Reply to "We don't really have housing options." Other cities have proactive land policies

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Reply to ""We don't really have housing options." Other cities have proactive land policies–DC needs them too."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live.  DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY.  So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above.  DC and American cities are way late.[/quote]
If you re-read carefully, DC already has all of this stuff.

- Public housing 
- Multi-generational housing 
- Group houses

Check, check and check. It just indicates to me that you haven’t been here very long and should get to know the place before trying to change policies. [/quote]

(I can do snark too:)  I see you don't know much about housing, and you also didn't read the article.

In many European cities there are downtown 5 bedroom apartments for families with kids.  How many of them are there in the DMV?  Miniscule numbers. 
Public workforce housing in DC: nearly none.  In European cities teachers can afford to live in most of the city. Not here. DC's telling teachers to go live in PG County.
Group houses for non-college kids: nearly none.

Look, good-faith people can critique any one of the above ideas.  Many are a bit outside our experience.  But some of them are good. And we should talk about them.

But it's just absolute denial to say "DC already has this."  It's like saying the sky is black or my uncle is my grandma.  Just massively incorrect.[/quote]
First of all, you are telling on yourself. If you actually knew a Black person or any immigrant family you would intrinsically know about multi-generational housing. Clearly you don’t know people of other races or actually know them very well. So that should first disqualify you from discussing housing policy.

Second, Group House living in DC has been a major trend, fact of life and a huge part of the culture of the city going back to the 80s. For a long time, Mt. Pleasant was the epicenter of group house living in DC. I’m sorry that you don’t know this. People still live in Group Houses.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/03/27/whats-it-like-to-live-in-a-dc-group-house-during-covid-19/

Lastly, public housing in DC is run by DCHA. There is a waiting list. Unfortunately a lot of it is not well maintained.

Everything that article recommends is already being done. [b]If you really want to make an impact on housing in DC, the last undeveloped tract of land is RFK.[/b] I highly recommend getting involved in planning discussion for the future of that site. Currently the majority of the land out of the flood plain is being planned for commercial and then some mixed use development. Go demand that this metro accessible property becomes 100% housing and mixed income housing. There could be tens of thousands of housing units there, which would make a real impact. All this other stuff would not because, again, DC is already doing it. 
[/quote]

DP. I don't have time to dissect your rebuttal to the PP line by line, as nearly all of it is wrong or specious (they never said DC doesn't have multi-generational housing, for instance), but I have to call out the bolded. That's just flat-out wrong. Upzoning and increasing density throughout DC would have a much bigger impact on housing than developing RFK alone.[/quote]

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