You say that one benefit of increased density is that, "we would have a much stronger tax base and could provide a much higher level of municipal services and a lower level of taxation."
As a former resident of Manhattan, this reads as wishful thinking. Manhattan is extremely dense and full of rich people, but the taxes are very high and the municipal services are embarrassing. To what extent are we prevented from what should be obvious outcomes by the reality of our limited state capacity?
Move government branches out of DC and redistribute them across the country, which should cause a local collapse in housing demand resulting in more affordable housing. Most of government can be run via zoom. I call this plan the detroitifcation of DC. I suspect this would be a nationally very popular change.
"In terms of the more fundamental issues the city grapples with, over 40% of DCPS students are currently classified as “at-risk” because they are either homeless, in the child protective services system, or their parents are poor enough to qualify for SNAP or TANF.
New market-rate housing would not displace those students, but it would dilute their presence in the system. On a superficial level that would make the graduation rate and college enrollment numbers look better, but on a non-superficial level, it would genuinely make more resources available for those in need."
It would also have the benefit of those lower-income students being a part of a cohort of richer students. Most people get jobs based on people they know. My current job I was recruited by my first-grade best friend.
In any plan like you suggest that includes substantial fees for new development, you may want to consider having those fees spread out over the first dozen years after the building gets its certificate of occupancy rather than being paid up front. Ideally the fees are assessed in years 3 through 12.
While in a theoretical model, it shouldn’t matter, as a practical matter soft costs like impact and neighborhood fees are much more challenging to finance when developing a building. Paying them over time is viewed just like any other property tax or municipal assessment.
If the goal is housing abundance, it’s important to focus on reducing the financial and practical barriers to getting the housing actually built. Land use rules and citizen veto points matter. The idiosyncratic issues that developers face in putting the project financing together matter a lot too.
I should add that the whole parking situation will change dramatically as the shift towards EVs in municipal settings increases. Where were we all planning on putting those? Will it even be legal for a conventional vehicle to park in a space with a charging terminal? If not I suspect whole lot more parking will be required.
This is an interesting problem. Do you require multi-story apartment buildings to not only have underground parking but be equipped with chargers as well? Part of the problem with deployment of charging infrastructure right now and driving an EV is you basically have to have a home first. Where you can install a charging station. Otherwise you are screwed.
The term 'dense walkable' is very much like the term 'neoliberal'. Everybody thinks they know what that means and they are usually very different things. The people who imagine that it is some sort of traffic free paradise where all the goods and services they require are readily available for everyone within walking distance or short commutes are dreaming. That literally cannot exist except on an extremely minute level.
The idea that you can dramatically increase density without increasing traffic is just ridiculous. As is the idea that municipal services don't require growth. Nope. You do need more police officers and fire services vehicles. Also a lot more waste services. And those walkable high density neighborhoods also need a way for the goods and services you require to themselves be serviced. And that means higher traffic regardless of who has parking permits.
By the way your proposal regarding parking permits sounds suspiciously like cab medallions. And we all know how that works out.
> The idea that you can dramatically increase density without increasing traffic is just ridiculous.
You may not be able to Solve Traffic, but you certainly can get to the point where traffic doesn't have much of an impact because there are viable alternatives to driving. If I could bike around my city safely, I'd generally have no reason to drive so would have no reason to care about any traffic!
I say this as a former resident of Palisades DC: there’s nothing in this proposal for the average Ward 3 resident save a lot of disruption and, possibly, a bit of cash that’ll do you little good if you’re moving to another part of the DC area.
This is good. I would go so far as to guarantee (where appropriate - it may depend on the specific neighborhood) *off-street* parking to incumbent (or even some new) residents in exchange for increased density, if it can be combined with some sort of financial incentive not to drive often. I think there may be ways to do that, at least in certain places.
On the concessions to left-NIMBYs, I'm ambivalent about the ideas, but IMO the YIMBYs and social justice advocates clearly misunderstand the real purpose of the current neighborhood-based vetocracy system. The idea of allowing the poorest neighborhoods to opt out implies the rationale for the current "community veto" process is to give a voice to different communities. By prioritizing voices for underprivileged communities we could have the "good" aspects of this while not sacrificing the benefits of encouraging development in rich areas.
I think this is kind of reverse to the real reason for having these sorts of community vetos. In reality rich neighborhoods will organize and have councilmembers and mayors thrown out of office if something happens that they don't like. They tend to vote, donate, and organize very effectively, and their influence goes up an order of magnitude in a low turnout/low information local election. So the rich neighborhoods and elected officials have worked together to arrange a system where people who show up at meetings have a veto on anything that happens in their neighborhood... this protects the rich neighborhoods from things they don't like and protects elected officials from an organized groundswell for their seats originating from rich/engaged residents.
So a proposal to replace the current community input process where rich people have a ton of sway with a new process where only underprivileged neighborhoods get a say cannot work, because the point of the old system is to give rich people for of a say. Rich neighborhoods will respond to the above settlement by organizing winning council elections...
Dense DC (and other cities) would be great by as a proud Arlingtonian I think we should fill the market gap and make Arlington even more of a dense urbanist paradise. I want Rosslyn to have skyscrapers rivaling Midtown and the Loop.
Yes! It always feels absurd to me that the county is so high on their bullseye concept but limited the building on top of the Courthouse station to 19 stories. How are you supposed to have a sloped down bullseye if you're capping the top heights that low?
It just seems like such a great opportunity. Ballston-Rosslyn is an amazing example of housing near transit……… but the buildings could be even taller and or that model could spread further just by market demand into other parts of the county not just orange line and pentagon city
This is not the main thrust but you say that rural places are safer because of a lack of anonymity, is this true? Like it might be but is there evidence for this?
Removing anonymity is part of the idea behind community policing even for urban areas: teenage mischief type offenses can be handled with both more certainty and less cruelty when e.g. the patrol cop recognized you and knows your parents.
This discussion reminded me of this passage from Sherlock Holmes:
"By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."
Bigger cities having more crime and rural areas less is a trend that holds up globally. From what I've seen the evidence is pretty robust.
Why that is is a different question that I wish I had more evidence for. But the anonymity / lack of social ties explanation seems very plausible, for whatever my random opinion is worth.
Yeah, I did a brief amount of googling and it appears you are at least more likely to be murdered in a city (but it seems less likely to be manslaughtered).
Murder is generally the best crime to go with when comparing rates or safety between jurisdictions. Other crimes just have far too much variation due to reporting rates, prosecution rates and legal definitions of the crime. Pretty much everyone reports murder and agrees on what murder is.
Right, but we can also compare accident rates for urban and rural (we have fairly good data on where accidents occur) and driving in rural areas is far more dangerous which I why I said you were more likely to be manslaughtered. That said not every car accident is a crime, even if there is a death so it is a little hard to know if there is more crime in rural areas or just more miles driven and higher speed limits.
Yeah I didn't mean to imply manslaughter data is less trustworthy than murder. I just know that murder is the stat most criminologists defer to when comparing crime rates. Manslaughter seems like it would be reliable like murder is, too, but I'm not as sure that it correlates to other categories of violent crime like murder does.
And for homicide, there is a lot more in urban areas as you said. I guess I always had the impression that urban areas are generally safer than rural ones. And I was trying to interrogate if that was true. And for homicide it's very much not. So I wondered if it was for other types of being killed. And it's a little more complicated there.
I lived in lower Manhattan for a decade and I’ve lived in a town of 700. Everyone in a town of 700 knows when there is a stranger in town. Everyone knows who the petty thief is. (Other crimes may be happening behind closed doors of course but property crimes are easily solved.)
I studied abroad on an island of 2000 people. When a kid stole a classmate’s expensive fishinf pole to local elders made him give it back and apologize. When they figured out who was stealing meat from people’s outdoor freezers, he turned himself in when he heard they were getting a posse together (after I left, but on my Facebook feed).
I think that’s exactly right: In a rural area everyone knows which cars drive by every day, everyone knows the UPS driver, the UPS driver knows who and what belongs where and when and what’s out of place.
This is a good plan but if you really want it to be adopted, write it up as a federal statute, and get it passed through Congress. As our national capital, DC belongs to the whole country, and as such it's the perfect city for trying and demoing new models for urban policy that other cities might then adopt.
Even the modest concessions to political reality here are not enough. A plan like this will never get through a big city government unless it's successfully demoed in a proof of concept model somewhere else. And that includes the DC city government. The small c conservativism and power of vested local interests in cities is too great.
Matt I love this, but I think you’re missing one reason people will fiercely push back:
Suppose you like living in DC as it is (medium density, walkable). It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to. So the big profit you make by selling isn’t enough to let you get the lifestyle you love back. People know this; it’s one of the reasons they fight so hard for “preservation.”
A true abundance solution needs to also include the creation of new walkable urban towns. Not the baloney fake lifestyle suburbs that have old colonial architecture and a retail street, but real walkable places built on the pre-war planning model instead of the post-war planning model.
Lacking a comparable alternative place to move to, people will still have strong incentives to fight against meaningful change being allowed in DC.
>>It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to.<<
What percentage of people would really be hurt by greater density? Safer streets, better shopping, more transit options, more dining options—these are all good, aren't they? Yes, in any large jurisdiction you're going to find outliers. But I suspect in actual practice, a very large percentage of incumbents would welcome the changes as time goes by. Very few would want to "cash out" because they're disgruntled by changes. (Getting them to back the plan in the beginning is the heavy lift.)
Also, I think most people who would "cash out" of a home in DC after living there for quite a while would do so because they A) have to transfer to a different city; B) or want to retire, perhaps to a suitable community, or warmer climate, or what have you; C) or maybe they just want a back yard or different schooling options for kids.
I'm not envisaging a large "Damn, DC's got too many new restaurants and swanky condo buildings these days, but Cincinnati doesn't work for me!" cohort.
I agree the plan would be better for the city as a whole, but I have some skepticism about whether upzoning increases land values. Yes, you can rent more units, but your rent goes down. Whether that leads to an increase in revenues depends on the magnitude involved.
To put it another way, a landlord who only cares about revenue (not neighborhood character) should want THEIR land to be upzoned, and no one else's. That way rents stay high and they get to sell more. It's possible downzoning is solving the landlords' collective action dilemma. It's also possible cities are SO downzoned that housing capacity is pushed below the revenue maximizing level. Does anyone know of any papers trying to measure what size of that cities are on?
So if I understand correctly, if these ideas are implemented, and someone new moves to DC, buys a townhouse, they won't have any place to park their car? The plan is to force all newcomers to give up their car?
Someone new who moves to DC can choose to buy a townhouse with parking. Or they can choose to buy a cheaper townhouse without parking. If people want townhouses with parking (they do) then developers will build them. If people want cheaper townhouses without parking (they do) then developers will build them.
I think the plan is let them use (improved) transit, walk, Uber.
Barring that they can pay for parking, either by purchasing a parking space (perhaps with their home), paying a garage, or purchasing a residential street parking permit on the open market.
To add to Bronx's explanation, with a street parking permit, you're essentially only guaranteed you won't be tickets/towed for parking illegally in areas reserved for cars bearing the correct permit. What you're *not* guaranteed is an actual place to park your car. I occasionally have PTSD flashbacks of hours spent circling the streets of my old neighborhood in Boston desperately searching for a parking space, all the while spewing gasses into the atmosphere. It's terrible. I think it's clear the driving behavior of a lot car-owners in these situations is heavily impacted by parking woes: there are certain times you simply don't want to drive your car, for fear of a stressful hunt for parking upon return. And the system (at least in Boston, I doubt it's much better in DC) borders on the useless for anyone who need to do an auto commute during the day. Because, while you might have a decent chance of getting a space before 4:30pm or so, your chances rapidly diminish thereafter. So a lot of residents simply keep their cars parked for weeks on end (months on end if it's winter) and use them only for trips out of town (Why not? Boston's pretty walkable!). But this lack of turnover, of course, renders the system even more constrained in terms of parking availability. And another factor is it's a real crapshoot as to how close to your building you'll be able to park. I very frequently had to park 6-7 blocks from my building. It's not the worst problem ever, but it does make it impractical to do a major spree at the supermarket.
I experience the driving around looking for a spot occasionally at my work (I work at a large university and have a staff parking pass, but there are fewer spaces than passes).
I misunderstood how parking in DC worked. Thanks for clearing that up.
Street parking in DC is available to anyone with a permit but there are no assigned spaces. Parking spaces for the purposes of this discussion are typically owned or leased and your space is assigned.
You say that one benefit of increased density is that, "we would have a much stronger tax base and could provide a much higher level of municipal services and a lower level of taxation."
As a former resident of Manhattan, this reads as wishful thinking. Manhattan is extremely dense and full of rich people, but the taxes are very high and the municipal services are embarrassing. To what extent are we prevented from what should be obvious outcomes by the reality of our limited state capacity?
I look forward to the first mystery novel where the victim is murdered because th family wants to inherit the free street parking pass.
Here's a modest proposal:
Move government branches out of DC and redistribute them across the country, which should cause a local collapse in housing demand resulting in more affordable housing. Most of government can be run via zoom. I call this plan the detroitifcation of DC. I suspect this would be a nationally very popular change.
"In terms of the more fundamental issues the city grapples with, over 40% of DCPS students are currently classified as “at-risk” because they are either homeless, in the child protective services system, or their parents are poor enough to qualify for SNAP or TANF.
New market-rate housing would not displace those students, but it would dilute their presence in the system. On a superficial level that would make the graduation rate and college enrollment numbers look better, but on a non-superficial level, it would genuinely make more resources available for those in need."
It would also have the benefit of those lower-income students being a part of a cohort of richer students. Most people get jobs based on people they know. My current job I was recruited by my first-grade best friend.
In any plan like you suggest that includes substantial fees for new development, you may want to consider having those fees spread out over the first dozen years after the building gets its certificate of occupancy rather than being paid up front. Ideally the fees are assessed in years 3 through 12.
While in a theoretical model, it shouldn’t matter, as a practical matter soft costs like impact and neighborhood fees are much more challenging to finance when developing a building. Paying them over time is viewed just like any other property tax or municipal assessment.
If the goal is housing abundance, it’s important to focus on reducing the financial and practical barriers to getting the housing actually built. Land use rules and citizen veto points matter. The idiosyncratic issues that developers face in putting the project financing together matter a lot too.
I should add that the whole parking situation will change dramatically as the shift towards EVs in municipal settings increases. Where were we all planning on putting those? Will it even be legal for a conventional vehicle to park in a space with a charging terminal? If not I suspect whole lot more parking will be required.
This is an interesting problem. Do you require multi-story apartment buildings to not only have underground parking but be equipped with chargers as well? Part of the problem with deployment of charging infrastructure right now and driving an EV is you basically have to have a home first. Where you can install a charging station. Otherwise you are screwed.
Office buildings can install them. My workplace has done so.
My building is installing chargers as the space owners requests them. It’s not some insurmountable obstacle.
The term 'dense walkable' is very much like the term 'neoliberal'. Everybody thinks they know what that means and they are usually very different things. The people who imagine that it is some sort of traffic free paradise where all the goods and services they require are readily available for everyone within walking distance or short commutes are dreaming. That literally cannot exist except on an extremely minute level.
The idea that you can dramatically increase density without increasing traffic is just ridiculous. As is the idea that municipal services don't require growth. Nope. You do need more police officers and fire services vehicles. Also a lot more waste services. And those walkable high density neighborhoods also need a way for the goods and services you require to themselves be serviced. And that means higher traffic regardless of who has parking permits.
By the way your proposal regarding parking permits sounds suspiciously like cab medallions. And we all know how that works out.
> The idea that you can dramatically increase density without increasing traffic is just ridiculous.
You may not be able to Solve Traffic, but you certainly can get to the point where traffic doesn't have much of an impact because there are viable alternatives to driving. If I could bike around my city safely, I'd generally have no reason to drive so would have no reason to care about any traffic!
I say this as a former resident of Palisades DC: there’s nothing in this proposal for the average Ward 3 resident save a lot of disruption and, possibly, a bit of cash that’ll do you little good if you’re moving to another part of the DC area.
This is good. I would go so far as to guarantee (where appropriate - it may depend on the specific neighborhood) *off-street* parking to incumbent (or even some new) residents in exchange for increased density, if it can be combined with some sort of financial incentive not to drive often. I think there may be ways to do that, at least in certain places.
On the concessions to left-NIMBYs, I'm ambivalent about the ideas, but IMO the YIMBYs and social justice advocates clearly misunderstand the real purpose of the current neighborhood-based vetocracy system. The idea of allowing the poorest neighborhoods to opt out implies the rationale for the current "community veto" process is to give a voice to different communities. By prioritizing voices for underprivileged communities we could have the "good" aspects of this while not sacrificing the benefits of encouraging development in rich areas.
I think this is kind of reverse to the real reason for having these sorts of community vetos. In reality rich neighborhoods will organize and have councilmembers and mayors thrown out of office if something happens that they don't like. They tend to vote, donate, and organize very effectively, and their influence goes up an order of magnitude in a low turnout/low information local election. So the rich neighborhoods and elected officials have worked together to arrange a system where people who show up at meetings have a veto on anything that happens in their neighborhood... this protects the rich neighborhoods from things they don't like and protects elected officials from an organized groundswell for their seats originating from rich/engaged residents.
So a proposal to replace the current community input process where rich people have a ton of sway with a new process where only underprivileged neighborhoods get a say cannot work, because the point of the old system is to give rich people for of a say. Rich neighborhoods will respond to the above settlement by organizing winning council elections...
Dense DC (and other cities) would be great by as a proud Arlingtonian I think we should fill the market gap and make Arlington even more of a dense urbanist paradise. I want Rosslyn to have skyscrapers rivaling Midtown and the Loop.
Yes! It always feels absurd to me that the county is so high on their bullseye concept but limited the building on top of the Courthouse station to 19 stories. How are you supposed to have a sloped down bullseye if you're capping the top heights that low?
It just seems like such a great opportunity. Ballston-Rosslyn is an amazing example of housing near transit……… but the buildings could be even taller and or that model could spread further just by market demand into other parts of the county not just orange line and pentagon city
This is not the main thrust but you say that rural places are safer because of a lack of anonymity, is this true? Like it might be but is there evidence for this?
Removing anonymity is part of the idea behind community policing even for urban areas: teenage mischief type offenses can be handled with both more certainty and less cruelty when e.g. the patrol cop recognized you and knows your parents.
This discussion reminded me of this passage from Sherlock Holmes:
"By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."
Bigger cities having more crime and rural areas less is a trend that holds up globally. From what I've seen the evidence is pretty robust.
Why that is is a different question that I wish I had more evidence for. But the anonymity / lack of social ties explanation seems very plausible, for whatever my random opinion is worth.
Yeah, I did a brief amount of googling and it appears you are at least more likely to be murdered in a city (but it seems less likely to be manslaughtered).
Murder is generally the best crime to go with when comparing rates or safety between jurisdictions. Other crimes just have far too much variation due to reporting rates, prosecution rates and legal definitions of the crime. Pretty much everyone reports murder and agrees on what murder is.
Right, but we can also compare accident rates for urban and rural (we have fairly good data on where accidents occur) and driving in rural areas is far more dangerous which I why I said you were more likely to be manslaughtered. That said not every car accident is a crime, even if there is a death so it is a little hard to know if there is more crime in rural areas or just more miles driven and higher speed limits.
Yeah I didn't mean to imply manslaughter data is less trustworthy than murder. I just know that murder is the stat most criminologists defer to when comparing crime rates. Manslaughter seems like it would be reliable like murder is, too, but I'm not as sure that it correlates to other categories of violent crime like murder does.
And for homicide, there is a lot more in urban areas as you said. I guess I always had the impression that urban areas are generally safer than rural ones. And I was trying to interrogate if that was true. And for homicide it's very much not. So I wondered if it was for other types of being killed. And it's a little more complicated there.
I lived in lower Manhattan for a decade and I’ve lived in a town of 700. Everyone in a town of 700 knows when there is a stranger in town. Everyone knows who the petty thief is. (Other crimes may be happening behind closed doors of course but property crimes are easily solved.)
I studied abroad on an island of 2000 people. When a kid stole a classmate’s expensive fishinf pole to local elders made him give it back and apologize. When they figured out who was stealing meat from people’s outdoor freezers, he turned himself in when he heard they were getting a posse together (after I left, but on my Facebook feed).
I think that’s exactly right: In a rural area everyone knows which cars drive by every day, everyone knows the UPS driver, the UPS driver knows who and what belongs where and when and what’s out of place.
This is a good plan but if you really want it to be adopted, write it up as a federal statute, and get it passed through Congress. As our national capital, DC belongs to the whole country, and as such it's the perfect city for trying and demoing new models for urban policy that other cities might then adopt.
Even the modest concessions to political reality here are not enough. A plan like this will never get through a big city government unless it's successfully demoed in a proof of concept model somewhere else. And that includes the DC city government. The small c conservativism and power of vested local interests in cities is too great.
Matt I love this, but I think you’re missing one reason people will fiercely push back:
Suppose you like living in DC as it is (medium density, walkable). It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to. So the big profit you make by selling isn’t enough to let you get the lifestyle you love back. People know this; it’s one of the reasons they fight so hard for “preservation.”
A true abundance solution needs to also include the creation of new walkable urban towns. Not the baloney fake lifestyle suburbs that have old colonial architecture and a retail street, but real walkable places built on the pre-war planning model instead of the post-war planning model.
Lacking a comparable alternative place to move to, people will still have strong incentives to fight against meaningful change being allowed in DC.
>>It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to.<<
What percentage of people would really be hurt by greater density? Safer streets, better shopping, more transit options, more dining options—these are all good, aren't they? Yes, in any large jurisdiction you're going to find outliers. But I suspect in actual practice, a very large percentage of incumbents would welcome the changes as time goes by. Very few would want to "cash out" because they're disgruntled by changes. (Getting them to back the plan in the beginning is the heavy lift.)
Also, I think most people who would "cash out" of a home in DC after living there for quite a while would do so because they A) have to transfer to a different city; B) or want to retire, perhaps to a suitable community, or warmer climate, or what have you; C) or maybe they just want a back yard or different schooling options for kids.
I'm not envisaging a large "Damn, DC's got too many new restaurants and swanky condo buildings these days, but Cincinnati doesn't work for me!" cohort.
I agree the plan would be better for the city as a whole, but I have some skepticism about whether upzoning increases land values. Yes, you can rent more units, but your rent goes down. Whether that leads to an increase in revenues depends on the magnitude involved.
To put it another way, a landlord who only cares about revenue (not neighborhood character) should want THEIR land to be upzoned, and no one else's. That way rents stay high and they get to sell more. It's possible downzoning is solving the landlords' collective action dilemma. It's also possible cities are SO downzoned that housing capacity is pushed below the revenue maximizing level. Does anyone know of any papers trying to measure what size of that cities are on?
So if I understand correctly, if these ideas are implemented, and someone new moves to DC, buys a townhouse, they won't have any place to park their car? The plan is to force all newcomers to give up their car?
Someone new who moves to DC can choose to buy a townhouse with parking. Or they can choose to buy a cheaper townhouse without parking. If people want townhouses with parking (they do) then developers will build them. If people want cheaper townhouses without parking (they do) then developers will build them.
I think the plan is let them use (improved) transit, walk, Uber.
Barring that they can pay for parking, either by purchasing a parking space (perhaps with their home), paying a garage, or purchasing a residential street parking permit on the open market.
Or developers can create units with parking, if there is sufficient demand.
Their is no ban on parking spaces or parking garages - developers will add as many as they think they can sell at a profit.
Parking maximums are a thing, though perhaps not in DC yet.
Are parking spaces different from street parking?
To add to Bronx's explanation, with a street parking permit, you're essentially only guaranteed you won't be tickets/towed for parking illegally in areas reserved for cars bearing the correct permit. What you're *not* guaranteed is an actual place to park your car. I occasionally have PTSD flashbacks of hours spent circling the streets of my old neighborhood in Boston desperately searching for a parking space, all the while spewing gasses into the atmosphere. It's terrible. I think it's clear the driving behavior of a lot car-owners in these situations is heavily impacted by parking woes: there are certain times you simply don't want to drive your car, for fear of a stressful hunt for parking upon return. And the system (at least in Boston, I doubt it's much better in DC) borders on the useless for anyone who need to do an auto commute during the day. Because, while you might have a decent chance of getting a space before 4:30pm or so, your chances rapidly diminish thereafter. So a lot of residents simply keep their cars parked for weeks on end (months on end if it's winter) and use them only for trips out of town (Why not? Boston's pretty walkable!). But this lack of turnover, of course, renders the system even more constrained in terms of parking availability. And another factor is it's a real crapshoot as to how close to your building you'll be able to park. I very frequently had to park 6-7 blocks from my building. It's not the worst problem ever, but it does make it impractical to do a major spree at the supermarket.
I experience the driving around looking for a spot occasionally at my work (I work at a large university and have a staff parking pass, but there are fewer spaces than passes).
I misunderstood how parking in DC worked. Thanks for clearing that up.
Street parking in DC is available to anyone with a permit but there are no assigned spaces. Parking spaces for the purposes of this discussion are typically owned or leased and your space is assigned.