Could Anacostia duplicate Arlington’s success if it allowed taller buildings?

More on raising the downtown height limit, via the discussion at The Bellows.

More pros:

• Business owners want to be downtown because there is already a critical mass of clients, competitors, and support services downtown. If we can’t accommodate everyone downtown who wants to be downtown, we risk sending some of them running to the suburbs.
• The land-banking and tear-down problems can be managed with effective regulation.
• Higher densities downtown should increase residential demand in adjacent neighborhoods, leading to more residential development in the inner city.
• Economics say in a world city economy like Washington’s there is a virtually unlimited supply of users who want to be downtown, and that we are unreasonably constraining development by limiting downtown density.
• Downtown already has the infrastructure necessary to support very high density.

More cons:

• A large continuous area of mixed-use urbanism is more desirable than a very dense downtown surrounded by bedroom communities. It would therefore be beneficial for the city to spread some of the office demand around to the neighborhoods in order to make them more complete 24 hour environments.
• There is so much available space near downtown, in places like NoMa, and elsewhere in the District that we don’t need skyscrapers downtown to accommodate at least another generation worth of office development. Why fight such a difficult political battle and ruin Washington’s aesthetic uniqueness when demand isn’t yet close to outstripping supply?
• The height limit is emotionally important to Washington’s status as a city that exists for reasons “above” mere business, as the head of American government.
• Downtown’s infrastructure is already being used near capacity, as the Orange line crowds illustrate.

More on the compromise:
In our last blog post, BeyondDC suggested keeping the height limit downtown, but raising it elsewhere in the city in places like Anacostia. That would:

• Provide an incentive for developers to invest in other parts of the city.
• Aesthetically “frame” downtown with tall buildings, which could add to rather than detract from Washington’s unique urban design.
• Provide an opportunity for more residential development downtown (as opposed to office development) via a transfer of development rights program, whereby a developer would earn a height bonus on a property outside downtown in exchange for building residential rather than office in downtown.
• Not affect the character of the monumental core any more than do tall buildings in Rosslyn or Silver Spring.

BeyondDC understand’s why tall buildings are desirable from an economic standpoint, but thinks that in this case there are good reasons to take into account interests other than pure business economics. Good urban design, including complete neighborhoods, has to be considered. If there’s a way to accomplish both good economics and good urban design, then that’s the track that should be taken. We think the compromise is that track.

America: “Promising life, liberty, and the reckless pursuit of happiness at any cost, even life and liberty.” –The Onion

BeyondDC isn’t an economic website. Our background is in urban design rather than finance, and our readers are here for planning news rather than money news. But for better or worse all infrastructure, development and planning is reliant on regional and national economics, so while BeyondDC isn’t about to start lecturing on the ins and outs of Paulson’s latest (we lack the education to speak knowledgably about that anyway), we will take a minute and call attention to a point by Ryan Avent that strikes us as particularly salient:

It’s hard to overstate how massive a missed opportunity the past eight years has been. We could have used a budget surplus to finance massive investments (including infrastructure) to secure the next round of economic growth. Instead we borrowed heavily to buy houses we couldn’t afford and a war we didn’t need. And in doing so, we significantly tied the hands of future administrations and generations.

In the long run, if America is to maintain its place in the world we are going to have to stop auctioning off our future for temporary gratification. No more off-shoring the productive economy for higher profits this quarter, no more tax cuts that bankrupt next year’s government, no more exporting small town wealth to China, no more McMansion and SUV for every adult, and for goodness sake, no more rule by NIMBY. Our sense of false entitlement is what got us into this mess, and only an honest reevaluation of national (and personal) priorities can get us out.

And that’s all we’ll say about that. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

In 2006 the gross domestic product for the Washington, DC region (the sum value of all goods and services produced regionally that year) was $367 billion. That includes the suburbs, but not Baltimore nor its suburbs. Assuming 2006 was a fairly typical year:

• Metro’s request for $11 billion in maintenance money over the next 10 years equates to about three-tenths of one percent of the regional economy.
• The approximately 190 miles of streetcar lines BeyondDC proposes in our Transit Vision, costing a very very back-of-the-napkin $6 billion, equate to less than two-tenths of one percent of the regional economy over 10 years, or about 1.6% of one-year’s economy.
• The Washington region alone could pay off the entire federal economic bailout in about two years.
• Each of the 5.3-some million people in the region produce, on average, about $70, 000 per year in economic activity.

Of course, these aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons. We physically can’t spend all our collective economic energy in one place (gotta eat, after all). The amount of money available to the government to spend discretionarily is much, much smaller than the overall total gross economy. But still, interesting stuff.

The result of NIMBYism’s rule.

Take a look at America’s new breed of third world style shantytown. It’s a tent village in Reno, Nevada populated by homeless with nowhere else to go. Get used to the image, because villages like it are popping up in cities all across the country.

Meanwhile, developers continue to build oversized, over-expensive housing rather than reasonable housing for the middle class. They do this because local governments around the country continue to outlaw affordable housing via exclusionary zoning practices that make modestly-sized homes difficult or impossible to construct. Local governments, in turn, have exclusionary zoning because local citizens demand it, or at least accept it.

When so-called starter homes look like this, it’s no wonder we’re in a foreclosure crisis. The American housing market cannot adequately supply housing affordable to the American workforce because Americans are busy demanding that only luxurious products be delivered. As a result, a smaller number of Americans are living in bigger houses, while a larger number of formerly middle class Americans fall through the cracks.

This is just a suggestion, but maybe we should rethink exclusionary zoning. The next time your town discusses residential development, for goodness sake, argue for more, smaller units.