Do Something: The week of November 13, 2023

Weekly, Regional Policy Director Dan Reed and DC Policy Director Alex Baca will be sharing with you an action you can take in the immediate future that has the potential, sometimes great and sometimes small, to increase the number of homes in our region, decrease the trips people take by car, make all of it safer, and not screw people over in the process. This week: Zoning for Housing in Alexandria, the Baltimore Red Line’s resurrection, how to say that more density on Wisconsin Avenue is good, and our Sunday afternoon happy hour.

If you have any questions, email dreed@ggwash.org about Maryland and Virginia Do Somethings, and abaca@ggwash.org about Washington, DC, Do Somethings—or, about whatever you want to talk about.

DC

Wednesday, November 15, 2023, is the deadline to submit comments on the Office of Planning (OP)’s draft of its Wisconsin Avenue development framework. OP has a nice little form set up with questions its staff would like you to answer. You will leave a better comment if you read the draft (this is true of anytime you have an opportunity to comment, on anything), and you will provide more meaningful input if you submit an actual comment that answers OP’s questions (a click-to-send action alert is, once again, a meh thing to do).

You don’t have to live in Ward 3 to provide feedback but, as always, if you do: It’s better. Write a comment, in your own words, here. You’ll need to keep it short!

Below are the comments I sent in on behalf of GGWash, which are cranky and specific and technical, because there’s, blessedly, a character limit, so I kept our feedback narrow. Overall, the draft allows for significantly upzoning sites along Wisconsin Avenue, so if that’s attractive to you, tell OP to ensure that the final framework maintains, and perhaps enhances, those proposed plans.

In response to, “The Corridor Plan (pages 16-45) outlines guiding principles and recommendations to support opportunities for more diverse housing and commercial activities as well as an inclusive public life for people of all ages and abilities. There are detailed recommendations on Friendship Heights, Tenleytown, and the area South of Tenley Circle. Do you think the guiding principles and recommendations achieve this objective? Please describe here”:

GGWash is generally supportive of OP’s draft. We request OP ensures that: Page 18: “Housing…should be the principal use along the corridor” is not struck, and “Parking associated with redevelopment should…” includes “should be minimized, and” between “redevelopment” and “should”; page 19: “Encourage vibrant retail by improving the mobility…” reads “encourage vibrant retail by prioritizing the mobility…”; page 21: Housing is given sole priority over “residential amenity space, green roofs, and solar photovoltaic panels”; page 26, 34, and 42: “Welcome a significant amount of new housing for… the growing neighborhood” is not struck.

Additionally, we request that any reference throughout the plan to “special paving” specify that it will meet the standards of DDOT’s DEM, and will not be purpose-built for a given location. And, we are excited to see Page 25 identify small spaces and plazas as appropriate for play structures, which should be a common practice District-wide.

In response to, “The sections on Zoning Strategy and Wisconsin Avenue Streetscape (pages 46-57) outline the regulatory standards for development and streetscape to achieve the framework’s recommendations. Do you think these standards achieve this objective? Please describe here”:

GGWash does not favor overlays, special zones, or other exceptional treatments for specific locations, and we are disappointed to see OP take this approach here. But we are well-aware of the political challenges to increasing density and building more housing in affluent neighborhoods whose historic character has been, effectively, keeping other people out through regulatory capture. If special zones are the best possible means by which to remedy Rock Creek West’s abject failure to meet the District’s housing targets for it, so be it. If special zones are to exist on Wisconsin Avenue so that more housing can be built there, we suggest OP exempt projects in them from the design-review and PUD process, making them by-right. This could be offset by providing more prescriptive design guidelines for the zones. We also suggest eliminating the proposed transition zone, which reinforces the discriminatory concept that greater density than what currently exists is only suitable on corridors.

We’ve got a happy hour this Sunday, November 19, from 3:00 - 5:00 pm at Grand Duchess in Adams Morgan. Please register so we can keep track of you! Come through to talk about whatever you want, which is probably going to include the proposed map amendment, ZC 23-02, to upzone 1617 U and 1620 V Street from MU-4 to MU-10. If that’s the case, I strongly, strongly recommend reading last week’s Do Something; in it, I talk about the appropriate way to approach the zoning commission, which will vote on whether to upzone 1617 U on Monday, November 20, 2023, in a case like this.

If you are interested in testifying or sending in testimony, you are more than welcome to reach out to me at abaca@ggwash.org for help, and, most importantly, you must sign up and submit your testimony to the zoning commission no later than 24 hours in advance of a hearing, which for ZC 23-02 is Sun., November 19, 2023, at 4:00 pm. Yes, that is when our happy hour is occurring, and, yes, you may use my laptop to submit a comment if you’d like to. —AB

Maryland

Remember the Red Line, the light rail that would have connected Woodlawn in Baltimore County with Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore City and died an unceremonious death at the hands of former governor Larry Hogan? It’s back, in a different form.

This month, the Maryland Transit Administration is holding pop-up events across Baltimore about the resurrected Red Line, and they want to know what people think about three big questions:

1. Should the Red Line be light rail, or a bus rapid transit line?
2. Should it include a tunnel under downtown Baltimore (aka “Maximum Tunnel,” according to MTA staff), or run on city streets?
3. Going east from downtown, should it run along Eastern Avenue and Fleet Street (one way each direction), going through the heart of Highlandtown, or should it run along Boston Street, passing the busy Canton Crossing shopping center?

GGWash doesn’t have a position on this yet, but in 2015, Matt Johnson explained why the Red Line absolutely needs a tunnel. If you can’t make any of the pop-ups, there’s also an online survey you can take.

(And for our friends in Montgomery and Frederick counties: this week the Maryland State Highway Administration kicks off meetings for the also-rebooted 270 and American Legion Bridge study, aka adding toll lanes to the Beltway and I-270. More on that in the future, but in the meantime, there are open houses this week in Bethesda, Gaithersburg, and Frederick, and next month in Rockville.)

—DR

Virginia

Move over, Arlington: it’s Alexandria’s turn to tackle single-family zoning. Starting this week, the Alexandria City Council will consider Zoning for Housing, a broad rethink of the city’s zoning code, and there are two public hearings this week where you can speak up in favor.

Zoning for Housing has gotten the most attention for its recommendation to allow up to four homes per lot across the city, including many areas where today you can only build one house. But city staff admit that it won’t produce many homes–maybe sixty in the next 10 years. As Emily Hamilton notes, single-family zoning is just one of the many barriers to housing production.

Thus, city staff are looking at how the current zoning code makes it hard or impossible to build homes that should already be allowed today. We’re talking about things like setback restrictions which say you can’t build houses too close together, or mandating that every house come with two parking spaces, or that homes need to have large lots–the opposite, basically, of how Alexandria’s beloved historic neighborhoods look and function.

Getting rid of these barriers could unlock thousands of new homes, and that’s why we’re focused on them in our testimony. City staff have laid out different options for reforms, and we support two of them: Option 2, which would open up single-family zoning across Alexandria, and Option 3, which would remove parking requirements for new homes near transit.

We also support a recommendation to remove the definition of the word “family” from the city’s zoning code. It may not seem like much, but it’s been used to make it hard to build homes for different kinds of households (like roommates, or multigenerational families, or single people) or restrict where those kinds of households can live. Officials in Alexandria–which was the center of the fight to overturn Virginia’s gay bar ban in the 1990s (!)–rightfully want to show they welcome everyone AND make sure those people have places to live. Taking “family” out of the zoning code means city regulations can focus on making better buildings, not who lives in them.

The City Council will hold two public hearings on Tuesday, November 14 from 5:30 to 11:30 pm and Saturday, November 18 from 9:30 am to 11:30 am, and you can sign up to speak here. You can also write the City Council at CouncilComment [at] alexandriava.gov. —DR

Your support of GGWash enable us, Dan and Alex, to do our jobs, big parts of which are knowing how development and planning works in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, so that if it’s appropriate to take action to advance our goals, which we hope you share, we can let you know what will have the most impact, and how to do it well. You can make a financial contribution to GGWash here.