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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Quick Question. If the Mayors stated goal is to build 36,000 new units of housing across DC and the Rock Creek West share of that is 2,500 units and as stated at some point yesterday current Tenleytown only building encompasses 2,000 new housing units, why are we changing the Comp Plan? We only need an additional 500 units of housing WOTP. That is more than accounted for in Connecticut Ave projects already in place. We can literally not change anything and meet all of the Mayors requirements with already approved projects.

[quote]The mayor’s plan to build 36,000 new units will require a
significant amount of capital. The all-in cost (land, design,
construction, etc.) of developing any rental unit in the District
is about $400,000 to $500,000 per unit based on panel interviews and the panel’s mixed-income case study. At $400,000,
producing the units called for by the plan would require about
$14.2 billion. For Rock Creek West only, assuming a cost
of $400,000 and 2,500 units, the capital required would be
about $1 billion.[/quote][/quote]

This is an excellent question.  I suspect that the official answer is that the mayor also has set personal “affordable housing” goals.  As she isn’t willing to spend money for the District to build affordable housing directly including in Ward 3, she is relying instead on building more market rate housing, through “inclusive zoning” for enough IZ housing to trickle down to reach her affordable goal.  (IZ isn’t really affordable housing but that is a different issue).  Because the mayor doesn’t want to push her developer cronies very hard, the percentage of IZ in any project is only 8 percent, at most 10 percent. So now to reach her “affordable housing” goal, Ward 3 will have to build a lot more than her stated number of new market rate units in Rick Creek West.  The mayor is moving the goal posts now.

But at the end of the day, it’s not really about affordable housing.  It’s really about opening up Rock Creek West and Ward 3 in particular for more intensive, market rate development for her political funders.  They want access to “high opportunity areas” in OP’s lexicon. [/quote]

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