ANC1B April 6 meeting hybrid (in-person + Zoom), supporting 1617 U St. NW - Neighborhood update - 3 April 2023

In this email - 

• Hybrid (in person + online) ANC 1B meeting this Thursday, April 6

• Reminder for other recurring ANC 1B meetings in April

• Why I support density at 1617 U St. NW

Dear neighbors,

I hope you have been enjoying the warm weather - and I especially hope that you’ve been enjoying the cherry blossoms and other blooms across our neighborhood and across our city. 

The focus of this email is to update you on this month’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 1B meetings, as well as to update you on an issue I support - an opportunity for more housing, more retail, and more city services near us at 1617 U St. NW.

Hybrid ANC 1B meeting

ANC 1B is happy to return to hybrid (in-person + Zoom) meetings a few times per year. The next hybrid meeting will be the April meeting of the full Commission. It will be held this Thursday, April 6, at 6:30pm. You can attend in-person at the auditorium of the Housing Finance Agency (HFA) building at 815 Florida Avenue NW. I’ll be there in person, and I hope to see you there too!

You can also attend virtually via Zoom - sign up at the ANC 1B website here. 

The agenda for the April meeting can be found on the ANC 1B website here.

Other recurring ANC 1B meetings

As a reminder, you can always find a list of all committee meetings on the ANC 1B website calendar. You can also find the April meetings listed here for reference (all via Zoom unless otherwise noted):  

• Tuesday, April 11 at 7pm - Transportation Committee 

• Tuesday, April 11 at 7pm - Public Safety and Community Engagement Committee 

• Monday, April 17 at 6:30pm - Zoning, Preservation, and Development Committee 

• Wednesday, April 19 at 7pm - Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Committee 

• Thursday, April 20 at 6:30pm - Economic Development Committee 

Why I support density at 1617 U St. NW

I’m excited to vote to support a proposed map amendment regarding the city-owned plot(s) of land at 1617 U St. NW. That site currently houses a station of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), a station of the Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) department, and a fuel station. With the proposed changes, that site can house so much more for our community. 

What is a map amendment? 

A map amendment changes the zoning for a certain area. Zoning is a set of rules that the government uses to determine what property owners and occupants of a property can and cannot do with that property. When governments use zoning, they usually impose limits on some combination of use of the property (e.g. excluding industrial use), and/or the physical nature of the property (e.g. setting minimum setbacks, requiring that the occupant build parking spaces, or imposing a maximum height).

Historically, zoning in the United States has been used to segregate neighborhoods by race, and otherwise exclude individuals and communities that more powerful people regard as ‘undesirable.’ A 2022 study finds that “racial dimensions are important when studying land use regulations [e.g. zoning], even when the policies in question are ostensibly race neutral.” But the history of zoning is a topic for another day!

What would this map amendment do?

The spot is currently zoned for MU-4. This allows for mixed-use (e.g. combination of residential, commercial, office, and/or other non-industrial use) with height limits of 50 feet.

The office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) has proposed changing the zoning to MU-10. This allows for mixed-use with height limits of 90 feet, or, if inclusionary zoning* is used, up to 100 feet. The loosening of restrictions on density is often called “upzoning,” and I refer to it that way in this email.

There are other restrictions associated with these zoning designations beyond height. The links above allow you to explore more about what those zoning designations mean. 

*Inclusionary zoning (IZ) is one of the ways that the DC government gets developers to build less expensive housing for people who have a demonstrated need and otherwise could not afford it. Many of our neighbors benefit from IZ. However, there are not enough IZ units to meet our city’s needs. (IZ is also far from perfect. There are well documented burdens to applying for IZ - see this Twitter thread of one DC resident’s experiences for specific examples. But difficulty accessing IZ is a topic for another day!).

Why this spot?

The DC government owns the land at the 1617 U St. NW. The current construction there does not meet the needs of DC government services, nor the needs of us as a community. To give a somewhat mundane but pretty concrete example: though there is some green space around the margins of the property in its current configuration, that green space is often occupied by parked MPD vehicles or parked private vehicles that seem to be owned by MPD officers. This results in a degraded experience for neighbors and visitors as this parking damages grass and trees. There are plenty of other ways this space is not meeting our community’s needs (more importantly, it is not helping us provide badly needed housing!), but this is a pretty clear example.

Because of this, the DC government is proposing that the site be redeveloped to better meet government and community needs.

What are DC’s plans for this spot?

The office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) has announced their intention to designate part of the property as surplus. A property that is ‘surplus’ in this case means that the Mayor has determined that the real property is no longer required solely for public purposes. You can read more about that here. 

I strongly suspect that the city will retain ownership of the land itself, and will lease the use of that land to a developer to allow for new construction and new uses. If instead the DC government proposes selling off actual ownership of the land, I will oppose that move, and I strongly suspect the rest of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1B (ANC 1B) will too.

If the property is designated as surplus, DC will open a Request for Proposals (RFP) with certain conditions that it wants to see - for example, DMPED has already stated that the DC government will include a replacement police station, fire station, and fuel station at this site as part of the RFP. Developers will then propose bids on how they would use the land to meet those needs. The DC government, with input from our community via bodies like the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, would then evaluate those bids. If DMPED thinks that one bid is the best for the property, it will pick that bid; however, DMPED may also reject all bids and re-open the RFP, with adjusted parameters.

In the Reeves Center redevelopment, DMPED did exactly that - rejected all bids, reissued the RFP, and started things over again. That was a frustrating experience and a waste of time for our community. But that process is a topic for another day!

How do we balance the many community desires for this spot?

There is a lot of room on this plot of land, but there’s even more ideas about what to do with it. The DC government is already requiring that a newly renovated police station, fire station, and fueling station be put at that location. Councilmembers Brianne Nadeau (Ward 1) and Brooke Pinto (Ward 2) have proposed putting put a library at that location. In addition, I’ve heard neighbors’ desires for spaces for community events and services, as much affordable housing as possible, parking, and green space. That’s a lot of desires for this spot! But we can meet most of them.

The way to meet as many of these desires as possible is to allow denser construction at this site. 

To put it bluntly, the fewer restrictions we impose on this site, the more ways we can be creative in meeting our needs. We can build badly needed affordable housing. We can provide green space to complement the nearby green space at Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park. We can provide adequate parking so that MPD no longer parks their vehicles on our sidewalks. We can’t have everything we want - but we can get a lot closer if we allow more density. And in this case, density means height. 

Here are four specific reasons I support the proposed upzoning of 1617 U St. NW:

1. Allowing parts of the 1617 U St. NW site to reach up to 90 or 100 feet in height is in line with the feel of the neighborhood. The nearby Reeves Center is already about nine stories tall, and both bids for its proposed redevelopment involve matching that height. A building currently used for personal storage at about 1420 U St is also about nine stories tall. A building at the corner of 16th and U is at least seven stories tall, and houses many of our neighbors. Buildings nearby the site on New Hampshire Avenue, V St, and other streets are seven, eight, and nine stories tall; these buildings too house many of our neighbors.

2. Allowing more height at 1617 U St. NW will allow for more affordable housing units. If the zoning were kept at MU-4 with a maximum of 50 feet in height, it seems clear that we would not be able to fit any significant amount of housing at this site. One of my top concerns for our neighborhood and our city is affordable housing; allowing height at this site means allowing more housing, and more affordable housing units.

3. Allowing more intense use of 1617 U St. NW will allow for better use of existing transit. This means we can have more neighbors and more visitors without as much impact on traffic. The site is served directly by the 90-series of bus lines running East-West, and the S-series of bus lines running North-South. The site is three blocks away from the U St. Metro station and stops for the 50-series of bus lines running North-South and a Circulator route. The site is also a block away from each the 15th. St NW cycle path and the 17th St. NW bike lanes, each major North-South bike routes, as well as East-West access to relatively safe biking on T and V streets NW.

4. Allowing more types of uses at 1617 U St. NW will help balance the uses of the U St area broadly. Currently, U St. sees a lot of activity at night, but parts of it are effectively ghost towns during the daytime - especially on weekdays. Unfortunately, in its current configuration, 1617 U St. contributes to that ghost town feel. By allowing for retail, housing, and possibly a library, we can bring in more foot traffic during the day, allowing for a more neighborly feel. I love our U St. bars, but it would be nice to supplement them with a diversity of options for U St. to offer our community!

This is not the end of the process; instead, this is a very important beginning step. We’ll run into questions, concerns, and probably real problems along the way - and I’m committed to dealing with them when they come up. But, well, that’s for another day. 

Today we get started by supporting more neighbors, more shops, more community services, and yes, more density, in our beautiful neighborhood in the heart of our beautiful city.

See you around the neighborhood!

Tucker

Commissioner Tucker Jones
ANC 1B - SMD 1B09
1b09@anc.dc.gov