Reply to New Cleveland Park library is a missed opportunity

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To refocus the discussion, they did a great job on the Cleveland Park library.  I can't imagine that adding 8 or 10 floors of flats on top would have improved it.  In fact, the site is pretty small, and it's difficult to see where they could have dug an entrance to a parking garage given all of the Metro infrastructure right under the site.  As a PP pointed out, there are a lot of multi-family buildings in Cleveland Park, not just on Connecticut Avenue, but east of Connecticut as well.  Some of them are not exactly top of the market, which means that they offer more affordable rents than new construction.  The situation is not so dire that DC has to be monetizing every property that it has for development.  And suppose they put 75 or 80 units on top of the library, that would be at most 7 or 8 "inclusionary zoning" units in an upscale building, a drop in the bucket for privatizing a public asset.  And as was noted previously, IZ is certainly not the same thing as affordable.  [/quote]

Well we need both market rate and affordable units.  And not building new units creates more pressure to gut older buildings for higher rent units, which in fact just happened to a building a few blocks from the library.

Why does a building a block from a Metro station need parking?

And what does having units on top of the library have to do with the quality of the library - I missed the skylights when I visited - are there some?

And DC in fact is quite an expensive city to live in with Cleveland Park being a particularly expensive neighborhood - the situation is not yet dire but we don't want it to get there and DC to become like San Francisco and the best way to do that is to continue adding new housing units.[/quote]

Isn't this all an academic discussion?  Cleveland Park is in an historic district and has a zoning overlay that limits the height of buildings on the strip.  So it might under zoning be possible to add a floor, maybe two, on top of the library, but that doesn't seem like a very compelling development proposition.

There are a number of rather empty private properties in Upper NW (consider the Dominos lot in Tenleytown, for example) that are developable, without rushing to turn public assets over to private developers.[/quote]

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