Image by Dan Reed.

Weekly, Regional Policy Director Dan Reed and DC Policy Director Alex Baca will share 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: read our ANC questionnaire responses; housing production in DC slows down; take this survey about the future of transit in DC, Maryland, and Virginia; and it’s time for a vacation.

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

As of this week, all the responses we’ve gotten so far to our questionnaire for ANC candidates live in this post, which I update when we receive fresh ones. It’s pinned on the homepage! And, also, as you’ve probably noticed by now, every Do Something, during the 2024 ANC season, contains links to questionnaire responses submitted by candidates in the previous week. Here’s who has submitted their responses since last week (and the week before that):

If you’re running for an ANC seat, we want to read your questionnaire responses!, and I want to post them so that voters can read them, too. Responses are due on Sunday, August 11, 2024, at 5 p.m. If you aren’t running for an ANC seat, you should consider doing so. Nominating petitions, which require at least 25 valid signatures from voters in your single-member district, are due to the Board of Elections on Wednesday, August 7, so there’s still time. Check your ANC and SMD here or here, and see if someone is running for your SMD seat here (click on “ANC candidates”).

I don’t really log onto Twitter anymore. This is a great thing: Leaving aside whether it’s morally sound to use it or not given its current state, I do way more actual work. But, for at least a decade, “actual work” on the things I work on has been conflated with tweeting about them; I’ve had former bosses introduce me as, “This is Alex. Their tweets about housing are phenomenal.” While I appreciated the compliment, there’s a lot more to advocating for housing production than tweeting, but because so much of YIMBY-ish stuff is Twitter-based, there are a handful of instances in which posts have become policy—which fuels the sensibility that tweeting is just as important as, like, building relationships with elected officials and their staffers, or getting your database to sort your contacts by specific geographies, or working with an attorney on a zoning text amendment, or training and recruiting and endorsing candidates. It bums me out that I have definitely lost clout and power in a space I’ve been in for as long as I have because all those things which make more progress toward legalizing more housing need doing, and so, instead of tweeting, I’ve been doing them instead. I know that this bind is inherent to a movement that emerged from online discourse as much as it emerged from real-life organizing, but I still reserve the right to be cranky about it.

All of that is to say that, in my old days, I probably would have written a long thread expanding on this tweet, from economist Joey Politano, which many people have texted me about and, instead, you’re going to get a blog post:

So, yes, housing production in the District is going to drop in the next year and, as a result, it is going to cost more to buy or rent a home. This is bad! As Patrick McAnaney wrote for us recently, developers in the District—and other US cities—are stuck largely on the inability to purchase land on which to build modestly priced housing, which is made worse by interest-rate wackiness. While Patrick and I both think that this will change in the next few years, it has resulted in a slowdown in homebuilding.

Opposition to new housing, much like tweeting about housing production instead of working on things that are more likely to increase it (and, I can say from experience, you are almost always tweeting instead of, not in addition to), is the flashiest apparent cause of a housing shortage. But it’s not the sole or primary reason for the District’s. Councilmembers don’t have prerogative over whether a certain project is or isn’t built, and the stuff that’s legal and easy to build—which is, these days, ~*~luxury condos~*~ or mansionizations, for the aforementioned reasons—does get built. Those types of homes are not sufficient, and that they are built at all here is more than many, many other jurisdictions can say.

The District’s own land-use regulations are, arguably, doing greater damage than NIMBYs. As Joey notes in a subsequent tweet, housing—particularly higher-density housing—has been built in very specific places in DC because, as I’ve noted, all of our things that govern what gets built wheresay that that should be so. Since Navy Yard and the Wharf and NoMa are what they are, we think housing production in the District is going gangbusters, but it’s kinda not. I genuinely love a big, looming, glass box, but a robust proliferation of smallish, plex-y, market-rate infill housing in every neighborhood is probably what’s going to save us as our population, and jobs count, continues to grow; in 2019, Patrick, Jenny Schuetz, and I imagined what legalizing sixplexes in the District would do, and found that “per-unit prices for a six-unit condominium building [would be] about 40% lower than for…three townhomes.”

All this is bleak, and frustrating, especially because influencing how much housing gets built sometimes comes down to negotiations over individual projects, but usually is just years-long, behind-the-scenes, careful work to change norms. And it definitely doesn’t come down to tweeting. Right now, the norm in DC is a) a handful of big-looking new buildings coming online per year, with fights over them bruising enough that they fully capture listservs and group chats, and b) tax abatements for whatever is taking up the most airtime—currently, downtown. DC’s mayor, per the Home Rule Act, has full jurisdiction over municipal planning, which, to be fair, Bowser has taken some advantage of; rightly determining what white homeowners in Ward 3 are not really her constituency, she’s done more than any other mayor to legalize more housing there, though only in some spots along major corridors, not into “neighborhoods.” The District’s executive and legislative branches are both pretty YIMBY, they’re just not as strategic, aggressive, or willing to go as hard as they would need to in order to legalize more housing in more places.

To be fair, the opportunities to do so are few and far between, but the rewrite of the Comprehensive Plan, slated to begin in 2025, is one of them. In the spirit of Do Something, if a likely drop in construction permits is bothering you, you can shoot an email to the Executive Office of the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Planning and Economic Development about it. Say that the District should produce more housing, and that whatever is happening with office-to-anything conversions downtown is not likely to make housing more attainable, so you want to see more housing production legalized and incentivized in other neighborhoods. Email eom@dc.gov and dmped.eom@dc.gov, bcc me at abaca@ggwash.org, and say in your own words that you want EOM to ensure that OP legalizes as much density as possible—like, up to the Height Act—in the Future Land Use Map when the Comp Plan is rewritten, particularly in places where housing has not historically been built. (I’ve gone over how the FLUM interacts with zoning here, and what it means for housing production here.) You could also say that, while it’s very impressive that the District will achieve its goal of building 36,000 new units of housing by 2025, it’s very disappointing that 12,000 of them are not, as intended, income-restricted and subsidized, and that a new, higher target for both market-rate and affordable housing is necessary so that District residents can ensure their government is meeting their housing needs.

The Comp Plan can’t do anything about interest rates; won’t in and of itself make housing more affordable, because it’s not a means by which to subsidize units; and doesn’t really make it easier or harder for an entity, whether a private developer or the government, to acquire land. The Comp Plan is not self-implementing, and it only legally guides land use (like, where there is or is not more or less dense housing), not how much housing costs. But restrictions on density are, in 2024 and beyond, political preferences, not legitimate protection from harms. There’s no need for the District to make it harder for homes to be built, especially in affluent neighborhoods where the worst thing current residents are likely to experience is construction noise, when forces well outside of its control are conspiring against housing production.—AB

Maryland

First: If you haven’t already, check out our Summer RISE interns’ posts about their research projects, including Brianna’s proposal to build a skate park in Germantown and Cynthea’s effort to refresh the Potomac Community Center. They’re really cool!

I need a vacation. It’s been a year since I last went on one, and it’s been a year of big accomplishments: several successful endorsements in Virginia, passing parking reform and a YIGBY (Yes In God’s Backyard) bill in Montgomery County, dipping our toes in the Virginia General Assembly, and of course our big push to secure Maryland’s first statewide zoning reform bill in decades, Moore Housing. Next to me right now, resting on the floor of my home office until I can hang it up, is this photo of me (among many other people) at Governor Moore’s signing for the Moore Housing bills in April.

Once the Maryland General Assembly session was over I said, you know, I’ll take some time off but life always gets in the way. This summer we hosted four awesome interns (see above), and I’m gearing up for a busy fall supporting Attainable Housing Strategies in Montgomery County, and setting legislative priorities for the 2025 Maryland General Assembly session. But there’s no glory in overworking yourself, so I’m taking a well-deserved break and joining Alex up on the Jersey Shore. I’ve packed some books I haven’t finished, tuned up my old beater bike, and looked up some dog-friendly hikes. I’ll be back in two weeks–

But until then: you’ve got until August 4 to take this 10-minute survey for DMVMoves, a regional effort (from WMATA, the Council of Governments, and others) to rethink transit service across DC, Maryland, and Virginia. DMVMoves wants to know more about your experiences using transit, and will use that feedback to make recommendations for improving it. More importantly, you can enter to win one of ten $100 gift cards.

Here’s that link again! This survey is open to anyone in DC, Maryland, and Virginia.—DR

Virginia
You can read more updates from Arlington’s missing middle trial right here, but as we are still waiting on a verdict, why not take the DMVMoves survey, as described above.—DR

Your support of GGWash enables us, Dan and Alex, to do our jobs. Our jobs are knowing how development and planning works in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. 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. And if you want to see Do Something in your inbox, scroll down and sign up for our daily emails.

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Tagged: alexandria, arlington, bicycling, dc, do something, equity, housing, housing shortage, housing supply, maryland, montgomery county, mwcog, politics, transit, virginia, wmata, zoning

Dan Reed (they/them) is Greater Greater Washington’s regional policy director, focused on housing and land use policy in Maryland and Northern Virginia. For a decade prior, Dan was a transportation planner working with communities all over North America to make their streets safer, enjoyable, and equitable. Their writing has appeared in publications including Washingtonian, CityLab, and Shelterforce, as well as Just Up The Pike, a neighborhood blog founded in 2006. Dan lives in Silver Spring with Drizzy, the goodest boy ever.

Alex Baca is the DC Policy Director at GGWash. Previously the engagement director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the general manager of Cuyahoga County's bikesharing system, she has also worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in DC, San Francisco, and Cleveland. She has written about all of the above for CityLab, Slate, Vox, Washington City Paper, and other publications.