A single-family home under construction along Foxhall Road. This is typical of the only new construction allowed in the Rock Creek West planning area. Image by the author.

Neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park, which are among the District’s wealthiest, have not built their fair share of affordable housing, said DC Mayor Muriel Bowser at a recent panel. And that’s a real problem in a housing-strapped city.

Now, armed with her new goal to build 36,000 new units citywide by 2025, Bowser has indicated she wants to change that. She and former DC mayor Anthony Williams discussed recommendations to add more housing last week during the Urban Land Institutes’s Fall Meeting.

GGWash Housing Program Organizer Alex Baca recently summarized the issue and the advisory team’s preliminary findings. ULI has now released the report if you’d like to read it in full.

Yet the most notable moments from the discussion were not the report itself, but rather the mayor’s strong comments in support of more housing in the area. She said:

“We have to give people a mission that they can embrace or be called out, and they have to explain why they’re not behind this very good thing for all of us who live in the city now and for the next generation of people who will live in the city. People will rationally pursue their own self-interest; we know that. And that is why we have a government to come collect the collective good for all of us.”

You can watch and listen to the entire session here.

The Washington Post’s Robert McCartney commented on Twitter:

She’s serious, and former mayor Tony Williams made same point. They say affluent people need to feel embarrassed about opposing affordable housing, and more density, in their communities. https://t.co/xVvV6Mjs7L — Robert McCartney (@McCartneyWP) September 20, 2019

Such strong words in support of density are rare from elected officials. But neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park have a long history of exclusion, so there is an especially good reason for the mayor to comment in this case.

How Rock Creek West came to be

Rock Creek West is a 13-square-mile planning area in the northwest quadrant of DC, as defined by the DC Office of Planning. Much of it falls into Ward 3, although it also encompasses parts of wards 1, 2, and 4. Many of these neighborhoods are among the most privileged areas of DC. They’re 80% white and have the highest average family income, net worth, home values, and percentage of homeownership in the city, according to the ULI report.

This is not by accident, but rather by design. In the late 19th century, the area saw deed restrictions that excluded African Americans and Jews. Later in the mid 20th century, the Federal Housing Administration deemed this area the safest for insuring mortgages, mainly because it was white and wealthy.

By contrast, it rarely insured mortgages in poorer, blacker parts of DC.

Map taken from ULI’s Affordable Housing Washington, DC report. July 7-13, 2019.

While these explicitly racist policies didn’t last forever, DC has reinforced the resulting segregation by restricting most of the area to detached single-family homes. This keeps it off-limits to most newcomers who don’t have a great deal of wealth. While single-family homes make up only 30% of the total housing units in the area, they account for 80% of the land area.

This restrictive zoning has stymied new development, particularly of new subsidized housing, west of Rock Creek Park. Of the city’s approximately 50,000 subsidized housing units, only about 1% are located there.

Map taken from ULI’s Affordable Housing Washington, D.C. report. July 7-13, 2019.

In their interviews with area stakeholders, some residents west of Rock Creek Park considered their relatively high share of rent-controlled units (16% of the District’s total) as their fair contribution of affordable housing.

However, other wards have comparable amounts of rent-controlled housing plus much more subsidized housing, which adds up to a lot more places for middle- and low-income residents to live in those places.

Map taken from ULI’s Affordable Housing Washington, D.C. report. July 7-13, 2019.

It’s also worth noting that this highly segregated pattern of subsidized housing development may actually be in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act.

ULI’s recommendations and next steps

After studying the issue, the ULI panel had many recommendations for Rock Creek West, which generally fell into three buckets:

Create more housing: Notably, the panel calls for allowing for additional density near transit stations and busy commercial corridors, such as Wisconsin Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, and MacArthur Boulevard. Other suggestions include process improvements for applicants trying to build accessory apartments, building more housing on government-owned sites, and more.

Streamline and improve the development process: The panel called for creating more Small Area Plans, which would get community input on change up front rather than allowing community fights for each separate new development. Other recommendations included legal reforms to development-related litigation and reducing parking requirements.

Gain community support: Finally, the panel emphasized the importance of “messaging, education, and promotion…to galvanize support for the additional housing in RCW.” Ideas include a marketing and education campaign and engaging the area’s faith community for housing partnerships.

These are all progressive and logical policy recommendations. But, to reiterate Baca’s post, lack of policy ideas has never been the obstacle to building more housing in exclusive areas like Rock Creek West. Instead, our leaders have made political choices to channel most development elsewhere in the city. That the mayor may finally be standing up to these inequitable choices is huge progress.

Of course, the executive branch alone cannot make these changes; many of them fall under the purview of the DC Council. While the mayor’s office, through the Office of Planning, submits the first drafts of amendments to the Comprehensive Plan, it’s up to the council to vote on and adopt them.

This discussion is especially timely given recent debates over whether to prioritize affordable housing versus the physical and visual character of new development in recently-proposed amendments to the Comprehensive Plan. We’ll keep you updated on what the council decides.