DC, I love you. Lose the post-breakup energy.

The District closed the book on 2023 with a sense of loss, uncertainty, and finger-pointing, with the inconstant Ted Leonsis’ plans to move the Capitals and Wizards teams away from their downtown arena providing the latest twist in a tale of wider economic and social heartache. Like the fallout from a bad breakup, we seem more interested in what we’ve lost than we are in our own future.

Just like a breakup, however hard things are for a while, there will be a next chapter, and we’re the authors. It’s a new year: time to stop handing off the pen to other would-be authors and start writing.

It’s not them. It’s us.

Like forging a new path after a personal crisis, the way out of our economic and social woes lies within. We have so much going for us, and we have to start acting like that’s true instead of just saying it. Words–“action plans” and leaders’ assurances that we’re a “comeback city,” or something equally redolent of despair–have rung hollow for over a year. Beyond great ideas like bus and bike lanes that DC was already doing (and is now, counterproductively, slow-walking), there’s little progress toward that vaunted return to glory.

Let’s look at ourselves in the mirror: do you like living or working here? DC is a place that’s filled with interesting ways to spend your precious hours–from changing the world to entertainment–and tremendous human capital in the form of smart, talented people who want this place to thrive. A lot of that will stay, especially if we play to our strengths.

The goal’s simply this: articulate a future that doesn’t depend entirely on following the tune of entities that don’t have DC’s interests at heart.

Legally bland

Sure, we have excuses: under Congress’ peculiar authority, there are limits to how much we can decide for ourselves, making it harder to solve problems than it needs to be. But even within that framework, we’ve left an awful lot on the table in navigating our destiny, sheerly because, for the last decade or so, we didn’t need it in order to thrive. But not only did many of our residents decidedly not thrive (a well-established flaw with long-known implications for many of the problems we face today, such as violent crime). In the end, the office-monoculture model wasn’t even good enough to last for downtown.

I highlight “downtown” because several commercial areas in the District are faring significantly better, in part because more people live in those places, enhancing their resilience. It hurts to recognize it because so much of our public purse depends on commercial real estate taxes from the downtown area and the interests that roost there. Money is important for doing good things!

But downtown’s future won’t look quite like it did before Covid, whether or not you liked the Legally Bland atmosphere of offices and fast casual chains, or the revenues they brought in. (You probably did like the money part, but that’s going either way). The sooner we stop trying to recreate a relationship that’s no longer sustaining us, however comfortable it was, the sooner we can nurture what we do have.

Eat, Pray, Location

The most important thing we could do for DC in the long term is to build a lot of housing, especially affordable housing, so that lots of people can live here, pursue their dreams and contribute ideas, innovation, and taxes. It’s a time-tested strategy for growth and resilience that’s worked across the globe, and we know there’s demand: our population’s growing faster than almost anywhere else in the country. But that will take several years–maybe decades–to pay off in terms of generating demand, access to labor, and other forms of growth that rightly excite economists.

In the meantime, what can we provide downtown in the next one to three years that people do like? It turns out they don’t much like being forced back into the office, especially if it seems like that’s a ruse to generate some kind of artificial economic development. To do their work well, sure. Many of us are here to do something impactful, and in-person interaction can help with that (one of my 2024 resolutions is to hold, and attend, more in-person events so I can connect with people). But we can’t control whether bosses do a good job of optimally leveraging in-person collaboration. Many do not. And despite the gnashing of teeth around federal workers, most remote workers across the DMV region are in the private sector, putting their transit and rent dollars outside the direct influence of the federal bureaucracy.

What we can do is create a downtown in which people want to spend time. Here on GGWash, former government official and Councilmember Tommy Wells called for putting “people, not cars at the center of every [policy] choice,” articulating several specific priorities from the long-term, like housing, to the short-term, like car-free streets. We need more influential voices sharing creative energy like this, and fewer public platforms for self-soothing behavior.

A recent CityAge podcast featured Brookings Institution Fellow Dr. Tracy Loh (also GGWash’s Board Chair) striking a similar chord as Wells did, touting cities across the country that invested in urban vibrancy as economic regeneration since the pandemic. “Downtowns that were successful at growing their job market share [have been] making investments in livable, mixed-use, walkable downtowns, because that made those places also more attractive to employers.” Loh highlighted the need for private sector actors to cooperate on generating long-term investment, asking: “Are they open to partnering beyond their group in order to create investment opportunities downtown that wouldn’t otherwise exist?”

Not if they’ve got their eye on the exit. Business leaders rushing for the lifeboats should not elicit nods of tacit commiseration, nor bouts of “why’d she leave me” self-pity. Policymakers have a central role to play, but it’s a role that requires a supporting cast of a dynamic private sector and residents who care enough to do something productive rather than piss into the wind.

After all, our one-foot-in-bed-one-foot-out-the-door lovers are not just commuters: it’s major investors, it’s leaders, and it’s also people like my neighbors who recently told me they were leaving town now to “get ahead of the curve.” We don’t need to rag on these people: we need to stop obsessing about them and start serving those who do want to build a future here.

Waiting to inhale

A car-based downtown is a frail, sad downtown where people loathe to spend time. It’s also unhealthy, with the highest concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the District, and wide streets that we’re scared to cede to anyone but our fickle driver friends. No ward had more pedestrian deaths than Ward 2 for the last five years. Sound inviting?

Right now, our downtown’s central problem right behind a lack of housing is that it depends on people arriving by car, so it can’t do more interesting things with itself. But what if we changed that dependent relationship? Those who don’t love us are leaving us anyway (they always do), and we have a Metro system that could serve a lot more people than it does now, especially by bus. There is no better time (except maybe during the throes of the pandemic) than now when the future’s unwritten.

We will survive

Is economic recovery in the midst of high-profile gloom really comparable to finding your path after a breakup? Having lived for four decades on four different continents, I’ve learned that in matters of human desire, rejection, and destiny, everything and everyone works on exactly the same principles.

We have to stop letting people who don’t actually like it here call the shots. When the ground’s shifted under your feet and you find yourself surrounded by water, it’s time to improve your breaststroke, not keep trying to walk.

It’s wishful thinking to imagine that commuters will ever be back in the way that they were. Downtown needs more people and jobs: that means housing, which will take several years to pay off, and fewer cars, which can pay off in months.

So now we have some years–they will probably be quite difficult years–to build out the kind of DC that people in all the new housing we hope to have want to live, work, play, and raise their children in. That’s what successful, resilient cities look like. DC has all its life to live, all its love to give, and we will survive.