New Cleveland Park library is a missed opportunity

[Anonymous]

DC council is always ready to pass laws. I'm frankly shocked at the squalor they allow the chronic mentally ill homeless to live in, and their use of libraries and bus stops as shelters. So inappropriate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I worked really, really hard for half my adult life to get as far away from "affordable housing" (and the people who live there) as I could. And I cringe every time I hear people who NEVER grew up poor talk about how they want to import poor people into their neighborhoods, as though they're some kind of pet or horticultural specimen.

As someone who grew up poor, in affordable housing, hear me when I say this: you don't want people like the ones who surrounded me while growing up living down the block from you. You DO NOT want this.

The point is that you grew up in what sounds like pretty dense affordable housing in an area where most people were poor. If you put these units into places that are NOT primarily poor, you create opportunities for the people living in affordable housing. And you diversify neighborhoods in a way that provides opportunities for people who are upper middle class.

Says the white urbanite who's been wealthy her whole life and thinks she understands how to fix the culture of poverty.

If it weren't for the Army, I'd never have made it out of Philadelphia.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I worked really, really hard for half my adult life to get as far away from "affordable housing" (and the people who live there) as I could. And I cringe every time I hear people who NEVER grew up poor talk about how they want to import poor people into their neighborhoods, as though they're some kind of pet or horticultural specimen.

As someone who grew up poor, in affordable housing, hear me when I say this: you don't want people like the ones who surrounded me while growing up living down the block from you. You DO NOT want this.

The point is that you grew up in what sounds like pretty dense affordable housing in an area where most people were poor. If you put these units into places that are NOT primarily poor, you create opportunities for the people living in affordable housing. And you diversify neighborhoods in a way that provides opportunities for people who are upper middle class.

Says the white urbanite who's been wealthy her whole life and thinks she understands how to fix the culture of poverty.

If it weren't for the Army, I'd never have made it out of Philadelphia.

Says the person wh clearly has no clue what the trends have been in dealing with affordable housing over the last 15 years.

[Anonymous]

Driving out of DC today and there was a 20-30 year old woman leaning /lying dazed against a lampost in palisades. If we didn't have harsh weather we would become SF as our council and mayor wish, with encampments everywhere. Why close DC general when there is so clearly a need for hospital grade facility, plus the mayor's promise of 'year round shelter'

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Driving out of DC today and there was a 20-30 year old woman leaning /lying dazed against a lampost in palisades. If we didn't have harsh weather we would become SF as our council and mayor wish, with encampments everywhere. Why close DC general when there is so clearly a need for hospital grade facility, plus the mayor's promise of 'year round shelter'

You are a paranoid and ignorant suburbanite - I'm sure if DC ever becomes like SF you'd be completely comfortably plowing over any homeless you got in your way with your SUV.

DC General has not been a hospital for more than a decade.

Not sure what the Mayor's wishes are and how they would lead to encampments everywhere so please enlighten us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As pointed out earlier, this is all hypothetical discussion. Cleveland Park Library is completed and open. Cleveland Park is in an historic district and has zoning that limits height. There is plenty of land in other parts of the city, including parking lots out New York Ave. that are ripe for housing development and redevelopment.

Textbook NIMBY argument - we should have more housing it should just go elsewhere!

Meanwhile Cleveland Park businesses are struggling and in some cases moving to more dense neighborhoods.

Businesses come and go. A number of new restaurants and other businesses have opened in the Cleveland Park historic commercial district in the last year, so overall the area is pretty healthy economically. Van Ness, with a lot of residential density and day traffic (UDC) immediately adjacent to the metro has more vacant storefronts than Cleveland Park.

Why do the Cleveland-Park businesses tolerate the half dozen or so panhandlers/homeless folks who camp out on the service lane sidewalks on the weekends? Between that and the broken sidewalks and overgrown planters that area is a complete eyesore.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Driving out of DC today and there was a 20-30 year old woman leaning /lying dazed against a lampost in palisades. If we didn't have harsh weather we would become SF as our council and mayor wish, with encampments everywhere. Why close DC general when there is so clearly a need for hospital grade facility, plus the mayor's promise of 'year round shelter'

You are a paranoid and ignorant suburbanite - I'm sure if DC ever becomes like SF you'd be completely comfortably plowing over any homeless you got in your way with your SUV.

DC General has not been a hospital for more than a decade.

Not sure what the Mayor's wishes are and how they would lead to encampments everywhere so please enlighten us.

In closing a very valuable property that has in fact housed the homeless for the past decade and could be renovated or razed and rebuilt as a state of the art facility for chronic homeless, the mayor's wishes are clearly to have encampments in libraries and lying dazed against lampost instead. In designing inefficient family shelters with no published requirements for residents, clear service delivery or good neighbor agreements - she clearly wishes to be SF where homeless have become a nuisance rather than dynamically served populations putting a damper on QOL for taxpaying residents and tourism.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Ask the retailers in Cleveland Park. Ask the residents and visitors who can't find street parking anywhere close to the CP strip. Only myopic urbanists and naive ideological planners believe that no one drives. A few developers, hoping to push their costs of providing off street parking onto the public, say it also. But they don't believe it, as they turn evasive and crimson when asked to covenant that their new development will not get RPP parking eligibility.

Won't someone think of the drivers?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Ask the retailers in Cleveland Park. Ask the residents and visitors who can't find street parking anywhere close to the CP strip. Only myopic urbanists and naive ideological planners believe that no one drives. A few developers, hoping to push their costs of providing off street parking onto the public, say it also. But they don't believe it, as they turn evasive and crimson when asked to covenant that their new development will not get RPP parking eligibility.

Won't someone think of the drivers?

+100 - the DDOT survey of visitors to Cleveland Park a few years back showed that 80% of the visitors to CP were in some manner arriving on foot.

If you plan for cars you will get cars and traffic.

Or you can plan for people and get people.

CP cannot compete against Bethesda for people who want to drive. But for people who don't want to drive it is doing a poor job of competing against nicer more walkable neighborhoods with its stupid service lane and overlap.

I bet Cleveland Park is losing more business to people leaving the neighborhood for more vibrant DC neighborhoods to eat and shop than it is losing because drivers can't find parking and BTW it is not actually hard to park in Cleveland Park though that is in part because so few people want to actually go there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I worked really, really hard for half my adult life to get as far away from "affordable housing" (and the people who live there) as I could. And I cringe every time I hear people who NEVER grew up poor talk about how they want to import poor people into their neighborhoods, as though they're some kind of pet or horticultural specimen.

As someone who grew up poor, in affordable housing, hear me when I say this: you don't want people like the ones who surrounded me while growing up living down the block from you. You DO NOT want this.

The point is that you grew up in what sounds like pretty dense affordable housing in an area where most people were poor. If you put these units into places that are NOT primarily poor, you create opportunities for the people living in affordable housing. And you diversify neighborhoods in a way that provides opportunities for people who are upper middle class.

Says the white urbanite who's been wealthy her whole life and thinks she understands how to fix the culture of poverty.

If it weren't for the Army, I'd never have made it out of Philadelphia.

Says the person wh clearly has no clue what the trends have been in dealing with affordable housing over the last 15 years.

Who cares what the “trends” are? This poster obviously knows a lot more about the realities of affordable housing residents than you do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Ask the retailers in Cleveland Park. Ask the residents and visitors who can't find street parking anywhere close to the CP strip. Only myopic urbanists and naive ideological planners believe that no one drives. A few developers, hoping to push their costs of providing off street parking onto the public, say it also. But they don't believe it, as they turn evasive and crimson when asked to covenant that their new development will not get RPP parking eligibility.

Won't someone think of the drivers?

+100 - the DDOT survey of visitors to Cleveland Park a few years back showed that 80% of the visitors to CP were in some manner arriving on foot.

If you plan for cars you will get cars and traffic.

Or you can plan for people and get people.

CP cannot compete against Bethesda for people who want to drive. But for people who don't want to drive it is doing a poor job of competing against nicer more walkable neighborhoods with its stupid service lane and overlap.

I bet Cleveland Park is losing more business to people leaving the neighborhood for more vibrant DC neighborhoods to eat and shop than it is losing because drivers can't find parking and BTW it is not actually hard to park in Cleveland Park though that is in part because so few people want to actually go there.

Cue the person from the Private School/GDS thread who admitted they drive to other neighborhoods for entertainment and food.

[Anonymous]

Cleveland Park was built exactly for what it was zoned for. It wasn't zoned to be any more dense than that. If you wanted it to be more dense, then city-wide zoning laws needed to have been changed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Cleveland Park was built exactly for what it was zoned for. It wasn't zoned to be any more dense than that. If you wanted it to be more dense, then city-wide zoning laws needed to have been changed.

Zoning code was developed in 1958. It conformed to what was built in Cleveland Park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At this point, it is a historic district and cannot transform. But it is a waste of billions of dollars of regional investment not to have a few more people able to live on top of a metro station.

You realize this causes both development of greenfields "out there" as well as artificailly increased housing prices in the District, right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Cleveland Park was built exactly for what it was zoned for. It wasn't zoned to be any more dense than that. If you wanted it to be more dense, then city-wide zoning laws needed to have been changed.

Zoning code was developed in 1958. It conformed to what was built in Cleveland Park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At this point, it is a historic district and cannot transform. But it is a waste of billions of dollars of regional investment not to have a few more people able to live on top of a metro station.

You realize this causes both development of greenfields "out there" as well as artificailly increased housing prices in the District, right?

You realize that there are almost 2000 new housing units already under permit but not yet constructed within a one-mile radius of the Cleveland Park Metro? And that doesn't include anything east of Rock Creek Park.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Cleveland Park was built exactly for what it was zoned for. It wasn't zoned to be any more dense than that. If you wanted it to be more dense, then city-wide zoning laws needed to have been changed.

Zoning code was developed in 1958. It conformed to what was built in Cleveland Park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At this point, it is a historic district and cannot transform. But it is a waste of billions of dollars of regional investment not to have a few more people able to live on top of a metro station.

You realize this causes both development of greenfields "out there" as well as artificailly increased housing prices in the District, right?

You realize that there are almost 2000 new housing units already under permit but not yet constructed within a one-mile radius of the Cleveland Park Metro? And that doesn't include anything east of Rock Creek Park.

Fannie Mae on Wisconsin Avenue doesn't even qualify as Cleveland Park, and is a whole different neighborhood than the subject of this thread.