Image by Andrew Turner.

This year seventeen candidates for DC Council* completed our extensive questionnaire on housing, land use, and transportation issues. We released each of their individual answers, as well as comparison documents for each race, on our 2022 Elections Hub.

But we also thought it would be useful to take a look at the combined overall landscape of all the candidate answers together. Thanks to some hard work by GGWash Neighborhood member Andrew Turner, we now have these amazing visualizations of some of the key questions from our survey.

We find interesting takeaways in both the points of broad agreement and the departures. Take a look yourself and share with your friends who are still evaluating candidates (remember, DC has same-day voter registration, so all eligible residents can still cast a vote at the polls this year!).

*Since completing our questionnaire, Ben Bergmann and Tricia Duncan have withdrawn from the Ward 3 DC Council race.

Housing and Land Use

Do you support Mayor Muriel Bowser’s goal, announced in 2019 to add 36,000 new units of housing in the District by 2025?

Housing production in D.C. has been uneven and particularly concentrated in certain neighborhoods. Do you support the mayor’s goal to set production targets in each area of the District to more evenly disperse the construction of new housing?

On the forty-three percent of all surface area that is owned by the federal government in the District it is illegal to build an apartment; according to a D.C. Policy Center report, “single-family units make up only 30 percent of the District’s housing stock, but occupy 80 percent of its residential buildings.” Should apartments be legal on 100 percent of all surface area governed by the District?

Would you support amending the District’s preservation laws to remove height and mass from the purview of historic review? Under such a proposal, District historic officials would still review materials, aesthetics and compatibility of designated structures, but overall density would be controlled by zoning the same way it is for non-designated structures.

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act has historically enabled the cooperative purchase of apartment buildings that are put up for sale by a tenants’ association. There are many ins and outs of the TOPA process, one of which is the ability of tenants to take buyouts, if the interested buyer is willing to make them. Buyouts have skyrocketed to, in some deals, $60,000 per unit, making TOPA, functionally, not an anti-displacement policy, but rather a tenant equity policy. Do you think that this is a suitable evolution of TOPA, or should the law be amended to either formalize or restrict this?

The D.C. Council voted to exempt single-family home sales from TOPA in 2017. As a councilmember, would you support reinstating single-family TOPA?

The District’s current Comprehensive Plan was written in 2006 and amended in 2021. Despite an extensive amendment process, it is still out-of-date and still more greatly restricts density in affluent neighborhoods than elsewhere. An April 2020 staff report from Office of Planning states that a rewrite of the Comprehensive Plan should be complete by 2025 (page 8). Do you commit to supporting the necessary budget and process for a rewrite of the Comprehensive Plan by 2025?

Traditional smart-growth planning principles concentrate high-density construction, including apartment buildings, on major corridors. This, by design, leave residential areas off of corridors untouched. Do you agree with this approach to the distribution of housing within neighborhoods?

The mayor has committed the District to attempting a fair distribution of affordable housing production across planning areas by 2050. More unevenly distributed than affordable housing is land zoned for production, distribution, and repair—basically, industrial uses. PDR zones are largely concentrated in the Near Northeast planning area. In a Comprehensive Plan rewrite, would you support a fair-share approach to the location of parcels zoned for PDR, which would necessitate adding PDR zoning to planning areas where there currently is none or very little, such as Near Northwest and Rock Creek West?

Transportation

Internal data for WMATA estimates that bus delays cost the system about $14 million per year. Buses are primarily delayed by sitting in single-occupancy vehicle traffic. Bus riders are more frequently Black and brown, and less affluent, than rail riders and drivers. Would you, as a councilmember, support removing single-occupancy vehicle parking and travel lanes for dedicated bus lanes, which make bus service faster and more reliable?

A 12-year study, published in 2019, found that protected bike lanes drastically lowered fatal crash rates *for all road users* in Seattle (-60.6%), San Francisco (-49.3%), Denver (-40.3%) and Chicago (-38.2%), among others. The Washington Post recently reported that “lower-income neighborhoods in the District recorded eight times more traffic fatalities in recent years than the city’s wealthiest area,” and that the “40 traffic fatalities in the nation’s capital last year were the most since 2007.” Would you, as a councilmember, support removing single-occupancy vehicle parking and travel lanes for protected bike lanes?

Road pricing, or congestion pricing, in which motorists pay directly for driving on a particular road or in a particular area, has successfully reduced congestion, improved air quality, and raised money in London, Stockholm, and Singapore by reducing the number of vehicles on the road and improving transit performance. New York will be implementing road pricing in the next few years. However, many drivers are loathe to pay for something that they currently get for free. Would you, as a councilmember, support road pricing as a means to reduce congestion to speed up transit, improve air quality, and raise revenue?

In 2019, the council budgeted $475,000 for a road pricing study. The study is complete, but Mayor Bowser has not yet released it. Do you think the study should be made public?

Do you support Councilmember Charles Allen’s Metro for D.C. proposal, which would “put a recurring $100 balance to D.C. residents’ SmarTrip cards every month and make a $10 million annual investment in improving bus service and infrastructure in the District”?

Assuming $500 million could be invested in either fare-free transit for all users or guaranteed headways of 10 minutes or less on bus lines within D.C., which would you prefer?

On-street parking occurs in public space, which means that an on-street parking spot cannot belong to a specific individual, and people park in different places at different times. What do you consider the threshold which is reasonable to expect to park in a neighborhood, most of the time?