Incumbent independent at-large Councilmember Elissa Silverman and outgoing Ward 5 Democratic Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie are both on the ballot in the District’s Nov. 8, 2022, general election for at-large DC Council.

Greater Greater Washington is endorsing the choice of incumbent independent at-large Councilmember Elissa Silverman and outgoing Ward 5 Democratic Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie on your ballots in the District’s November 8, 2022, general election for at-large DC Council.

Seven candidates responded to our questionnaire, and you can see a visualization of their responses here.

This race—she’s not like other girls. For a detailed explanation of why, read our post, “Not a Fore-Bonds Conclusion.” To summarize, DC voters’ ballots will contain a list of seven at-large candidates, including party-aligned candidates who won their party’s primary election in June and independent candidates who have not yet appeared on a ballot this year.

If you’re voting in DC’s general election this fall, you will select up to two people from this list regardless of party.

So, the seats of Silverman and incumbent Democratic at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds are at play. And, McDuffie’s foray into this race has created an unprecedented scenario. That three well-known, sitting councilmembers are competing for two seats meaningfully changes the calculus of this race compared to prior years, where lesser-known independent candidates have suffered, in overwhelmingly blue DC, due to the (I) next to their name.

Questionnaires and the question of committees

We require candidates to fill out our questionnaire to be considered for an endorsement. Following their submissions, as this post outlines, our elections committee makes an endorsement that it feels will advance GGWash’s policy goals.

As the current chair of the Committee on Housing and Executive Administration, Anita Bonds is a considerable obstruction to good housing and land use policy, and, consequently, transportation policy. While it is tempting to elevate the new talent and energy that Karim Marshall and Graham McLaughlin could bring to the Council, we feel that the foremost opportunity in this race is to consolidate votes around the two candidates with the best chance to replace Bonds.

Bonds’ leadership or lack thereof has been a roadblock to the advancement of policies that would create more housing and more affordable housing, frequent and reliable transportation, and fair land-use practices. Our endorsement of Silverman and McDuffie is a function of how we are viewing this race: one in which there is an unexpected, decent shot to meaningfully change the makeup of the Council.

What about Insta-Graham or a Marshall plan?

You thought we were going to endorse Graham McLaughlin, huh? He’s adamantly pro-housing supply, and comes across as full of plans and ready to build. He proposes an extensive, if overly ambitious, grab-bag of ideas—social impact bonds to finance community land trusts, a community opportunity to purchase policy, workforce housing partnerships with employers, full-speed ahead on, very specifically, bridge-tolling as a means of charging commuters driving into the District. It’s energy we love to see that we anticipate will endure past this election.

We could have just as easily endorsed Karim Marshall who, too, is full of plans and ready to build. His approach to housing highlights the complex relationship between supply constraints and intergenerational wealth losses for Black families. How he’d bring about “increased density…in all neighborhoods” that avoids “drastically altering the character of a neighborhood” isn’t clear (and, we disagree that the District has enough vacant properties to meet development needs), but Marshall does possess government experience that has added heft to his political endeavors–and we hope to see him remain involved in DC politics.

Labor 🤝 capital?

As a general matter, both Silverman and McDuffie’s terms on the Council have been marked by both triumphs and missteps. Though Silverman has been a consistent vote in support of policies that further racial equity, she made insensitive remarks during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests (for which she apologized)*. McDuffie’s laudable initiatives to support Black families fit uneasily with his vote against raising taxes on the District’s highest earners, which is paying for, among other things, many, many more housing vouchers.

Silverman can be dogmatic, yet flighty: Despite her continual support for the project, her rambly, Pollyannaish attempts at racial unity nearly derailed further the fractious 9th Street cycletrack almost-vote. McDuffie can be opaque, and opportunistic: When Chairman Mendelson stripped amendments to the Comp Plan proposed by the Eckington Civic Association, which would have legalized more housing there, he rolled over. That McDuffie has used constituents who support more housing, more affordable housing, better public transportation, and safer places to bike and walk as rhetorical foils against whom he can burnish his credibility among more change-averse ones is not an elegant tendency.

McDuffie hasn’t championed housing, transportation, and land-use issues as much as his questionnaire suggests he’s capable of, and Silverman’s sentiments on single-family housing are a little too preservationist for our taste. However, both have voted in support of the Vision Zero omnibus, transportation benefits equity legislation, and budgets that have included dedicated revenue from automated traffic enforcement cameras and increased fees for heavier vehicles.

In this race, Silverman and McDuffie are at each other’s throats, which is particularly on-the-nose when one considers that their current committee assignments are literal symbols of labor and capital. But, we have endorsed each in the past, and are standing by them now.

To the extent that anyone’s actually leading the housing committee, it’s Silverman, who has made it her business to address the poor oversight of the Housing Production Trust Fund (without calling its existence into question), and has steadily leveled needed critiques of the DC Housing Authority. She supported increased density during negotiations over the Comp Plan’s Future Land Use Map, and her questionnaire responses, while rushed and flippant, reconcile the need for more housing of all types with ways in which low, very low, and extremely low-income housing should be subsidized, built, and managed. That’s a GGWash-y stance if there ever was one—perhaps unsurprising, as it’s coming from a former contributor—and one that a new entrant to the legislative branch would likely not be able to put into practice quickly enough to address the severity of housing access and affordability in the District.

McDuffie’s commitment to the development of the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site has been quietly consistent, and his 2013 co-introduction of legislation to beef up requirements for affordable housing in land dispositions is in line with GGWash’s interest in more aggressive uses of the District’s land. The version of himself that he presented in his questionnaire responses was one freed a bit from the exceptionalism that ward politics demands. Should he return to the council in an at-large capacity, we’d like him to sharpen up and, say, prioritize frequent transit over fare-free transit; his preference for the latter in our questionnaire is a red flag from the person who’s ostensibly supportive of bus rapid transit on New York Avenue.

Laser-focused on the housing committee

Housing policy, transportation policy, and land-use policy are intertwined. Bonds’ weak leadership of her committee has had ramifications for all three, though it has most especially affected the production and preservation of subsidized, income-restricted affordable housing. As we wrote in our endorsement of Lisa Gore in the Democratic at-large primary:

Councilmember Bonds has chaired the housing committee since 2015, coinciding with an acute acceleration of the housing crisis. Yet, Bonds’ legislative output on this issue has been light, particularly in the last two council periods, and lacking any bills commensurate with the scope of the problem.

Bonds’ seeming inability to differentiate between Local Rent Supplement Program vouchers and federal vouchers distributed to D.C. residents, a distinction essential to housing affordability at the local level, and her outing of a whistleblower are recent, significant missteps. Further, the committee has functionally abdicated any attempt at meaningful oversight as scandals and mismanagement have plagued agencies that touch the District’s housing policy; behold, its FY23 budget report, particularly regarding the Department of Housing and Community Development, which makes extremely marginal, basic recommendations that the committee should have legislated years ago.

It is common knowledge around and beyond the Wilson building that other members can’t get bills through her committee because of her reticence, disinterest, or both. And a recent Washington Post profile found one worrying rumor about her decision-making process credible enough to address it directly: “Advocates on all sides of an issue often struggle to figure out where she stands and say she is sometimes swayed by the last conversation she had — but also praise her for making them feel as though she’s listening carefully to their concerns.”

Raise the idea of endorsing, or voting, to beat Bonds, and prepare for scoffs. But not in this organization’s memory has there been an at-large general election in which the Democratic primary winner was so clearly weak (36 percent in the primary!) and up against two long-serving councilmembers with their own name recognition, ideological positioning, and dedicated voter bases. We know, too, that we run some risk of a worst-case scenario: McDuffie beating Silverman, while Bonds holds on.

But Marshall and McLaughlin’s big, fresh ideas for housing, affordable housing, transportation, and land use, or anyone’s big, fresh ideas, will get little traction unless Bonds is elsewhere. The first-best chance to make that happen was to elect Erin Palmer over council chairman, and committee-assigner-in-chief, Phil Mendelson. Alas. The second-best chance is this race.

On November 8, you can pick two. If you pick one, we suggest Silverman, because her all-caps energy (“I SHOULD BIKE MORE TO THE WILSON BUILDING”) and intellectual independence are idiosyncratic among her colleagues and because urbanism, as we’ve meditated on before, is, in the District, better yoked to progressivism than to other political postures. If you pick two, pick Silverman and McDuffie. If you pick one, pick Silverman.

Our 2022 Elections Hub is your one-stop shop for GGWash’s questionnaires, candidate forum recordings, endorsements process details, and our endorsements themselves. Access the hub anytime from the “2022 Elections” link in the upper right corner of our homepage.

*The post has been updated to correct an erroneous statement that Silverman has not apologized. We regret the error.