Greater Greater Washington is endorsing Mayor Muriel Bowser for mayor in the 2022 DC Democratic primary.

Three candidates in the race completed the questionnaire: Bowser, At-Large Councilmember Robert White, and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White. Their responses are visible in a side-by-side comparison here.

Bowser, Robert White, and Trayon White’s questionnaire responses and respective government service all have glints of compelling strengths among troubling misses. We voted to endorse Bowser for a third term as mayor based on her administration’s execution of fair-share housing-production goals and a recent, noticeable pivot toward bus priority and bike lane planning.

We came to our endorsement decision after three lengthy meetings, an initially split vote, and extensive writing exercises—thus, the release of this less than a week before the polls close in the primary election. Our endorsements committee yearned for Robert’s progressive values and Trayon’s unyielding focus on Black residents who live East of the River, alongside Bowser’s tangible, if limited and compromised, actions.

That candidate does not exist. Deliberating an endorsement as if they might exist would be misleading to you, and to ourselves. We looked, as we have in our previous endorsements, to candidates’ questionnaire responses, and to the gaps between what those responses contain and what the candidates have done.

The houses that Muriel built

Bowser’s stated goal to build 36,000 new units of housing by 2025, 12,000 of them subsidized and income-restricted, has been transformational, so much so that her opponents’ responses to our questionnaire, on housing, affordable housing, and land use, hew to this structure.

Bowser is the first District mayor to introduce such targets in the modern era. Doing so has not just been an exercise in messaging. An actual number has made it possible to plan for new housing, and has given decisionmakers, and the public, measures by which progress on those plans can be gauged. Bowser’s determination to allocate the greatest share of subsidized, income-restricted housing in Rock Creek West, where it is no accident that nothing like that has been built in recent memory, requires extreme strength in the face of continually mounting resistance. Bowser has successfully put in place the largest-ever challenge to the District’s discriminatory status quo when it comes to where affordable housing gets developed.

That the majority of the primary candidates we’ve surveyed, in all races, supported her housing-production target, suggested an expansion of it, and identified affluent neighborhoods as most ripe for increased housing production would have been unfathomable four years ago. Bowser’s corresponding changes to the Comprehensive Plan were a significant expenditure of political capital, and she has genuinely prioritized funding the Housing Protection Trust Fund. It is hard to overstate the significance of the targets, and the money, in shoring up the District government’s response to the housing crisis.

Bowser has not made a similar paradigm shift with regard to transportation. To stave off the worst of climate change and ensure that not another person is killed by a driver in the District, anyone in the mayor’s seat must aggressively deprioritize driving in favor of biking, walking, taking transit, scooting, or rolling—literally anything that isn’t driving a single-occupancy vehicle. Reallocating street space and managing traffic through road pricing, also known as congestion pricing, are priorities at the top of our list. Historically, this administration hasn’t quite had the appetite for taking space away from cars or charging those who drive them for the costs they impose on the rest of us. Bowser’s forward momentum on transportation policy has come seemingly only after being dragged into it, though her recent budget delivered some encouraging signs.

To that end, the District Department of Transportation’s bus priority plan does have great potential to deliver better service for riders, and most people seem to have gotten the message that bike lanes are fine, actually: DDOT is now more consistently building protected lanes, and connecting those already in place. If the next four years see nothing but an implementation of currently planned projects, the results, while by no means transformative or a serious bulwark against traffic violence, will be nothing to sneeze at.

That’s important, because road pricing will not be successful in incentivizing drivers to choose other modes of transport unless people can reliably take the bus or safely bike to where they need to go. Bowser’s willingness to explore a road pricing scheme—just not one downtown during rush hour, which accounts for the discrepancy between her response to us (see question 31) and her response to the Washington Post—will be made more fruitful by the aforementioned investments. Unfortunately, the mayor has not yet released a report on how road pricing could work in the District (disclosure: that study was coordinated by DC Sustainable Transportation, a coalition managed by GGWash).

The Bowser administration’s scars run deep, and we know that the mayor has permanently lost the trust of many. Her veto of the Council’s fare-evasion decriminalization bill was cruel, and crueler still for its missing political logic. Clearing encampments while many people still live in them is violent, and a gross capitulation to the uglier impulses of some constituents. The apparent distribution of Housing Production Trust Fund dollars to lower-scoring projects, proposed by development teams with evident ties to the administration, is fuel for critics eager to discredit the concept of building more housing. Drivers have killed more people on Bowser’s watch than on her predecessors’, and the non-attempts to establish reciprocity for out-of-state drivers indicate that road safety is hardly at the top of anyone’s agenda at the Executive Office of the Mayor.

On the R. White we’d like to meet

If Bowser’s record on transportation is limited in vision, while moderate in accomplishments, Robert White’s, on both transportation and housing, is the inverse: high on promise, without much action to reference. Robert’s responses to our questionnaire were solidly ambitious, especially on GGWash’s big-ticket items: He said yes to implementing road pricing, legalizing apartments District-wide, and actively redistributing industrial land uses throughout the District, and explicitly stated that discouraging and decreasing the use of single-occupancy vehicles is a necessary goal.

But progressivism without progress is just a posture. In Robert White’s six years on the Council, his legislative wins on housing production have been important, but marginal; a notable foray into transportation saw him pit streetcar funding against public housing, which was unnecessarily dramatic and muddled capital and operating dollars. It’s a limited record compared not just to similarly tenured colleagues, including GGWash’s endorsees, Brianne Nadeau and Charles Allen, but to freshmen legislators Janeese Lewis George and Christina Henderson, whose Safe Routes to School expansion legislation and continued pressure to re-envision I-295, respectively, are appropriately large-scale rectifications of systemic inequities in transportation planning and infrastructure.

And, none of our aforementioned big tickets, which differentiate his responses to us from Bowser’s, have been real features of White’s campaign. He’s certainly supported zoning reform and road pricing when asked, but, last month, he was playing footsie with tired talking points about housing production, and raised the need for undefinable community buy-in. In that light, his questionnaire responses come off as cramming for the test, rather than a to-do list that he’s midway through completing.

Like Allen, Henderson, Lewis George, and Nadeau, Robert White has voted to advance considerable progressive packages, such as an income-tax increase to fund housing choice vouchers and permanent supportive housing, and accountability measures for Metropolitan Police Department officers. But, unlike his colleagues, he has not clearly championed more housing, more affordable housing, and fewer single-occupancy vehicle trips outside of progressive-bloc votes. Legislators who link typical leftward preferences to housing production and transportation safety, including Allen, Henderson, Lewis George, and Nadeau, have embodied that urbanism is not the domain of white guys with Twitter accounts.

Urbanism! It’s a limiting term but, at its best, it conjures those who believe in the power inherent in people living near each other. Through that lens, urbanism is progressivism. But merely rejecting what is happening at present is not the same as creating the future, and we’ve seen a bit too much of that from the real-life Robert White. It’s tempting, but ultimately not viable, to endorse White on the basis of his vision, because six years as an at-large councilmember is a considerable amount of time to have started the tough conversations he’s promising will bring that vision to bear.

Faced with the decision between him and Bowser, whose moves on housing production, in particular, are game-changing, we are choosing our—your—mayor. Work, which can be critiqued and organized against, is more valuable to us than having conversations on spec.

Should Robert return to the Council for two more years, we would not be surprised to see him run for mayor again in 2026. Regardless of his political future, he can walk the path he charted for himself in his questionnaire responses as soon as he wishes, and bring the broad coalition he’s built during this election along with him.

As an at-large councilmember, or as mayor, he has plenty of power to make moves to legalize apartments District-wide, or implement road pricing. And, as a member of the housing committee—to say nothing of the potential of a perch from the executive branch—White actually can institute the ready-made reforms for the Housing Production Trust Fund proposed by the Office of the Inspector General. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority’s forthcoming $375 million budget deficit is a critical, massive opportunity for him to put to work what he learned while overseeing WMATA.

Robert’s campaign released poll results on Tuesday, June 14 showing him within a four-point spitting distance of overtaking Bowser. It wouldn’t surprise us to hear murmurs that the “urbanists” threw this election as some long-held grudge for White’s visible uneasiness toward voting for emergency legislation that would have forced the installation of the 9th Street cycletrack in Shaw, which he initially cosponsored. But considering the many actions that the District’s leaders must take to build a city in which housing costs aren’t debilitating, and where a driver won’t hit you, and where you can walk, bike, or take transit to work without thinking much about it at all, 9th Street isn’t a shibboleth—it’s a tiny speck.

A third Bowser term is perhaps the best time for Robert White to show as much as tell what he says he’ll do; no matter the mayor, they need checking. In the next few years, we want to see him become the champion of an integrated, more sensitive urbanism he is telling us that he can be.

Transparently Trayon

We disagree with Councilmember Trayon White on transportation, both in vision and detail. His refusal to acknowledge, in our questionnaire, that the forced reliance on single-occupancy vehicles is a systemic problem that most severely harms low-income residents is particularly egregious. He does, however, deserve credit for a campaign that has doggedly highlighted the ways in which Black residents, and East of the River residents, too often receive less funding, focus, and prioritization in the District’s policy decisions. He’s also in lockstep with our preference to build more housing, and more affordable housing, primarily in Wards 2 and 3, and kept up a steady refrain to that point throughout his responses.

Filling out an intensive questionnaire that requires deep consideration of how policymaking works, for an organization that probably won’t endorse you—notwithstanding our “dual” endorsement in 2020 in a very different field for the Ward 8 Council seat—is refreshingly transparent. Voters deserve more politicians willing to stand up in spaces where their ideas aren’t popular.

“This is my plan, I will see it through”

The GGWash staff often marvels at how far the collective positioning on our issues has come in recent years. We now talk about where we build housing, not if; we now talk about whether the Housing Production Trust Fund is mismanaged, not if it exists; we now talk about, however haltingly, how to build bike and bus lanes, not if; we now talk about Vision Zero as a failure of the District to change its laws and change its roads, and even the tendency of politicians, the media, and those lurking in comments sections to blame the victim in crashes has faded in recent years.

Bowser, in response to how she would navigate pushback so as to implement her proposals, said, “This is my plan, I will see it through. There are simply too many benefits to too many people and to our economy to not succeed.”

There are simply too many benefits to too many people for the best parts of what the Bowser administration has set in motion—the production of more housing and more affordable housing, particularly in affluent neighborhoods, and the prioritization of public transit in notable places throughout the District—to not succeed. We are endorsing her because we want her to see it through.