UPDATED: Our endorsement for Ward 3 DC Council

Update on June 15, 2022: Our endorsed candidate, Ben Bergmann, dropped out of the Ward 3 DC Council race on June 14, 2022, and endorsed candidate Matt Frumin. Following Ben’s lead, considering candidates’ responses to the questionnaires we received, and given the evolving circumstances of this race in the weeks since we made our initial endorsement, our endorsements committee met and voted to endorse Frumin for the Ward 3 DC Council seat.

While not a candidate perfectly aligned with GGWash, Frumin shares many of our policy priorities, and we would be glad to work with him to strengthen Ward 3 and the District. Frumin worked on the first-ever Housing Production Trust Fund award in Rock Creek West, supports limited equity cooperatives and community land trusts, and supports expanding DOPA to all multifamily and commercial properties. He is also vocally supportive of road pricing, supports the removal of travel and parking lanes for bus and protected bike lanes, and identifies regional reciprocity for automated traffic enforcement as a top priority for safe streets. Plus – he’s been a bike commuter for years.

Original endorsement below:

Greater Greater Washington is endorsing Ben Bergmann for the Ward 3 DC Council seat. Bergmann’s responses to our questionnaire are best aligned with the ways in which we view land use, housing, and transportation, and are the most suited to address that which will come across the Ward 3 councilmember’s desk with regard to issues in those areas in the coming years.

All candidates with email addresses on file with the Board of Elections by March 12 received our questionnaire. View all the responses we received side-by-side here.

Housing

Bergmann best demonstrates his policy alignment in a two-step that might cause a few double-takes for GGWash acolytes. In response to question 6, “Should apartments be legal on 100 percent of all surface area governed by the District?”: “No.”

And, in response to question 8, “Where in Ward 3 do you think new housing should be built?”: “Everywhere…I am not opposed to single-family zoning, which is why I answered No to Question 6, but I will not defend mansion zones, which is what we have in parts of DC today. Single-family homes are increasingly out of reach for all but the wealthiest because supply of all types of housing is so limited. The result is a steady exodus of families out of the District. By just allowing smaller homes, such as the row-homes that populate other parts of the District, we could greatly increase supply without actually reducing single-family zones.”

Technically, the District probably will have to reduce single-family zones to fully stick the landing on what Bergmann is proposing. But a dogged insistence that single-family zoning needs to go so that housing will be built, and that, then, finally, the cost of housing will no longer be an issue, or that single-family zoning is the only thing holding us back from a nirvana of affordability, is not the way that we will get there.

GGWash absolutely believes that single-family zoning should be eliminated District-wide. We see no value in it, and despise its white-supremacist origins, which have no place in our books today. We will get rid of it in Washington, D.C. But doing so is number many-of-many-things in Ward 3 right now.

The course to actually building enough housing in the District is, in practice, a twisted and complex one that winds through a milieu of other policy changes, not just zoning reform. These include smaller lot sizes; less parking; changes to the building code to make construction more efficient and affordable; permit streamlining; just an absolutely unimaginable amount of new housing, period; historic preservation reform; and, more than anything, shifting the norms of how to live, particularly with a family, in an American city in 2022 and beyond.

Bergmann, of the five Ward 3 candidates who responded to our questionnaire, has most thoroughly considered those specifics. His preferred method to build housing at higher income levels tracks with GGWash’s belief that, even if a mixed-income social-housing program ramps up, the city’s limited public-subsidy dollars should be spent on constructing housing for those with very low or extremely low incomes, while market-rate units should be constructed en masse for higher earners. He was the only candidate to take aim at the size of lots on which buildings sit, which, if not hacked down, won’t enable the density we need, even in a future replete with sixplexes.

A fully fleshed-out ideology of how to make housing more affordable without the elimination of single-family zoning is critical because, in Ward 3, that’s what’s most realistic for this council seat’s upcoming term.

Here’s why: Amendments to the 2006 Comprehensive Plan, passed by the DC Council last year, did increase density on certain sites in Ward 3, mostly along corridors, but construction on those sites is contingent upon more planning. The Implementation element of the Comp Plan states that, in future planning analysis areas, “analyses” (which basically just means small-area plans) “shall precede any zoning changes in this area.”

So, while significant advancements have been made to increase density on a couple of corridors in Ward 3, another several years of even more detailed planning is now required to even start to tap into that new density. Historic district and landmark nominations, which have started rolling in for sites in Ward 3 targeted for new housing, will further restrict the flexibility to plan for new construction.

This is ridiculous. GGWash opposed this language, but we were not as convincing as Chairman Phil Mendelson’s former neighbors in Ward 3, and so it’s a feature of the Comp Plan we have. “More planning” does, at least, identify a clear path, albeit an extremely narrow one, to building housing—not enough, and not in time, but at least building housing—in Rock Creek West, which Bergmann seems best poised to navigate. His suggestion to fast-track developments that meet certain standards is something that GGWash has suggested as a way to make “more planning” more productive, and close the lag time between the adoption of that planning and new construction.

Once the small-area plans and design guidelines that are funded in Ward 3 are shepherded through, it will be about time to rewrite the Comp Plan. Bergmann suggests some modest options for changes to it, such as upping MacArthur Boulevard and Nebraska Avenue to moderate density. Should he be elected, we’ll push him further. As it is, this is a context-appropriate starting place that can’t be as weaponized against him, as blanket opposition to single-family zoning could be.

Beau Finley does grasp that teeing up housing to be built when planning is not just the zeitgeist, but the law, will require a firm moral grounding in addition to a preference for, say, streamlined permits and increased density along corridors. Finley provided textbook-quality responses to nearly all 47 questions in our questionnaire. He has chaired ANC 3C with aplomb, steering its newer, younger, condo- and apartment-dwelling commissioners away from clashes with the old guard and into major wins for more construction in Cleveland Park.

But Finley is enabling more housing production in his current role than he would as a councilmember, because councilmembers, unlike ANC commissioners, rarely vote on individual projects (this is in accordance with the Home Rule Act, and it’s a good thing). It is wonderful that talented, engaged, and obviously smart commissioners have political ambitions beyond the drudgery and petty drama that is the domain of many ANCs. However, we, frankly, wish that Bergmann and Finley, whose beliefs are similar, had coordinated those ambitions among themselves rather than leaving it up to voters and endorsing groups, who do not yet have a ranked-choice voting system that would smooth out the consequences.

Bergmann is the only candidate to explicitly discuss racial and economic segregation: “A community that fights a building that would allow renters to live in a high opportunity area is not a welcoming one, regardless of what their yard signs say. … If we genuinely care about racial justice, and about repairing the damage of decades of segregationist policies, redlining, and racial covenants, or about the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we must commit to reimagining the ward.”

While this makes itself most obviously known through zoning codes—D.C.’s says the goal of the R-2 zone is to “protect these areas from invasion by denser types of residential development”—it is not exclusive to them. Ward 3 is threatened by planning more so than it ever will be by density, and by the attendant spats that could crowd out sound decisions in processes like the Friendship Heights small-area plan.

So, it’s good that Bergmann does away with subtext, stating that “opposition [to development] comes from the same familiar group of ideologues and anti-change curmudgeons.” To do otherwise will lead to another gordian knot of infinite planning, as detailed above—a reflection of bureaucratic appeasement to the District’s most privileged residents.

Ward 3 needs an ideologue to set the baseline for what life there can be. Residents should hear rhetoric about right and wrong. Bergmann, whose views are clearly informed by living in a condominium on Cathedral Avenue with his spouse and two children, is the candidate to deliver it.

On teenagers running for office

Henry Cohen should continue to engage in DC politics. The ad hominem attacks on him, leveled by adults who surely have better things to do than heckle a teenager, are reprehensible, and the unnecessary dunks on how he should be doing his homework instead of running for office are sad little missives.

Despite not answering our questionnaire (and thus not being eligible for our endorsement), he has articulated more forcefully than any other candidate the urgency to provide enough homes, enough affordable homes, frequent and reliable transportation, and a reduction of single-occupancy vehicle trips in the District of Columbia. Cohen and his peers will inherit whatever mistakes we make with regard to Ward 3; his voice, and voices like his, should be considered just as seriously, if not more so, than the ward’s “typical” constituents.

Transportation

All candidates were decent on transportation, committing to finding funding to close WMATA’s pending $375 million budget gap, and demonstrating that they understand that there is not often space for parking and a bike lane and a bus lane. Finley gave a tremendous answer to our inquiry on which major street he’d envision a transportation project for (“I am not sure if I would rather be on the first bus driving down a new bus lane or with the first group of cyclists to ride down a new protected bike lane, but I’m sure my smile would be wider than Wisconsin Avenue”).

Still, while the Connecticut Avenue bike lane is notable, and a twin on Wisconsin would be fantastic, there aren’t an overwhelming number of transportation projects on which to actively engage in Ward 3 in the coming years.

More important than a transportation visionary is someone who believes that they were elected with a mandate to represent their constituents, not to personally address every one of their concerns. Bergmann’s answers suggest to us that he doesn’t view the office as primarily executing constituent services, but rather is very much eager to implement policies on the issues he is running on.

Ultimately, the likely case here is a vote split—not between Finley and Bergmann, but the whole field, which will fracture among nine Democrats. For our part, we find most appealing the candidate who has vocalized what GGWash has long argued is the first, necessary step to changing the law to make housing more affordable: Accepting, and stating, that “a community that privileges aesthetics over people is not one that cares about diversity, equity, or inclusion.”

Visit our 2022 elections hub, where you’ll find candidates’ responses to our questionnaire, information about who we are endorsing, how we arrived at our decision, recordings of our candidate forums (including a Ward 3 candidate forum), and ways you can get involved.