Reply to The Pandemic Hit Cities Hard And Then There's Washington, DC

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Moving the focus from SC politics back to Washington, DC.  What the article points out is how DC officials refused requests  to look at how COVID was challenging assumptions about DC population growth, commercial office demand commuting patterns, car use, etc. when the Bowser Admin was ramming the Comprehensive Plan amendments through the DC Council.  The amendments included increases in density and height under the Future Land Use Map in a variety of DC neighborhoods.  Now that the pro-developer, deregulatory changes have been enacted, the DC government finally DC acknowledging that its assumptions were a bit... inaccurate.  Population growth was slowing, and last year reversed.  Personal vehicle registrations in DC are way up, as residents rethought public transit use.  Office space demand has fallen off, as DC now looks to encourage office to residential conversions.  Real estate demand for single family homes with at least a small yard has skyrocketed, while demand for new condos and upmarket rents has fallen.[/quote]

I don't especially agree with this line of reasoning, but suppose that it's true that the District is looking less attractive because of COVID and WFH.  What is the Bowser administration supposed to do about it?  The District has very little available land, which would only support a tiny number of new single family homes, so the city really can't compete on that ground anyway.

If commercial property tax revenue (and sales tax from office worker lunches) falls dramatically, then the city will need to make up the difference in some other way.  Most of those options involve either taxing existing residents more, which could cause more people to leave, or attracting more residents, especially ones who make relatively little use of expensive city services.  It seems to me that if WFH makes the city less attractive for some people, the city's best move is to play to it's comparative advantage and double down on attracting the subset of folks who still want to be in a city environment for reasons other than the location of their jobs.

But, like I said, I'm not that keen on this line of reasoning.  Most of the entertainment and commercial areas are feeling pretty active to me lately.  Obviously there are fewer people in restaurants and more outside, and other signs that not all people feel safe with all activities just yet.  The office-driven parts of downtown are still pretty quiet.  But in general, people seem anxious to return to the same activities that they used to enjoy.  I just don't see this kind of contagion where large numbers of people suddenly decide that they don't like the activities that the city has to offer after all.[/quote]
You started off with a factually untrue statement which people like you like to ignore. The RFK site is a massive area of undeveloped land where a whole new neighborhood of row houses could be built. 
[/quote]

The RFK site is 190 acres, or about 0.3 square miles according to the redevelopment study I found.  At rowhouse neighborhood densities, that would hold 5-6000 people.  At the average population growth rate of the last 10 years, that buys us maybe 8-9 months of growth and would make up less than 1% of the city's population when it was complete.  Certainly not enough to transform the city or its growth path.  At apartment block densities, that buys us more like 2 years, which is better, but we're not going to keep coming up with sites this size every 2 years for long.

I love rowhouses, and I live in one.  It's a great life that I would love for more people to have.  But as long as we have a height restriction that binds through basically all of the downtown area, we can't build new apartment housing densely enough to satisfy the demand for apartment living and justify building new rowhouses so close to downtown.  Building apartments also helps to protect the existing rowhouse stock from becoming a sea of hideous pop-ups and condo splits.  If you want more people to be able to live the rowhouse life, you should focus your energy on relaxing the height restriction (to take the pressure off of scarce available land) and improving transit access and urban planning in the places where it's actually reasonable to build at a townhouse/rowhouse density (mostly in closer-in suburbs).[/quote]

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