Shockingly, Washington, DC does not look like this.

Residents of Washington, DC will continue to be denied Congressional representation because, once again, a bunch of Congresspeople who aren’t from cities want to use voting as an excuse to force the District to drastically weaken its gun laws.

In some places of the country carrying a gun makes sense. If you live an hour from the nearest police station, get the protein for many meals from animals you’ve killed yourself, or have certain jobs, guns are sensible tools to have around. However, urban centers like the District of Columbia are not like that. In Washington the police are always nearby, most people would rather give up their wallet to a mugger than risk dying in a gun fight, and in any event it’s too crowded to use a gun safely without worrying about hitting someone innocent.

Most city residents conclude quite sensibly that the city is better off with fewer guns, for the same reasons that most rural residents conclude quite sensibly that their communities are better off with more guns: Different policies are appropriate in different places.

Wouldn’t it be great if elected officials from both parties accepted that cities and rural areas have different problems with different solutions, rather than trying to force their own local politics onto places that are fundamentally different? Maybe that’s too much to ask.

DC’s Zoning Administrator issued a ruling that DCRA will no longer grant Building Permits or Certificate of Occupancies for restaurants, bars, diners, coffees shops and carry-outs along 14th and U streets (plus adjacent commercial side streets) because of zoning regulations restricting the availability of space to eating and drinking establishments to 25% of the linear frontage of the greater 14th and U Street area.
– Welcome to MidCity

This is a tough game, because nobody wants to discourage investment in the city, especially in places that are historically underdeveloped. On the other hand, there are some good reasons why this 25% rule is a good one.

One of the most basic tenets of urbanism is that a healthy mix of uses should be encouraged, and while people normally think of “mixed use” as meaning the residential/commercial mix, it also applies to the type of commercial. Healthy city neighborhoods need a mix of commercial types just as much as they need a mix of land use types. If a neighborhood becomes overrun with too many of one type of storefront, that means there is less room for every other type. If a commercial district leans too heavily on restaurants and bars, that means it probably doesn’t have enough hardware stores, clothing stores, book stores, barber shops, or home goods stores to meet the day-to-day needs of neighborhood residents. And neighborhood commercial districts that force neighborhood residents to travel elsewhere for their basic needs aren’t doing their job as neighborhood commercial districts.

This is something that private shopping malls have known a long time, and it’s one of the advantages they have over urban neighborhoods that led to the mall’s dominance in the latter part of the 20th Century. Ownership controls the exact mix of tenants in order to serve every need under one roof and reduce shopper’s desire to ever leave or go anywhere else. Every good mall has one or two sports apparel stores, one or two formalwear stores, one or two jewelry stores, etc. And of course a food court. But unless it’s an older mall struggling to survive (and therefore not picky about who signs leases), there is never more than a couple of stores for any one niche. They want to hit every niche, so they can capture as many markets as possible. In the short term that means some potential tenants have to be turned away, but in the long term it makes the whole mall more healthy. It’s a form of delayed gratification that the major commercial developers of the country are very, very good at.

Of course, we don’t really want our neighborhoods to all look like shopping malls, lest they all look exactly the same. Been to one Lids and you’ve been to them all. But that having been said, DC is generally a city that is overserved by restaurants and underserved by actual stores. And while it’s OK for some neighborhoods to develop specialties (such as 14th Street emerging as a furniture district), it’s in the city’s long term best interests to have as diverse a collection of retail as possible.

Zoning has always been a blunt tool, and maybe the zoning for Mid City needs to be more sophisticated. It’s entirely possible that 25% is the wrong ratio. But in discussing the matter we should remember that there are legitimately good reasons why livable neighborhoods don’t want every storefront to be the same.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.

Update: Ryan Avent responds thoughtfully, suggesting that higher residential densities are a better way to encourage commercial diversity, and that as a regional specialty district for nightlife, U Street in particular increases investment in the whole city.

WTOP reports that yesterday the police wrote a $1,000 ticket to an HOV violator on I-66 for his fourth such violation.

At what point does this person start to wonder if they’ve done something wrong?

A developer in Toronto will soon build a 42-story condo tower with zero – zero – parking spaces for private cars. They received approval for the tower in September over the objections of city zoning staff who, following the regulations enacted into law by the city’s zoning code, demanded a massive parking garage be included in the project. The developer says smaller units without bundled parking sell better, and that providing a parking space would increase the cost of each condo unit by $20,000.

This is a perfect example of how government regulation subsidizes and supports car use. If the normal city law requiring parking had been followed the developer would have been forced to build more expensive condo units, with unnaturally easy car access. It would have been an anti-market double whammy, artificially decreasing the supply of needed affordable housing while increasing the number of people driving (since people are more likely to drive if you contrive to make it easier to do so). And of course, since those same laws are in effect all over the city, the result compounds itself across the metropolis and results in an entire city with more parking and more expensive condos than the market wants. Since virtually every city in Canada and the United States has such laws, our entire civilization is over-housed and over-parked.

Good on Toronto for taking a step to change things.

Gaithersburg: Not so bad, but they still mandate a lot of driving.

After last Thursday’s post about Gaithersburg I was contacted by City Council members Cathy Drzyzgula and Jud Ashman, who claimed that their characterization in the linked-to Gazette story and subsequent BeyondDC post was inaccurate. At their request I watched the video of the public hearing in question. With more complete information, I have some thoughts to add to last week’s post:

1. The characterization of the Council as a whole and particularly Ms. Drzyzgula was indeed inaccurate. To the Council’s credit, they seem to recognize the importance of planning, value the principles of Smart Growth, and agree that the city should revisit its formulas for minimum parking. To Ms. Drzyzgula’s individual credit, she seems to be one of the Council’s stronger proponents of good urbanism, and I didn’t hear the statement attributed to her about Gaithersburg’s future as a car-driven community at any point in the meeting.

2. That having been said, the Council still exhibited plenty of examples of car-centric thinking. At one point the Mayor said “parking is one of those issues that really is quality of life; you need to have a parking space close to you.” Council Vice President Michael Sesma said he is “not sure we have the transportation resources necessary to convince people they don’t need the number of cars they have now” and later argued that parking minimums were important, lest neighborhoods near larger developments be burdened with overflow parking. A cars-first bias showed through even when Planning Commissioner Matt Hopkins voiced support for Smart Growth by saying that lower parking requirements would support the “social engineering” efforts by the city to increase walkability and transit use. The message in all of these statements is that driving for most trips is the natural way of things. In truth, there is nothing at all natural about driving everywhere; that only seems to be the case because regulations supporting (and funding) cars to the detriment of other living/transportation arrangements are so entrenched in law that overcoming them is extremely difficult. That brings me to my final point:

3. Despite the progressiveness of some on the Gaithersburg City Council, and despite 20 years as a center of New Urbanism, BeyondDC’s headline last Thursday was absolutely correct – Gaithersburg (and just about all of its peers in the world of local government) continues to legally mandate congestion by continuing to uphold laws that result in a driving-first community. Gaithersburg has gotten rid of some of those laws and is ahead of a lot of places in this region and nationally, but it still has a very long way to go. The good news is at least one person on the Gaithersburg City Council recognizes that – in an email exchange Councilman Ashman asked if I could identify places in the Gaithersburg code that unnaturally encourage driving. Watch for that in a future post.

Want that small town charm for your community? Great. Good goal. But FYI – you won’t get there by slapping down some brick sidewalks and calling it a day. The buildings and how they frame the public space between them is key. Get the right set of buildings and the material of your sidewalk won’t matter.

That point in mind, I can’t get too worked up about Montgomery County’s proposal to ban brick and cobblestone sidewalks. That’s about the least important item on the list of things that actually make a difference to community character, so losing that option doesn’t hurt very much. It might even help, since communities no longer tempted into thinking brick is their panacea may instead focus on the real issues.

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.

Should this be our future? There are good arguments for and against.

As it seems to about once a year, the question of Washington’s height limit has once again come up. Should we keep it? Eliminate it? Raise it just a little? Is there a place in DC for what Federico García Lorca called both poetic and terrible? BeyondDC has opined already, but why not again?

Tall building pros:

• More density downtown, which helps Smart Growth, makes future investments in infrastructure more efficient by centralizing destinations, and increases the amount of retail that downtown can support.
• Downtown would transition from office-ghetto to mixed-use neighborhood. With the height limit restricting supply unnaturally, the overwhelming majority of buildable square footage downtown is used for office space since that’s what’s in highest demand. Residential is less profitable, so it is rarely built. Eliminating the height limit would allow the market to provide many more residential units downtown, turning it into more of a 24 hour environment.
• More tax revenue for the District (less for the suburbs).

Tall building cons:

• Washington’s skyline, currently unique among American cities, becomes less distinct.
• Downtown’s existing canopy of 12-story buildings will face tremendous and potentially wholesale pressure to redevelop. Right now downtown’s stock of buildings is architecturally diverse, since downtown has been constructed incrementally over the course of the last century or so. Architectural diversity is a good thing for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that pedestrians need diverse things to look at, and because diverse buildings breed diverse users, which breed a diverse economy. If the height limit is eliminated or raised there will be pressure to tear down existing buildings and replace them with taller new ones. Eliminate the height limit and pressure will mount to completely replace downtown’s core near Metro Center, home to the densest collection of old buildings, with new skyscrapers. Raise the height limit a few stories (but don’t eliminate it) and that pressure will extend to every building downtown, since property owners will seek to maximize leasable square footage. Any way you look at it, changing the height limit downtown will result in radical and large-scale changes to downtown’s existing building stock.
• There will be more surface parking lots. The big urban design benefit we get from the height limit is that it makes land a premium commodity, which makes it unprofitable to consume land for less-than-premium uses. New York aside, there is no American city with less land given over to parking than Washington. San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia all have large surface parking lots downtown, and all have many above-ground parking garages. Save some Federally-owned parking lots near the Capitol that aren’t subject to market pressures, downtown Washington has virtually no above-ground parking. The urban design benefits of that to pedestrians cannot be understated. If land is at less of a premium, then developers will have no reason to incur the added cost of putting parking underground, and land banking will become more common. Without a height limit, there is a very real chance downtown will start to look like this.

So what should we do? How can we obtain the benefits of added central city density, better neighborhoods, and more money without incurring the costs of homogeneity, wholesale redevelopment of historic buildings, and more land being used for urbanistically negative purposes?

The answer, to BeyondDC, seems obvious: Keep the height limit in the historic / monumental core, but lose it elsewhere in the District. Allow the likes of Tenleytown and Brookland to develop into true uptowns such as Bethesda and Silver Spring, and give Anacostia the chance to become the new Arlington. Doing so would protect the character of the L’Enfant city, and would at the same time extend efficient land use practices across the District. We’d get a more mixed-use and walkable city across the boards, without sacrificing any of the things that make Washington special, and without gambling downtown’s urbanity.

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.

The good: DDOT is studying installation of exclusive transit lanes in Georgetown. Short of spending untold billions on a new subway or ruining Georgetown’s character with an el, the only way to provide decent transit service to M and Wisconsin will be to dedicate part of the surface streets. For years naysayers have insisted that M Street isn’t wide enough to accommodate transit, and that all six lanes of it (including parking) have to be given over to cars at all times, lest the world end. Good on DDOT for considering that maybe 17% (one sixth) of a street isn’t too much to ask in exchange for serving by transit one of the city’s most walkable neighborhoods.

The bad: Virginia’s Supreme Court on Friday struck a blow to the Tysons Metro project, reviving a lawsuit filed by transit opponents that had been struck down by a lower court. At issue is whether it was constitutional for Governor Kaine to transfer the Dulles Toll Road to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority without General Assembly Action. A Circuit Court originally ruled that the state was protected from the lawsuit by sovereign immunity, but the Supreme Court disagreed and on Friday ordered the Circuit Court to take up the case again and decide it on its own merit. The Airports Authority plans to raise fares on the toll road in order to provide construction funds for the Silver Line, so a negative ruling by the Circuit Court could hurt or delay Virginia’s ability to pay its share of construction costs.

The ugly: Homeowners in a Bethesda neighborhood are upset that Montgomery County wants to locate a group home for people with disabilities on a piece of land the locals had hoped would be used to expand an existing park. The fact that for years residents in the Hillmead neighborhood opposed the previous landowner’s plan to build four houses on the property suggests these folks suffer from a sense of misplaced entitlement. They think they deserve a bigger luxury more than other people deserve a basic human need. Shameful enough when targeting the sort of upper middle class family likely to buy one of the originally proposed houses, but when targeting the disabled? Disgraceful.