The official DC Zoning and Comprehensive Land Use maps are incredibly detailed and useful tools that serve specific, necessary functions. They’re also incredibly complex and difficult to read at a glance. I wanted to see a map that showed DC’s land use in the very simplest terms, to know where the commercial streets are, to see how downtown might reasonably expand, and to see where redevelopment is most likely (commercial properties are more likely to redevelop than residential ones).

Therefore I produced the following map, using data downloaded from the DC GIS Catalog. It shows predominantly commercial areas in red, predominantly residential ones in yellow, and everything else in gray.

For those interested in Washington as a living and working city, this is the city at just about its most bare.