Do Something: The week of April 15, 2024

Weekly, Regional Policy Director Dan Reed and DC Policy Director Alex Baca will share with you an action you can take in the immediate future that has the potential, sometimes great and sometimes small, to increase the number of homes in our region, decrease the trips people take by car, make all of it safer, and not screw people over in the process. This week: the wheels come off on Connecticut Avenue; fourplexes (and more) in Montgomery County; and getting ready for the Virginia primaries.

If you have any questions, email dreed@ggwash.org about Maryland and Virginia Do Somethings, and abaca@ggwash.org about Washington, DC, Do Somethings—or, about whatever you want to talk about. Also: we’d love to see you at GGWash’s Sweet Sixteen, April 30 at Pearl Street Warehouse! Buy tickets here.

DC

OK, here is what I think about Connecticut Avenue: Defund it. When Mayor Muriel Bowser removed the bike lanes from plans for the K Street transitway last year, the council swept the funds from the project. The same is appropriate in the case of Connecticut Avenue, too. No bike lane, as District Department of Transportation Acting Director Sharon Kershbaum let slip at last week’s budget hearing for the agency’s public witnesses? No anything, for anyone.

In previous instances of the District Department of Transportation not doing something that it was supposed to do, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, has frozen its capital reprogrammings (Florida Avenue NE, the road pricing report). Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, too, once introduced emergency legislation to unstick a project (the crosstown cycletrack on 9th Street). Defunding K Street, which Allen proposed and Council Chair Phil Mendelson took up in last year’s FY24 budget deliberations, was a more significant action, by far, because it acknowledged that there wasn’t a way to just, like, reinsert the bike lanes and make it OK. The K Street transitway itself was a $100 million boondoggle that DDOT was about to move forward with despite it hardly advancing the District’s own mode-shift, sustainability, and Vision Zero goals.

Connecticut Avenue is not a 1:1 comparison to K Street. It’s a less substantial project, and the concept selection for K Street was over a decade ago, meaning DDOT was only shopping around one (not-great) design for it this time last year, as opposed to the four that have been well-mined by the public in recent memory. But it’s certainly a sibling. In addition to being angry myself that we can’t seem to grow as a city beyond a deeply stupid back-and-forth over bike lanes, I worry about the effects of the executive continually yoinking the hard work of DDOT’s very talented rank-and-file on the latter’s morale at a time when it’s already fragile (is anyone in the DC government loving going into the office four days a week?).

I sincerely hope that no decisionmaker to whom the fate of Connecticut Avenue is relevant attempts to broker some sort of compromise. The planning process—which, for Connecticut Avenue, has happened, extensively—is the negotiation, and the District has violated its end of the agreement, its commitment to Concept C. Such a refusal by the executive branch to do what it said it would do cannot and should not be addressed by councilmembers trying to figure out how, from the dais, to design a bike lane that won’t make some people mad. Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin should reinvest the $9 million allocated for Connecticut Avenue into other places into his ward. Wisconsin Avenue is right there.

Something is going to happen—maybe Concept C comes back from the dead, maybe Alex’s Defund Dream comes true, maybe a secret third thing—because there’s enough of a constituency in the District of people who bike, write their elected officials, and are totally sick of the mayor pulling stuff like this (including you, reading this, right now). But if you’re upset about Connecticut Avenue and haven’t expressed that to the powers that be, email eom@dc.gov and members of the Committee on Transportation and the Environment (and, if you’d be so kind, cc me at abaca@ggwash.org) and say so. I would be much obliged if you’d also mention the need for the council to Do Something to extract the road pricing report from executive purgatory. It’s another instance of the mayor violating her administration’s own commitments. —AB

Maryland

My mother is the youngest of 13, and a few years after her family emigrated to the US from Guyana my grandfather decided to trade their cramped apartment next to Meridian Hill Park for something bigger. He thought about buying a big house when another option emerged: a fourplex, with two one-bedrooms, two two-bedrooms, and a big yard, perfect for his adult children as they started families of their own. In 1977 he and two of my uncles bought a building in Petworth we’d call Second Street.

There are thousands of little brick buildings like this in our region, many of which were built in the 1940s as people flooded into our region after World War II. Like Second Street they served as launchpads for people putting down roots here. Even as my family spread out into Maryland and Virginia and as far away as Florida, this building remained home base for holidays and gatherings for nearly half a century.

A few weeks ago, I attended a “listening session” at the Montgomery County Planning Board for Attainable Housing Strategies, an effort to produce more, and more affordably-priced homes, in a county where the median home price topped $600,000 last year. Buildings like Second Street could be part of it: county planners recommend opening up the county’s single-family zones–which allow just one house per lot on most of the residential land in Montgomery County–to duplexes or triplexes, and near transit stations, fourplexes. Over the next few months, the Planning Board will consider those suggestions, make their own, and give feedback to the County Council, whose job it is to actually change the zoning.

Three-fourths of the speakers were in favor, an encouraging sign and a reminder that most people like things. Those who opposed the recommendations—many of whom came from the county’s wealthiest neighborhoods—used some version of the phrase “one size fits all,” as in, their community had special circumstances and if the county was to change zoning, they deserved a special solution.

But consider the fourplex, versions of which you’ll find all over the DC region, from Chevy Chase to Columbia Heights to Arlington to College Park and even as far out as Damascus. On my own block in Silver Spring, there are several. Eighty years ago, this was a “one size fits all” solution for many different kinds of communities, and single-family zoning isn’t that much different. The houses might look different from neighborhood to neighborhood, but they’re all held to the same standards for height or setbacks and so on.

Montgomery County has stepped up its commitment to racial equity in recent years, and that’s one rationale for single-family zoning reform: the houses themselves aren’t inherently good or bad, but the policy was designed to keep non-white or less affluent people out of certain neighborhoods. My grandfather’s building, and the kind of people who lived in it, were targeted by these laws. So it seems only fair that if we’re going to change single-family zones, we should do it across the board. (Compare that to Prince George’s County, which will “pilot” duplexes and triplexes in a single neighborhood: Queens Chapel Manor, a middle-ish class community in Hyattsville that already has a mix of different housing types. We’ll come back to that another day.)

There are lots of details in Attainable Housing Strategies, and while I’m generally on board with the recommendations, it’s important to see what the new Planning Board will do. Will they concur with staff, or will they seek some compromise with neighbors who don’t want “one size fits all”? For now, the best thing you can do is let Planning Board members know you support the staff recommendations. Here’s our testimony, which you can crib from.

If you have a few minutes: email the Planning Board at mcp-chair [at] mncppc-mc [dot] org, address it to Chair Artie Harris and members of the Montgomery County Planning Board, and say “I support the staff recommendations for Attainable Housing Strategies, and I urge the board to approve them.” As always, bcc me at dreed [at] ggwash [dot] org so I know you sent it.—DR

Virginia

I’m preoccupied bugging Arlington and Alexandria candidates to fill out their endorsement questionnaires, so your Do Something this week is, if you personally know anyone running for Alexandria City Council, tell them how much you’d love to hear their thoughts on land use and transportation issues. (I’m serious, but only if you’re actually close enough to a candidate or sitting councilmember to ask them. Don’t be weird.) Questionnaires are due at the end of next week, and then we’ll post them here for everyone to read before making our endorsement in early May.—DR

Your support of GGWash enables us, Dan and Alex, to do our jobs. Our jobs are knowing how development and planning works in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. If it’s appropriate to take action to advance our goals, which we hope you share, we can let you know what will have the most impact, and how to do it well. You can make a financial contribution to GGWash here. And if you want to see Do Something in your inbox, scroll down and sign up for our daily emails.