Reply to New Cleveland Park library is a missed opportunity

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[quote=Anonymous][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.

[b]Why does a building a block from a Metro station need parking?[/b]

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]

:lol:  :lol: 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.[/quote]

Yet other DC neighborhoods with no parking, and some with poorer transit, have thriving retail areas and those are often neighborhoods with lower average household incomes.

And you may have missed this but a couple of CP retailers closed shop in CP and moved to neighborhoods with less parking so I think some retailers have spoken and don't agree with you.

I get that you don't understand the layers of things that are going on in DC and how things are changing but if you were somehow right that Cleveland Park has it all figured it I think the proof would be a thriving retail sector in the neighborhood which is unfortunately not the case.[/quote]

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