured anti-development posts. Opposition to any new development including new housing is still part of the discussion, but more progressive voices are being heard.

With this new focus on equity, the Chevy Chase planning effort has the potential to benefit from input beyond the usual suspects of affluent, mostly white, long-time homeowners. To broaden the reach of the public engagement process, ANC 3/4G conducted “Information Exchanges” in the fall of 2020. In one session in September, Commissioner Connie Chang convened three residents living in Chevy Chase apartment buildings to learn their perspective and how they’d like to see the neighborhood change. One of the residents who spoke explained how the District’s affordable housing Inclusionary Zoning program enabled him to find an apartment in Chevy Chase, a neighborhood he said enjoyed living in.

The session put a face on the residents who might live in new buildings that many say would be “inconsistent with the character of the neighborhood.” All the participants said that the only way they can afford to live in this neighborhood of multi-million dollar single family houses is the limited availability of apartments and condominiums.

A bold vision for Chevy Chase

The Small Area planning effort is also getting a boost from local volunteer group Ward3Vision, which has put forth its own urban design plan (Ward3Vision is a partner with my organization, the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and I reviewed and gave input on the plan). In an event hosted by Historic Chevy Chase DC on October 6, Ward 3 resident Matt Bell, architecture professor at University of Maryland and principal at urban design firm Perkins Eastman presented a 30-year urban design concept on behalf of Ward3Vision.

According to Bell, although retail vitality has been challenged by recent events, many residents have expressed a desire for more local businesses and engaging civic spaces. Bell suggested planning for more residents who can walk to and patronize local businesses.

The Ward3Vision plan notes four goals that emerged from the Office of Planning’s community outreach to create a vision to guide the plan: quality of life, neighborhood architectural character, environmental sustainability, and social equity. Their plan suggests that tactics to achieve these goals include new buildings along the Avenue’s east side and northern end close to the Chevy Chase Circle at the Maryland boundary. The existing community center and library can be redeveloped with affordable housing, and inclusionary zoning can add affordable homes at other sites.

In his presentation, Bell talked about how on great streets, buildings define the public realm and need to have human-scaled elements. Historic structures like the Avalon Theater and Chevy Chase Arcade building should be preserved, and charming traditional Main Street streetscapes that contribute to community character should be retained. The group’s plans show how a mix of apartment buildings and townhouses can fit into the neighborhood to shape a more walkable public realm, and create a variety of new housing choices for many families who would like to live in Chevy Chase.

The public presentation was well-received by many attendees, but the usual questions were posed - what about building height, parking and school capacity? Bell suggested that parking would be largely underground, and building heights would be lower than those already existing on Connecticut Avenue. Regarding schools, he noted that single family houses generate many more school aged children than multifamily buildings, but that the District should address capacity issues. Former planning director Ellen McCarthy, another Ward3Vision member also at the event, said that school overcrowding is a problem to solve, but should not be a reason to ignore housing needs in the area.

Ron Eichner, also with Ward3Vision, estimated that a full build-out would include roughly 230 affordable homes and about 500 other units. Approximately 100 new affordable homes could be built in a joint-development project with the community center/library, and the rest of the affordable homes could come from IZ units as part of private development.

Eichner said that the Small Area Plan needs to include design guidelines for the ground floors to avoid unfriendly blank walls like those at CVS and Safeway, as well as a public space plan that looks at how to take full advantage of the wide sidewalks, how to create a civic space along the Avenue, and how to accommodate buses, bikes, and pedestrians. A programming and management plan for Connecticut Avenue, supporting activities like a farmers market, or sidewalk art shows would be welcome.

The Chevy Chase DC Small Area Plan area is small - just a few blocks of Connecticut Avenue below the Chevy Chase Circle. It’s diminutive in scale when compared to concurrent small area planning efforts east of the Anacostia River. But despite the Chevy Chase plan’s small geographic focus and baseline of no growth, its potential is significant. Ward 3 has a history of failed attempts at planning for more housing and more affordable housing — from the scotched 2008 mixed income housing plan above the Tenley Library (where the library was rebuilt without the planned 174 housing units above, including 53 affordable homes) to the abandoned 2003 Upper Wisconsin Avenue Corridor Study which suggested 10 story buildings between Tenleytown and Friendship Heights. The Chevy Chase DC plan could signal a reversal from those past failures, bringing about a generational shift from exclusion to inclusion, from a suburban auto-centric past to an urban, greener, more equitable future.

To have your say in Chevy Chase’s future and who gets to live there, join upcoming Chevy Chase Small Area Plan community walks.