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.