Reply to Soooo, how is high-density looking to everyone now?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our neighborhood (Cleveland Park in Washington) is called the “village in the city.”  We love that.  It doesn’t have to be Bethesda.[/quote]

It basically is Bethesda...

Also, other people would also like to live in Cleveland Park.[/quote]

There are apartment vacancies and condos and houses on the market right now.[/quote]

Well, of course there are. That's how the housing market works. There are always some vacancies and some housing units on the market. But you wouldn't seriously argue that these vacancies/units on the market prove that there's no demand for additional housing, would you?[/quote]

There’s always demand for new housing at a lower price.  Many people would love to find an affordable flat across from the Metropolitan Museum or in Aspen but that’s not a realistic entitlement.  Closer to home and a bit more down to earth, you could replace a lot of SFHs in the Palisades, Chevy Chase DC and  Cleveland Park with taller and denser apartment buildings.  Some might be cheaper but I suspect a lot would be very high end.  Of course, then you would destroy a lot of the neighborhood character and change the quiet leafy streets and other qualities that people value.  Then those neighborhoods will become a lot more generic looking, just another place to live in DC.[/quote]

This argument is basically, "I live here, and I don't want it to change, so the other people who own property here should have to do what I want."[/quote]

You realize, don’t you, that there are thousands of new housing units in Ward 3 that are under construction or in projects getting ready to break ground.  They range from City Ridge (Fannie site) to 4000 Wisconsin next door (with over 1500 residences between them), the Lady Bird in AU Park, several new buildings in Tenleytown and Friendship Heights, just to name as few.  A good question is where is the local school capacity for these residences, even if only 20 percent have kids of school age?  What is worrisome is that the proposed Comp Plan amendments actually weaken the requirement to consider local infrastructure, such as schools, in approving large development projects![/quote]

There are not several new buildings coming in Tenleytown and Friendship Heights.  There are 2 buildings approved for Tenleytown and nothing approved for Friendship Heights.

The two large projects in Cleveland Park on Wisconsin Ave and the Lady Bird project are a fraction of what is being built in other parts of DC so no Ward 3 really isn't unfairly shouldering DC's housing burden.

BTW the two larger projects were matter of right projects which is to say the city needs to deal with the out of boundary student issue in WOTP schools regardless so your pining for more review would do nothing to address the issue you claim to care about it though it is doubtful you have actual skin in that game.[/quote]

“Shouldering DC’s housing burden”?  To build what, more upscale young professional flats?  The DC CFO - who has an incentive to make accurate projections - projects a rate of population growth in DC that is significantly below that projected by the office of planning and development cheerleaders in the smart growth community to justify their push for upzoning.  As for affordable housing, most housing professionals concede that inclusive zoning requirements, which in DC are paltry anyway, will not make a meangingful dent.  Im other words we are not going to provide a significant amount of affordable housing through lots of up zoning, market rate housing construction and trickle down IZ.  What will move the needle on providing affordable and workforce housing is when the DC government builds such housing itself or in partnership with a nonprofit.  That is likely to be on sites that the DC government owns or can acquire for redevelopment.  That, and doing everything possible to protect existing rent controlled units of which there are several thousand in Ward 3.  Upzoning in fact creates pressure  to remove rent controlled housing by creating economic incentives for developers to purchase and raze older apartment buildings where many such units exist, to replace them with new, upmarket buildings.[/quote]

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